In spite of questions about his politics, Oppenheimer was put in charge of the New Mexico component of this atom bomb project. Stanley Goldberg explores the relationship between Oppenheimer and Leslie R. Groves (1896–1970), the general given command of the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) in September 1942. Prior to this appointment, Groves had managed many Army projects, including the building of the Pentagon in 1940–1941, as deputy to the Chief of Construction in the Army Corps of Engineers.
Named for its regional office, as per standard US Army Corps of Engineers procedure, the MED is today better known as the Manhattan Project. The effort would grow to employ approximately 130,000 people in the US, Canada, and the UK at its peak. (It would have been remarkable if there had not been any spies among all these people.) Los Alamos, New Mexico, was Oppenheimer’s domain. It was built from the ground up in 1942–1943. By war’s end in the radioactive desolation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Los Alamos’s population was 8,000. (The Oppenheimer’s second child, Toni, was born there in 1944.) The price tag for the Project was around $2 billion, equal to nearly twenty times that amount today.
“One of the most-cited and least-interpreted quotations from the history of the atomic age,” writes James A. Hijiya, “is what J. Robert Oppenheimer claimed to have thought when he witnessed the world’s first nuclear explosion: ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’” (Another version found in the literature has the perhaps more powerful “shatterer” instead of “destroyer.”) The line is from the Hindu scripture, Bhagavad Gita. The movie has Oppenheimer quoting it in bed with his lover, Jean Tatlock. This combination of scripture and sex predictably riled up fundamentalists, with Hindu nationalists in India expressing rage at the scene and vowing punishment.
Hijiya argues Oppenheimer “understood the Gita and other Sanskrit texts well enough to formulate a code for living.” This “homemade Hinduism” is key, Hijiya argues, to understanding Oppenheimer’s complexity—such as his fear that he would fail at Los Alamos and his fear that he would succeed at Los Alamos. Curtis W. Hart also essays a “faith development portrait” of Oppenheimer, noting that Oppenheimer wasn’t conventionally religious, but that his “life and thought were permeated with themes and ideas of a religious and ethical nature.”
