Manhattan Project, Princeton

J. Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist. Bom in New York, 1904, died in Princeton 1967. Professor California Institute of Technology. Fermi award for nuclear research, 1963. Important contributions to nuclear physics. Director of the Manhattan Project 1943-1945. Victimized as a security risk by senator Joseph McCarthy s Un-American Activities Committee in 1954. Central figure of the eponymous PBS TV series (Oppenheimer Sam Waterston). 

The entrance of the U.S. into World War II redirected quickly the pursuit of nuclear studies. Many of those afiiliated with Lawrence at Berkeley became attached to the Manhattan Project (17,18), Libby, on leave from Berkeley, interrupted his tenure as a Guggenheim Fellow at Princeton to join the Manhattan project group at Golumbia University. When not occupied with the principal matter at hand, he continued to investigate aspects of radiocarbon chemistry. One obvious issue was the question of the Kalf-life. The initial estimates were based on values which varied by an order of magnitude or more. Attempts to obtain more precise estimates were thus very much in order. Unfortunately, the values obtained (26,000 13,000 and 21,000 4,000 years) were, in retrospect, seriously in error (19), Only with the use of mass spectro-metric data to determine the isotopic composition of the samples used in the experiments would more accurate values become available. 

Einstein was visiting the United States when Hitler came to power, so he accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1940. Although a lifelong pacifist, he wrote a letter to President Roosevelt warning of ominous advances in German nuclear research. This led to the creation of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb and tested it in New Mexico in 1945. 

While working on the Manhattan Project, he traveled each day into New York City, at the same time carrying a full-time teaching schedule at Princeton — a crushing workload. He used to tell a story about those years with a bit of wry humor. After years of hard work, he had a store of light water enriched, as we remember, with about 25% of heavy water which he "loaned" to the government. At the end of the war, he was paid back in kind 100% heavy water diluted back to 25% heavy water. 

Julius Robert Oppenheimer lau iao ), American physicist and professor at the University of California in Berkeley, the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. From 1943 to 1945, Oppenheimer headed the Manhattan Project (atomic bomb). 

Henry DeWolf Smyth and Eugene M. Zuckert were also old hands, having served on the Commission since 1949 and 1952 respectively. Both would leave before the year was out. Smyth, a brilliant Princeton physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, replaced Bacher as the scientist on the Commission. Zuckert, a Yale-educated lawyer, had helped organize the new Department of the Air Force in 1946 and became assistant secretary the following year, experiences that gave him a keen sense for administration. The fifth commissioner was Joseph Campbell, on leave from his position as treasurer of Columbia University, who had joined the Commission in the same month as Strauss. 

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