title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Before he began his Berkeley professorship, Oppenheimer was diagnosed with a mild case of tuberculosis and spent some weeks with his brother Frank at a New Mexico ranch, which he leased and eventually purchased. When he heard the ranch was available for lease, he exclaimed, "Hot dog!", and later called it "Perro Caliente", literally "hot dog" in Spanish. Later he used to say that "physics and desert country" were his "two great loves". He recovered from tuberculosis and returned to Berkeley, where he prospered as an advisor and collaborator to a generation of physicists who admired him for his intellectual virtuosity and broad interests. His students and colleagues saw him as mesmerizing: hypnotic in private interaction, but often frigid in more public settings. His associates fell into two camps: one that saw him as an aloof and impressive genius and aesthete, the other that saw him as a pretentious and insecure poseur. His students almost always fell into the former category, adopting his walk, speech, and other mannerisms, and even his inclination for reading entire texts in their original languages. Hans Bethe said of him:


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: He worked closely with Nobel Prize-winning experimental physicist Ernest O. Lawrence and his cyclotron pioneers, helping them understand the data their machines were producing at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 1936, Berkeley promoted him to full professor at a salary of $3,300 a year (). In return he was asked to curtail his teaching at Caltech, so a compromise was reached whereby Berkeley released him for six weeks each year, enough to teach one term at Caltech.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer did important research in theoretical astronomy (especially as related to general relativity and nuclear theory), nuclear physics, spectroscopy, and quantum field theory, including its extension into quantum electrodynamics. The formal mathematics of relativistic quantum mechanics also attracted his attention, although he doubted its validity. His work predicted many later finds, which include the neutron, meson and neutron star.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Initially, his major interest was the theory of the continuous spectrum and his first published paper, in 1926, concerned the quantum theory of molecular band spectra. He developed a method to carry out calculations of its transition probabilities. He calculated the photoelectric effect for hydrogen and X-rays, obtaining the absorption coefficient at the K-edge. His calculations accorded with observations of the X-ray absorption of the sun, but not helium. Years later it was realized that the sun was largely composed of hydrogen and that his calculations were indeed correct.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer also made important contributions to the theory of cosmic ray showers and started work that eventually led to descriptions of quantum tunneling. In 1931, he co-wrote a paper on the "Relativistic Theory of the Photoelectric Effect" with his student Harvey Hall, in which, based on empirical evidence, he correctly disputed Dirac's assertion that two of the energy levels of the hydrogen atom have the same energy. Subsequently, one of his doctoral students, Willis Lamb, determined that this was a consequence of what became known as the Lamb shift, for which Lamb was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1955.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: With his first doctoral student, Melba Phillips, Oppenheimer worked on calculations of artificial radioactivity under bombardment by deuterons. When Ernest Lawrence and Edwin McMillan bombarded nuclei with deuterons they found the results agreed closely with the predictions of George Gamow, but when higher energies and heavier nuclei were involved, the results did not conform to the theory. In 1935, Oppenheimer and Phillips worked out a theory—now known as the Oppenheimer–Phillips process—to explain the results; this theory is still in use today.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: As early as 1930, Oppenheimer wrote a paper that essentially predicted the existence of the positron. This was after a paper by Paul Dirac proposed that electrons could have both a positive charge and negative energy. Dirac's paper introduced an equation, known as the Dirac equation, which unified quantum mechanics, special relativity and the then-new concept of electron spin, to explain the Zeeman effect. Oppenheimer, drawing on the body of experimental evidence, rejected the idea that the predicted positively charged electrons were protons. He argued that they would have to have the same mass as an electron, whereas experiments showed that protons were much heavier than electrons. Two years later, Carl David Anderson discovered the positron, for which he received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: In the late 1930s, Oppenheimer became interested in astrophysics, most likely through his friendship with Richard Tolman, resulting in a series of papers. In the first of these, a 1938 paper co-written with Robert Serber entitled "On the Stability of Stellar Neutron Cores", Oppenheimer explored the properties of white dwarfs. This was followed by a paper co-written with one of his students, George Volkoff, "On Massive Neutron Cores", in which they demonstrated that there was a limit, the so-called Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit, to the mass of stars beyond which they would not remain stable as neutron stars and would undergo gravitational collapse. Finally, in 1939, Oppenheimer and another of his students, Hartland Snyder, produced a paper "On Continued Gravitational Contraction", which predicted the existence of what are today known as black holes. After the Born–Oppenheimer approximation paper, these papers remain his most cited, and were key factors in the rejuvenation of astrophysical research in the United States in the 1950s, mainly by John A. Wheeler.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer's papers were considered difficult to understand even by the standards of the abstract topics he was expert in. He was fond of using elegant, if extremely complex, mathematical techniques to demonstrate physical principles, though he was sometimes criticized for making mathematical mistakes, presumably out of haste. "His physics was good", said his student Snyder, "but his arithmetic awful".


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: After World War II, Oppenheimer published only five scientific papers, one of which was in biophysics, and none after 1950. Murray Gell-Mann, a later Nobelist who, as a visiting scientist, worked with him at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1951, offered this opinion:


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer's diverse interests sometimes interrupted his focus on science. He liked things that were difficult and since much of the scientific work appeared easy for him, he developed an interest in the mystical and the cryptic. In 1933, he learned Sanskrit and met the Indologist Arthur W. Ryder at Berkeley. He eventually read the "Bhagavad Gita" and the "Upanishads" in the original Sanskrit, and deeply pondered over them. He later cited the Gita as one of the books that most shaped his philosophy of life.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: His close confidant and colleague, Nobel Prize winner Isidor Rabi, later gave his own interpretation:


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: In spite of this, observers such as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez have suggested that if he had lived long enough to see his predictions substantiated by experiment, Oppenheimer might have won a Nobel Prize for his work on gravitational collapse, concerning neutron stars and black holes. In retrospect, some physicists and historians consider this to be his most important contribution, though it was not taken up by other scientists in his own lifetime. The physicist and historian Abraham Pais once asked Oppenheimer what he considered to be his most important scientific contributions; Oppenheimer cited his work on electrons and positrons, not his work on gravitational contraction. Oppenheimer was nominated for the Nobel Prize for physics three times, in 1946, 1951 and 1967, but never won.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: During the 1920s, Oppenheimer remained uninformed on worldly matters. He claimed that he did not read newspapers or listen to the radio and had only learned of the Wall Street crash of 1929 while he was on a walk with Ernest Lawrence some six months after the crash occurred. He once remarked that he never cast a vote until the 1936 presidential election. From 1934 on, however, he became increasingly concerned about politics and international affairs. In 1934, he earmarked three percent of his annual salary—about $100 ()—for two years to support German physicists fleeing from Nazi Germany. During the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike, he and some of his students, including Melba Phillips and Bob Serber, attended a longshoremen's rally. Oppenheimer repeatedly attempted to get Serber a position at Berkeley but was blocked by Birge, who felt that "one Jew in the department was enough".


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer's mother died in 1931, and he became closer to his father who, although still living in New York, became a frequent visitor in California. When his father died in 1937 leaving $392,602 to be divided between Oppenheimer and his brother Frank, Oppenheimer immediately wrote out a will that left his estate to the University of California to be used for graduate scholarships.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Like many young intellectuals in the 1930s, he supported social reforms that were later alleged to be communist ideas. He donated to many progressive causes that were later branded as left-wing during the McCarthy era. The majority of his allegedly radical work consisted of hosting fundraisers for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and other anti-fascist activity. He never openly joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), though he did pass money to leftist causes by way of acquaintances who were alleged to be party members.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: In 1936, Oppenheimer became involved with Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a Berkeley literature professor and a student at Stanford University School of Medicine. The two had similar political views; she wrote for the "Western Worker", a Communist Party newspaper. In 1939, after a tempestuous relationship, Tatlock broke up with Oppenheimer. In August of that year, he met Katherine ("Kitty") Puening, a radical Berkeley student and former Communist Party member. Kitty had been married before. Her first marriage lasted only a few months. Her second, common-law marriage husband was Joe Dallet, an active member of the Communist Party, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War. Kitty returned to the United States where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in botany from the University of Pennsylvania. There she married Richard Harrison, a physician and medical researcher, in 1938. In June 1939 Kitty and Harrison moved to Pasadena, California, where he became chief of radiology at a local hospital and she enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Oppenheimer and Kitty created a minor scandal by sleeping together after one of Tolman's parties. In the summer of 1940, she stayed with Oppenheimer at his ranch in New Mexico. She finally asked Harrison for a divorce when she found out she was pregnant. When he refused, she obtained an instant divorce in Reno, Nevada, and took Oppenheimer as her fourth husband on November 1, 1940.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Their first child Peter was born in May 1941, and their second child, Katherine ("Toni"), was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, on December 7, 1944. During his marriage, Oppenheimer rekindled his affair with Jean Tatlock. Later their continued contact became an issue in his security clearance hearings because of Tatlock's communist associations. Many of Oppenheimer's closest associates were active in the Communist Party in the 1930s or 1940s. They included his brother Frank, Frank's wife Jackie, Kitty, Jean Tatlock, his landlady Mary Ellen Washburn, and several of his graduate students at Berkeley.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: When he joined the Manhattan Project in 1942, Oppenheimer wrote on his personal security questionnaire that he had been "a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast". Years later he claimed that he did not remember saying this, that it was not true, and that if he had said anything along those lines, it was "a half-jocular overstatement". He was a subscriber to the "People's World", a Communist Party organ, and he testified in 1954, "I was associated with the communist movement." From 1937 to 1942, Oppenheimer was a member at Berkeley of what he called a "discussion group", which was later identified by fellow members, Haakon Chevalier and Gordon Griffiths, as a "closed" (secret) unit of the Communist Party for Berkeley faculty.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: The FBI opened a file on Oppenheimer in March 1941. It recorded that he attended a meeting in December 1940 at Chevalier's home that was also attended by the Communist Party's California state secretary William Schneiderman, and its treasurer Isaac Folkoff. The FBI noted that Oppenheimer was on the Executive Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, which it considered a communist front organization. Shortly thereafter, the FBI added Oppenheimer to its Custodial Detention Index, for arrest in case of national emergency. Debates over Oppenheimer's party membership or lack thereof have turned on very fine points; almost all historians agree he had strong left-wing views during this time and interacted with party members, though there is considerable dispute over whether he was officially a member of the party. At his 1954 security clearance hearings, he denied being a member of the Communist Party, but identified himself as a fellow traveler, which he defined as someone who agrees with many of the goals of communism, but without being willing to blindly follow orders from any Communist Party apparatus.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Throughout the development of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was under investigation by both the FBI and the Manhattan Project's internal security arm for left-wing associations he was known to have had in the past. He was followed by Army security agents during a trip to California in June 1943 to visit his former girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, who was suffering from depression. Oppenheimer spent the night in her apartment. Tatlock committed suicide on January 4, 1944, which left Oppenheimer deeply grieved. In August 1943, he volunteered to Manhattan Project security agents that George Eltenton, whom he did not know, had solicited three men at Los Alamos for nuclear secrets on behalf of the Soviet Union. When pressed on the issue in later interviews, Oppenheimer admitted that the only person who had approached him was his friend Haakon Chevalier, a Berkeley professor of French literature, who had mentioned the matter privately at a dinner at Oppenheimer's house. Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., the director of the Manhattan Project, thought Oppenheimer was too important to the project to be ousted over this suspicious behavior. On July 20, 1943, he wrote to the Manhattan Engineer District:


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: On October 9, 1941, two months before the United States entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a crash program to develop an atomic bomb. In May 1942, National Defense Research Committee Chairman James B. Conant, who had been one of Oppenheimer's lecturers at Harvard, invited Oppenheimer to take over work on fast neutron calculations, a task that Oppenheimer threw himself into with full vigor. He was given the title "Coordinator of Rapid Rupture", which specifically referred to the propagation of a fast neutron chain reaction in an atomic bomb. One of his first acts was to host a summer school for bomb theory at his building in Berkeley. The mix of European physicists and his own students—a group including Robert Serber, Emil Konopinski, Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller—kept themselves busy by calculating what needed to be done, and in what order, to make the bomb.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: In June 1942, the US Army established the Manhattan Project to handle its part in the atom bomb project and began the process of transferring responsibility from the Office of Scientific Research and Development to the military. In September, Groves was appointed director of what became known as the Manhattan Project. He selected Oppenheimer to head the project's secret weapons laboratory. This was a choice that surprised many because Oppenheimer had left-wing political views and no record as a leader of large projects. Groves was concerned by the fact that Oppenheimer did not have a Nobel Prize and might not have had the prestige to direct fellow scientists. However, he was impressed by Oppenheimer's singular grasp of the practical aspects of designing and constructing an atomic bomb, and by the breadth of his knowledge. As a military engineer, Groves knew that this would be vital in an interdisciplinary project that would involve not just physics, but chemistry, metallurgy, ordnance and engineering. Groves also detected in Oppenheimer something that many others did not, an "overweening ambition" that Groves reckoned would supply the drive necessary to push the project to a successful conclusion. Isidor Rabi considered the appointment "a real stroke of genius on the part of General Groves, who was not generally considered to be a genius".


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer and Groves decided that for security and cohesion they needed a centralized, secret research laboratory in a remote location. Scouting for a site in late 1942, Oppenheimer was drawn to New Mexico, not far from his ranch. On November 16, 1942, Oppenheimer, Groves and others toured a prospective site. Oppenheimer feared that the high cliffs surrounding the site would make his people feel claustrophobic, while the engineers were concerned with the possibility of flooding. He then suggested and championed a site that he knew well: a flat mesa near Santa Fe, New Mexico, which was the site of a private boys' school called the Los Alamos Ranch School. The engineers were concerned about the poor access road and the water supply but otherwise felt that it was ideal. The Los Alamos Laboratory was built on the site of the school, taking over some of its buildings, while many new buildings were erected in great haste. At the laboratory, Oppenheimer assembled a group of the top physicists of the time, which he referred to as the "luminaries".


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Los Alamos was initially supposed to be a military laboratory, and Oppenheimer and other researchers were to be commissioned into the Army. He went so far as to order himself a lieutenant colonel's uniform and take the Army physical test, which he failed. Army doctors considered him underweight at , diagnosed his chronic cough as tuberculosis and were concerned about his chronic lumbosacral joint pain. The plan to commission scientists fell through when Robert Bacher and Isidor Rabi balked at the idea. Conant, Groves, and Oppenheimer devised a compromise whereby the laboratory was operated by the University of California under contract to the War Department. It soon turned out that Oppenheimer had hugely underestimated the magnitude of the project; Los Alamos grew from a few hundred people in 1943 to over 6,000 in 1945.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer at first had difficulty with the organizational division of large groups, but rapidly learned the art of large-scale administration after he took up permanent residence on the mesa. He was noted for his mastery of all scientific aspects of the project and for his efforts to control the inevitable cultural conflicts between scientists and the military. He was an iconic figure to his fellow scientists, as much a symbol of what they were working toward as a scientific director. Victor Weisskopf put it thus:


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: In 1943 development efforts were directed to a plutonium gun-type fission weapon called "Thin Man". Initial research on the properties of plutonium was done using cyclotron-generated plutonium-239, which was extremely pure but could only be created in tiny amounts. When Los Alamos received the first sample of plutonium from the X-10 Graphite Reactor in April 1944 a problem was discovered: reactor-bred plutonium had a higher concentration of plutonium-240, making it unsuitable for use in a gun-type weapon. In July 1944, Oppenheimer abandoned the gun design in favor of an implosion-type weapon. Using chemical explosive lenses, a sub-critical sphere of fissile material could be squeezed into a smaller and denser form. The metal needed to travel only very short distances, so the critical mass would be assembled in much less time. In August 1944 Oppenheimer implemented a sweeping reorganization of the Los Alamos laboratory to focus on implosion. He concentrated the development efforts on the gun-type device, a simpler design that only had to work with uranium-235, in a single group, and this device became Little Boy in February 1945. After a mammoth research effort, the more complex design of the implosion device, known as the "Christy gadget" after Robert Christy, another student of Oppenheimer's, was finalized in a meeting in Oppenheimer's office on February 28, 1945.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: In May 1945 an Interim Committee was created to advise and report on wartime and postwar policies regarding the use of nuclear energy. The Interim Committee in turn established a scientific panel consisting of Arthur Compton, Fermi, Lawrence and Oppenheimer to advise it on scientific issues. In its presentation to the Interim Committee, the scientific panel offered its opinion not just on the likely physical effects of an atomic bomb, but on its likely military and political impact. This included opinions on such sensitive issues as whether or not the Soviet Union should be advised of the weapon in advance of its use against Japan.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: The joint work of the scientists at Los Alamos resulted in the world's first nuclear explosion, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Oppenheimer had given the site the codename "Trinity" in mid-1944 and said later that it was from one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets. According to the historian Gregg Herken, this naming could have been an allusion to Jean Tatlock, who had committed suicide a few months previously and had in the 1930s introduced Oppenheimer to Donne's work.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer later recalled that, while witnessing the explosion, he thought of a verse from the "Bhagavad Gita" (XI,12): ""


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Years later he would explain that another verse had also entered his head at that time: namely, the famous verse:


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Among those present with Oppenheimer in the control bunker at the site were his brother Frank and Brigadier General Thomas Farrell. When Jeremy Bernstein asked Frank what Robert's first words after the test had been, the answer was "I guess it worked." Farrell summarized Robert's reaction as follows:


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Physicist Isidor Rabi noticed Oppenheimer's disconcerting triumphalism: "I'll never forget his walk; I'll never forget the way he stepped out of the car ... his walk was like "High Noon" ... this kind of strut. He had done it." At an assembly at Los Alamos on August 6 (the evening of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima), Oppenheimer took to the stage and clasped his hands together "like a prize-winning boxer" while the crowd cheered. He noted his regret the weapon had not been available in time to use against Nazi Germany. However, he and many of the project staff were very upset about the bombing of Nagasaki, as they did not feel the second bomb was necessary from a military point of view. He traveled to Washington on August 17 to hand-deliver a letter to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson expressing his revulsion and his wish to see nuclear weapons banned. In October 1945 Oppenheimer was granted an interview with President Harry S. Truman. The meeting, however, went badly, after Oppenheimer remarked he felt he had "blood on my hands". The remark infuriated Truman and put an end to the meeting. Truman later told his Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson "I don't want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again."


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: For his services as director of Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was awarded the Medal for Merit from President Harry S. Truman in 1946.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: The Manhattan Project was top secret and did not become public knowledge until after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Oppenheimer became a national spokesman for science who was emblematic of a new type of technocratic power. He became a household name and his portrait appeared on the covers of "Life" and "Time". Nuclear physics became a powerful force as all governments of the world began to realize the strategic and political power that came with nuclear weapons. Like many scientists of his generation, he felt that security from atomic bombs would come only from a transnational organization such as the newly formed United Nations, which could institute a program to stifle a nuclear arms race.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: In November 1945, Oppenheimer left Los Alamos to return to Caltech, but he soon found that his heart was no longer in teaching. In 1947, he accepted an offer from Lewis Strauss to take up the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. This meant moving back east and leaving Ruth Tolman, the wife of his friend Richard Tolman, with whom he had begun an affair after leaving Los Alamos. The job came with a salary of $20,000 per annum, plus rent-free accommodation in the director's house, a 17th-century manor with a cook and groundskeeper, surrounded by of woodlands. He collected European furniture, and French post-impressionist and Fauvist artworks. His art collection included works by Cézanne, Derain, Despiau, de Vlaminck, Picasso, Rembrandt, Renoir, Van Gogh and Vuillard.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer brought together intellectuals at the height of their powers and from a variety of disciplines to answer the most pertinent questions of the age. He directed and encouraged the research of many well-known scientists, including Freeman Dyson, and the duo of Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, who won a Nobel Prize for their discovery of parity non-conservation. He also instituted temporary memberships for scholars from the humanities, such as T. S. Eliot and George F. Kennan. Some of these activities were resented by a few members of the mathematics faculty, who wanted the institute to stay a bastion of pure scientific research. Abraham Pais said that Oppenheimer himself thought that one of his failures at the institute was being unable to bring together scholars from the natural sciences and the humanities.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: During a series of conferences in New York from 1947 through 1949, physicists switched back from war work to theoretical issues. Under Oppenheimer's direction, physicists tackled the greatest outstanding problem of the pre-war years: infinite, divergent, and non-sensical expressions in the quantum electrodynamics of elementary particles. Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman and Shin'ichiro Tomonaga tackled the problem of regularization, and developed techniques which became known as renormalization. Freeman Dyson was able to prove that their procedures gave similar results. The problem of meson absorption and Hideki Yukawa's theory of mesons as the carrier particles of the strong nuclear force were also tackled. Probing questions from Oppenheimer prompted Robert Marshak's innovative two-meson hypothesis: that there were actually two types of mesons, pions and muons. This led to Cecil Frank Powell's breakthrough and subsequent Nobel Prize for the discovery of the pion.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: As a member of the Board of Consultants to a committee appointed by Truman, Oppenheimer strongly influenced the Acheson–Lilienthal Report. In this report, the committee advocated the creation of an international Atomic Development Authority, which would own all fissionable material and the means of its production, such as mines and laboratories, and atomic power plants where it could be used for peaceful energy production. Bernard Baruch was appointed to translate this report into a proposal to the United Nations, resulting in the Baruch Plan of 1946. The Baruch Plan introduced many additional provisions regarding enforcement, in particular requiring inspection of the Soviet Union's uranium resources. The Baruch Plan was seen as an attempt to maintain the United States' nuclear monopoly and was rejected by the Soviets. With this, it became clear to Oppenheimer that an arms race was unavoidable, due to the mutual suspicion of the United States and the Soviet Union, which even Oppenheimer was starting to distrust.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: After the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) came into being in 1947 as a civilian agency in control of nuclear research and weapons issues, Oppenheimer was appointed as the Chairman of its General Advisory Committee (GAC). From this position he advised on a number of nuclear-related issues, including project funding, laboratory construction and even international policy—though the GAC's advice was not always heeded. As Chairman of the GAC, Oppenheimer lobbied vigorously for international arms control and funding for basic science, and attempted to influence policy away from a heated arms race.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: The first atomic bomb test by the Soviet Union in August 1949 came earlier than expected by Americans, and over the next several months there was an intense debate within the U.S. government, military, and scientific communities regarding whether to proceed with the development of the far more powerful, nuclear fusion-based hydrogen bomb, then known as "the Super". Oppenheimer had been aware of the possibility of a thermonuclear weapon since the days of the Manhattan Project and had allocated a limited amount of theoretical research work toward the possibility at the time but nothing more than that given the pressing need to develop a fission weapon. Immediately following the end of the war, Oppenheimer argued against continuing work on the Super at that time, due both to lack of need and to the enormous human casualties that would result from its use.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Now in October 1949, Oppenheimer and the GAC recommended against the development of the Super. He and the other GAC members were motivated partly by ethical concerns, feeling that such a weapon could only be strategically used, resulting in millions of deaths: "Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations." They also had practical qualms, as there was no workable design for a hydrogen bomb at the time. Regarding the possibility of the Soviet Union developing a thermonuclear weapon, the GAC felt that the United States could have an adequate stockpile of atomic weapons to retaliate against any thermonuclear attack. In that connection, Oppenheimer and the others were concerned about the opportunity costs that would be incurred if nuclear reactors were diverted from materials needed for atom bomb production, to the materials such as tritium needed for a thermonuclear weapon.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: A majority of the AEC subsequently endorsed the GAC recommendation – and Oppenheimer thought that the fight against the Super would triumph – but proponents of the weapon lobbied the White House vigorously. On January 31, 1950, President Truman, who was always predisposed to proceed with the development of the weapon anyway, made the formal decision to do so. Oppenheimer and other GAC opponents of the project, especially James Conant, felt disheartened and considered resigning from the committee. They stayed on, though their views on the hydrogen bomb were well known.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: In 1951, Edward Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam developed what became known as the Teller-Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb. This new design seemed technically feasible and Oppenheimer officially acceded to the weapon's development, while still looking for ways in which its testing or deployment or use could be questioned. As he later recalled:


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer, along with Conant and Lee DuBridge, another member who had opposed the H-bomb decision, left the GAC when their terms expired in August 1952. President Truman had declined to reappoint them, as the president wanted new voices on the committee who were more in support of H-bomb development. In addition, various opponents of Oppenheimer had communicated to Truman their desire that Oppenheimer leave the committee.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer played a role on a number of government panels and study projects during the late 1940s and early 1950s, some of which found him in the middle of controversies and power struggles.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: In 1948 Oppenheimer chaired the Department of Defense's Long-Range Objectives Panel, which looked at the military utility of nuclear weapons including how they might be delivered. After a year's worth of study, in spring 1952 Oppenheimer wrote the draft report of Project GABRIEL, which examined the dangers of nuclear fallout. Oppenheimer was also a member of the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer participated in Project Charles during 1951, which examined the possibility of creating an effective air defense of the United States against atomic attack, and in the follow-on Project East River in 1952, which, with Oppenheimer's input, recommended building a warning system that would provide one-hour notice to atomic attacks against American cities. Those two projects led to Project Lincoln in 1952, a large effort where Oppenheimer was one of the senior scientists. Undertaken at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which had recently been founded to study issues of air defense, this in turn led to the Lincoln Summer Study Group, where Oppenheimer became a key figure. Oppenheimer's and other scientists' urging that resources be allocated to air defense in preference to large retaliatory strike capabilities brought an immediate response of objection from the United States Air Force (USAF), and a debate ensued about whether Oppenheimer and allied scientists, or the Air Force, was embracing an inflexible "Maginot Line" philosophy. In any case, the Summer Study Group's work eventually led to the building of the Distant Early Warning Line.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Edward Teller, who had been so uninterested in work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos during the war that Oppenheimer had given him time instead to work on his own project of the hydrogen bomb, had eventually left Los Alamos in 1951 to help found, in 1952, a second laboratory at what would become the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Oppenheimer had defended the history of work done at Los Alamos and had opposed the creation of the second laboratory.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Project Vista looked at improving U.S. tactical warfare capabilities. Oppenheimer was a late addition to the project in 1951 but wrote a key chapter of the report that challenged the doctrine of strategic bombardment and advocated for smaller tactical nuclear weapons which would be more useful in a limited theater conflict against enemy forces. Strategic thermonuclear weapons delivered by long-range jet bombers would necessarily be under the control of the U.S. Air Force, whereas the Vista conclusions recommended an increased role for the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy as well. The Air Force reaction to this was immediately hostile, and they succeeded in getting the Vista report suppressed.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: During 1952 Oppenheimer chaired the five-member State Department Panel of Consultants on Disarmament, which first urged that the United States postpone its planned first test of the hydrogen bomb and seek a thermonuclear test ban with the Soviet Union, on the grounds that avoiding a test might forestall the development of a catastrophic new weapon and open the way for new arms agreements between the two nations. The panel lacked political allies in Washington, however, and the Ivy Mike shot went ahead as scheduled. The panel then issued a final report in January 1953, which, influenced by many of Oppenheimer's deeply felt beliefs, presented a pessimistic vision of the future in which neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could establish an effective nuclear superiority but both sides could effect terrible damage on the other. One of the panel's recommendations, which Oppenheimer felt was especially important, was that the U.S. government practice less secrecy and more openness towards the American people about the realities of the nuclear balance and the dangers of nuclear warfare. This notion found a receptive audience in the new Eisenhower administration and led to creation of Operation Candor. Oppenheimer subsequently presented his view on the lack of utility of ever-larger nuclear arsenals to the American public with an article in "Foreign Affairs" in June 1953, and it received attention in major American newspapers.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Thus by 1953, Oppenheimer had reached another peak of influence, being involved in multiple different government posts and projects and having access to crucial strategic plans and force levels. But at the same time, Oppenheimer had become the enemy of the proponents of strategic bombardment, who viewed the physicist's opposition to the H-bomb, followed by these accumulated positions and stances, with a combination of bitterness and distrust. This view was paired with their fear that Oppenheimer's fame and powers of persuasion had made him dangerously influential within government, military, and scientific circles.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had been following Oppenheimer since before the war, when he showed communist sympathies as a professor at Berkeley and had been close to members of the Communist Party, including his wife and brother. They strongly suspected that he himself was a member of the party, based on wiretaps in which party members referred to him or appeared to refer to him as a communist, as well as reports from informers within the party. He had been under close surveillance since the early 1940s, his home and office bugged, his phone tapped and his mail opened. The FBI furnished Oppenheimer's political enemies with evidence that implicated communist ties. These enemies included Strauss, an AEC commissioner who had long harbored resentment against Oppenheimer both for his activity in opposing the hydrogen bomb and for his humiliation of Strauss before Congress some years earlier; regarding Strauss's opposition to the export of radioactive isotopes to other nations, Oppenheimer had memorably categorized these as "less important than electronic devices but more important than, let us say, vitamins".


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: On June 7, 1949, Oppenheimer testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he testified that he had associations with the Communist Party USA in the 1930s. He testified that some of his students, including David Bohm, Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Philip Morrison, Bernard Peters and Joseph Weinberg, had been communists at the time they had worked with him at Berkeley. Frank Oppenheimer and his wife Jackie testified before the HUAC where they testified that they had been members of the Communist Party USA. Frank was subsequently fired from his University of Minnesota position. Unable to find work in physics for many years, he became instead a cattle rancher in Colorado. He later taught high school physics and was the founder of the San Francisco Exploratorium.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: The triggering event for the security hearing happened on November 7, 1953, when William Liscum Borden, who until earlier in the year had been the executive director of the United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, sent a letter to Hoover which said that "more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union." Eisenhower never exactly believed the allegations within the letter, but felt compelled to move forward with an investigation, and on December 3 he ordered that a "blank wall" be placed between Oppenheimer and any government or military secrets. On December 21, 1953, Strauss told Oppenheimer that his security clearance had been suspended, pending resolution of a series of charges outlined in a letter, and discussed his resigning by way of requesting termination of his consulting contract with the AEC. Oppenheimer chose not to resign and requested a hearing instead. The charges were outlined in a letter from Kenneth D. Nichols, General Manager of the AEC. The hearing that followed in April–May 1954, which was held in secret, focused on Oppenheimer's past communist ties and his association during the Manhattan Project with suspected disloyal or communist scientists. It then continued with an examination of Oppenheimer's opposition to the H-bomb and stances in subsequent projects and study groups. A transcript of the hearings was published in June 1954, with some redactions. The US Department of Energy made public the full text of the transcript in October 2014.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: One of the key elements in this hearing was Oppenheimer's earliest testimony about George Eltenton's approach to various Los Alamos scientists, a story that Oppenheimer confessed he had fabricated to protect his friend Haakon Chevalier. Unknown to Oppenheimer, both versions were recorded during his interrogations of a decade before. He was surprised on the witness stand with transcripts of these, which he had not been given a chance to review. In fact, Oppenheimer had never told Chevalier that he had finally named him, and the testimony had cost Chevalier his job. Both Chevalier and Eltenton confirmed mentioning that they had a way to get information to the Soviets, Eltenton admitting he said this to Chevalier and Chevalier admitting he mentioned it to Oppenheimer, but both put the matter in terms of gossip and denied any thought or suggestion of treason or thoughts of espionage, either in planning or in deed. Neither was ever convicted of any crime.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: This led to outrage by the scientific community and Teller's virtual expulsion from academic science. Ernest Lawrence refused to testify on the grounds that he was suffering from an attack of ulcerative colitis, but an interview transcript in which he condemned Oppenheimer was presented as evidence in his absence. Groves, threatened by the FBI as having been potentially part of a coverup about the Chevalier contact in 1943, likewise testified against Oppenheimer. Many top scientists, as well as government and military figures, testified on Oppenheimer's behalf. Inconsistencies in his testimony and his erratic behavior on the stand, at one point saying he had given a "cock and bull story" and that this was because he "was an idiot", convinced some that he was unstable, unreliable and a possible security risk. Oppenheimer's clearance was revoked one day before it was due to lapse anyway. Isidor Rabi's comment was that Oppenheimer was merely a government consultant at the time anyway and that if the government "didn't want to consult the guy, then don't consult him".


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: During his hearing, Oppenheimer testified willingly on the left-wing activities of many of his scientific colleagues. Had Oppenheimer's clearance not been stripped then he might have been remembered as someone who had "named names" to save his own reputation. As it happened, Oppenheimer was seen by most of the scientific community as a martyr to McCarthyism, an eclectic liberal who was unjustly attacked by warmongering enemies, symbolic of the shift of scientific creativity from academia into the military. Wernher von Braun summed up his opinion about the matter with a quip to a Congressional committee: "In England, Oppenheimer would have been knighted."


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: In a seminar at the Woodrow Wilson Institute on May 20, 2009, based on an extensive analysis of the Vassiliev notebooks taken from the KGB archives, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev confirmed that Oppenheimer never was involved in espionage for the Soviet Union. Soviet intelligence tried repeatedly to recruit him, but was never successful; Oppenheimer did not spy on the United States. In addition, he had several persons removed from the Manhattan Project who had sympathies to the Soviet Union. Haynes, Klehr and Vassiliev also state Oppenheimer "was, in fact, a concealed member of the CPUSA in the late 1930s". According to biographer Ray Monk: "He was, in a very practical and real sense, a supporter of the Communist Party. Moreover, in terms of the time, effort and money spent on party activities, he was a very committed supporter".


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: On December 16, 2022, United States Secretary of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm cleared Oppenheimer of allegations that led to the 1954 revocation of his security clearance, citing as the reason a "flawed investigation" of his background by the United States Atomic Energy Commission in the early 1950s.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Starting in 1954, Oppenheimer lived for several months of the year on the island of Saint John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. In 1957, he purchased a tract of land on Gibney Beach, where he built a spartan home on the beach. He spent a considerable amount of time sailing with his daughter Toni and wife Kitty.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer's first public appearance following the stripping of his security clearance was a lecture titled "Prospects in the Arts and Sciences" for the Columbia University Bicentennial radio show "Man's Right to Knowledge", in which he outlined his philosophy and his thoughts on the role of science in the modern world. He had been selected for the final episode of the lecture series two years prior to the security hearing, though the university remained adamant that he stay on even after the controversy.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: In February 1955, the president of the University of Washington, Henry Schmitz, abruptly cancelled an invitation to Oppenheimer to deliver a series of lectures there. Schmitz's decision caused an uproar among the students; 1,200 of them signed a petition protesting the decision, and Schmitz was burned in effigy. While they marched in protest, the state of Washington outlawed the Communist Party, and required all government employees to swear a loyalty oath. Edwin Albrecht Uehling, the chairman of the physics department and a colleague of Oppenheimer's from Berkeley, appealed to the university senate, and Schmitz's decision was overturned by a vote of 56 to 40. Oppenheimer stopped briefly in Seattle to change planes on a trip to Oregon, and was joined for coffee during his layover by several University of Washington faculty, but Oppenheimer never lectured there.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer was increasingly concerned about the potential danger that scientific inventions could pose to humanity. He joined with Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Rotblat and other eminent scientists and academics to establish what would eventually, in 1960, become the World Academy of Art and Science. Significantly, after his public humiliation, he did not sign the major open protests against nuclear weapons of the 1950s, including the Russell–Einstein Manifesto of 1955, nor, though invited, did he attend the first Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in 1957.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: In his speeches and public writings, Oppenheimer continually stressed the difficulty of managing the power of knowledge in a world in which the freedom of science to exchange ideas was more and more hobbled by political concerns. Oppenheimer delivered the Reith Lectures on the BBC in 1953, which were subsequently published as "Science and the Common Understanding". In 1955, Oppenheimer published "The Open Mind", a collection of eight lectures that he had given since 1946 on the subject of nuclear weapons and popular culture. Oppenheimer rejected the idea of nuclear gunboat diplomacy. "The purposes of this country in the field of foreign policy", he wrote, "cannot in any real or enduring way be achieved by coercion". In 1957 the philosophy and psychology departments at Harvard invited Oppenheimer to deliver the William James Lectures. An influential group of Harvard alumni led by Edwin Ginn that included Archibald Roosevelt protested against the decision. Some 1,200 people packed into Sanders Theatre to hear Oppenheimer's six lectures, entitled "The Hope of Order". Oppenheimer delivered the Whidden Lectures at McMaster University in 1962, and these were published in 1964 as "The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises for Physicists".


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Deprived of political power, Oppenheimer continued to lecture, write and work on physics. He toured Europe and Japan, giving talks about the history of science, the role of science in society, and the nature of the universe. In September 1957, France made him an Officer of the Legion of Honor, and on May 3, 1962, he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in Britain. At the urging of many of Oppenheimer's political friends who had ascended to power, President John F. Kennedy awarded Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Award in 1963 as a gesture of political rehabilitation. Edward Teller, the winner of the previous year's award, had also recommended Oppenheimer receive it, in the hope that it would heal the rift between them. A little over a week after Kennedy's assassination, his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, presented Oppenheimer with the award, "for contributions to theoretical physics as a teacher and originator of ideas, and for leadership of the Los Alamos Laboratory and the atomic energy program during critical years". Oppenheimer told Johnson: "I think it is just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today."


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: The rehabilitation implied by the award was partly symbolic, as Oppenheimer still lacked a security clearance and could have no effect on official policy, but the award came with a $50,000 tax-free stipend, and its award outraged many prominent Republicans in Congress. The late President Kennedy's widow Jacqueline, still living in the White House, made it a point to meet with Oppenheimer to tell him how much her husband had wanted him to have the medal. While still a senator in 1959, Kennedy had been instrumental in voting to narrowly deny Oppenheimer's enemy Lewis Strauss a coveted government position as Secretary of Commerce, effectively ending Strauss's political career. This was partly due to lobbying by the scientific community on behalf of Oppenheimer.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer was a chain smoker who was diagnosed with throat cancer in late 1965. After inconclusive surgery, he underwent unsuccessful radiation treatment and chemotherapy late in 1966. He fell into a coma on February 15, 1967, and died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, on February 18, aged 62. A memorial service was held a week later at Alexander Hall on the campus of Princeton University. The service was attended by 600 of his scientific, political and military associates that included Bethe, Groves, Kennan, Lilienthal, Rabi, Smyth and Wigner. His brother Frank and the rest of his family were also there, as was the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the novelist John O'Hara, and George Balanchine, the director of the New York City Ballet. Bethe, Kennan and Smyth gave brief eulogies. Oppenheimer's body was cremated and his ashes were placed into an urn. His wife Kitty took the ashes to St. John and dropped the urn into the sea, within sight of the beach house.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: In October 1972, Kitty died aged 62 from an intestinal infection that was complicated by a pulmonary embolism. Oppenheimer's ranch in New Mexico was then inherited by their son Peter, and the beach property was inherited by their daughter Katherine "Toni" Oppenheimer Silber. Toni was refused security clearance for her chosen vocation as a United Nations translator after the FBI brought up the old charges against her father. In January 1977 (three months after the end of her second marriage), she committed suicide aged 32; her ex-husband found her hanging from a beam in her family beach house. She left the property to "the people of St. John for a public park and recreation area". The original house was built too close to the coast and succumbed to a hurricane. Today the Virgin Islands Government maintains a Community Center in the area.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: When Oppenheimer was stripped of his position of political influence in 1954, he symbolized for many the folly of scientists who believed they could control the use of their research, and the dilemmas of moral responsibility presented by science in the nuclear age. The hearings were motivated by politics and personal enmities, and also reflected a stark divide in the nuclear weapons community. One group viewed with passionate fear the Soviet Union as a mortal enemy and believed having the most powerful weaponry capable of providing the most massive retaliation was the best strategy for combating that threat. The other group felt that developing the H-bomb would not in fact improve the Western security position and that using the weapon against large civilian populations would be an act of genocide, and advocated instead a more flexible response to the Soviets involving tactical nuclear weapons, strengthened conventional forces, and arms control agreements. The first of these groups was the more powerful in political terms, and Oppenheimer became its target.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Rather than consistently oppose the "Red-baiting" of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Oppenheimer testified against some of his former colleagues and students, both before and during his hearing. In one incident, his damning testimony against former student Bernard Peters was selectively leaked to the press. Historians have interpreted this as an attempt by Oppenheimer to please his colleagues in the government and perhaps to divert attention from his own previous left-wing ties and those of his brother. In the end, it became a liability when it became clear that if Oppenheimer had really doubted Peters' loyalty, his recommending him for the Manhattan Project was reckless, or at least contradictory.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Popular depictions of Oppenheimer view his security struggles as a confrontation between right-wing militarists (symbolized by Teller) and left-wing intellectuals (symbolized by Oppenheimer) over the moral question of weapons of mass destruction. The Oppenheimer story has often been viewed by biographers and historians as a modern tragedy. National security advisor and academic McGeorge Bundy, who had worked with Oppenheimer on the State Department Panel of Consultants, has written: "Quite aside from Oppenheimer's extraordinary rise and fall in prestige and power, his character has fully tragic dimensions in its combination of charm and arrogance, intelligence and blindness, awareness and insensitivity, and perhaps above all daring and fatalism. All these, in different ways, were turned against him in the hearings."


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: The question of the scientists' responsibility toward humanity inspired Bertolt Brecht's drama "Galileo" (1955), left its imprint on Friedrich Dürrenmatt's "Die Physiker", and is the basis of the opera "Doctor Atomic" by John Adams (2005), which was commissioned to portray Oppenheimer as a modern-day Faust. Heinar Kipphardt's play "In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer", after appearing on West German television, had its theatrical release in Berlin and Munich in October 1964. Oppenheimer's objections resulted in an exchange of correspondence with Kipphardt, in which the playwright offered to make corrections but defended the play. It premiered in New York in June 1968, with Joseph Wiseman in the Oppenheimer role. "New York Times" theater critic Clive Barnes called it an "angry play and a partisan play" that sided with Oppenheimer but portrayed the scientist as a "tragic fool and genius". Oppenheimer had difficulty with this portrayal. After reading a transcript of Kipphardt's play soon after it began to be performed, Oppenheimer threatened to sue the playwright, decrying "improvisations which were contrary to history and to the nature of the people involved".


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Oppenheimer is the subject of numerous biographies, including "" (2005) by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for 2006. The 1980 BBC TV serial "Oppenheimer", starring Sam Waterston, won three BAFTA Television Awards. "The Day After Trinity", a 1980 documentary about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the building of the atomic bomb, was nominated for an Academy Award and received a Peabody Award. Oppenheimer's life has also been explored in the 2015 play "Oppenheimer" by Tom Morton-Smith, and in the 1989 film "Fat Man and Little Boy", where he was portrayed by Dwight Schultz. In the upcoming American film "Oppenheimer", directed by Christopher Nolan and based on "American Prometheus", Oppenheimer is portrayed by actor Cillian Murphy. A centennial conference and exhibit were held in 2004 at Berkeley, with the proceedings of the conference published in 2005 as "Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections". His papers are in the Library of Congress.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: As a scientist, Oppenheimer is remembered by his students and colleagues as being a brilliant researcher and engaging teacher who was the founder of modern theoretical physics in the United States. Because his scientific attentions often changed rapidly, he never worked long enough on any one topic and carried it to fruition to merit the Nobel Prize, although his investigations contributing to the theory of black holes may have warranted the prize had he lived long enough to see them brought into fruition by later astrophysicists. An asteroid, 67085 Oppenheimer, was named in his honor, as was the lunar crater Oppenheimer.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: As a military and public policy advisor, Oppenheimer was a technocratic leader in a shift in the interactions between science and the military and the emergence of "Big Science". During World War II, scientists became involved in military research to an unprecedented degree. Because of the threat fascism posed to Western civilization, they volunteered in great numbers both for technological and organizational assistance to the Allied effort, resulting in such powerful tools as radar, the proximity fuse and operations research. As a cultured, intellectual, theoretical physicist who became a disciplined military organizer, Oppenheimer represented the shift away from the idea that scientists had their "head in the clouds" and that knowledge on such previously esoteric subjects as the composition of the atomic nucleus had no "real-world" applications.


title: J. Robert Oppenheimer

text: Two days before the Trinity test, Oppenheimer expressed his hopes and fears in a quotation from Bhartṛhari's Śatakatraya:


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: Amanda Michelle Seyfried ( ; born December 3, 1985) is an American actress. Born and raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, she began modeling at age 11 and ventured into acting at 15, with recurring roles as Lucy Montgomery on the CBS soap opera "As the World Turns" (1999–2001) and Joni Stafford on the ABC soap opera "All My Children" (2003). She came to prominence for her feature film debut in the teen comedy "Mean Girls" (2004), and her recurring roles as Lilly Kane on the CW/Hulu television series "Veronica Mars" (2004–2006) and Sarah Henrickson on the HBO drama series "Big Love" (2006–2011).


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: Seyfried has appeared in a number of films, including "Mamma Mia!" (2008) and its sequel "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again" (2018), "Jennifer's Body" (2009), "Dear John" (2010), "Letters to Juliet" (2010), "Red Riding Hood" (2011), "In Time" (2011), "Les Misérables" (2012), "A Million Ways to Die in the West" (2014), "Ted 2" (2015), and "First Reformed" (2017).


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: She received critical acclaim for her portrayal of Marion Davies in David Fincher's biopic "Mank" (2020), earning nominations for the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. For her starring role as Elizabeth Holmes in the drama miniseries "The Dropout" (2022), she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress. "Time" magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: Amanda Michelle Seyfried was born on December 3, 1985, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Ann Seyfried (née Sander) is an occupational therapist, and her father, Jack Seyfried, is a pharmacist. She is of mostly German descent with smaller amounts of English, Scots-Irish, and Welsh ancestry. She has an older sister, Jennifer Seyfried, who is a musician in the Philadelphia rock band Love City.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: Seyfried attended William Allen High School in Allentown, graduating in 2003. She subsequently enrolled at Fordham University in New York City in the fall of 2003, but chose not to attend after being offered a role in the 2004 film "Mean Girls".


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: While attending William Allen High School in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Seyfried began modeling. She appeared in several print ads for clothing companies, including Limited Too with Leighton Meester, and was featured on three covers of the "Sweet Valley High" novel series. At age 17 she stopped modeling and started a job as a waitress in a retirement community. While still a teen, she took vocal lessons, studied opera, trained with a Broadway coach, and began her acting career as an extra in "Guiding Light", a daytime television drama. From 2000 to 2001 she played the recurring character Lucy Montgomery on the CBS soap opera "As the World Turns" and, from 2002 to 2003, Joni Stafford on the ABC soap "All My Children".


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: In 2003, Seyfried auditioned to play Regina George in "Mean Girls", but the role eventually went to Rachel McAdams. While she was initially considered for the lead role of Cady Heron, ultimately played by Lindsay Lohan, the film's producers decided that Seyfried should play Karen Smith, Regina's dim-witted "plastic" friend and sidekick. The film was a box office success, grossing over $130 million in its theatrical run. Seyfried's performance in the film earned her, along with Lohan, Lacey Chabert, and McAdams, an MTV Movie Award in the category of "Best On-Screen Team".


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: Seyfried then auditioned to play the title character on UPN's television series "Veronica Mars". The role eventually went to Kristen Bell, and Seyfried portrayed Veronica's murdered best friend Lilly Kane. Her character was only shown in flashbacks. In 2005, she played the lead character Samantha, a role written by director Rodrigo García specifically for her, in one of the nine parts of the film "Nine Lives", composed of nine short films with different themes and an ensemble cast. For her performance, Seyfried, along with the film's other female leads, won the role Best Actress at the Locarno International Film Festival. That year, she played the supporting character Mouse in the independent film "American Gun". In 2006, she appeared in five episodes of "Wildfire" as Rebecca and played the lead role Chrissy in the short film "Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves", written and directed by Andrea Janakas. She also contributed in a minor role as Julie Beckley in "Alpha Dog". From 2004 to 2006, she made multiple guest appearances on several television series, including "House", "Justice", "", "American Dad!" and "".


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: With her role in the HBO drama television series "Big Love", Seyfried's profile as an actress grew substantially; the series centered on a fictional fundamentalist Mormon family in which Seyfried plays Sarah Henrickson, Bill and Barb's first daughter, who struggles with her family's polygamous faith. "Big Love" premiered in the United States on March 12, 2006. In December 2009, HBO confirmed that Seyfried would return for the show's fourth season, but that it would be her last since she wished to begin concentrating on her film career and other upcoming projects.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: Following "Big Love", Seyfried played a supporting role, as Zoe, in the 2008 horror drama film "Solstice" and co-starred with Meryl Streep in "Mamma Mia!", a romantic comedy film adaptation of the 1999 musical of the same name. "Mamma Mia!", which was Seyfried's first leading role, was the fifth highest-grossing film of 2008, and, as of February 2021, the 159th highest-grossing film of all time. Five songs from her musical performance in "Mamma Mia!" were released on the film's soundtrack. As part of promotion for both the film and its soundtrack, Seyfried recorded a music video of the song "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)".


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: In March 2008, Seyfried was cast in the comedy horror film "Jennifer's Body" as Anita "Needy" Lesnicki, the title character's best friend. The film, which premiered at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival and was released to theaters on September 18, 2009, received mixed reviews from critics. The same year she was cast in the comedy drama independent film "Boogie Woogie". She played Paige Oppenheimer, one of the lead roles in the ensemble movie. The movie was originally shown on June 26, 2009, at Edinburgh International Film Festival, and was shown in US theaters April 25, 2010. On February 22, 2009, Seyfried presented an award and performed at the 81st Academy Awards ceremony. In early March 2009, director Zack Snyder had tapped Seyfried to portray the lead role, Baby Doll, in "Sucker Punch", but Seyfried had to drop out of the film due to scheduling conflicts with "Big Love".


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: Seyfried starred alongside Channing Tatum in "Dear John", the film adaptation of the novel of the same name that was written by Nicholas Sparks. The film, which was released February 5, 2010, received generally negative reviews. Seyfried wrote and recorded "Little House", a song on one of the soundtracks of "Dear John". Kirk Honeycutt of "The Hollywood Reporter" wrote, "Seyfried gives the character and her relationship all she's got, but she can't do all the heavy lifting. The romance is too one-sided, and frankly, you can't blame her for steering her life into another channel." Despite the negative reviews, "Dear John" became the first film to break up "Avatar"s box office reign at number one at the United States box office, grossing $80 million in the U.S. theatrically and $115 million worldwide.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: Seyfried next appeared as the title character in the erotic thriller "Chloe", released by Sony Pictures Classics on March 26, 2010. "Chloe" premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2009. In the film, Seyfried's character is an escort who is hired to test a husband's faithfulness after his wife concludes that his fidelity could not be trusted. "Chloe" enjoyed commercial success and became director Atom Egoyan's highest-grossing film. Seyfried's performance in the film received favorable reviews from critics, helping her gain industry acclaim and additional opportunities to play varied roles.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: Later in 2010, Seyfried starred in the romantic-comedy film "Letters to Juliet", based on the book by Lise and Ceil Friedman. "Letters to Juliet" was released to mixed reviews but was a box office success, grossing $80 million worldwide. For her performance, Seyfried was awarded "Showest Breakthrough Female Star of The Year". She also won the "Scared-As-S**T" award for her performance in "Jennifer's Body" and was nominated for Best Female Performance for her movie "Dear John", at the 2010 MTV Movie Awards. Also in 2010, Seyfried was named to "Forbes" "17 Stars To Watch" list, and received three Teen Choice Award nominations, including for Choice Movie Actress Drama and Choice Movie Chemistry with her co-star Channing Tatum for roles in "Dear John". Seyfried was also nominated for Choice Movie Actress Romantic Comedy for "Letters to Juliet".


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: In late January 2009, Seyfried was to appear in Myriad Pictures' adaptation of Oscar Wilde's comedy "A Woman of No Importance". The film, which was scheduled for a 2011 release, encountered financing impediments. In 2009, she was set to star in the film "Albert Nobbs" but withdrew from the film because of scheduling conflicts; her role ended up being played by Mia Wasikowska. Seyfried next starred in Catherine Hardwicke's "Red Riding Hood", playing the lead role of Valerie. The film was released on March 11, 2011 to mostly negative reviews, but earned $90 million worldwide on a $42 million budget. She also played the lead role of Sylvia Weis in Andrew Niccol's "In Time", which reunited her with "Alpha Dog" co-star Justin Timberlake; "In Time" was released in October 2011 to mixed reviews but grossed in excess of $172 million worldwide. Also in 2011, Seyfried became a spokesperson and model for Cle de Peau Beaute, a line of Japanese beauty products.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: Seyfried starred in the thriller "Gone", released in early 2012. Later that year, she played Cosette in the film adaptation of the musical "Les Misérables". The film, and her performance, received acclaim from critics, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture and grossed a total of $440 million worldwide.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: In 2013, Seyfried had a voice role in the comedy "The Big Wedding" and in the animated movie "Epic". She played Linda Lovelace in the biopic "Lovelace", earning critical acclaim from film critics for her role in it. She appeared in the 2013 drama "The End of Love". She was also signed to play the role of Ann Burden in the dramatization of the Robert O'Brien post-apocalyptic novel "Z for Zachariah", but was replaced by Margot Robbie following a delay in the film's production. In 2013, she became the face of Givenchy.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: In 2015, she appeared in the comedy "Ted 2", alongside Mark Wahlberg and Seth MacFarlane, and played Peter Pan's mother in the film "Pan". In 2018, she starred as Anon, a futuristic visual hacker, in the Netflix original film "Anon", with Clive Owen; and reprised her role as Sophie Sheridan in the "Mamma Mia!" sequel, "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again", which was released in July. In 2019, Seyfried starred as Eve in "The Art of Racing in the Rain", a comedy drama based on best selling book of the same name.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: In 2020, Seyfried provided the voice of Daphne Blake in the film "Scoob!" She also starred in the psychological horror "You Should Have Left", opposite Kevin Bacon and directed by David Koepp. She received critical acclaim for her third film of the year, playing actress Marion Davies in David Fincher's "Mank", which earned her Golden Globe and Oscar nominations. She earned further critical acclaim in her performance as Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the limited series "The Dropout" for which she won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress and a nomination for a second Emmy for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series as a producer of the show.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: Seyfried has received numerous accolades from "People" magazine, which ranked her number one in a 2011 article featuring "25 Beauties (and Hotties) at 25"; she was also included in the magazine's annual beauty list in 2009 and 2010. She also appeared in the magazine's "Beautiful at Every Age" article in 2012. She was featured in "Vanity Fair"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s "Bright Young Hollywood" article in 2008; and in 2010 appeared on the magazine's cover along with several other actresses.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: In 2013, Seyfried was selected as brand's muse, ambassador and official spokesperson for French-Japanese luxury skincare house Clé de Peau Beauté.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: Seyfried has been brand ambassador for Swiss luxury watch brand Jaeger-LeCoultre since 2019 and was named as the global ambassador for Lancôme in October 2019.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: Seyfried has acknowledged suffering from anxiety, obsessive–compulsive disorder, and panic attacks. She also had stage fright, and largely for that reason, avoided performing in theater productions until 2015.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: Seyfried was in a relationship with actor Dominic Cooper on and off from 2008 to 2009, and actor Justin Long from 2013 to 2015. She also dated "Dexter" star Desmond Harrington from July 2012 to April 2013.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: In early 2016, she began a relationship with her co-star in "The Last Word", Thomas Sadoski. They confirmed their engagement on September 12, 2016, and in March 2017. They have two children, a daughter and a son.


title: Amanda Seyfried

text: Seyfried is a board member of the International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance (INARA), which provides medical services for children wounded in war zones, with a special focus on refugee children from Syria impacted by the Syrian civil war.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service upon the United States against the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, just before 8:00a.m. (local time) on Sunday, December 7, 1941. The United States was a neutral country at the time; the attack led to its formal entry into World War II the next day. The Japanese military leadership referred to the attack as the Hawaii Operation and Operation AI, and as Operation Z during its planning.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: Japan intended the attack as a preventive action. Its aim was to prevent the United States Pacific Fleet from interfering with its planned military actions in Southeast Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and those of the United States. Over the course of seven hours there were coordinated Japanese attacks on the US-held Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island and on the British Empire in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: The attack commenced at 7:48a.m. Hawaiian Time (6:18p.m. GMT). The base was attacked by 353 Imperial Japanese aircraft (including fighters, level and dive bombers, and torpedo bombers) in two waves, launched from six aircraft carriers. Of the eight US Navy battleships present, all were damaged, with four sunk. All but were later raised, and six were returned to service and went on to fight in the war. The Japanese also sank or damaged three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and one minelayer. More than 180 US aircraft were destroyed. 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 others were wounded. Important base installations such as the power station, dry dock, shipyard, maintenance, and fuel and torpedo storage facilities, as well as the submarine piers and headquarters building (also home of the intelligence section) were not attacked. Japanese losses were light: 29 aircraft and five midget submarines lost, and 64 servicemen killed. Kazuo Sakamaki, the commanding officer of one of the submarines, was captured.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: Japan announced declarations of war on the United States and the British Empire later that day (December 8 in Tokyo), but the declarations were not delivered until the following day. The British government declared war on Japan immediately after learning that their territory had also been attacked, while the following day (December 8) the United States Congress declared war on Japan. On December 11, though they had no formal obligation to do so under the Tripartite Pact with Japan, Germany and Italy each declared war on the US, which responded with a declaration of war against Germany and Italy. There were numerous historical precedents for the unannounced military action by Japan, but the lack of any formal warning (required by part III of the Hague Convention of 1907), particularly while peace negotiations were still apparently ongoing, led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to proclaim December 7, 1941, "a date which will live in infamy". Because the attack happened without a declaration of war and without explicit warning, the attack on Pearl Harbor was later judged in the Tokyo Trials to be a war crime.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: War between Japan and the United States had been a possibility that each nation had been aware of, and planned for, since the 1920s. Japan had been wary of American territorial and military expansion in the Pacific and Asia since the late 1890s, followed by the annexation of islands, such as Hawaii and the Philippines, which they felt were close to or within their sphere of influence.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: Although Japan had begun to take a hostile policy against the United States after the rejection of the Racial Equality Proposal, the relationship between the two countries was cordial enough that they remained trading partners. Tensions did not seriously grow until Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Over the next decade, Japan expanded into China, leading to the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Japan spent considerable effort trying to isolate China and endeavored to secure enough independent resources to attain victory on the mainland. The "Southern Operation" was designed to assist these efforts.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: Starting in December 1937, events such as the Japanese attack on USS "Panay", the Allison incident, and the Nanking Massacre swung Western public opinion sharply against Japan. The US unsuccessfully proposed a joint action with the British to blockade Japan. In 1938, following an appeal by President Roosevelt, US companies stopped providing Japan with implements of war.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: In 1940 Japan invaded French Indochina, attempting to stymie the flow of supplies reaching China. The United States halted shipments of airplanes, parts, machine tools, and aviation gasoline to Japan, which the latter perceived as an unfriendly act. The United States did not stop oil exports, however, partly because of the prevailing sentiment in Washington that given Japanese dependence on American oil, such an action was likely to be considered an extreme provocation.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: In mid-1940 President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Hawaii. He also ordered a military buildup in the Philippines, taking both actions in the hope of discouraging Japanese aggression in the Far East. Because the Japanese high command was (mistakenly) certain any attack on the United Kingdom's Southeast Asian colonies, including Singapore, would bring the US into the war, a devastating preventive strike appeared to be the only way to prevent American naval interference. An invasion of the Philippines was also considered necessary by Japanese war planners. The US War Plan Orange had envisioned defending the Philippines with an elite force of 40,000 men; this option was never implemented due to opposition from Douglas MacArthur, who felt he would need a force ten times that size. By 1941, US planners expected to abandon the Philippines at the outbreak of war. Late that year, Admiral Thomas C. Hart, commander of the Asiatic Fleet, was given orders to that effect.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: The US finally ceased oil exports to Japan in July 1941, following the seizure of French Indochina after the Fall of France, in part because of new American restrictions on domestic oil consumption. Because of this decision, Japan proceeded with plans to take the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. On August 17, Roosevelt warned Japan that America was prepared to take opposing steps if "neighboring countries" were attacked. The Japanese were faced with a dilemma: either withdraw from China and lose face or seize new sources of raw materials in the resource-rich European colonies of Southeast Asia.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: Japan and the US engaged in negotiations during 1941, attempting to improve relations. In the course of these negotiations, Japan offered to withdraw from most of China and Indochina after making peace with the Nationalist government. It also proposed to adopt an independent interpretation of the Tripartite Pact and to refrain from trade discrimination, provided all other nations reciprocated. Washington rejected these proposals. Japanese Prime Minister Konoye then offered to meet with Roosevelt, but Roosevelt insisted on reaching an agreement before any meeting. The US ambassador to Japan repeatedly urged Roosevelt to accept the meeting, warning that it was the only way to preserve the conciliatory Konoye government and peace in the Pacific. However, his recommendation was not acted upon. The Konoye government collapsed the following month when the Japanese military rejected a withdrawal of all troops from China.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: Japan's final proposal, delivered on November 20, offered to withdraw from southern Indochina and to refrain from attacks in Southeast Asia, so long as the United States, United Kingdom, and Netherlands supplied of aviation fuel, lifted their sanctions against Japan, and ceased aid to China. The American counter-proposal of November 26 (November 27 in Japan), the Hull note, required Japan completely evacuate China without conditions and conclude non-aggression pacts with Pacific powers. On November 26 in Japan, the day before the note's delivery, the Japanese task force left port for Pearl Harbor.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: The Japanese intended the attack as a preventive action to keep the United States Pacific Fleet from interfering with its planned military actions in Southeast Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States. Over the course of seven hours there were coordinated Japanese attacks on the US-held Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island and on the British Empire in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Additionally, from the Japanese viewpoint, it was seen as a preemptive strike "before the oil gauge ran empty."


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: Preliminary planning for an attack on Pearl Harbor to protect the move into the "Southern Resource Area" (the Japanese term for the Dutch East Indies and Southeast Asia generally) had begun very early in 1941 under the auspices of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, then commanding Japan's Combined Fleet. He won assent to formal planning and training for an attack from the Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff only after much contention with Naval Headquarters, including a threat to resign his command. Full-scale planning was underway by early spring 1941, primarily by Rear Admiral Ryūnosuke Kusaka, with assistance from Captain Minoru Genda and Yamamoto's Deputy Chief of Staff, Captain Kameto Kuroshima. The planners studied the 1940 British air attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto intensively.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: Over the next several months, pilots were trained, equipment was adapted, and intelligence was collected. Despite these preparations, Emperor Hirohito did not approve the attack plan until November 5, after the third of four Imperial Conferences called to consider the matter. Final authorization was not given by the emperor until December 1, after a majority of Japanese leaders advised him the "Hull Note" would "destroy the fruits of the China incident, endanger Manchukuo and undermine Japanese control of Korea".


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: By late 1941, many observers believed that hostilities between the US and Japan were imminent. A Gallup poll just before the attack on Pearl Harbor found that 52% of Americans expected war with Japan, 27% did not, and 21% had no opinion. While US Pacific bases and facilities had been placed on alert on many occasions, US officials doubted Pearl Harbor would be the first target; instead, they expected the Philippines would be attacked first. This presumption was due to the threat that the air bases throughout the country and the naval base at Manila posed to sea lanes, as well as to the shipment of supplies to Japan from territory to the south. They also incorrectly believed that Japan was not capable of mounting more than one major naval operation at a time.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: The Japanese attack had several major aims. First, it intended to destroy important American fleet units, thereby preventing the Pacific Fleet from interfering with the Japanese conquest of the Dutch East Indies and Malaya and enabling Japan to conquer Southeast Asia without interference. Second, it was hoped to buy time for Japan to consolidate its position and increase its naval strength before shipbuilding authorized by the 1940 Vinson-Walsh Act erased any chance of victory. Third, to deliver a blow to America's ability to mobilize its forces in the Pacific, battleships were chosen as the main targets, since they were the prestige ships of any navy at the time. Finally, it was hoped that the attack would undermine American morale such that the US government would drop its demands contrary to Japanese interests and would seek a compromise peace with Japan.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: Striking the Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor carried two distinct disadvantages: the targeted ships would be in very shallow water, so it would be relatively easy to salvage and possibly repair them, and most of the crews would survive the attack since many would be on shore leave or would be rescued from the harbor. A further important disadvantage was the absence from Pearl Harbor of all three of the US Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers (, , and ). Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) top command was attached to Admiral Mahan's "decisive battle" doctrine, especially that of destroying the maximum number of battleships. Despite these concerns, Yamamoto decided to press ahead.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: Japanese confidence in their ability to win a short war also meant other targets in the harbor, especially the navy yard, oil tank farms, and submarine base, were ignored since by their thinking the war would be over before the influence of these facilities would be felt.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: On November 26, 1941, a Japanese task force (the Striking Force) of six aircraft carriers, , , , , and departed Hittokapu Bay on Kasatka (now Iterup) Island in the Kuril Islands, "en route" to a position northwest of Hawaii, intending to launch its 408 aircraft to attack Pearl Harbor: 360 for the two attack waves and 48 on defensive combat air patrol (CAP), including nine fighters from the first wave.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: The first wave was to be the primary attack, while the second wave was to attack carriers as its first objective and cruisers as its second, with battleships as the third target. The first wave carried most of the weapons to attack capital ships, mainly specially adapted Type 91 aerial torpedoes which were designed with an anti-roll mechanism and a rudder extension that let them operate in shallow water. The aircrews were ordered to select the highest value targets (battleships and aircraft carriers) or, if these were not present, any other high-value ships (cruisers and destroyers). First-wave dive bombers were to attack ground targets. Fighters were ordered to strafe and destroy as many parked aircraft as possible to ensure they did not get into the air to intercept the bombers, especially in the first wave. When the fighters' fuel got low they were to refuel at the aircraft carriers and return to combat. Fighters were to serve CAP duties where needed, especially over US airfields.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: Before the attack commenced, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched reconnaissance floatplanes from cruisers and , one to scout over Oahu and the other over Lahaina Roads, Maui, respectively, with orders to report on US fleet composition and location. Reconnaissance aircraft flights risked alerting the US, and were not necessary. US fleet composition and preparedness information in Pearl Harbor were already known due to the reports of the Japanese spy Takeo Yoshikawa. A report of the absence of the US fleet in Lahaina anchorage off Maui was received from the Tone's floatplane and fleet submarine . Another four scout planes patrolled the area between the Japanese carrier force (the Kidō Butai) and Niihau, to detect any counterattack.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: Fleet submarines , , , , and each embarked a Type A midget submarine for transport to the waters off Oahu. The five I-boats left Kure Naval District on November 25, 1941. On December 6, they came to within of the mouth of Pearl Harbor and launched their midget subs at about 01:00 local time on December 7. At 03:42 Hawaiian Time, the minesweeper spotted a midget submarine periscope southwest of the Pearl Harbor entrance buoy and alerted the destroyer . The midget may have entered Pearl Harbor. However, "Ward" sank another midget submarine at 06:37 in the first American shots in the Pacific Theater. A midget submarine on the north side of Ford Island missed the seaplane tender with her first torpedo and missed the attacking destroyer with her other one before being sunk by "Monaghan" at 08:43.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: A third midget submarine, "Ha-19", grounded twice, once outside the harbor entrance and again on the east side of Oahu, where it was captured on December 8. Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki swam ashore and was captured by Hawaii National Guard Corporal David Akui, becoming the first Japanese prisoner of war. A fourth had been damaged by a depth charge attack and was abandoned by its crew before it could fire its torpedoes. It was found outside the harbor in 1960. Japanese forces received a radio message from a midget submarine at 00:41 on December 8 claiming damage to one or more large warships inside Pearl Harbor.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: In 1992, 2000, and 2001 Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory's submersibles found the wreck of the fifth midget submarine lying in three parts outside Pearl Harbor. The wreck was in the debris field where much surplus US equipment was dumped after the war, including vehicles and landing craft. Both of its torpedoes were missing. This correlates with reports of two torpedoes fired at the light cruiser at 10:04 at the entrance of Pearl Harbor, and a possible torpedo fired at destroyer at 08:21.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: The attack took place before any formal declaration of war was made by Japan, but this was not Admiral Yamamoto's intention. He originally stipulated that the attack should not commence until thirty minutes after Japan had informed the United States that peace negotiations were at an end. However, the attack began before the notice could be delivered. Tokyo transmitted the 5000-word notification (commonly called the "14-Part Message") in two blocks to the Japanese Embassy in Washington. Transcribing the message took too long for the Japanese ambassador to deliver it at 1 pm Washington time, as ordered; in the event, it was not presented until more than an hour after the attack began. (In fact, US code breakers had already deciphered and translated most of the message hours before he was scheduled to deliver it.) The final part is sometimes described as a declaration of war. While it was viewed by a number of senior U.S government and military officials as a very strong indicator negotiations were likely to be terminated and that war might break out at any moment, it neither declared war nor severed diplomatic relations. A declaration of war was printed on the front page of Japan's newspapers in the evening edition of December 8 (late December 7 in the US), but not delivered to the US government until the day after the attack.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: For decades, conventional wisdom held that Japan attacked without first formally breaking diplomatic relations only because of accidents and bumbling that delayed the delivery of a document hinting at war to Washington. In 1999, however, Takeo Iguchi, a professor of law and international relations at International Christian University in Tokyo, discovered documents that pointed to a vigorous debate inside the government over how, and indeed whether, to notify Washington of Japan's intention to break off negotiations and start a war, including a December 7 entry in the war diary saying, "[O]ur deceptive diplomacy is steadily proceeding toward success." Of this, Iguchi said, "The diary shows that the army and navy did not want to give any proper declaration of war, or indeed prior notice even of the termination of negotiations... and they clearly prevailed."


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: In any event, even if the Japanese had decoded and delivered the 14-Part Message before the beginning of the attack, it would not have constituted either a formal break of diplomatic relations or a declaration of war. The final two paragraphs of the message read:


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: U.S. Naval intelligence officers were alarmed by the unusual timing for delivering the message – 1 pm on a Sunday, which was 7:30 am in Hawaii – and attempted to alert Pearl Harbor. But due to communication problems the warning was not delivered before the attack.


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: The first attack wave of 183 planes was launched north of Oahu, led by Commander Mitsuo Fuchida. Six planes failed to launch due to technical difficulties. The first attack included three groups of planes:


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: As the first wave approached Oahu, it was detected by the US Army SCR-270 radar at Opana Point near the island's northern tip. This post had been in training mode for months, but was not yet operational. The operators, Privates George Elliot Jr. and Joseph Lockard, reported a target to Private Joseph P. McDonald, a private stationed at Fort Shafter's Intercept Center near Pearl Harbor. But Lieutenant Kermit A. Tyler, a newly assigned officer at the thinly manned Intercept Center, presumed it was the scheduled arrival of six B-17 bombers from California. The Japanese planes were approaching from a direction very close (only a few degrees difference) to the bombers, and while the operators had never seen a formation as large on radar, they neglected to tell Tyler of its size. Tyler, for security reasons, could not tell the operators of the six B-17s that were due (even though it was widely known).


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: As the first wave of planes approached Oahu, they encountered and shot down several US aircraft. At least one of these radioed a somewhat incoherent warning. Other warnings from ships off the harbor entrance were still being processed or awaiting confirmation when the Japanese air assault began at 7:48a.m. Hawaiian Time (3:18a.m. December 8 Japanese Standard Time, as kept by ships of the "Kido Butai"), with the attack on Kaneohe. A total of 353 Japanese planes reached Oahu in two waves. Slow, vulnerable torpedo bombers led the first wave, exploiting the first moments of surprise to attack the most important ships present (the battleships), while dive bombers attacked US air bases across Oahu, starting with Hickam Field, the largest, and Wheeler Field, the main US Army Air Forces fighter base. The 171 planes in the second wave attacked the Army Air Forces' Bellows Field near Kaneohe on the windward side of the island and Ford Island. The only aerial opposition came from a handful of P-36 Hawks, P-40 Warhawks, and some SBD Dauntless dive bombers from the carrier .


title: Attack on Pearl Harbor

text: In the first-wave attack, about eight of the forty-nine 800kg (1760lb) armor-piercing bombs dropped hit their intended battleship targets. At least two of those bombs broke up on impact, another detonated before penetrating an unarmored deck, and one was a dud. Thirteen of the forty torpedoes hit battleships, and four torpedoes hit other ships. Men aboard US ships awoke to the sounds of alarms, bombs exploding, and gunfire, prompting bleary-eyed men to dress as they ran to General Quarters stations. (The famous message, "Air raid Pearl Harbor. This is not drill.", was sent from the headquarters of Patrol Wing Two, the first senior Hawaiian command to respond.) The defenders were very unprepared. Ammunition lockers were locked, aircraft parked wingtip to wingtip in the open to prevent sabotage, guns unmanned (none of the Navy's 5"/38s, only a quarter of its machine guns, and only four of 31 Army batteries got in action). Despite this low alert status, many American military personnel responded effectively during the attack. Ensign Joseph Taussig Jr., aboard , commanded the ship's antiaircraft guns and was severely wounded but continued to be on post. Lt. Commander F. J. Thomas commanded "Nevada" in the captain's absence and got her underway until the ship was grounded at 9:10a.m. One of the destroyers, , got underway with only four officers aboard, all ensigns, none with more than a year's sea duty; she operated at sea for 36 hours before her commanding officer managed to get back aboard. Captain Mervyn Bennion, commanding , led his men until he was cut down by fragments from a bomb which hit , moored alongside.