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Each time Vladimir Putin raises the spectre of nuclear confrontation, the trail ultimately leads back to one man.

Eighty years before the Russian president invaded Ukraine, and brought the potential of such weapons back to mainstream attention, J Robert Oppenheimer was recruited to lead a team that would construct the world’s first atomic bombs.

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The Manhattan Project, set up during the Second World War in 1942, was guided by fear that if the US and its allies didn’t make them first, Hitler’s Nazi scientists would.

A left-wing theoretical physicist not known for his leadership qualities or laboratory acumen, the American was an unconventional pick but proved a devastatingly effective one.

As blockbuster biopic Oppenheimer hits cinemas, Sky News looks at how the father of the atomic bomb still shapes the world decades after his creation was deployed.

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An unusual recruitment

Oppenheimer was appointed by General Leslie Groves, the project’s military leader, to head up Site Y – a secret weapons research facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

But there were, as Oppenheimer biographer Professor Ray Monk puts it, “all sorts of reasons” not to appoint him, notably perceived association with communist organisations that had made him a suspect of the FBI.

Born to a Jewish family in New York in 1906, his student years had seen him drawn to the left as Germany’s fascist regime saw friends and relatives oppressed and forced to flee.

During studies at Harvard, Cambridge, and Germany‘s Gottingen university in the 1920s, he was known for being a “disaster in the laboratory”. Of his time studying physics at Harvard, Oppenheimer himself said: “My feeling about myself was always one of extreme discontent.”

Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the new director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J., is shown in front of a blackboard full of mathematical formulas, Dec. 17, 1947. Dr. Oppenheimer served as wartime director of the Manhattan Project when it developed and produced the first atomic bomb. (AP Photo)
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Oppenheimer worked in education before and after the war

He may have been unconvincing in the lab, but found his calling as a university lecturer in California. His ability to explain complex science in a relatively straightforward and compelling way proved key to impressing Groves, who interviewed countless scientists before a chance meeting with Oppenheimer.

Crucially, he also recognised the need for urgency.

Prof Monk says: “Oppenheimer knew Heisenberg, one of the greatest scientists in the world, who he worked with at Gottingen, was leading the Nazi bomb project and was worried they would get one before the Allies.

“He was in no doubt at all – the duty of all scientists in the US, and the allied countries, was building a bomb first.”

Catalog Number: Oppenheimer J Robert C35.Oppenheimer and Groves at Ground Zero, September, 1945..Credit: Digital Photo Archive, Department of Energy (DOE), courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives
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Oppenheimer enjoyed an unconventional relationship with Leslie Groves. Pic: Digital Photo Archive, Department of Energy

Building the bomb

Los Alamos was one of three sites critical to the development of the atomic bomb.

The others were a factory in Hanford, Washington, where plutonium was made; and a hidden base in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for enriching uranium.

The two elements would act as fuel for the bombs made at Los Alamos, two of which would be dropped on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945.

THE SCIENCE BEHIND OPPENHEIMER’S BOMB

The basis of the atomic bomb is the process of nuclear fission – when the nucleus of an atom is split into two smaller nuclei, releasing a large amount of energy in the process.

This was discovered in 1938 by two German scientists, and Oppenheimer realised its destructive potential when word reached him in 1939.

The prospect of weaponising nuclear fission focused the minds of scientists across Europe, with plutonium and uranium identified as elements that could undergo the process.

With the process understood, the race was on to weaponise it.

Cynthia C Kelly is founder and president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, dedicated to the preservation of the Manhattan Project and crucial to having the three sites gain national park status in the US.

“It was a first-of-a-kind effort across the board,” she says of the Manhattan Project, named after the New York City district where it was founded.

With the city that never sleeps deemed too busy for such a secretive initiative, the three laboratories were set up in isolated places far away from urban centres and the coast. They brought together geniuses from across America and overseas – including Britain and some who fled Nazi Germany – into one single-minded pursuit.

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“It required creative minds from the machinists to the craftsmen – everything had to be perfect,” Kelly adds, with a “classic absent-minded professor” at the heart of it.

“They had to take this energy, which had been uncontrolled up to now, figure out how to control it, and package it tightly enough to fit in the bomb bay of an aeroplane that could transport it and drop it.

“They had little confidence in harnessing this technology in time for the end of the war.”

On the test ground for the atomic bomb near Almagordo, N.M., Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, University of California physicist, smokes his pipe as he contemplates the site on Sept. 9, 1945. (AP Photo)
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Oppenheimer on the test ground for the atomic bomb near Almagordo, New Mexico

Becoming Death

But harness it they did – and the world would change forever.

The first atomic bomb test in New Mexico happened on 16 July 1945, after which Oppenheimer uttered a line that, along with his trademark fedora and pipe, has become quintessential to his public image.

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” he observed after the so-called Trinity Test, quoting a sacred Hindu text in a reminder of his acumen as a philosopher as well as a scientist.

A few weeks after, death followed on an unimaginable scale. On 6 August, a uranium-based bomb named Little Boy was detonated over Hiroshima; and another, Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki three days later.

The latest blast was larger larger than the bomb dropped on Japan's Nagasaki in 1945
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The atomic bomb dropped on Japan’s Nagasaki in 1945

Both cities were left unrecognisable, 200,000 people died, and Japan surrendered. Oppenheimer was shaken.

“Right up until the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, he had no moral qualms whatsoever,” says Prof Monk.

“Even when the Germans surrendered (on 7 May 1945), and it was obvious the Americans were still going to use the bomb against the Japanese, he had no qualms.

“But he thought one demonstration of the awesome power of this weapon was enough.”

-FILE PHOTO MARCH 1946 - This general view of the city of Hiroshima showing damage wrought by the atomic bomb was taken March 1946, six months after the bomb was dropped August 6, 1945. The 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and the end of World War II is August 1995
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Hiroshima in March 1946, six months after America’s atomic bomb was dropped

A new world

Despite its undoubted role in ending the Second World War, which cost the lives of some 90 million people, Oppenheimer was changed by the atomic bomb, believing it made the prospect of future conflict “unendurable”.

“It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country,” he said in 1946, later signalling his opposition to his government’s plan to develop even bigger nuclear weapons.

Oppenheimer was ignored and held in deep suspicion, and his security clearance at the Atomic Energy Commission eventually rescinded. He died of lung cancer in 1967 with none of the power he once yielded.

FILE-This Oct. 17, 1945 file photo Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer of the New Mexico laboratories of the atomic bomb making project, testifies before the Senate Military Affairs Committee in Washington
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Oppenheimer testifies before the Senate military affairs committee in Washington in 1945

Nuclear weapons have not been used again, but the threat lingers. America and Russia’s arsenals are far smaller than their Cold War peak, but they hold 90% of an estimated global stockpile of 13,000 weapons.

Other nuclear powers include China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Like Putin, Kim Jong Un has on several occasions threatened to use them. The Nuclear Threat Initiative, an organisation focused on reducing nuclear and biological threats, says the world could be “sleepwalking into a nuclear disaster”.

Ever since Oppenheimer witnessed the Trinity Test in the New Mexico desert, Cynthia C Kelly says there’s been “no way to put the genie back in the bottle”.

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‘Nuclear weapon threat never goes away’

Beyond the mountain

While Oppenheimer failed in his post-war efforts, his work is the best example world leaders have of why they wouldn’t want to risk “mutually-assured destruction” by launching a nuclear weapon.

Two cities devastated beyond recognition have seemingly served as the ultimate deterrence.

“Oppenheimer was invited to say he regretted developing the atomic bomb many times, most prominently when he visited Japan, and his answer was always no,” says Prof Monk.

“It can be argued the fact the weapons have never been used again shows deterrence works.”

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Beyond deterrence, the Manhattan Project also unleashed an era of science and innovation still being felt today, including nuclear energy vital to weaning ourselves off greenhouse gases.

Last year, American scientists performed the first-ever nuclear fusion experiment to achieve net energy gain, paving the way for a “clean energy source that could revolutionise the world”.

Some experts have called for a Manhattan Project-style initiative to combat climate change, leveraging the same urgency and determination to tackle a crisis that threatens us all. The startling rise of artificial intelligence, already compared to the threat of nuclear weapons by its very creators, may present another such opportunity.

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Unfortunately, nothing seems to focus the minds quite like war.

“Weapons are one part of the nuclear story, and that will be with us until we blow ourselves up,” says Kelly.

“Hopefully that won’t happen and, as Oppenheimer put it, we can see beyond the mountain.”

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Donald Trump’s tariffs will have consequences for globalisation, the US economy and geopolitics

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Donald Trump's tariffs will have consequences for globalisation, the US economy and geopolitics

For decades, trade and trade policy has been an economic and political backwater – decidedly boring, seemingly uncontroversial. 

Trade was mostly free and getting freer, tariffs were getting lower and lower, and the world was becoming more, not less, globalised.

But alongside those long-term trends, there were some serious consequences.

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Mature, developed economies like the UK and US became ever more reliant on cheap imports from China and, in the process, saw their manufacturing sectors shrink.

Large swathes of the rust belt in the US – and much of the Midlands and North of England – were hollowed out.

And to some extent that’s where the story of Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” really began – with the notion that free trade and globalisation had a darker side, a side he wants to remedy via tariffs.

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He imposed a set of tariffs in his first term, some on China, some on specific materials like steel and aluminium. But the height and the breadth of those tariffs were as nothing compared with the ones we have just heard about.

Not since the 1930s has the US so radically increased the level of tariffs on all nations across the world. Back then, those tariffs exacerbated the Great Depression.

It’s anyone’s guess as to what the consequences of these ones will be. But there will be consequences.

Consequences for the nature of globalisation, consequences for the US economy (tariffs are exceptionally inflationary), consequences for geopolitics.

President Trump with his list of tariffs for various countries. Pic: Reuters
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Imports from the UK will face a 10% tariff, while EU goods will see 20% rates. Pic: Reuters

And to some extent, merely knowing that little bit more about the White House’s plans will deliver a bit of relief to financial markets, which have fretted for months about the imposition of tariffs. That uncertainty recently reached unprecedented levels.

But don’t for a moment assume that this saga is over. Nothing of the sort. In the coming days, we will learn more – more about the nuts and bolts of these policies, more about the retaliatory measures coming from other countries.

We will, possibly, get more of a sense about whether some countries – including the UK – will enjoy reprieves from the tariffs.

To paraphrase Churchill, this isn’t the end of the trade war, or even the beginning of the end – perhaps just the end of the beginning.

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‘A genius actor’, ‘firecracker’, and ‘my friend’: Tributes paid to Top Gun star Val Kilmer

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'A genius actor', 'firecracker', and 'my friend': Tributes paid to Top Gun star Val Kilmer

Actors, directors and celebrity friends have paid tribute to Val Kilmer, after he died aged 65.

The California-born star of Top Gun, Batman and Heat died of pneumonia on Tuesday night in Los Angeles, his daughter Mercedes told the Associated Press.

She said Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 but later recovered.

Tributes flooded in after reports broke of the actor’s death, with No Country For Old Men star Josh Brolin among the first to share their memories.

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Watch: Val Kilmer in his most iconic roles

He wrote on Instagram: “See ya, pal. I’m going to miss you. You were a smart, challenging, brave, uber-creative firecracker. There’s not a lot left of those.

“I hope to see you up there in the heavens when I eventually get there. Until then, amazing memories, lovely thoughts.”

Kyle Maclachlan, who co-starred with Kilmer in the 1991 biopic The Doors, wrote on social media: “You’ll always be my Jim. See you on the other side my friend.”

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Michael Mann, who directed Kilmer in 1995’s Heat, also paid tribute in a statement, saying: “I always marvelled at the range, the brilliant variability within the powerful current of Val’s possessing and expressing character.

“After so many years of Val battling disease and maintaining his spirit, this is tremendously sad news.”

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Heat co-star Danny Trejo also called Kilmer “a great actor, a wonderful person, and a dear friend of mine” on Instagram.

Cher, who once dated the actor, said on X that “U Were Funny, crazy, pain in the ass, GREAT FRIEND… BRILLIANT as Mark Twain, BRAVE here during ur sickness”.

Lifelong friend and director of Twixt, Francis Ford Coppola said: “Val Kilmer was the most talented actor when in his High School, and that talent only grew greater throughout his life.

“He was a wonderful person to work with and a joy to know – I will always remember him.”

The Top Gun account on X also said it was remembering Kilmer, who starred as Iceman in both the 1986 original and 2022 sequel, and “whose indelible cinematic mark spanned genres and generations”.

Nicolas Cage added that “I always liked Val and am sad to hear of his passing”.

“I thought he was a genius actor,” he said. “I enjoyed working with him on Bad Lieutenant and I admired his commitment and sense of humor.

“He should have won the Oscar for The Doors.”

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Elon Musk calls reports he will step back from government role ‘fake news’

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Elon Musk calls reports he will step back from government role 'fake news'

Elon Musk has called reports that he will leave his government role in the coming months “fake news”.

A senior White House official previously told NBC News, Sky’s US partner network, that Donald Trump had discussed the Tesla and X boss transitioning back to the private sector at a cabinet meeting last month.

Donald Trump walks with Elon Musk before attending a viewing of the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket, in Brownsville, Texas, U.S., November 19, 2024 . Brandon Bell/Pool via REUTERS TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
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The Tesla boss has headed DOGE since 20 January. File pic: Reuters

After reports emerged of the meeting, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it was “garbage” and added: “Elon Musk and President Trump have both publicly stated that Elon will depart from public service as a special government employee when his incredible work at DOGE is complete.”

Mr Musk added in response on X: “Yeah, fake news.”

NBC News reported that the official said Mr Musk would leave at the end of his 130 days as a special government employee.

That would be 30 May, but it is unclear if the billionaire businessman will indeed leave on that date.

Previously, the White House said that as a temporary organisation, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would be terminated on 4 July next year – the 250th anniversary of the US.

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It comes days after Mr Musk said some members of his DOGE team were getting death threats on a daily basis.

Mr Musk had drawn criticism over his efforts to downsize the US federal government.

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In just weeks, entire agencies were dismantled, and tens of thousands of workers from the 2.3 million federal workforce have been fired or have agreed to leave their jobs.

A number of lawsuits were filed in state and federal courts over cuts recommended by DOGE.

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