Article ID: CBB001320118

The Biographies of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Desert Saint or Destroyer of Worlds (2012)

unapi

In 2005, sixty years after the scientific director of the Manhattan Project looked out over the New Mexico desert and witnessed the result of eighteen months of work on what was then the world's largest and most expensive scientific endeavor, there appeared no fewer than four biographies of J. Robert Oppenheimer. That moment marked, among other things, an important reassessment of the histories, legacies, and meanings of both Oppenheimer himself and the nuclear culture that emerged following that world's first atomic explosion on July 16, 1945. That such a reassessment could manifest itself in a spate of biographies speaks to the importance of the genre for understanding postwar nuclear culture and other changing aspects of American science during that time. This persistent retelling of the life of a scientist also raises a number of questions: How are we to make our way through the different narratives? What do the biographies tell us about the role of Oppenheimer's life story in understanding the atomic age? How do we manage the "irresistibly cultural" (203) similarities Robert M. Young has identified between the literary form of the biography and the scientific content of a scientist's biography? What recurring tropes might shed light on the relationships between the construction of Oppenheimer biographies and the biographers' governing assumptions? This article will address one of those tropes---the desert---in an attempt to answer some of the other questions.

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Authors & Contributors
Oppenheimer, Frank
Bernstein, Jeremy
Zhu, Yuelin
Wellerstein, Alex
Strasser, Bruno J.
Sopka, Katherine Russell
Concepts
Nuclear weapons; atomic weapons
Physics
Atomic, nuclear, and particle physics
Biographies
Science and politics
Manhattan Project
Time Periods
20th century
20th century, early
21st century
20th century, late
Places
United States
Berkeley (California, U.S.)
England
Ohio (U.S.)
Switzerland
Italy
Institutions
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
University of California, Berkeley
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (U.S.)
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
Cavendish Laboratory
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