Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (126 page)

Joe Weinberg, Rossi Lomanitz, David Bohm and Max Friedman pose for a street photographer, a picture that would arouse the FBI’s interest in all four for many years after it was taken.

The staff of the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley sitting on the 60-inch cyclotron in 1939. Lawrence is on the front row, fourth from the left; Oppenheimer is on the top at the back with a pipe in his mouth.

Julian Schwinger, who became Oppenheimer’s research assistant in 1940 and went on to develop quantum electrodynamics, to win the Nobel Prize and be recognised as one of America’s greatest ever physicists.

Young, brilliant and mischievous Richard Feynman, who is Schwinger’s main rival for the greatest physicist the USA has ever produced.

The Los Alamos Ranch School, which became the site of the laboratory that produced the world’s first atomic bombs.

The indomitable General Groves, whose fearsome power of will was an important factor in the success of the Manhattan Project.

Enrico Fermi in Chicago in 1942, at a time when he was working on the project that would succeed in producing the world’s first fission chain-reaction.

The graphite pile at Stagg Field in Chicago, where, on 2 December 1942, Fermi and his team successfully produced a chain reaction, thereby showing that it was indeed possible to produce energy through nuclear fission.

Hans Bethe in the 1940s.

Klaus Fuchs

Edward Teller, 1956.

Typically unimpressive results of Seth Neddermeyer’s early attempts at implosion.

The Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs.