![]() ![]() General Leslie Groves, the military commander of the Manhattan Project, later blamed the British for failing to identify Fuchs as a Soviet spy. Declassified records reveal that Soviet spying on the US atomic bomb effort advanced Moscow’s bomb program, but Oppenheimer was no spy. From the time he started to work on Britain’s wartime atom bomb project, Fuchs was in what he later described as “ continuous contact” with Soviet intelligence, providing theoretical calculations that were necessary to build the atom bomb. Oppenheimer focuses on Klaus Fuchs, a brilliant theoretical physicist who fled from Nazi Germany to Britain and became a British naturalised subject. Multiple scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project provided critical information about US atomic bomb research to the Soviet Union. But the Russians did penetrate the Manhattan Project – the greatest security breach in US history. In fact, Soviet intelligence reports about the Manhattan Project reveal that at key points, Stalin’s spy chiefs were frustrated that their operatives had not recruited Oppenheimer. It seems likely that Robert was trying to protect his brother from Army security.Īrchives made available after the Soviet Union’s collapse now establish beyond doubt that Oppenheimer was not a Soviet agent. Over the ensuing years, Oppenheimer provided at least three versions of the story, sometimes involving his brother Frank. Oppenheimer rejected the approach, but for reasons that remain unclear, he did not inform authorities for several months.Īlso Read: Oppenheimer: Why the father of atomic bomb was offered Indian citizenship by Nehru? But being targeted and cultivated for recruitment is not the same as being a recruited spy.Īs the movie shows, in 1943, Oppenheimer’s academic colleague at the University of California, Berkeley, Haakon Chevalier, told Oppenheimer that a British scientist working in San Francisco could relay information to the Soviets. He was also being cultivated by Soviet intelligence officers. ![]() Oppenehimer was a top target for Soviet intelligence, which assigned him the code names CHESTER and CHEMIST. That year, Oppenheimer helped US Army security officers identify scientists he believed were communists. Oppenheimer saw communism as the best defence against the rise of fascism in Europe, which, being of Jewish heritage, was personal for him.īy 1943, however, Oppenheimer’s support for Communist Party causes shifted – evidently, as he realised the enormity of his mission to produce an atomic bomb. APįor Oppy, as his students called him, Marxism was intellectually interesting, but it was also practical. Oppenheimer was a Communist sympathiser until 1943. His brother Frank and his girlfriend Jean Tatlock belonged to the Communist Party of the United States, and Oppenheimer’s wife Katherine was a former member. ![]() We know that in the 1930s, and until 1943, Oppenheimer was a Communist sympathiser. In 1954, at the height of the McCarthy era, Oppenheimer was accused of being a Communist and even a Soviet spy. The scientists he led at the Los Alamos site were probably the most talented group of minds ever assembled in a single laboratory, including 12 eventual Nobel laureates.Īlso read: Who was Oppenheimer? What was his link to Hinduism? ![]() Oppenheimer joined the Manhattan Project, a nationwide effort to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis developed one, in 1942. ![]()
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