Closer Look at “Father of Atomic Bomb”

was that it was a military installation, but one including a great scientific research center. And that assembling of scientific talent for military purposes had never happened before — certainly not remotely at that scale. There were a lot of tensions associated with the relations between science and the military; military conceptions of secrecy and security often clashed with scientific expectations of relatively free communication. There were no obvious off-the-shelf patterns for this kind of scientific collaboration and organization, so neither the scientists nor the military had secure understandings of what sort of place Los Alamos was.

For the scientists, there was enormous time pressure, because they understood that this bomb had to be built to beat the Germans to it. The complexity of the task was enormous, but the resources were also enormous.

Laine Perfas: A lot of people credited the success of building the bomb to aspects of Oppenheimer’s unique personality, which you refer to as “charismatic authority” in a 2000 paper you wrote with Charles Thorpe. Could you talk a little more about him and what he was like as a person and a leader?
Shapin: Oppenheimer was actually a very unlikely choice for the scientific directorship of Los Alamos. Many people thought that he lacked any organizational ability or much sense of how to manage people. One of his colleagues once said that he couldn’t run a hamburger stand. And yet he did successfully run Los Alamos. And many people said afterwards that he was the essential person in the project — his role in organizing people and motivating people and in bridging the world between the scientists and military was absolutely key. I like the British saying “Cometh the hour, cometh the man.”

Oppenheimer was recognized as a charismatic leader, but lots of people helped him become a successful leader, and a charismatic one. This unique individual was a collective accomplishment. That said, Oppenheimer was only one of hundreds of thousands of people working on the project. He did not have much to do with the production of fissile materials, without which there would have been no bomb. He did not have great understanding of the mathematics of calculating shock waves or of engineering explosive lenses. And of course, he did not decide how the bomb would be used.

I suspect that Oppenheimer is such a compelling character because he’s so enigmatic, so complicated. We have off-the-shelf conceptions of eccentric