Robert Oppenheimer and the World's First Atomic Bombs (America was Third to Make Them)

I hate trashing the celebrity status of a man who did a great job very competently running the Manhattan Project - but for all that J. Robert Oppenheimer achieved - his accomplishments were greatly exaggerated for the purposes of cold war propaganda. So while wishing him a belated happy birthday (he last celebrated his on April 22, 1966) I'll briefly explain why we should not credit him as the inventor of the atomic bomb.

There is a reason why all the great quantum physicists learned Sanskrit. As Oppenheimer once said: “In ancient India, we find words for certain measurements of length, one was the distance of light-years and one was the length of the atom. Only a society that possessed nuclear energy would have the need for such words.” There are plenty of reasons to think that the first known atomic bombs were in ancient India, and Oppenheimer would be the first to admit it:

And even the statement about the detonation in New Mexico being the first atomic blast in modern times - even that is not true. The Manhattan Project couldn't have finished a single atomic bomb on their own before the end of WWII. Not until the United States made a secret deal with Nazi leadership to arrange for the transfer of Germany's enriched uranium to the Manhattan Project, along with the infrared detonators that made plutonium bombs possible. These were brought to the United States by submarine on the U-234. The deal was sweetened with Germany's very own atomic bombs, made just a little too late to win the war for Hitler because Germany no longer had the air supremacy needed to fly them to their targets, and had not yet developed long range rockets capable of delivering multi-ton warheads.

Germany was planning to be able to nuke New York by October 1945, and earlier that year General Patton (who had learned about German secret weapons projects) said "We can still lose this war." Fortunately for New York, Moscow, and London - Nazi Germany ran out of time to develop and deploy such weapons.

As I wrote near the end of my last book - Oppenheimer and Heisenberg - "I respect Oppenheimer’s genius, but he was a narcissistic psycho with a lot of unresolved mental problems. He kept having adulterous affairs with women who were often a bit masculine or lesbian, ardent communists, and quite often psychiatrists who could help him sort through his emotional baggage. President Truman deeply disliked him for being a “crybaby scientist” and he was a communist leading a program eventually known to have leaked atomic secrets to the communists. He was almost arrested for attempted murder at Cambridge and was soon diagnosed by professional psychiatrists as schizophrenic and beyond help. And he did not invent or father the first atomic bombs, not even 'in modern times.' How can this man be viewed as such a hero? Only because what is usually peddled by government as truth is really diluted with plenty of lies.”

If you want to be entertained and spoonfed the official story - watch Christopher Nolan's movie named after Oppenheimer. But if the truth sounds interesting, consider reading

Oppenheimer and Heisenberg