Quotes about Oppenheimer

Philip Morrison

When fission was first discovered, within perhaps a week, there was on the blackboard of Robert Oppenheimer’s office a drawing—a very bad … drawing of a [atomic] bomb.

Morrison was then a graduate student of Oppenheimer. The quotation is important, not because it shows how quickly the “father of the atomic bomb” realized that a nuclear bomb could be made and how, but how relatively easy and rapid it was for a competent theoretical physicist could conceptually design a nuclear weapon if they first had knowledge of the Hahn / Strassmann Experiment and the Meitner / Frisch explanation of what had happened ({640924}). Note Leo Szilard’s letter at about the same time--{640925}.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)

Steve Sheinkin

Here at great expense,' [Colonel Groves] moaned to Oppenheimer, 'the government has assembled the world's largest collection of crackpots.

Steve Eisman

My parents worked as brokers at Oppenheimer securities. They managed to finagle me a job.

Sting

How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?

Richard P. Feynman

The original reason to start the project, which was that the Germans were a danger, started me off on a process of action, which was to try to develop this first system at Princeton and then at Los Alamos, to try to make the bomb work.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

Quoting the Baghavad-Gita at the first atomic bomb test, Alamogordo, NM, July 16, 1945

Hans Albrecht Bethe

In Los Alamos we were motivated by the desire to develop the atomic bomb before the Germans could do it. That was our main motivation …. The Germans surrendered before the bomb was ready and so it was obvious to use it against our remaining enemy [Japan].

Bethe and other European refugees joined American and British scientists at Los Alamos, NM, for the development of the atomic bomb.

Oppenheimer Quotes