Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race. “It was almost unthinkable that loyalty should be in question,” writes Priscilla McMillan in The Ruin of J. His opposition was among the reasons that the American government began to look at the brilliant scientist with suspicion in the postwar years. However, the hydrogen bomb represented a postwar progression in nuclear technology that would push forward the emerging American-Soviet arms race–something Oppenheimer opposed on multiple grounds.

The scientists who worked on the bomb didn’t fully understand the impact of a nuclear bomb attack, but they were there to witness as their relatively primitive technology changed warfare forever. The Manhattan Project was forged in the heady days of a shooting war that Americans believed needed a swift and decisive resolution.

Oppenheimer opposed Teller’s vision of a larger bomb, believing American resources should be devoted to more feasible small projects. At Livermore, Teller worked on his ultimate vision, the hydrogen bomb–a product of nuclear fusion, which creates much larger bombs than nuclear fission. At these two competing weapons development facilities, as both the Cold War and McCarthyism blossomed, a slow-burning academic rivalry turned into a feud that involved the Atomic Energy Commission and ended in Oppenheimer’s security clearance being revoked, leaving him unable to work.Īt Los Alamos, Inglis-Arkell writes, Oppenheimer worked on developing small (and in the end unfeasibly dangerous) nuclear bombs for field use. Los Alamos and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory were their respective fortresses of solitude. In the end, writes Esther Inglis-Arkell for Gizmodo, the feud between Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller–once colleagues–alienated both from the community of scientists that fostered their work. It was a postwar portrait of pettiness: two renowned nuclear scientists, each leading a cutting-edge facility, waging war on one another, with dire consequences for both.

Cobalt bomb edward teller