Los Alamos: Rabi Made Oppenheimer

During this experience, Rabi taught Oppenheimer his new role as a moral and instrumental leader of the scientists’ community in Los Alamos. Theoretical physicist Hans Bethe said that Rabi made Oppenheimer ‘more practical’, ‘He talked Oppie out of putting on a uniform’. In Bethe’s view the project would have been a mess if Rabi did not step in. Men like Rabi and Bacher constituted Oppenheimer as the kind of a man to could and would press his military superiors for a civilian form of organization. Oppenheimer wrote Conant again saying that his attempts to persuade the scientists that militarization would not result in the loss of the ‘scientific anatomy’ wasn’t successful. And he warned that many of the scientists that are working on the project

Bethe proposed the idea of regular Colloquia where stuff meets and shares reports of their work. The idea behind the Colloquia was for the scientists to be able to see the whole picture instead of just what they are working on, that also enables them to get suggestions from each other even though they are work on different parts of the project. Weisskopf ascribed the Colloquia and its importance to Oppenheimer ‘Oppenheimer insisted on having these regular colloquia against the opposition of the security-minded people, who wanted each man only to know his part of the work. He knew that each one must know the whole thing if he was to be creative’. Bethe wrote on the same topic 'Oppenheimer had to fight hard for free discussion among all qualified members of the laboratory. But the free flow of information and discussion, together with Oppenheimer's personality, kept morale at its highest throughout the war' (Thorpe and Shapin,

On the 16th of July 1945, at Alamogordo Air Force Base in the New Mexican desert the trinity test as it was dubbed by Oppenheimer was the first test of an atomic warhead in the world. It had Power of approximately 18,000 tons of TNT (Scientists and Scientists, 2017). After watching the detonation from distance, a Hindu scripture in the Bhagavad-Gita ‘I am become death, the shatterer of the world’ came to his mind (English.illinois.edu, 2017). Ironically, he was the leading scientist and the director of the making of the atomic bomb and he was against using it on Japan; he was too aware of the outcome of the bomb and how dangerous it is. After the war, he was appointed Chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). He served 1947-1953 as the chairman, at that time he strongly opposed the making of a hydrogen bomb considering how much more powerful than the atomic it would be. (English.illinois.edu,