Portal:Nuclear technology

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Over four weeks in 1954, the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) explored the background, actions, and associations of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American scientist who directed the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. The hearing resulted in Oppenheimer's Q clearance being revoked. This marked the end of his formal relationship with the government of the United States and generated considerable controversy regarding whether the treatment of Oppenheimer was fair, or whether it was an expression of anti-communist McCarthyism.

Doubts about Oppenheimer's loyalty dated back to the 1930s, when he was a member of numerous Communist front organizations and was associated with Communist Party USA members, including his wife, brother and sister-in-law. These associations were known to Army Counterintelligence at the time he was made director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in 1942 and chairman of the influential General Advisory Committee of the AEC in 1947. In this capacity, Oppenheimer became involved in bureaucratic conflict between the Army and Air Force over the types of nuclear weapons the country required, technical conflict between the scientists over the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb, and personal conflict with AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss.

The proceedings were initiated after Oppenheimer refused to voluntarily give up his security clearance while working as an atomic weapons consultant for the government, under a contract due to expire at the end of June 1954. Several of his colleagues testified at the hearings. As a result of the two-to-one decision of the hearing's three judges, he was stripped of his security clearance one day before his consultant contract was due to expire. The panel found that he was loyal and discreet with atomic secrets, but did not recommend that his security clearance be reinstated.

The loss of his security clearance ended Oppenheimer's role in government and policy. He became an academic exile, cut off from his former career and the world he had helped to create. The reputations of those who had testified against Oppenheimer were tarnished as well, though Oppenheimer's reputation was later partly rehabilitated by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The brief period when scientists were viewed as a "public-policy priesthood" ended; thereafter, they would serve the state only to offer narrow scientific opinions. Scientists working in government were on notice that dissent was no longer tolerated.

The fairness of the proceedings has been a subject of controversy, criticized in the acclaimed Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus and dramatized in film and television. On December 16, 2022, United States Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm nullified the 1954 decision, saying that it had been the result of a "flawed process" and affirming that Oppenheimer had been loyal. (Full article...)

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Credit: Cpl. Lynn P. Walker, Jr. (Marine Corps)
Battered religious figures stand watch on a hill above a tattered valley. Nagasaki, Japan. September 24, 1945, 6 weeks after the city was destroyed by the world's second atomic bomb attack. Photo by Cpl. Lynn P. Walker, Jr. (Marine Corps) NARA FILE #: 127-N-136176

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James Bryant Conant (March 26, 1893 – February 11, 1978) was an American chemist, a transformative President of Harvard University, and the first U.S. Ambassador to West Germany. Conant obtained a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard in 1916.

During World War I, he served in the U.S. Army, where he worked on the development of poison gases, especially Lewisite. He became an assistant professor of chemistry at Harvard University in 1919 and the Sheldon Emery Professor of Organic Chemistry in 1929. He researched the physical structures of natural products, particularly chlorophyll, and he was one of the first to explore the sometimes complex relationship between chemical equilibrium and the reaction rate of chemical processes. He studied the biochemistry of oxyhemoglobin providing insight into the disease methemoglobinemia, helped to explain the structure of chlorophyll, and contributed important insights that underlie modern theories of acid-base chemistry.

In 1933, Conant became the President of Harvard University with a reformist agenda that involved dispensing with a number of customs, including class rankings and the requirement for Latin classes. He abolished athletic scholarships, and instituted an "up or out" policy, under which untenured faculty who were not promoted were terminated. His egalitarian vision of education required a diversified student body, and he promoted the adoption of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and co-educational classes. During his presidency, women were admitted to Harvard Medical School and Harvard Law School for the first time.

Conant was appointed to the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) in 1940, becoming its chairman in 1941. In this capacity, he oversaw vital wartime research projects, including the development of synthetic rubber and the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bombs. On July 16, 1945, he was among the dignitaries present at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range for the Trinity nuclear test, the first detonation of an atomic bomb, and was part of the Interim Committee that advised President Harry S. Truman to use atomic bombs on Japan. After the war, he served on the Joint Research and Development Board (JRDC) that was established to coordinate burgeoning defense research, and on the influential General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC); in the latter capacity he advised the president against starting a development program for the hydrogen bomb.

In his later years at Harvard, Conant taught undergraduate courses on the history and philosophy of science, and wrote books explaining the scientific method to laymen. In 1953, he retired as President of Harvard University and became the United States High Commissioner for Germany, overseeing the restoration of German sovereignty after World War II, and then was Ambassador to West Germany until 1957.

On returning to the United States, Conant criticized the education system in The American High School Today (1959), Slums and Suburbs (1961), and The Education of American Teachers (1963). Between 1965 and 1969, Conant authored his autobiography, My Several Lives (1970). He became increasingly infirm, had a series of strokes in 1977, and died in a nursing home in Hanover, New Hampshire, the following year. (Full article...)

Nuclear technology news


25 April 2024 – Russia–NATO relations
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov warns that Russia will make NATO nuclear weapons in Poland one of its primary targets if they are deployed there. (The Jerusalem Post)
23 April 2024 – North Korea and weapons of mass destruction
North Korea claims that it tested a new command-and-control system in a simulated nuclear counterstrike. (CNN)

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