Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2018–2023years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Having read waaaay too many books about the development of the atomic bomb, I have to say that my favorite is Lawrence and Oppenheimer by Davis. It tells the story of two strong willed scientists, the competing methods that they were pushing for isotope separation, and how the intersection of personality, science & engineering, and the political/bureaucratic jockeying that's part of any large project played out.
- The claim of the article is not about Oppenheimer's ideology. Rather, its claim is that he was at one point a member of a specific organization, the Communist Party USA, despite denying this later. His security investigation was something of a conflict between guys like Boris Pash, who saw communists everywhere and wanted to purge them, and John Lansdale, who defined a communist as "someone more loyal to Russia" than to the United States. This is described endlessly in "Lawrence and Oppenheimer" (written in the 1960s) and the more recent Oppenheimer biography "Inside the Center" by Ray Monk. I expect American Prometheus goes into all of it too, but I haven't read it.
The Monk biography leaves open the possibility that Oppenheimer was once a CPUSA member and covered it up. He might have been, but his own hiring policy at Los Alamos was he willing to hire ex-CPUSA members as long as they were not current members.
