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When Oppenheimer was not bossing the laboratory at Los Alamos, he was dealing with military and civilian brass in Washington, and growing in personal assurance at each new contact. He acquired a new trademark. Worried about security, General Groves told Oppie that his broad-brimmed Stetson was too much hat; every spy within a mile of Union Station could spot his comings & goings. Oppie compromised on a brown porkpie (size 6 7/8|), and has worn it ever since. Physicists were not mystified when the hat appeared, uncaptioned and unexplained, on the cover of the magazine Physics Today.
On July 16, 1945, all the long months at Los Alamos were put to the test in the New Mexico desert. Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell was watching Oppenheimer when it happened; "He grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself . . . When the announcer shouted 'Now!' and there came this tremendous burst of light, followed ... by the deep-growling roar of the explosion, his face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief." Oppenheimer recalls that two lines of the Bhagavad-Gita flashed through his mind: "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds."
A Sense of Sin. Los Alamos and its aftermath left him with "a legacy of concern." Two years later Oppenheimer told his fellow physicists that their weapon had "dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."*
As if to expiate this sense of sin Oppenheimer threw himself into the campaign for international atomic regulation. He was appointed to a seven-man board (chairman: David Lilienthal) to suggest U.S. policy on the future of atomic energy. Chalk in hand, Oppie lectured to the nonscientific members for ten days on atomic energy, patiently repeating the lesson whenever some member got lost. Oppenheimer was responsible for much of the writing, and many of the ideas, in the resulting 34,000-word Acheson-Lilienthal Report (TIME, April 8, 1946), which called for an international atomic development authority. Says Lilienthal: "Robert is the only authentic genius I know."
To a reporter who asked him the bomb's "limitations," Oppenheimer replied: "The limitations lie in the fact that you don't want to be on the receiving end." He is still convinced that an international program is essential, and for the best of selfish reasons: "Our atomic monopoly is like a cake of ice melting in the sun . . ."
Sober Penetration. Soon after the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japanese physicists sent messages to
Oppenheimer and other U.S. "colleagues," congratulating them on their "fine job" in achieving nuclear fission. To Oppenheimer, there was nothing very remarkable or shocking about this: it simply illustrated how international science has always been.