In this modest autobiography, Webb describes a wartime trajectory common to millions of ordinary people, who were suddenly plunged from a peaceful civilian world into the unfamiliar environment of military life. Unusual too, because she was the only British servicewoman to work both at Bletchley Park, home to the government code and cypher school, and in intelligence at the Pentagon in Washington. She is about to turn one hundred years old and has chosen at the end of a long life to recount her service in the Second World War, when she rose to be a staff sergeant in the ATS, the women’s branch of the British army. He added that Oppenheimer donated to refugee organizations that may have helped some of his distant relatives escape Germany.Betty Webb is an unusual author. Oppenheimer did not go to synagogue and rarely spoke about Judaism, but he was aware of antisemitism at Harvard University, as well as when he visited Germany and England, according to Bird. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist and friend of Oppenheimer’s, Isidor Rabi, born into an Orthodox Jewish family, purportedly said something that Bird takes to be at least partly in jest: “Well, Robert might have been a better physicist if he had studied the Talmud more and less the Gita.” When the first test of the bomb succeeded, Oppenheimer told his brother simply, “It worked.” But to a New York Times reporter, he quoted from the “Bhagavad Gita”: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” These two men were like oil and water-really bad chemistry.”Īn intellectual, Oppenheimer was also a student of Hindu scripture. “As he got to know Oppenheimer, he began to loathe him. “Lewis Strauss was someone who came to despise Oppenheimer,” Bird said. Strauss advocated for the hydrogen bomb, while Oppenheimer did not, and Strauss, who attended a Conservative synagogue, didn’t like that Oppenheimer was so casual about his Jewish ancestry, according to Bird. government stated was flawed and which it overturned last December. Atomic Energy Commission-drove the revocation of Oppenheimer’s clearance, which the U.S. commerce secretary and then chair of the U.S. The Jewish businessman Lewis Strauss-a future U.S. When Oppenheimer left, Einstein turned to his secretary and said in Yiddish, “There goes a nahr, a fool,” said Bird. You don’t need to subject yourself to any kind of witch hunt.’” “‘If they don’t want you, you should walk away. “Einstein looks at him and says, ‘Robert, why are you doing this? You know, you’re Mr. The father of relativity told Oppenheimer that fighting the government was a fool’s errand, but the latter told Einstein that he had to use his celebrity to convince the United States not to keep building increasingly dangerous weapons in an arms race with Russia. (Washington, Jerusalem and others have said that Iran will not be allowed to become a nuclear power.)īird also spoke of an exchange between Albert Einstein and Oppenheimer, whose security clearance was revoked in a “kangaroo court” in 1954. “So he’s predicting North Korea and Pakistan and India and Israel and soon, Iran, and he knows there are no secrets-that the cat is out of the bag so to speak,” he added. Three months after the bombing, Oppenheimer told a Philadelphia crowd that although it might think the bombs’ $2 billion price tag was hefty, “it is actually cheap, and any nation anywhere in the world, however poor, that decides to get this weapon will be able to do so,” said Bird. The author rejected the view that dropping the bomb was necessary to convince Japan to surrender and that a second bomb was necessary after Japan didn’t stand down in the aftermath of the first one.ĭue to Russia’s involvement, Japan was near surrendering before the first bomb was even dropped according to Bird, it first wanted assurances that its emperor would not be hanged.
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