Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project
Background
In 1960, the journalist Robert Cahn interviewed Robert Oppenheimer for an article he was writing on the Trinity atomic bomb test that was published in the July 16, 1960 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. The article did not quote extensively from the interview. Cahn appears to have eventually given a copy of the interview transcript to Al Barlett, a physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, who in turn donated it to AIP in the 1990s. Although Cahn’s questions were clearly not transcribed verbatim, Oppenheimer’s replies do appear to be reasonably complete, if not always transcribed correctly. There is no known copy of the audio from the interview.
Digital repository copies and metadata
Original typescript | Formatted transcript
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Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein picks out passages from the Oppenheimer interviews that are of particular interest to a scholar with a strong understanding of his biography and work.