By Jerilyn Watson
Broadcast: November 14, 2004
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VOICE ONE:
I'm Sarah Long.
VOICE TWO:
And I'm Steve Ember with People in America in VOA Special English. Today we report about two scientists, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi, who helped lead the world into the nuclear age.
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VOICE ONE:
It is July Sixteenth, Nineteen-Forty-Five. All is quiet in an American desert at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Suddenly there is a terrible explosion. A huge cloud rises from the Earth. The sky turns purple and yellow.
The first atomic bomb has been exploded. It is a test of the most deadly weapon ever known. American officials are considering using this weapon to try to end World War Two.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer is the head of the Los Alamos laboratory. It is the creative center of the secret Manhattan Project, which made the explosion possible. As the cloud rises, Mister Oppenheimer remembers words from the Hindu holy book, the Baghavad Gita. He says: "For I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
VOICE TWO:
Less than one month after the test at Alamogordo, the United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities. President Harry Truman announced to the world about the first bomb:
ACT ONE: TRUMAN READING ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE DROPPING OF THE BOMB AT HIROSHIMA. (15 secs)
The Japanese soon surrendered. World War Two ended.
VOICE ONE:
Enrico Fermi had been the first to use a neutron to produce the radioactive change of one element to another. He was a refugee from Fascist Italy. He and other refugee scientists were worried that Germany was working to develop an atomic bomb. They urged the United States government to pay for a secret scientific effort, called the Manhattan Project, to create the bomb. Mister Fermi helped Mister Oppenheimer prepare the Alamogordo bomb test.
Yet later both Mister Oppenheimer and Mister Fermi spoke against further development of nuclear weapons. Both men opposed the hydrogen bomb.
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VOICE TWO:
J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April Twenty-Second, Nineteen-Oh-Four. Even as a boy, he showed he had unusual intelligence. As a young man he attended Harvard University, in the eastern United States, and Cambridge University in England.He earned his doctorate in physics at Gottingen University, Germany, in Nineteen-Twenty-Seven. There he worked with the famous scientist, Max Born. By Nineteen-Thirty, Mister Oppenheimer was teaching at two top universities on the American West Coast. His fame as a teacher spread. Soon he was teaching the best students of physics in the United States.
VOICE ONE:
In Nineteen-Forty-Two, Mister Oppenheimer joined the American government's project to develop the atomic bomb. He was appointed head of the Los Alamos Laboratory. Many of his former students worked for him on the project.
One year after the bombs were dropped on Japan, he received the Presidential Medal of Merit for his work . In Nineteen-Forty-Seven, he began to direct the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton University on the East Coast.
VOICE TWO:
At the same time, Mister Oppenheimer became chairman of the advisory committee to the United States Atomic Energy Commission. He used the position to try to make the public recognize the dangers of nuclear power as well as its possibilities for good.
He regretted that work was being done to develop the hydrogen bomb. He felt it was bad for both scientific and humanitarian reasons. However, extreme tension existed between the United States and the Soviet Union at the time. So in Nineteen-Forty-Nine President Truman decided that work on nuclear weapons should continue.
