DOE acknowledges J. Robert Oppenheimer

Sixty-three years after its predecessor agency effectively banished J. Robert Oppenheimer, the US Department of Energy has moved to posthumously recognize the father of the atomic bomb by renaming a leadership training program in his honor. Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the Manhattan Project and the founding director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 1954, at the height of the McCarthy era, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) revoked Oppenheimer’s security clearance, ostensibly for failing to report his contacts with a friend who was a Communist sympathizer.

The Oppenheimer Science and Energy Leadership Program, which began as a pilot program last year, grooms early- to mid-career scientists and engineers for management posts at DOE, in the labs, and in industry. Fourteen individuals are currently enrolled in the year-long program, which consists of workshops that cover the range of the agency’s missions. The workshops take place in Washington, DC, and at the national labs. Oppenheimer himself was just 38 when he was put in charge of developing the bomb, Energy secretary Ernest Moniz noted on 18 January in a formal announcement of the program’s renaming.

“In making this designation, we fully acknowledge the controversy surrounding Dr. Oppenheimer’s security clearance a decade after the Manhattan Project,” Moniz said in the statement. Oppenheimer, who was a consultant to the AEC at the time, was banished by the agency’s personnel security board following lengthy hearings at which both Edward Teller and Leslie Groves, the military commander of the Manhattan Project, testified against him. The board, however, noted that it had found no evidence of disloyalty.

“The federal government’s treatment of Oppenheimer after the war was an unfortunate chapter in our nation’s history. And this will help to correct that,” says former New Mexico senator Jeff Bingaman (D), who has long urged public recognition of the wartime leader. Bingaman’s successor, current Sen. Martin Heinrich (D), says recognizing Oppenheimer “is a positive step toward restoring the record of a patriotic genius who was unfairly tarnished by a McCarthy-era witch hunt.”

Franklin Orr, DOE undersecretary for science and energy, says information released over the years since the hearings, including by the National Security Agency, has put to rest any questions about Oppenheimer’s loyalty. In 2014 DOE released the unredacted transcript of the hearings.

Renaming the training program in honor of Oppenheimer will “recognize what an incredible impact he had on what we now know as our national laboratory system,” Orr says, and also hopefully provide the program some visibility.

It isn’t the first time Oppenheimer was recognized after being banished from the AEC. In 1963 he received from President Lyndon Johnson the commission’s Enrico Fermi Award, which honors scientists, engineers, and policymakers who advance energy science and technology. (Teller had received the award the year before.) Oppenheimer died in 1967.