Oppenheimer, Robert (Julius Oppenheimer)
(1904–67)
US physicist. Oppenheimer was appointed in 1942 as Director of the Manhattan Project, based at Los Alamos, New Mexico, which in 1945 made the first atomic bomb. In 1953, at the height of the witch-hunting campaign led by the US Senator Joseph McCarthy, Oppenheimer was excluded from sensitive research on the grounds that he had Communist sympathies, but subsequently (1963) he was unreservedly rehabilitated.