![Professor Julius Robert Oppenheimer](https://www.cantab.org/sites/www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/files/styles/400px_wide/public/robert_oppenheimer.jpg?itok=8LbuqPzu)
Professor Julius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics. He is known as the 'father of the atomic bomb' for his role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II project that developed the first nuclear weapons used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1924 Oppenheimer was accepted into Christ's College, where he spent two terms before continuing his studies at the University of Göttingen. In 1942, he was recruited to head the Manhattan Project’s secret weapons laboratory. The first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945.
At an assembly at Los Alamos on August 6 Oppenheimer and many of the project staff were upset about the bombing of Nagasaki, as they did not feel the second bomb was necessary from a military point of view. He travelled to Washington on August 17 to hand-deliver a letter to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson expressing his revulsion and his wish to see nuclear weapons banned. Read more.