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Showing posts with the label Oppenheimer House

Hey hey USA - 24th October - Bandelier National Monument

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  Despite the dust we had a good night at the Comfort Inn, and were very pleased to have been in the warm when we saw that the van was covered with frost and icicles were dripping from the trees. We went back to the J Robert Oppenheimer house as it had not been open to the public the day before. It is quite a large house and contains a museum dedicated to Oppenheimer's life. When Oppenheimer heard the explosion at the Trinity test site he later said that the words from the Bhagavad Gita came to him "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds". After the war Oppenheimer became the chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission and used that position to lobby against nuclear proliferation and the development of the hydrogen bomb. In 1954, during the McCarthy era, Oppenheimer's security clearance was stripped from him. His politics had always been left leaning but he had never spied for the USSR as was confirmed by the Russians themselves. President Kennedy awarded him