The "father of the atomic bomb" J. Robert Oppenheimer has had his name cleared posthumously after US Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm annulled a 1954 decision to revoke his security clearance.
In a written statement on Friday, Granholm stressed that the move by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the US Energy Department’s predecessor, to revoke Oppenheimer’s clearance was the result of a “flawed process” that ran counter to the commission’s own regulations.
“As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed,” she stressed.
Granholm added that she was “pleased to announce the Department of Energy has vacated the Atomic Energy Commission’s 1954 decision in the matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer.”
In the early 1940s, the physicist was at the helm of the top-secret Los Alamos Laboratory, which was endorsed by former US President Franklin Roosevelt as the home of the Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bomb during the Second World War.
Oppenheimer oversaw the first atomic bomb blast in the New Mexico desert before nuclear weapons were used for the first time in the deadly bombings of Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
The physicist opposed nuclear proliferation and the development of the hydrogen bomb after World War II, which prompted the AEC to revoke his security clearance in 1954 amid Soviet spy charges that Oppenheimer faced at the time. The top US government scientist died from cancer in 1967 at the age of 62.
In 2014, documents from his hearing were declassified, placing doubt on disloyalty accusations against the scientist. The documents, in particular, suggested that Oppenheimer’s opposition to the hydrogen bomb project was for technical and military reasons rather than any pro-Soviet stance.