Oppenheimer: documents on the atomic bomb go up for auction – 03/10/2024 – Science

Propelled to fame by the success of the film “Oppenheimer”, articles related to the creation of the atomic bomb by physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) will go up for auction in the United States.

Christopher Nolan’s film, which grossed US$1 billion at the box office, is the favorite to win the Oscar in different categories this Sunday (10).

The work received 13 nominations, including best film, best actor and best director.

Among the items to be auctioned in Boston is a report on the birth of the atomic bomb that the United States later dropped on Japan at the end of World War II.

The document chronicles the Manhattan Project, which was managed in secret at Los Alamos, a city built around a laboratory created from scratch in New Mexico at the suggestion of the physicist, who has been seduced by this landscape since he was a child.

Called the Smyth Report, the document was first published in print on August 12, 1945, days after the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“The report offers a comprehensive look at the scientific and administrative journey that led to the creation of one of humanity’s most formidable weapons,” said Boston-based RR Auction House.

“Among its most notable signatories are Enrico Fermi, famous for creating the world’s first nuclear reactor; J. Robert Oppenheimer, the visionary physicist who led Los Alamos Laboratory; Ernest Lawrence, Nobel Prize winner and pioneer of the cyclotron; James Chadwick , discoverer of the neutron; and Harold Urey, Nobel Prize winner and specialist in isotope separation”.

The current offer exceeds US$35 thousand (R$174 thousand) and the auction will end next Wednesday (13).

Also auctioned was a letter typed by Oppenheimer in which he denounces his invention as “a weapon for aggressors”.

“The elements of surprise and terror are as intrinsic to it as fissionable nuclei,” the scientist wrote in the letter, which he signed “Opie” and sent to a journalist writing about the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal.

Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of RR Auction, said it is “a truly remarkable letter of substance in which Oppenheimer demonstrates extraordinary foresight for the future use of the atomic bomb.”

The main offers for this article currently exceed US$4,000 (R$20,000).