After more than half a century of intrigue and mystery, the U.S. Department of Energy has declassified documents related to a Cold War hearing for the man who directed the Manhattan Project and was later accused of having communist sympathies. The department last week released transcripts of the 1950s hearings on the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer, providing more insight into the previously secret world that surrounded development of the atomic bomb and the anti-communist hysteria that gripped the nation amid the growing power of the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which developed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The secretive projects involved three research and production facilities at Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington.
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The department last week released transcripts of the 1950s hearings on the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer
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Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project , which developed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War I
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The once-celebrated physicist lost his security clearance following the four-week hearing and he was accused of having communist relatives
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President Lyndon B. Johnson later tried to erase Oppenheimer's poor treatment by giving him the Atomic Energy Commission's Enrico Fermi Award in 1963
The documents also show how unfairly @placeholder was treated immediately following World War II, Aftergood said.