Interest in the late scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer extends beyond this weekend's Oscar ceremony to his historic signed reports and letters.
RR Auctions in Boston is accepting bids for a rare 1945 report and a letter to journalists signed by Opie describing the nuclear bomb as a “weapon for the invaders.” By Saturday, bids for the report had exceeded $35,000 and the letter was approaching $5,000. Auction ends Wednesday.
The movie “Oppenheimer'' is the favorite to win a number of awards at Sunday's Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won many other awards before that. The film, directed and produced by Christopher Nolan, is the most successful biopic of all time, grossing nearly $1 billion at the box office.
The report details the bomb's development and includes Oppenheimer and other scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, including Enrico Fermi, Ernest Lawrence, James Chadwick and Harold Uley. and 23 administrators have signed it.
According to RR Auctions, the approximately 200-page report was written before the first bomb test at the Trinity Site in New Mexico and released to the press days after the 1945 attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was published.
This report was called the “Smith Report'' after its author, Henry Smith. The official title is “The Atomic Bomb: A General Account of the Development of the Use of Atomic Energy for Military Purposes Under the Sponsorship of the United States Government from 1940 to 1945.”
Also up for auction is a signed one-page letter from Opie to Look magazine's Stephen White. Mr. Oppenheimer is commenting on a draft document that Mr. White sent him detailing Russia's growing nuclear weapons stockpile.
Oppenheimer tells White he should “put it in print” and cites a previously written quote in which he stated that if the bomb were to be used again, the bomb delivery method and strategy might be different.
“But it is a weapon for the aggressor, and like a fissile nuclear weapon, it has inherent elements of surprise and fear,” Oppenheimer wrote.