Boston (United States) (AFP) – Propelled to fame by the hit film “Oppenheimer,” items evoking the creation of the atomic bomb by the physicist of the same name will go up for auction in the United States.
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Christopher Nolan's film, which grossed $1 billion, appears as a favorite to win several Academy Awards this Sunday. It has received 13 nominations, including best picture, best actor and best director. Given this moment of fame for the subject, items related to the atomic bomb by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer will go to auction in the United States.
Among what will 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 narrates the Manhattan Project, which was secretly managed in Los Alamos, a city built around a laboratory created from scratch in New Mexico at the suggestion of physicist Oppenheimer, who had been seduced by that landscape since he was a child.
Called the Smyth Report, the document was first published in the press on August 12, 1945, days after the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“The report provides a comprehensive view of the scientific and administrative journey that led to the creation of one of humanity's most formidable weapons,” said Boston's 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 headed the Los Alamos Laboratory; Ernest Lawrence, Nobel laureate and pioneer of the cyclotron; James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron; and Harold Urey, Nobel Prize winner and expert in isotope separation.”
The current bid is over $35,000 and the auction will end on Wednesday.
A typed letter by Oppenheimer was also put up for auction in which he denounced 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 that letter, which he signed as “Opie” and addressed to a journalist writing about the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal.
Top bids for that item are currently over $4,000.
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