J. R. Oppenheimer (1904-1967)

An American theoretical physicist & professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those who are credited with developing the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project. After the war ended, he became chairman of the influential General Advisory Committee of the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission. He used that position to lobby for international control of nuclear power to avert nuclear proliferation.