“It was not obvious that Oppenheimer would be [the new laboratory’s] director,” Bethe notes. “He had, after all, no experience in directing a large group of people. The laboratory would be devoted primarily to experiment and to engineering, and Oppenheimer was a theorist.”1733 Worse—in the eyes of the project leaders, Nobel laureates all—he had no Nobel Prize to distinguish him. There was also what Groves calls the “snag” of Oppenheimer’s left-wing background, which “included much that was not to our liking by any means.”
