Relationship With Oppenheimer
Chevalier met Oppenheimer in 1937 at Berkeley while he was an associate professor of Romance languages. Together, Chevalier and Oppenheimer, would found the Berkeley branch of a teachers' union, which sponsored benefits for leftist causes.
Chevalier was accused of approaching Oppenheimer in 1942 and seeking information about nuclear power for the Soviet Union on behalf of George Eltenton. This encounter would later become one of the key issues in Oppenheimer's security hearings in front of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954 which resulted in the revocation of his security clearance.
Chevalier is interviewed in The Day After Trinity (1981), an Oscar-nominated documentary about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb.
Read more about this topic: Haakon Chevalier
Famous quotes containing the words relationship and/or oppenheimer:
“We think of religion as the symbolic expression of our highest moral ideals; we think of magic as a crude aggregate of superstitions. Religious belief seems to become mere superstitious credulity if we admit any relationship with magic. On the other hand our anthropological and ethnographical material makes it extremely difficult to separate the two fields.”
—Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)
“In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”
—J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967)