Although Robert Oppenheimer’s signature porkpie hat is the most iconic piece of costume design in “Oppenheimer,” there’s another detail that shows up in many scenes: the white K-6 badge on his chest.
In the scenes set in Los Alamos, the New Mexico town selected for the Manhattan Project, characters can be seen wearing round badges with combinations of letters and numbers. These refer to the identification numbers they were assigned upon arriving at Los Alamos.
In actual ID photos taken for security purposes, you can see their number on the image. Oppenheimer’s was, in fact, K-6.
J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security badge photo taken for the Los Alamos site during the Manhattan Project.
Historical/Corbis via Getty ImagesSecurity, in theory, was tight at Los Alamos. In practice, however, America’s foremost concentration of scientific geniuses wasn’t exactly known for playing by the rules. Richard Feynman, who was just 24 when he was recruited for the Manhattan Project, was the chief pain in the ass. His ID photo says it all: A young man, about to embark on a serious and secretive mission, sporting a cheeky grin.
A security badge from the Manhattan Project test site of future Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman. He was 24 when he joined the Manhattan Project.
Historical/Corbis via Getty ImagesFeynman (who is played by Jack Quaid in the film) instructed his wife and father to write him letters in code to see how much he could get past the censors. “As a result of all these experiences with the censor, I knew exactly what could get through and what could not get through,” he would later write in his memoir “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” “Nobody else knew as well as I. And so I made a little money out of all of this by making bets.”
Some of Feynman’s other activities could have easily resulted in being arrested or worse. Once, he found a hole in the security fence around Los Alamos. For fun, he decided to leave the facility through its guarded gate and then turn right back around and sneak in via the hole. Back inside, he waved goodbye through the gate and crawled in through the hole again. He made a few loops before the guard called his superior officer to ask if he could arrest Feynman.
Even more dangerously, Feynman indulged his passion for cracking codes by breaking into safes. At night, he would go into the facility and open top-secret file cabinets by guessing colleagues’ combinations. Sometimes he left notes inside the opened drawers as a joke, which had the unintended consequence of terrifying at least one co-worker that a spy was at Los Alamos.
“If this were a country like Germany … there were a dozen [scientists] we should have shot right off,” military head of the Manhattan Project Leslie Groves once said. “And another dozen we could have shot for suspicion and carelessness.”
This image released by Universal Pictures shows Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves, left, and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in a scene from “Oppenheimer.”
Melinda Sue Gordon/AP(For those who have seen the movie, two of Feynman’s eccentricities made it into the final cut. One, he did indeed enjoy playing bongo drums, and two, he actually declined a piece of welder’s glass to look at the Trinity test. He believed the UV in his truck’s windshield would be enough to protect his eyes. He claimed to be the only person to look directly at the explosion.)
Feynman’s precocity in all things drew him the highest compliment from Oppenheimer, who in 1943 wrote that he was “by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this.”