Unless there is a powerful and vindictive person like Levi Strauss pulling strings behind the scenes.
He was blacklisted during the 1950s Red Scare and lost his security clearance
In 1946, the United States formed the Atomic Energy Commission to oversee the country’s nuclear weapons program. Oppenheimer used his position on this commission to argue for more control of nuclear weapons and against the development of the hydrogen bomb, which the United States tested for the first time in 1952.
“He was opposed to pursuing the hydrogen bomb, the ‘superbomb,’ because that was 1,000 times more powerful than [the bombs dropped on] Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” says Cynthia C. Kelly, founder and president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation. Oppenheimer was worried about the potential destruction that an arms race to build bigger and bigger bombs would unleash.
Businessman Lewis Strauss, who became chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1953, disliked Oppenheimer’s opposition to the hydrogen bomb, and held a security hearing to investigate Oppenheimer’s loyalty. This was at the height of the second Red Scare, when Senator Joseph McCarthy held hearings to expose supposed communists in the federal government.
With the help of the FBI, which illegally tapped Oppenheimer’s phone, the Atomic Energy Commission argued during the hearing that Oppenheimer’s association with communists made him a security threat. In 1954, the government revoked his security clearance, making him one of the many people to be blacklisted during that era.