J. Robert Oppenheimer gained prominence as a physicist and academic because of his success in publishing research in the highly specialized language of the physical sciences and through his abilities in the seminar room, though he was a somewhat shaky lecturer. During World War II, his success at the laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he worked to design an atomic bomb, depended on his skill at mediating among the very different worlds of the soldiers, scientists, and engineers assigned to the project and persuading them to work together in the face of personal and political suspicions and rivalries.His Memorandum on the Radiological Dangers of a Nuclear Detonation was written to General Thomas Farrell, the second-ranking military officer in charge of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government’s program to develop nuclear weapons during World War II. In the memo, dated May 11, 1945, Oppenheimer outlines the dangers of radioactive fallout.