J. Robert Oppenheimer with his successor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Norris Bradbury, May 1964. Norris Edwin Bradbury (May 30, 1909 - August 20, 1997) was an American physicist. He served as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 25 years (1945-70), succeeding J. Robert Oppenheimer, who personally chose Bradbury for the position of director after working closely with him on the Manhattan Project. During the war he was in charge of the final assembly of "the gadget", detonated in July 1945 for the Trinity test. He oversaw the transition of the laboratory from World War II through the Cold War. The Bradbury Science Museum is named in his honor. Julius Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 - February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with Enrico Fermi, he is often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II project that developed the first nuclear weapons. The first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, in the Trinity test in New Mexico; Oppenheimer remarked later that it brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.