Oppenheimer was wrongly stripped of security clearance, says US

Dr J Robert Oppenheimer, creator of the atom bomb, in his study in Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, in 1957 (John Rooney/AP)

The Biden administration has reversed a decades-old decision to revoke the security clearance of Dr J Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist called the father of the atomic bomb for his leading role in the Second World War’s Manhattan Project.

US energy secretary Jennifer Granholm said the 1954 decision by the Atomic Energy Commission was made using a “flawed process” that violated the commission’s own regulations.