American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer | Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

He was right, and Oppenheimer and his team produced to requirement in just over two years. What Groves had brushed aside, however, was Oppenheimer’s pink past. To a European, the American obsession with reds under beds, would be comical if it weren’t so terrifying, bathetic if it weren’t so soul-destroying. The FBI under the thuggish J. Edgar Hoover had long been mumbling over every detail of Oppenheimer’s life, trying desperately (mostly through illegal surveillance) to ‘prove’ that he had been a Communist Party member. It was not, of course, illegal, even in America, even in the 1950s, to be a Communist. But while it was not illegal, it could destroy you just the same. Much of American Prometheus, as with much of Oppenheimer’s life, is concerned with claims and counter-claims. For those not immediately set a-tremble by the very word ‘communist’, the fourth detailed analysis of a brief conversation held two decades earlier can pall.

What does not pall, what Bird and Sherwin brilliantly show, is how the destruction of Oppenheimer was the result not of genuine concern for security — as the physicist I. I. Rabi shrewdly remarked, most of what the Atomic Energy Commission claimed should be off-limits to Oppenheimer had been conceived by him in the first place. Instead it was a collection of petty grudges and personal vendettas, cultivated by power-hungry place-seekers and professional territory-stakers that brought Oppenheimer down.

Oppenheimer was destroyed, not in a court of law, where due process would have had to be observed, but by a kangaroo court where the rules were established by his inveterate enemy, Lewis Strauss, the thin-skinned, vain and vicious head of the AEC. A weak president looked on quietly, content that a man he thought was a ‘cry-baby’ for his concern about the morality of atomic warfare should be publicly traduced.

Oppenheimer was destroyed, ultimately, not because he was a security risk, but simply because he wanted an open, democratic debate on the morals and practice of atomic warfare. He thought that asking questions was not in, and of itself, treasonable. His government said he was wrong.