Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

When pink was far from rosy

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Atlantic, 736pp, £25,

Judith Flanders

Wednesday, 23rd January 2008

Judith Flanders on the new book by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

There have been many books on Oppenheimer — shelves-full, perhaps libraries-full — but American Prometheus is the first to attempt to explore more than a single facet: not just Oppenheimer the physicist, or Oppenheimer the creator of Los Alamos, or Oppenheimer the victim of a government witch-hunt, but all of these, and more. It is a portrait of the man, the times, the science, and the politics. Not unsurprisingly, some of these elements are better represented than others, but it is a vaulting ambition, and it is amply rewarded.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in 1904 to a cultivated, assimilated German-Jewish family. He was an isolated, strange child — bullied when, aged 14, he produced his copy of Middlemarch at summer camp. After a patchy stint at Harvard, a traumatic time at Cambridge (where he attempted, or claimed he attempted, to poison his tutor), he was taken under the wing of Max Born at Göttingen, joining the cutting-edge of the new world of quantum mechanics (the term was coined by Born).

Doctorate in hand, aged 23 he returned to America to find 10 job offers waiting; he chose Caltech and the University of California at Berkeley. Berkeley, he said, was a physics ‘desert’, and ‘it would be nice to try to start something.’ He did indeed ‘start something’: odd and difficult as he remained, he produced 16 papers of revolutionary physics in three years, and drew to the university the country’s most brilliant students. Yet this did nothing to make him an easier colleague — arrogant and uncertain, supremely indifferent to others’ opinions and yet obsequiously eager to please.

It was only after Pearl Harbor that these traits had resonance outside academia. Oppenheimer was at once a natural and a quixotic choice to run the new secret weapons lab: he had never supervised anything bigger than a graduate seminar and, unlike many of his colleagues, he had no Nobel prize. And yet General Leslie Groves, the army officer in charge of the Manhattan Project, saw his weaknesses as strengths: he thought Oppenheimer’s ‘overweening ambition’ would drive him on, and that his reputation as a facilitator, as a mind quick to grasp others’ ideas and understand their implications, would enable him to take a lab set up in a ramshackle boys’ school, and turn it into one of the great science- factories of all time.