Making the bomb

Of the making of many books about J. Robert Oppenheimer there is apparently no end. There have been 23 previous lives, seven of them published since 2004. This situation, which would have delighted its subject, is now complicated by the appearance of Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk, previously the biographer of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. In a crisp introduction Professor Monk explains that he is joining the throng because there has been no ‘scientific biography’, and previous work has largely ignored Oppenheimer’s contribution to physics.

In fact — as Inside the Centre makes clear — JRO’s major contribution to physics would scarcely have justified one biography, let alone 24. ‘Oppie’ died in 1967 and the reason he remains a biographical obsession is because he was the first scientific director of the top secret Los Alamos Military Laboratory in New Mexico, and — following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US Air Force in August 1945 — he was publicly identified by Washington as ‘the father of the Atomic Bomb’.

Oppenheimer was regarded by very clever men as one of the cleverest men of his age — the best among them — but his greatest achievement was the erection of a monument to human stupidity, the creation of a device that could destroy our civilisation. At Los Alamos it was widely agreed that only Robert Oppenheimer could have driven the project through at the speed necessary to produce two atomic bombs ready for use before the end of the war. It was therefore his work that ushered in the age of ‘deterrence’, or mutually assured destruction. And he knew exactly what he had done.

Two months after he became world famous Oppenheimer returned to Los Alamos to say goodbye to his staff and gave a celebrated speech in which he said

If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of the warring world …then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.