Judith Flanders

When pink was far from rosy

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer, ‘the father of the atomic bomb’, remembered that when he saw the first mushroom cloud rise in its terrifying beauty above the test site in New Mexico, a line from the Bhagavad-Gita came into his head: ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ According to a colleague, however, what he actually said was, ‘Now we’re all sons-of-bitches.’ Oppenheimer the legend vs. Oppenheimer the man. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, in this magisterial reconstruction of the rise and fall of America’s first great theoretical physicist, are careful to give both sides, the Sanskrit-reading mystic and the down-to-earth pragmatist.

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.

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