American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer

by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin

Atlantic Books £25, pp721

Albert Einstein had clear views about Robert Oppenheimer. 'There goes a narr [fool],' he remarked in 1954. Einstein had just spent a fruitless hour trying to persuade Oppenheimer to resign from the US Atomic Energy Commission. Better to walk from his post there than face a humiliating tribunal to answer accusations that he was a security risk, Einstein had argued.

Oppenheimer's tenuous communist party connections in the Thirties had returned to haunt him in the McCarthy-infected Fifties. The physicist, who had directed the Allies' atom bomb project in the Second World War, had been summoned to a security meeting - 'a veritable kangaroo court,' according to American Prometheus - to account for his past behaviour and old associations. Don't give legitimacy to this poisonous process: quit your post, and your country, as I did when an academic in Germany during the rise of the Nazis, urged Einstein.

But Oppenheimer refused. He was no gypsy like Einstein, he insisted. 'He loved America,' said a friend, 'and this love was as deep as his love of science.' So he faced the tribunal, to the disdain of Einstein and to the joy of his enemies who ensured he was indeed stripped of his security clearance. Thus, one of America's most brilliant administrators, a scientist who had dedicated his life to public service, was branded a traitor on evidence that amounted to hearsay. 'Einstein's instincts were right and time would demonstrate that Oppenheimer's were wrong,' state Bird and Sherwin.

The revoking of Oppenheimer's clearance astounded America. This was a tragedy that was 'Shakespearean in richness' claimed the Washington Post, while Life announced that he was 'one of the most famous men in the world, one of the most admired, quoted, photographed, consulted, glorified, well-nigh deified - then, suddenly, the glory was gone and he was gone too'.

In fact, Oppenheimer, to his enemies' disgust, endured as a public figure. His persecution turned him into a scientific martyr, a 20th-century Galileo, a role he performed to perfection until he died, aged 62, of throat cancer in 1967. By then, the Oppenheimer story had acquired iconic status. Books, films, plays, articles and even an opera, Doctor Atomic , ensured his shadow would be 'etched ever more sharply on the pages of American and world history,' write Bird and Sherwin.

Certainly, much has been written about Oppenheimer but none of it comes close to matching these two writers' titanic attempt to delineate his character and to put it into its full historical and political perspective. Already acclaimed in the US, American Prometheus is, quite simply, a giant among biographies, a life story that at times reads like a thriller but which is also deeply authoritative and persuasively informative.

As part of their research, the authors interviewed dozens of Oppenheimer's friends and relatives, visited scores of archives and libraries and gathered tens of thousands of letters, memoranda and government documents. The FBI, which obsessively wire-tapped Oppenheimer for two decades, alone provided 10,000 pages of transcripts.

Even more impressive, however, is the manner in which Bird and Sherwin have exploited this avalanche of material, extracting the most revealing nuggets before combining them in a manner that is often gripping, sometimes moving and occasionally shocking. The story of Oppenheimer's security trial is presented with understated care, for example. Yet it would be a flint-hearted reader who failed to feel pity for the physicist and deep disquiet, if not disgust, for the forces ranged against him, in particular the repellent Lewis Strauss, the Atomic Energy Commission's chairman, who orchestrated Oppenheimer's downfall, mainly because he felt he had been slighted by the scientist at a couple of parties.

Born on 22 April 1904, Robert Oppenheimer was the first son of a family of rich Jewish German immigrants and grew up 'an unctuous, repulsively good little boy', in his own words. He proved to be a brilliant scholar, a gifted linguist, a fair poet and a student of science, eventually choosing to study physics at Harvard. However, he was also an emotionally fragile youth afflicted by bouts of depression.

Eventually, while a researcher in Cambridge in 1925, Oppenheimer suffered a major breakdown. He laced an apple with poison and left it on the desk of his tutor, the future Nobel laureate Patrick Blackett. Fortunately, Blackett did not eat it. The university authorities were aghast, nevertheless. The young scientist was ordered to visit a Harley Street psychiatrist, who concluded he was suffering from schizophrenia.

Fortunately, a second opinion was sought, this time from a French psychoanalyst who merely diagnosed a ' crise morale ' associated with sexual frustration and who prescribed 'une femme' and 'a course of aphrodisiacs'.

It is not clear if Oppenheimer took this advice, but he did recover and moved to Gottingen, then a leading world centre in theoretical physics. There, he became immersed in the study of quantum mechanics and returned to the United States to help set up a school of theoretical physics at Berkeley.

Oppenheimer grew his hair long, threw parties, adopted liberal causes and mixed with union leaders and left-wing politicians. These connections would later blight his life, but were viewed as mere eccentricities in Roosevelt's liberal Thirties. Certainly they were no barrier to his selection as leader of the Los Alamos project, set up in the New Mexican mesa to build an atom bomb before the Nazis did.

It was an inspired choice. Oppenheimer provided patient guidance for a mad ragbag of boffins who ranged from grumpy, recalcitrant Edward Teller, who dreamed only of building a mighty, megaton hydrogen bomb and who disdained Oppenheimer's pipsqueak kiloton atom bomb project, to the impish Richard Feynman, whose idea of fun was to crack every army safe on the station and rifle its secrets.

Then came Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer was initially guarded in his comments about the atom bombing of civilian targets, but later denounced it. 'We used atomic weapons against an enemy that was essentially defeated,' he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1946. Later, when Teller and others urged America to move on to build ever more destructive devices - the Super or hydrogen bomb - Oppenheimer resisted. These were not weapons of war but genocide, he complained.

So his enemies - Strauss, Teller and other supporters of the US military's dream of building an arsenal of thermonuclear weapons - conspired to break him, a campaign that was to have profound repercussions. For one thing, his humiliation destroyed for ever the idea that scientists might offer guidance as public philosophers. 'With Oppenheimer's defrocking, scientists knew that in the future they could serve the state only as experts on narrow scientific issues,' state Bird and Sherwin. Equally, it was clear that full-throated militarism would now dominate American life, leading to the arms build-up of the Cold War.

As to Oppenheimer, he emerges from American Prometheus as a rather amiable intellectual bohemian. He smoked four packs of cigarettes a day and made celebrated dry martinis: a tumbler of gin plus a droplet of vermouth. He was vain, compassionate, wise, pretentious, scholarly, liberal, humane, occasionally cruel and utterly dedicated to public life. In the end, he was treated in a thoroughly shabby manner by his country, an injustice that has at least been offset by this magisterial biography.

Three to read

Atomic power

Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists by Robert Jungk

Classic account of the development of the first nuclear weapons.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the dawn of the atomic age.

Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman by Richard P Feynman and Ralph Leighton

Quirky reminiscences of Los Alamos by Nobel Prize-winning physicist.