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SCMP Reporter

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

by Kai Bird and  Martin J. Sherwin

Knopf $273

At a closed US Senate hearing in 1946, J. Robert Oppenheimer was asked 'whether three or  four men couldn't smuggle units of an [atomic] bomb into New York and blow up the whole city'. He responded: 'Of course it could be done, and people could destroy New York.'

To the follow-up question of the startled senator - 'What instrument would you use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in the city?' - Oppenheimer replied: 'A screwdriver [to open each and every crate and suitcase].'

These words might still prove prescient. Oppenheimer, the 'father of the atomic bomb', understood well that the only defence against nuclear weapons was their elimination.

In American Prometheus, the authors have painstakingly pieced together a portrait of a flawed genius, a charismatic and ambitious man of conscience who found himself at the centre  of things when the secrets of the atom were unlocked and brought to terrible fruition. In a biography a quarter of a century in the making, they have drawn on thousands of documents and  scores of interviews in search of the essence of this  most unlikely American  figure.

Born into a  Jewish family in New York City in 1904, Oppenheimer was a  polymath who could have chosen any path. As a young man he was a tortured soul. From Cambridge in 1923 he wrote to his former teacher, Herbert Smith: 'I labour, and write innumerable theses, notes, poems, stories and junk; I go to math lib[rary] and read and to the phil[osophy] lib ... I make stenches in three different labs ... read Greek, commit faux pas, search my desk for letters, and wish I were dead. Voila.'

Not until he reached Gottingen in Germany in 1926 did Oppenheimer find his feet. There the  prodigy immersed himself in theory, dazzling the leading scientists of the time.

By 1939, Oppenheimer had built a centre  for excellence in physics at the University of California, Berkeley. His thirst for social justice had also led him to dalliances with communism. When in January of that year German scientists split the atom, the race to build a bomb before the Nazis was on.

The authors could find  few people who believed Oppenheimer a likely candidate to lead the Manhattan Project. One Berkeley scientist said: 'He couldn't run a hamburger stand.'  But General Groves, who was in charge of the project, would have his genius.

Oppenheimer proposed Los Alamos, an isolated mesa in New Mexico, as the site for the scientific endeavour of the century and we have a sense of a man transformed. Everyone became infected by his enthusiasm. 'It was a golden time,' said English physicist James Tuck. 'Here at Los Alamos, I found the spirit of Athens, of Plato, of an ideal republic.'

Yet in the weeks that followed August 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay released her deadly payload over Hiroshima and then a second bomb fell over Nagasaki, Oppenheimer wrote to Herbert Smith: 'You will believe that this undertaking has not been without misgivings; they are heavy on us today, when the future, which has so many elements of high promise, is yet only a stone's throw from despair.' The guilt that was to wrack the atomic scientists had taken hold.

A new breed of American hero, Oppenheimer turned his intellect and  powers of persuasion to bringing about a treaty for international control of atomic weapons to avert an arms race. 'Every American knows,' he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 'that if there is another major war atomic weapons will be used. We know this because in the last war, the two nations which we like to think are the most enlightened and humane in the world - Great Britain and the United States - used atomic weapons against  an enemy which was essentially defeated.'

But in the chillingly depicted hawkish administration of the time Oppenheimer was swimming against the tide. Often arrogant and aloof, he soon made enemies.

Years earlier, on reading Henry James'  The Beast in the Jungle, a short story of existential foreboding, Oppenheimer had had  a premonition that something dark lay in his future. In James' words it was 'the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible'. Now, as anti-communist hysteria gripped the US in the 1950s, Oppenheimer's own beast closed in.

More than a biography, American Prometheus serves also as a social history documenting the shifting political landscape from Franklin D. Roosevelt's liberal New Deal America of the 1930s to the communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy era and beyond. A gripping read,  it provides a harsh critique of the neo-conservative politics that made nuclear weapons the centerpiece of US defence policy and precipitated the cold war, a strand of thought that reasserted itself in the form of the 2003 Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war in the wake of September 11, 2001.



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