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

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin spent a combined twenty five years researching the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, following him from a wealthy New York childhood and a physics education that took him through Harvard, Cambridge, and finally Göttingen, where he earned his doctorate under Max Born and became close with the young European physicists, Heisenberg and Pauli among them, who were then remaking the field. The book follows Oppenheimer to Berkeley, where he built an American school of theoretical physics almost from nothing and became the kind of teacher whose students absorbed his mannerisms along with his ideas, and traces his growing political engagement through the 1930s, fundraising for Spanish Republicans and refugee scientists, and his close ties to a circle of friends and family, including his own wife and brother, with Communist Party connections.

The book's center is the Manhattan Project: General Leslie Groves's surprising choice of a scientist with left wing politics and no experience running large projects to direct the secret laboratory at Los Alamos, and the years in which Oppenheimer assembled and led the physicists who built the first atomic bomb, tested at Trinity in July 1945 and used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki weeks later. Bird and Sherwin follow Oppenheimer's postwar advocacy for international control of nuclear weapons and his public opposition to building the hydrogen bomb, positions that made him a target once the Cold War's political mood turned against him.

The book's final third covers the 1954 security hearing in painstaking detail, the closed door proceeding in which former colleagues and government officials picked over his old associations and stripped his security clearance, effectively ending his influence over the weapons program he had once led. Reading it means following both a genuine scientific triumph and a genuine political destruction inside the same life, told with a novelist's pacing and a historian's documentation, and it suits a reader who wants the full moral weight of the bomb carried by the man most responsible for building it.