Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. Sixty years ago summer came to America’s New Mexico desert with extraordinary ferocity. One July morning, near Los Alamos, when Robert Oppenheimer uttered those words from the Bhagavad Gita, the three passions that drove this extraordinary man came together. Oppenheimer was something of a child prodigy, assisted by his well-heeled New York parents to pursue his love of physics and the arts in the universities of Europe. But it was to a rugged patch of New Mexico that he would return in the 1930s for pause. In between, his flair for languages and literature led him to transformative readings of Marcel Proust and the Gita. But on that July day, as the first atomic bomb was successfully tested, a device which Oppenheimer had so deeply believed would eliminate all wars in the future, his world was already coming apart. On that day, as scientific director on the Manhattan Project, he could already sense that he’d played a great part in changing the world. By then, the danger of Hitler’s Nazi aspirations had passed, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a few weeks away. But science, he and his colleagues knew, had lost its innocence. In years ahead, even all the nobility that sustained his ambitions at Los Alamos — to win a war against Hitler, to race him to a fission device — must have been difficult to summon, when the US administration turned against him, citing communist leanings in the 1930s to charge him with un-American activities and withdraw his security clearance. The man Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin profile in this splendid new biography is well known. The Oppenheimer shelf is well-stocked. But their skill in locating Oppenheimer in a larger context, in almost reading omens of future tragedy in his carefree and intellectually vibrant youth, will ensure that it will remain a key work on the man who gave America the bomb. Other physicists — men of stature and compassion like Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman and so many more — carried for the rest of their lives deep scars from what in retrospect was a remarkably celebratory stint in Los Alamos. But they made tenuous peace with it — sometimes controversially, for instance by arguing that they had good reason to believe Werner Heisenberg was making progress in delivering the bomb to Hitler. No man was perhaps better suited than him to contrast vividly with the scenes at Hiroshima and the ugliness of the McCarthyite hunt It was on Oppenheimer’s person, however, that the dilemmas and betrayals of the 1930s and ’40s played out most dramatically. And it is on him that the innocence and fervent belief that the world could be made over for the drastically better fragmented. No man, in his upbringing and in his love of learning and knowledge, was perhaps better suited than him to contrast vividly with the scenes at Hiroshima — he had pleaded with the US administration to restrain from using the bomb against Japan — and the ugliness of the McCarthyite hunt. In the late 1940s, Oppenheimer read a short story by Henry James called “The Beast in the Jungle”. Bird and Sherwin say he was rivetted by the idea of “being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen.” Sooner it was, alas. Sixty years after the test at Los Alamos, the conflicts that wracked Oppenheimer have lost none of their urgency.
