American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin #1578

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin was published in 2005, and a year later the authors were presented with the Pulitzer Prize for this biography. Certainly, it’s a story of murder and intrigue, so a review deserves to be written in this blog, but it is really a biography of one of the most brilliant scientists to ever influence national and international relations. It’s a long book, listed at 710 pages, and I chose to listen to it in audiobook format. I like to have a good listen when I’m out on my frequent long dog walks, and this one took 27 hours. The details that are possible in this book are very important to understanding who Oppenheimer was, just how brilliant he truly was, the wide breath of his interests, his stunning linguistic talents, and of course his drive as a theoretical physicist. It was only after finishing the book and actually relistening to a couple sections that I went to see the movie. While the book added tons of details to the story, the movie did a pretty good job of being true to the biography. What a story! Without question, Oppenheimer left his mark on the world in a way that influences everyone who is alive today.

 

Oppenheimer was “The Father of the Atomic Bomb,” a project that could not have been completed without his intelligence and drive. But, he was so much more. This is a story of the U.S. emerging from the Great Depression when millions of American’s could not find jobs. In the academic world and the labor world, people turned to the idea of communism as a possible solution to the toxic properties of capitalism that led to the depression. It was only as so many people in that leftist movement began to appreciate the difference between the philosophy of communism and its actual practice that the enthusiasm for this alternate form of government lost much of its appeal to the U.S. intelligencia. However, the Red Scare was a factor throughout the time of the bomb’s development. Despite his known pre WWII left wing sympathies, the government needed Oppenheimer to create the bomb, and the U.S. was in a race to get that done before Germany did so. When the war ended against Germany before either of those countries had finished the bomb, the war was still going on against Japan. Although Japan was nearly defeated, the political, scientific, and militaristic forces in the U.S. chose to use two atomic explosions against Japan, one a Uranium bomb, the other a Plutonium bomb. The U.S. worried what would be the human cost to American troops to actually capture the Japanese islands, and after the second bomb was dropped, Japan gave up its demand that they be able to keep their Emperor and to surrender unconditionally. The controversy of Truman’s decision is explored in this story.

 

After the war, there was an ongoing fight between American hawks and doves, and Oppenheimer was worried about an arms race, nuclear proliferation. He argued strongly against the development of the even more powerful hydrogen bomb, and he was then pushed out of government office by the hawks after which he no longer had a real platform for his ideas. In the book, Truman was not portrayed favorably. While it was clear that the U.S. Air Force was pushing to be in control of the atomic program, I was surprised that General Curtis LeMay was never mentioned as being the one who was the driving force behind that.

 

A review of this length cannot do justice to the details and complexity of this story. Perhaps there has never been an individual about whom the FBI gathered so much data, so the authors had an incredible amount of research to sort through. The movie did capture much about Oppenheimer’s social life, his marriage and his affairs, but those were not part of the main plot. I was pleased that the Hollywood depiction of Oppenheimer did not exaggerate the importance of such sexual issues to the extent that the theme of Oppenheimer’s work was lost. The role of antisemitism was also explored throughout Oppenheimer’s life. The struggle between Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss who became the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission was integral to Oppenheimer’s ascendency during the war, his fall from grace after the war, and his eventual resurrection were all connected to that struggle. In the movie, that struggle was wonderfully played by Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer and Robert Downey, Jr., as Strauss. The cast included such talents as Emily Blunt, Rami Malek, Matt Damon, and others. (We should all expect a load of Oscar nominations for the cast.)

 

This is an important book about an incredibly important man. I can only encourage you to pick it up and spend some time with the details. Although there was some scientific info to learn about (which I frankly loved), it’s still a 5/5 rating.

An addendum to my original review: I forgot to write about one important aspect of the book. The authors wrote about the tension between the hawks in American politics versus the doves, and they clearly portrayed Oppenheimer in the post WWII era as being against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Truman was definitely in the hawk camp, and he believed the US needed to dramatically expand its nuclear arsenal with the naive belief that this would so intimidate other nations that this was the way to ensure lasting peace. Eisenhower also saw the early development of the nuclear arsenal, but as Bohr and Oppenheimer expected, rather than being a deterrent to an arms race, it was a challenge that Stalin and Russia's subsequent rulers could not let go unmet. It was Eisenhower in his last address as the President who famously warned future generations "to be wary of the military industrial complex." It seems to me that this warning has gone unheeded, and Oppenheimer has proven to be correct in his fears for our planet's and societies' survivability.