Making the bomb

Of the making of many books about J. Robert Oppenheimer there is apparently no end. There have been 23 previous lives, seven of them published since 2004. This situation, which would have delighted its subject, is now complicated by the appearance of Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk, previously the biographer of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. In a crisp introduction Professor Monk explains that he is joining the throng because there has been no ‘scientific biography’, and previous work has largely ignored Oppenheimer’s contribution to physics.

In fact — as Inside the Centre makes clear — JRO’s major contribution to physics would scarcely have justified one biography, let alone 24. ‘Oppie’ died in 1967 and the reason he remains a biographical obsession is because he was the first scientific director of the top secret Los Alamos Military Laboratory in New Mexico, and — following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US Air Force in August 1945 — he was publicly identified by Washington as ‘the father of the Atomic Bomb’.