American Prometheus

The story in brief

Martin Sherwin, a historian of the nuclear age, began researching Oppenheimer’s life in 1980. Two decades later, with the work still unfinished, he invited the writer Kai Bird to join him, and American Prometheus was published in 2005, after some twenty-five years of research. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2006. Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer (2023) was based on it.

The book follows Oppenheimer from his childhood in a wealthy, secular Jewish family in New York, through a troubled period as a student in Cambridge and his formation as a physicist in Göttingen, to his years as a professor at Berkeley, where he built one of the leading schools of theoretical physics in the United States. It covers his left-wing political commitments in the 1930s, his leadership of the Los Alamos laboratory that built the first atomic bombs, his post-war role as the country’s most influential scientific adviser, and the security hearing of 1954 that ended his government career.

The decisions that made it

In 1942 General Leslie Groves chose Oppenheimer to direct the laboratory that would design the bomb. It was an unlikely choice. Oppenheimer had no Nobel Prize, no experience running anything large, and left-wing associations that worried security officials. Groves saw in him the ability to understand every part of the problem and to persuade others to work for him. The choice turned out to be inspired. Oppenheimer recruited a remarkable group of scientists to a remote mesa in New Mexico, and the laboratory produced a working bomb in under three years.

Oppenheimer pressed for an open scientific culture inside Los Alamos, against Groves’s preference for strict compartmentalisation, arguing that scientists needed to discuss problems across groups to solve them. He largely won, and the book suggests that this was one reason for the project’s speed.

After the bomb was tested in July 1945 and used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, Oppenheimer was among the scientists advising on the decision. He sat on a scientific panel that endorsed military use. Afterwards he became increasingly troubled, and he told President Truman in October 1945 that he felt he had blood on his hands, an encounter that angered Truman.

After the war, as chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer led its opposition in 1949 to a crash programme to build the hydrogen bomb, on both technical and moral grounds. He favoured international control of atomic energy and argued against reliance on ever-larger weapons. Those positions made him enemies, notably Lewis Strauss, later chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and the physicist Edward Teller.

In 1954, in the climate of McCarthyism, the commission held a hearing on whether Oppenheimer was a security risk. Old associations and his conflicting accounts of a 1943 incident involving a friend, Haakon Chevalier, were used against him. His clearance was revoked. Bird and Sherwin show that the hearing was conducted unfairly, with the prosecution given access to wiretaps and classified material that his lawyers could not see.

What the book sees in them

The book’s title evokes Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and was punished for giving it to humanity. Bird and Sherwin see Oppenheimer’s story as a tragedy in that sense. His gifts made the bomb possible, and his awareness of what it meant led him to try to limit its dangers. That effort cost him his place in government.

They also see the hearing as a turning point for the role of scientists in American public life. After 1954 scientists who advised the government learned that dissent on policy could be treated as disloyalty. The book argues that the country lost an important voice of restraint at the beginning of the nuclear arms race.

At the same time, the authors present Oppenheimer as a complicated man, capable of arrogance and cruelty as well as charm, and sometimes evasive under questioning. They do not make him a saint. They show how his own inconsistencies gave his enemies the material they used.

Since it was published

In December 2022 the US Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, vacated the 1954 decision, stating that it had resulted from a flawed process that violated the commission’s own regulations. Kai Bird had campaigned for the reversal for years. Martin Sherwin died in 2021, before the film was released. Nolan’s Oppenheimer was released in July 2023, won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and brought renewed attention to the book and to questions about the responsibility of scientists, which have been widely discussed in debates about artificial intelligence. The site’s essay The Machine That Answers takes up some of those questions.

What it asks of someone deciding

The book asks what a leader of a technical project owes the world beyond the project’s success. Oppenheimer delivered what he was asked to deliver, and then tried to influence how it would be used. Leaders of powerful technologies face the same question today.

It asks how an institution treats dissent. The hearing punished Oppenheimer not for disloyalty but for disagreeing with a policy. Organisations that treat principled dissent as a threat lose the people most able to warn them.

And it asks about the choice of leaders. Groves chose a man who looked wrong on paper and was right for the job. Spotting that requires judgement that no checklist provides.