Oppenheimer rehabilitated

Few creators have been as uncomfortable with their creations as Robert Oppenheimer. Few have suffered so much public ignominy because of it. Yet for all the controversy in his lifetime and the perilous course of nuclear politics since Hiroshima, the "father of the atom bomb" has come through history with his reputation intact if not burnished.

Lionised for his part in creating the atom bomb that brought World War II to an end, suspected of passing on atomic secrets to the USSR on the strength of pre-war communist associations and then rehabilitated by Lyndon Johnson just before his death, Oppenheimer had long been a controversial figure.

This biography, out in India late last year, does much to rehabilitate him. Their job has been made easier by the fact that revisionist history has unequivocally""and rightly""heaped opprobrium on the McCarthy era, of which Oppenheimer was an indirect victim.

Also, in the light of current international events, Oppenheimer's own prescience about the threat from this weapon of mass destruction speaks for itself. Purveyed in an era of belligerent American nationalism, fresh from the victories of World War II, Oppenheimer inevitably found himself on a collision course with the military establishment.

Ironically, few remembered him during the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Yet afterwards, the US and the USSR began talking in terms of a more transparent dialogue, just as Oppenheimer had prescribed after Hiroshima.

Bird and Sherwin's biography is a door-stopper of 700-odd pages but nevertheless an enormously enjoyable read. It avoids the twin problems of deifying or demonising Oppenheimer, as journalists did in his lifetime, to come up with an essentially human portrait of a remarkable man.

The book shows that Oppenheimer's magnetic charm and coruscating intelligence masked an ambivalent and often troubled personality. Brought up in a moderately prosperous Jewish home, Oppenheimer described himself as "an unctuous, repulsively good little boy". Later as a young adult, he suffered personality disorders, which doctors mundanely ascribed to a lack of sex.

A disastrous stint at Rutherford's famous laboratory in Cambridge""he proved hopeless at lab work""was followed by a fruitful time as Gottingen University, where he received his doctorate in quantum physics under Max Born.

Gottingen proved a turning point for him. Not only was it one of the centres of cutting-edge research in the quantum physics, it brought him into contact with the brilliant Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who did much to shape his world view on nuclear armaments. As an acquaintance later observed, "Bohr was god and Oppie was his prophet."

As a physicist at Berkeley, California, Oppenheimer proved a brilliant teacher. Though he never won a Nobel Prize himself, he contributed significantly to the prize-winning work of others.

Oppie was a many-faceted scientist, with a deep interest in philosophy. He learnt Sanskrit so that he could read the Bhagavad Gita in the original. It was from the Gita that he quoted the line "I am become death" as he watched the A-Bomb tests in 1945.

Like many humanist liberals of the time, Oppenheimer flirted with Communism during the Depression era. His interest, however, rarely went beyond subscribing to causes such as workers' rights, racial equality in public facilities or supporting the republicans in the Spanish civil war.

Yet, after the war, when Oppenheimer raised unpopular objections to developing the more powerful H-bomb, much of FBI chief J Edgar Hoover's energies were spent on proving that he was a card-carrying communist. Bird and Sherwin show that this never was the case. Curiously, they do not refer to recently declassified decrypts of Russian intelligence reports that prove this point more unequivocally.

The humungous demands imposed by Project Manhattan, set out in the harsh beauty of the Mexican desert that he loved, proved just the outlet for Oppenheimer's nervous brilliance. It allowed him to bring together the cream of scientific talent in the (then) free world, to defeat an enemy (the Germans, rather than the Japanese) against whom he felt an instinctive revulsion.

Yet after Hiroshima, he conspicuously opted out of the post-war triumphalism despite his status as a national hero. Stripped of his security clearance as member of the Atomic Energy Clearance, Oppenheimer maintained a lonely dignity till his rehabilitation.

Carefully, even painstakingly, researched, Bird and Martin do not let the minutiae of their investigations clutter the telling of a compelling story. It is one that holds many lessons for the world in these days of political determinism and nuclear adventurism. It is unlikely to be on Mr Bush's reading list. More's the pity.

American Prometheus
The triumph and tragedy of Robert Oppenheimer

Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin
Vintage Books, $17.95; 721 pages