American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the physicist who directed the US atomic bomb program during World War II. From 1943 to 1945, Robert Oppenheimer oversaw the bomb’s research and development at secret facilities and laboratories in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The bomb’s use on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, however, left him with grave misgivings, and he spent the ensuing years trying to prevent a nuclear arms race. He was horrified when US policymakers decided to develop a thermonuclear superbomb with destructive capabilities thousands of times greater than the original atomic bomb, and his arguments against it earned him powerful enemies. As anti-Communist sentiment intensified, those enemies dredged up Oppenheimer’s left-wing past to banish him from government councils. American Prometheus builds to his dramatic 1954 hearing before a special panel that voted to recommend revoking his security clearance. This humiliating inquisition occurred against the backdrop of McCarthyism. Bird and Sherwin, both Cold War historians, describe Oppenheimer as “the most prominent victim” of “McCarthyite hysteria” (548).