Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon

Brilliant, eccentric, absent-minded, and sympathetic to Communism, physicist Robert Oppenheimer, a professor at UC Berkeley and later at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, is in Sheinkin’s work a complex person whose role as director of the US atomic bomb program highlights the project’s political and psychological subtleties. More than any other figure in Bomb, he embodies the mingled Pride and Guilt Among the Weapon Makers.

Despite suspicions about his loyalties, Oppenheimer won the unqualified support of Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves, who declared, “He’s a genius, a real genius” (49). After the war, however, Oppenheimer’s Marxist sympathies put him on a collision course with the US government, as he campaigned for nuclear disarmament during a period of heightened anti-Communism in America. In 1954 he lost his security clearance. Though controversial, Oppenheimer’s role as the leading figure in the development of the atomic bomb marks him as one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.

Army general Leslie Groves, “an engineer by training” (47), oversaw the Manhattan Project’s development and construction of the first atomic bombs. As the soldier who managed the wartime construction of The Pentagon—the US War Department’s then-new headquarters and the largest office building in the world—Groves was highly qualified to get large industrial jobs done.