'Shatterer of Worlds'
Any portrait of Julius Robert Oppenheimer as a man must
always return to the crucial fact that he was, and is still seen as, the 'father of the
Atom Bomb', the effective creator of the deadliest weapon ever used by mankind.
This new biography gives a clear picture of Oppenheimer's stormy
personal life and his charismatic personality; it also looks at him as the brilliant
physicist whose work brought together the top scientists of Britain and America at Los
Alamos during World War II. There he acted as organiser and catalyst of their researches.
It was a race against time, against Germany, to produce the bombs that were to have such
fateful results.
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 meant victory for the
allies and brought the war abruptly to an end, saving the lives of countless thousands of
servicemen on both sides. It was a huge achievement for the scientists, but it caused
unprecedented death and devastation and opened the door to the possibility of a nuclear
holocaust. This possibility was strengthened in 1949 when the Russians tested their first
A-bomb. Unknown to the West, they had been receiving details of allied developments from
Klaus Fuchs who worked at Los Alamos under Oppenheimer. Because of his radical left-wing
background, suspicion fell on Oppenheimer himself and he was indicted to answer charges of
being a security risk.
Was he simply another victim of the anti-communist paranoia sweeping
America in the early fifties? Or was there good reason for the suspicions of the FBI?
After all, Oppenheimer had once been closely involved in Communist Party activities and
for years subscribed a tenth of his income to their cause.
Peter Goodchild has been able to use completely new material from the
files of the FBI, now released under the American Freedom of Information Act, plus recent
interviews with friends and colleagues of Oppenheimer, to write a new appraisal of the
dichotomies and the controversies that still reverberate around the name of Oppenheimer.