American Prometheus

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

First edition cover, photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt
Author	Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Publication date	2005
Pages	721
ISBN	978-0-375-72626-2
OCLC	249029647
Dewey Decimal	530.092
LC Class	QC16.O62 B57 2005

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer is a 2005 biography of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project which produced the first nuclear weapons, written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin over a period of twenty-five years. It won numerous awards, including the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

The book served as inspiration for Christopher Nolan's 2023 biographical film Oppenheimer.

Summary

J. Robert Oppenheimer, often credited as the "father of the atomic bomb", was a theoretical physicist and the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory, which designed and built the world's first nuclear weapons. The bomb is regarded as a crucial turning point and a significant meeting between science and wartime weapons. This pivots Oppenheimer as not only an important historical figure but also as a symbol for atomic bomb ethics and political discourse about nuclear power. The book delves into various components of Oppenheimer's life inside and outside the Manhattan Project. His early life, ambitions, ideas, relationships with other physicists, security hearing and impact are also discussed in the book.

Production

Historian Martin J. Sherwin, who had previously written A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies (1975), started to work on the Oppenheimer biography in 1979, and signed the first contract with the publisher, Knopf, on March 13, 1980, for $70,000. Between 1979 and 1985 he conducted interviews "with 112 persons in his [Oppenheimer's] orbit", including his friend Haakon Chevalier, and his son Peter, who refused a formal interview. Sherwin gathered "some 50,000 pages of interviews, transcripts, letters, diaries, declassified documents and F.B.I. dossiers, stored in seemingly endless boxes in his basement, attic and office". After the deadline had come, and after his editor's retirement, Sherwin had still not finished the book. Thomas Powers writes that "historians of the subject, a small gossiping group, suggested that Sherwin was the latest victim of the curse of Oppenheimer". The book became a joke in Sherwin's family, and he said "that he was going to take the book to the grave".

In 1999 Sherwin invited his friend, writer and editor Kai Bird, who had already written two political biographies, to join him and put it together in a cohesive and readable format. At first Bird refused, but eventually agreed to work on the book, and both authors signed a new contract with Knopf, for a further $290,000. Bird wrote drafts that were then reviewed and rewritten by Sherwin.

The working title of the book was Oppie, but that was vetoed by their editor. Susan Goldmark, Bird's wife, suggested the new title: "Prometheus … fire … the bomb is this fire. And you could put 'American' there." Sherwin said that his friend Ronald Steel independently suggested the same title. First comparison of the physicists who made the bomb possible to Prometheus was in the Scientific Monthly in September 1945: "Modern Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus." Some reviewers also connected the name of the book to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

Reception

The biography was praised by critics. The Boston Globe wrote that the book "stands as an Everest among the mountains of books on the bomb project and Oppenheimer, and is an achievement not likely to be surpassed or equaled." Janet Maslin wrote in her The New York Times review that "American Prometheus aligns its subject's most critical decisions with both his early education and his ultimate unraveling. It succeeds in deeply fathoming his most damaging, self-contradictory behavior." She noted that it is "a thorough examination and synthesis, sometimes overwhelming in its detail". Another reviewer notes that "there is no mathematics and very little physics. There is little about the engineering of the “gadget” tested in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945."

Thomas Powers, in his review of several Oppenheimer's biographies for The New York Review, noted that Sherwin had an advantage in writing Oppenheimer's biography in 1979. Many friends and colleagues of Oppenheimer were, at that time, still alive. Powers described the book as "clear in its purpose, deeply felt, persuasively argued, disciplined in form, and written with a sustained literary power", and notes the complex character of Oppenheimer:

But it is Oppenheimer the man, not general ideas about the nuclear age, that dominates these pages. Oppenheimer emerges in all his complexity — a brainy theorist but also an "underdogger", quick in his sympathy for those at the bottom of the social ladder; a sometime revolutionary who irritated former students like Philip Morrison with his talk after the war about "Dean" and "George"—Dean Acheson and George Marshall; devoted defender of his alcoholic wife Kitty but blind to her ego-crushing treatment of their son, Peter; lifelong friend of students like Serber, and betrayer of students like Rossi Lomanitz, Joseph Weinberg, and Bernard Peters, whom he simply threw to the Red-hunting wolves.

Frank A. Settle called the book "meticulously researched" and "the most comprehensive biography to date". Braham Dabscheck notes the "scholarship of the highest order". John S. Rigden calls the book "well written and almost free of serious errors", and that "reading this worthy book is a gripping experience: It stimulates the mind and stirs the emotions."

Thomas A. Julian critiqued the book and the authors, writing that "[t]hey still assert, despite the conclusive evidence to the contrary ... that Japan was already defeated and wanted to 'surrender'", and that they "ignore disturbing evidence provided from former Soviet sources that Oppenheimer might have provided information to the Soviet Union about the U.S. atomic bomb project".

Awards

• 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award
• 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography
• 2008 Duff Cooper Prize

Film adaptation

Main article: Oppenheimer (film)

British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan began work on an Oppenheimer biopic in 2019 following a gift, a book of Oppenheimer's speeches, from British actor Robert Pattinson, who starred in Nolan's film Tenet. Nolan continued a newfound interest in Oppenheimer, reading American Prometheus, and decided to base his screenplay on the book, centering on the security clearance hearings. Since 2015, the adaptation rights were owned by producer J. David Wargo, who agreed to work alongside Nolan.

Nolan met with Bird as Sherwin had been diagnosed with cancer and was not able to travel. Bird read the script prior to filming:

"Nolan covers in a very deft way the argument among the physicists over whether the bomb was necessary or not and has Oppenheimer after Hiroshima saying the bomb was used on a virtually already defeated enemy," Bird adds. "People who know nothing about Oppenheimer will go thinking they're going to see a movie about the father of the atomic bomb." Instead, "they're going to see this mysterious figure and a deeply mysterious biographical story."

Budgeted at $100 million, the resulting film, titled Oppenheimer, was released on July 21, 2023, to critical and commercial acclaim. Written and directed by Nolan, it stars Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer.

Nolan said that "I don't think I ever would have taken this on without Kai and Martin's book", and Murphy said to Bird during production that the book is "mandatory reading around here". According to Nolan, "he envisioned Oppenheimer not as a biography ('a formula that you write into can be creatively stifling') but more like "a thriller, a heist film, a courtroom drama". Nolan also said:

What I wanted to do was take the audience into the mind and the experience of a person who sat at the absolute center of the largest shift in history. Like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. He made the world we live in, for better or for worse.

Other Oppenheimer biographies

• Monk, Ray (2014). Robert Oppenheimer: a life inside the center (First Anchor books ed.). New York: Anchor Books. ISBN 978-0385722049.
• Thorpe, Charles (2006). Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-79848-6.
• McMillan, Priscilla J. (2005). The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer: And the Birth of the Modern Arms Race. JHU Press. ISBN 978-1-4214-2567-2.
• Bernstein, Jeremy (2004). Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma. Duckworth. ISBN 978-0-7156-3330-4.
• Cassidy, David C. (2004). J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-9317-9.
• Herken, Gregg (2002). Brotherhood of the bomb: the tangled lives and loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. New York: H.Holt. ISBN 978-0-8050-6588-6.
• Rhodes, Richard (1986). The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-65719-2.
• Goodchild, Peter (1980). J. Robert Oppenheimer: Shatterer of Worlds. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-395-30530-0.

External links

• American Prometheus at the Internet Archive
• Presentation by Bird and Sherwin on American Prometheus, September 30, 2006, C-SPAN
• Oppie—"A very mysterious and delphic character." Interview with Kai Bird, co-author of American Prometheus for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
• Martin J. Sherwin Collection Relating to J. Robert Oppenheimer (Research material gathered for the writing of American Prometheus) at the Library of Congress