Books about J Robert Oppenheimer (to Read After the Movie)

People who are connoisseurs are normally quite snooty when their subject gets turned into a movie, but you thought the Oppenheimer movie was great and its Best Picture Oscar “richly deserved.” Tell me more.

Christopher Nolan is one of my favourite directors so I went to the movie, thinking, ‘This will be good, but I’m curious as to how he’s going to do this and what he’s going to put in there.’ As I watched, I kept thinking, ‘Oh, he has this in here, he’s got that part in.’ The things that I thought were going to be left out he had in there. He was covering the whole picture, not just the atomic bomb, and doing it all accurately. Obviously, there are some allowances for dramatic license, but he hit all the right notes.

One of the things that anybody who has studied Oppenheimer or knew him will tell you is that you never really knew Oppenheimer because there were so many different Oppenheimers. It was really hard to pin him down because he was just so complex and contradictory. But the movie, I think, really comes as close as possible to doing that. With Cillian Murphy’s performance they really captured Oppenheimer as much as anyone could capture him.

A lot of friends asked me what I thought about the movie because they knew I’d written about him and I said, ‘It’s great. It’s a masterpiece.’ But in a way I’m not the right person to ask because unlike a lot of the audience who’s going to come to this fresh and not knowing anything or much about Oppenheimer, I know a whole lot about him. So I perceive it in a way that somebody else is not going to. And I can’t change that.

So the movie was based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Is this the best Oppenheimer biography?

My first thought when I heard that Christopher Nolan was doing a movie about Oppenheimer was, ‘Wait a minute, Chris! You didn’t call me? What is this? You’re not using my book?’ But yes. American Prometheus by Bird and Sherwin is the gold standard for books about Oppenheimer. It’s the definitive Oppenheimer biography—and I say that as the author of one myself.

Your book focuses on Oppenheimer’s later years, is that right?

Yes. Oppenheimer is one of those really intimidating subjects, because so much has been written about him. He’s a figure I’ve always been fascinated by—you saw the movie, you can understand why. But most of the books about him before were all about him working on Los Alamos and on the bomb. What happened after he was disgraced at his security hearing and kicked out of the government as such, tends to be treated very, very briefly. So I got curious about that: ‘How did he live after that happened? What was the rest of his life like?’ That was where my book came from.

What did he do in his later years?

He basically stayed at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and did a lot of speaking around the world. He was sort of an elder statesman of science but he also was very careful not to get too publicly involved with policy. He would be asked sometimes by reporters, ‘What do you think about this latest thing with the hydrogen bomb or these disarmament talks?’ And even though he would definitely have opinions on it, he would say, ‘I can’t really comment on that, because I’m too far from the center of events now.’ He just lay low and lived out his life. He was destroyed by the security hearing, as we see in the movie, but maybe not quite as much as some people thought. One thing I think comes out in the movie is that he did have something of a martyr complex. That was also there in his later life.

It’s a bit of a shame. Einstein said a lot about stuff, but the whole experience seems to have shut Oppenheimer up.

I think Einstein just had such a special status—and had had it for so long. In some ways, he was immune from being canceled (as we’d say nowadays) like Oppenheimer was.

One thing that’s tragic about his later years is that Oppenheimer was doing really interesting, valuable research before the Manhattan Project. On black holes, and so forth, as you see in the movie. He dropped all of that for the Manhattan Project. He could have picked that up after, especially after he was out of government and he no longer had those responsibilities. But he never did.

When I was researching my book, I talked to people like Freeman Dyson, who knew him. Dyson once asked Oppenheimer, ‘You did all this great stuff. Why don’t you get back into it? Why don’t you do more of that?’ But he just didn’t seem interested in doing it anymore. Maybe because he was just so demoralized. But he could have. He could maybe have won the Nobel Prize if he had.

Let’s turn to the novel you’ve chosen now: The Oppenheimer Alternative by Robert Sawyer. So this is alternative history.

Robert Sawyer is a very well-known science fiction writer. This book came out a few years ago and it traces Oppenheimer’s history. For a lot of it, it’s almost straight history, although dramatized, because it’s a novel. But then, after the war and the atomic bomb, it takes a left turn into an alternate path that might have occurred, building on some things that they had discovered during the Manhattan Project. Because a lot of the research that had been done leading up to the atomic bomb, and that Oppenheimer had been working on, and Enrico Fermi and so forth, was about solar and stellar physics. And without giving too much away, they discover some disturbing things that are going on…and the course of Oppenheimer’s life takes a different turn.

It’s extremely well researched and very accurate scientifically. It’s just a great book for anyone interested in Oppenheimer. In an alternate universe, this is maybe how Oppenheimer turned out.

Going beyond Oppenheimer, for the story of nuclear weapons in general, you recommend both The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes. 

Yes, I’m cheating a little with the dual choice, but I think it’s appropriate because these are really two volumes of a larger work. It’s the seminal history of nuclear weapons from their beginnings in early 20th-century physics through the development of the hydrogen bomb and beyond.

Lastly, you’ve recommended Genius in the Shadows, a biography of Leo Szilard. He shows up at the beginning of the Richard Rhodes book in London, I think, and he’s in the Oppenheimer movie. Do you feel he’s not remembered enough?

He’s a minor character in the movie but a major force in starting the whole atomic bomb effort. He was really instigator of the letter that was sent to Roosevelt, that started the Manhattan Project. He and Edward Teller went to Einstein and convinced him to put his name on this letter.

He was such an interesting and eccentric character. He did not have a conventional career, like scientists usually do. He never really had a particular place that he settled. He was always very peripatetic. The legend about him is that he always kept two packed suitcases. He was a refugee from Europe, so that experience, I think, affected him. Genius in the Shadows is really the first full biography of him that I had encountered.

Szilard was very politically active. We see this in the Oppenheimer movie: he’s the one with the petition, trying to get the demonstration of the bomb. He was a gadfly. He was somebody who was always going against the grain, annoying people, but also making them think about things. He always had out-of-left-field ideas, but very interesting ones.

Szilard was distraught by nuclear weapons. He fought to stop the use of the atomic bomb on Japan. He became very, very involved in the anti-nukes movement. Probably more than anyone else, he was the one who saw the definite damaging potential of them and what could happen. He predicted that there would be an arms race—many of the things that he predicted have come true. And he was so disillusioned by it all that in his later years, he switched from physics to molecular biology.

Without him, would the atomic bomb have happened, do you think?

I think it would have, but maybe a little bit later. After fission was discovered, everyone in the physics community knew was going on, and knew the potential of it. And of course, since that happened in Germany, everyone was worried about the Germans getting the bomb first. So I think even without Szilard pushing for it, it would have would have gotten done. Maybe a little bit later, maybe too late for us. And of course, Szilard really regretted his role in that, in getting it started. That led, in later life, not so much to guilt, but feeling responsibility for it—he was trying to offset that.