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

Content Warning: This section discusses death by suicide.

“And yet, it was the irony of Robert Oppenheimer’s odyssey that a life devoted to social justice, rationality and science would become a metaphor for mass death beneath a mushroom cloud.”

Oppenheimer did not become overtly political until the 1930s. When he did, he consciously devoted himself to ideals that the atomic bomb’s mere existence would seem to undermine. This contributes to the “irony” that the authors mention. Furthermore, many of the world’s best scientists worked on the bomb program at Los Alamos. After the war, some of them ardently supported and then helped develop the thermonuclear superbomb. This too contributes to the “irony”: Nothing in the nature of “rationality and science” necessarily precludes activities that produce “mass death beneath a mushroom cloud.”

“He gets to the soul and torment of man.”

In March 1926—a month before his 22nd birthday—Oppenheimer accompanied friends from Cambridge on a brief getaway to the island of Corsica. When one of them mentioned that he enjoyed the literary works of Leo Tolstoy, Oppenheimer replied that he preferred another great Russian author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. According to Oppenheimer, Dostoyevsky’s work revealed man’s “soul and torment.” This comment sheds light on young Oppenheimer’s dark state of mind during his year in England. The Corsican vacation helped improve his outlook, but periodic depression plagued Oppenheimer for the rest of his life.