Looking back at ‘American Prometheus’, the book that inspired Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’

On August 6, 1945, at 15 minutes past 8 a.m., an atomic bomb flashed over Hiroshima, Japan, killing over 100,000 people. It all began with the Manhattan Project, led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb”, a brilliant American theoretical physicist who had learned quantum physics in Germany in the 1920s. ‘A Faustian bargain’ Oppenheimer was “America’s Prometheus”, who headed the effort to “wrest from nature the awesome fire of the sun for his country in the time of war”, write Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin in their gripping Pulitzer-winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. “Oppenheimer had led the effort to unleash the power of the atom, but when he sought to warn his countrymen of its dangers, to constrain America’s reliance on nuclear weapons, the government questioned his loyalty and put him on trial.” The first half of the book outlines Oppenheimer’s rise to fame and iconic status in the 1940s; his personal life and tragedies, such as the passing away of his girlfriend; his politics; and the fact that he loved to quote from the Bhagavad Gita, and gift it to his friends. In 2017, Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers fame wrote in his devastating book, The Doomsday Machine, that senior American army commanders were discussing in the 1960s how many people would die if, in the event of war, 40 megatons of N-bombs were dropped on Moscow: the “curve of deaths” was estimated at 100 million with more than half the population of the Soviet Union killed from radioactive fallout alone.