American Prometheus: The Inspiration for the Main Movement Image OPPENHEIMER

The movie was faithful to the book
This is not a quick read for sure. The book is so big it’s hard to hold, so probably better to read it on the Kindle. I got it from the library, and it was falling apart to such an extent that when I returned it, it really needed to be re-glued before they could give it to another reader. That being said, I found Oppenheimer a very interesting person. You really couldn’t get that much of a handle on who he was in the movie, compared to reading the book.Definitely worth the effort and very well done, including his relationship with his wife and children, which is always an interesting part of any book. It certainly helps to know the history of our country during those years. My granddaughter, age 18, went to see it, and I wanted to make sure she knew about the house un-American activities committee and what was going on at that time in our country. My husband, a newspaper journalist in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, back in the day, interviewed Oppenheimer for his newspaper. He mentioned to me that he thought Oppenheimer was haunted by his connection to the bomb, and that made me all the more interested in seeing the film. He was a man who did everything he could to stop the proliferation of the H bomb. He never could’ve dreamed the way things would go. After reading this, I decided that I could no longer defend Harry Truman for the bombing of Nagasaki, especially when one finds out that the Japanese were so close to surrendering. How can you ignore a nation with so many innocent people at risk? I thought Truman was smarter and more sensitive than he turns out to be, according to these authors. All in all, an interesting read and well worth your time.

The rise and fall of the physicist who helped create the Atomic Bomb
Subtitled “The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer”, this 2005 book won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. This fascinating story of the physicist who oversaw the creation of the atomic bomb is meticulously researched by the authors and offers the reader a comprehensive look at the facts and the political complexities that first held this man in high esteem in 1945 and later turned on him and disgraced him just nine years later in 1954.Born in 1904 to a Jewish family who had been one of the founders of the Ethical Culture movement in the America, young Robert attended a private Ethical Culture school and grew up inspired by the ideal that the supreme aim of our lives is to create a more humane society. He graduated from Harvard and did graduate work at the University of Cambridge in England and the University of Gottingen in Germany, later becoming a professor at the University of Berkeley in California. This was in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Europe was where the innovations in physics were happening, Hitler was rising to power, Russia was in a state of revolution, the Spanish Civil War was beginning and the work of Karl Marx was being discussed by the segment of American society that believed in making the world a better place. Naturally, Robert Oppenheimer found himself in that world, and contributed money to some humanitarian causes. During this time he had several romances and eventually married a woman whose former husband was a Communist who had died fighting in the Spanish Civil War.Robert was a brilliant physicist and was chosen to run the project at Los Alamos to create what turned out to be the Atomic Bomb. In this section of the book we meet the other scientists involved in the project and get to understand the kind of isolationist lives they and their families lived during the two years that the project was being developed. Later, when the Atomic Bomb became a reality, there was debate over whether or not it should be used. Originally, it was designed to be used in Europe, but Hitler had already surrendered and Japan was on the verge of surrendering. There were no military targets left that the bomb was suited for. All it would do would be to kill thousands of civilians and wreck havoc in Japan. Some thought at the time that all that would be needed was to call a press conference and do a test in an isolated area so that reporters could report on its strength which might have been enough to push Japan’s surrender. This, however, was not to be.Well, we all know what happened. Two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Japan surrendered. And Robert Oppenheimer was lauded as one of the greatest scientists of all time.Things changed however. Atomic power seemed to let the genie out of the bottle. The arms race began with the Soviet Union exploding a bomb of its own and the United States wanting to develop even bigger and bigger bombs. All of a sudden, it seemed as if there would be no end – that the bombs would just get bigger and bigger and the world would blow itself into destruction. Robert Oppenheimer opposed this trend and wrote many articles warning the world of this course of action. Some saw him as un-American and wanted to destroy him. Eventually, in 1954, there was a hearing which would eventually strip him of his top secret security clearance. It was an unfair, kangaroo court which made me cringe as I read the transcripts. How awful for him.After that, Robert was never the same. A few years later, at the age of 62, he died of throat cancer.I looked up the myth of Prometheus so that I could better understand the title. In Greek Mythology, Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals to use. Zeus then punished him by having him bound to a rock while an eagle ate his liver, only to have it grow back the next day.This is a fine book. I learned a lot. It is not the kind of book to read in one big gulp though. I read it little by little, a page or two at a time. And during the period I was reading it I was right there in those long-ago years, living and breathing all the influences of the times and understanding the world around me just a little bit better.

Loved the narrative, gives a great context to the “Red Scare” of the 50s and how so many could get swept up in it after their passions to help the poor and downtrodden in the 1920s and 1930s.

War ein Geschenk