Inside The Centre

J. Robert Oppenheimer is among the most contentious and important figures of the twentieth century. As head of the Los Alamos Laboratory he oversaw the successful effort to beat the Nazis to develop the first atomic bomb - a breakthrough which was to have eternal ramifications for mankind and made Oppenheimer the father of the Bomb. Oppenheimer was a man of diverse interests and phenomenal intellectual attributes. His talent and drive allowed him as a young scientist to enter a community peopled by the great names of twentieth-century physics - men such as Bohr Born Dirac and Einstein - and to play a role in the laboratories and classrooms where the world was being changed forever. But Oppenheimers was not a simple story of assimilation scientific success and world fame. A complicated and
fragile personality the implications of the discoveries at Los Alamos were to weigh heavily upon him. Having formed suspicious connections in the 1930s in the wake of the Allied victory in World War Two Oppenheimers attempts to resist the escalation of the Cold War arms race would lead many to question his loyalties - and set him on a collision course with Senator Joseph McCarthy and his witch hunters. As with Ray Monks peerless biographies of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell Inside the Centre" is a work of towering scholarship. A story of discovery secrecy impossible choices and unimaginable destruction it goes deeper than any previous work in revealing the motivations and complexities of this most brilliant and divisive of men."