"J. Robert Oppenheimer was a puzzle to everyone. The nuclear physicist most responsible for the creation of the atomic bomb, he was a genius both scientifically and otherwise. His standards were impossibly high. He read widely in many languages, wrote poetry, and did superb science. Yet in Jeremy Bernstein's biographical profile, Oppenheimer emerges as man unsure of his identity and captive to an element of self-destructiveness in his makeup." "Oppenheimer once told the author that during the now-famous Atomic Energy Commission hearing in which he lost his security clearance - one of the most spectacular attacks of the McCarthy era - he felt it was happening to someone else. His lawyer at the hearing, after being with Oppenheimer day in and day out for several months, confessed he did not know him in any real sense at all. Yet everyone in the scientific community and in government agreed that without Oppenheimer's totally remarkable leadership at Los Alamos, the atomic bomb would not have happened, and the Second World War would have ended very differently."--BOOK JACKET.