Inside the Centre by Ray Monk: review Shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Robert Oppenheimer met Harry Truman at the White House. The director of the Manhattan Project was an emotional wreck. "Mr President," he said, "I feel we have blood on our hands." Truman, the hard-bitten man from Missouri, had no patience for histrionics. "Never mind," he grunted, "it'll all come out in the wash." He reputedly gave Oppenheimer a handkerchief. "Don't let that cry-baby in here again," he later told an aide. That incident at the White House is troubling because it contradicts the delight Oppenheimer took in building the bomb. The man who spoke so often of knowing sin was also the man who celebrated the Hiroshima bombing by "clasping his hands together like a prize-winning boxer." When, in 1944, things were not going well at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer seriously considered dropping highly radioactive uranium into German reservoirs. After the successful test of the bomb at Alamogordo, he argued, against the objections of his colleagues, that it should immediately be used on Japanese civilians. His only regret, he confessed, "was that we hadn't developed the bomb in time to use it against the Germans." Yet Oppenheimer found Jewishness too parochial for his cosmopolitan outlook - he was a Jew, but never Jewish. He wanted most of all to be an American, an embodiment of the modernity of the New World. Yet all those shining splinters rendered him too unique to be part of anything. He was the perpetual outsider, admired by many, accepted by none. This lack of belonging nearly destroyed him. After graduating from Harvard in just three years, he went on to Cambridge, where he found himself in a confusing world without emotional props. He did not deal well with the presence of people more brilliant, more handsome or more charming than him. A mental breakdown resulted. Being Oppenheimer, the collapse was by nature bizarre. He might have tried to murder his tutor with a poisoned apple. He might have tried to strangle his best friend. Did these events actually happen? Monk admits that it is difficult to separate fantasy and hallucination from concrete reality. The best line in the book comes when he recounts how Oppenheimer witnessed a woman having sex with a man in a third-class train carriage, then kissed the woman, then later tried to kill her by dropping a suitcase on her head. "It is impossible to tell how much of this story is true," Monk admits. Can one believe that Oppenheimer deliberately dropped his suitcase, intending to hit the woman? Did he really kiss her? And, perhaps most improbably of all: can one really imagine him travelling third-class? Given the subject, this might have been a very heavy book, but it is rescued by the author's light touch. The emotional cripple who was nearly expelled from Cambridge eventually went on to manage the Manhattan Project, an endeavour as large as the American auto industry at the time. The enigma of Oppenheimer arises in part because he achieved what should have been impossible, especially for a man so weak. That enigma is then complicated by his emotional reaction to the terrible weapon he helped develop. Some have judged that reaction another attempt to belong, in this case to the legion of the troubled. John von Neumann thought that he "profess[ed] guilt to claim credit for the sin." That is the most cutting criticism ever directed at Oppenheimer, and perhaps the most apposite. Monk is more charitable than von Neumann, more inclined to excuse his subject's enormous faults. His charity seems unwarranted. In the end, however, judgment must rest with the beholder. After reading this book, some will judge Oppenheimer a colossus. Others will think him an ass. All will find him fascinating. Ray Monk Jonathan Cape, £30, 818pp Gerard DeGroot is Professor of History at St Andrews and author of 'The Bomb: A Life'. 1 The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1986). 2 American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird (2005). 3 In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist by Silvan Schweber (1986).