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|title=Inside The Centre: The Life of J Robert Oppenheimer

|author=Ray Monk

|publisher=Vintage

|date=November 2013

|video=qTjRHagudJU

|summary=A detailed and fascinating biography of the theoretical physicist, his German Jewish background, education in New York, Harvard, Cambridge and Göttingen, how he came to lead the scientific section of the Manhattan Project that developed the Atomic Bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and his subsequent appearance before the Un-American Activities Committee.

}}

Thinking back to the early 1960s, Bertrand Russell, the subject of another prize winning biography by Ray Monk, was frequently seen on black and white television declaring his concerns over Nuclear Weapons. He stated, ''Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.'' For nearly seventy years, mankind has wondered in the words of Sting, ''How can I save my boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?'' As concerns about nuclear proliferation in relation to Iraq, Pakistan and North Korea escalate it is salutary to return to a thorough biography of the man, known as the father of the bomb, that felt a deep and urgent need to be at the centre and to belong, J Robert Oppenheimer.