J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67) has become an iconic figure in the history of twentieth-century science. A leader in the institutionalization of American theoretical physics in the 1920s and 1930s, he became scientific head of the Manhattan Project and helped oversee the design, construction and testing of the first atomic bombs. As director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1947, his nuclear insider status and his extensive scientific and political connections made him an influential public figure and a key science adviser to the US government in the early Cold War. But his ambivalence towards and subsequent opposition to the development of the H-bomb in the late 1940s earned him many enemies in the political, scientific and military worlds.

Charismatic, intellectually and socially gifted, yet enigmatic and often inconsistent, Oppenheimer inspired devotional loyalty from his friends and admirers – and equally intense animosity from his detractors. At the height of McCarthyism, FBI evidence about his forays into popular-front politics in the 1930s added to suspicions about his credentials, and provided grounds for his critics to act against him. In 1954, after a quasi-judicial hearing, the Atomic Energy Commission stripped him of his security clearance and therefore of his status in the highest counsels of state. Oppenheimer quickly came to be regarded as a victim by many on the left who worried about the encroachment of the security state into science, and was portrayed as a tragic figure, even a martyr. Over the next decade he charted a new public role as a scientific philosopher and sage. He reflected deeply and authoritatively on the bomb and its impact on global affairs, and publicly expressed the guilt that many physicists felt for their role in its creation and use.

This protean figure and his tribulations have been the focus of many popular and scholarly biographies, memoirs and commentaries since the 1950s. In 2005 he was even the subject of an opera – John Adams's Doctor Atomic – indicating his deep and enduring significance in American culture. The centenary of his birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the AEC hearings produced a new outpouring of work on Oppenheimer, and the papers in this collection arise from a conference marking these events. Bringing together leading scholars in the field, the volume is cogently organized into six parts dealing with Oppenheimer's scientific work, ‘the Communist question’, comparisons with the Soviet Union, the AEC hearing itself, ‘cultural resonances’ and ‘the public Oppenheimer’. As with any conference-derived volume, the contributions – eighteen chapters, plus an introduction and afterword by the editors – vary in scope, quality and originality, though the overall standard of scholarship is very high. The collection contains a wealth of excellent new research and analysis, and while some of the material has already appeared elsewhere, it is useful to have it reworked and republished here.

Among the highlights of the volume are the papers discussing the controversial theme of Oppenheimer's alleged membership of the Communist Party – a charge Oppenheimer himself always denied. Following initial claims in his 2002 book Brotherhood of the Bomb that Oppenheimer had been a member of a closed unit of the Berkeley CP, Gregg Herken adduces new anecdotal evidence in support of this claim. Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, authors of another recent biography of Oppenheimer, vigorously contest the claim, and offer an alternative account both of Oppenheimer's political activities and of the evolution of his political views in the 1930s and 1940s. In a closely argued, incisive and methodologically reflective essay, however, nuclear historian Barton J. Bernstein meticulously reviews all the available evidence, and concludes that Oppenheimer probably was a member of the CP. While the debate may continue, Bernstein's exemplary analytical style of argumentation also makes a nice contrast to the more narrative forms of history to which historians of science have perhaps become accustomed.

Other noteworthy chapters include those contextualizing Oppenheimer's changing views on nuclear weapons and the 1954 AEC security hearings. James G. Hershberg gives a detailed account of Oppenheimer's involvement in discussions over the international control of atomic energy in the late 1940s, after the failure of the Baruch Plan at the United Nations in 1946. He nicely charts the physicist's developing scepticism both about the USSR's willingness to compromise its own nuclear ambitions and about the US administration's foreign policy strategy in nuclear matters, and establishes the implications for the 1954 hearing. In related vein, W. Patrick McCray details Oppenheimer's involvement in Project Vista, a 1951 summer study at Caltech charged with examining US options (including the use of tactical nuclear weapons) for the defence of Europe in the event of Soviet attack. Oppenheimer's expressed opposition to strategic nuclear bombing and thermonuclear weapons made him vulnerable to attack by his political opponents and scientific rivals. And from the other side, Stephanie Young nicely analyses the development of AEC Personnel Security Board procedures in the late 1940s, and helps establish some of the juridical background to the 1954 case. The procedures employed against Oppenheimer were, she argues, an extension of ‘a dubious apparatus that had been wielded against AEC employees for many years’ (p. 250).

Several other papers in the volume shed fascinating new light on their subject. Oppenheimer famously said he remembered thinking of the lines from the Bhagavad-Gita, ‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds’, at the Alamogordo test of the first nuclear device in July 1945. Indeed, he often cited allusively from Sanskrit literature and philosophy. Exploring the roots and consequences of this interest, John Heilbron offers an insightful analysis of Oppenheimer's intellectual relationship with his Sanskrit teacher-cum-guru at Berkeley, Arthur William Ryder, and of his tendency to submit to authority figures like Ryder – and the Manhattan Project's General Groves. Charles Thorpe gives a rich account of Oppenheimer's post-1954 reconstitution of himself from nuclear insider to public intellectual via such organizations as the covertly CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom, with its Cold War liberal democratic pluralism. Robert P. Crease, too, takes a refreshingly sceptical view of Oppenheimer's self-presentation and the constitution of his public image, and challenges the conventional view of the tragic persona often projected onto him.

Offering an excellent historical and historiographical reassessment of a complex, contradictory and puzzling character, this collection will be an essential starting point for those interested in the current state of ‘Oppenheimer studies’ and for any further work on the physicist and his times. And given the number of questions raised here, the Oppenheimer industry clearly has work enough to keep it busy for a long time to come.