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The time was 5.29am, the date July 16, 1945. On a sun-scorched plain in the U.S. state of New Mexico, on a test site nicknamed the Jornada del Muerto, the Trail of the Dead, the world was about to change for ever.

As the seconds ticked down before the nuclear detonation, the scientists of the Manhattan Project held their breath. Then, as the countdown reached zero, came the explosion — a vast ball of burning orange, bursting from the desert floor with terrifying speed.

Just outside the control bunker, the man responsible lay face down on the ground, shielding his eyes from the searing glare. When it was safe, he looked up, and beheld what he had created. The entire sky burned with colour: red and yellow and purple.

Under his breath, the man murmured a verse from the Hindu scriptures: ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one.’ Then another verse flashed across his mind, and its message was rather more ominous: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’

The man’s name was J. Robert Oppenheimer. As director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where the scientists of the Manhattan Project had built the world’s first nuclear weapons, he was one of the titanic figures of the 20th century.

The man’s name was J. Robert Oppenheimer. He was one of the titanic figures of the 20th century

Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer in the upcoming biographical film directed by Christopher Nolan

The story of those ground-breaking nuclear bombs, which were dropped a few weeks later on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is well known. But Oppenheimer’s life itself is an extraordinary story — the tale of a man who created the most devastating weapons in history, only to find himself publicly investigated and condemned as a tool of communism.

To some he was a monster, to others a martyr. Even today, some people see him as the embodiment of scientific hubris; others as a victim of witch-hunting hysteria. No wonder, then, that the British film director Christopher Nolan has turned his life story into a forthcoming cinematic blockbuster, Oppenheimer, widely expected to dominate the box office this summer.

So who was this intense, brooding man, whose creation still haunts the world’s imagination?

J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York on April 22, 1904, the son of a German Jewish businessman, Julius, and his wife Ella, a painter.

Unlike many immigrant families, the Oppenheimers were rich. Robert grew up in a house with a Picasso, a Rembrandt, a Renoir and three Van Goghs, and learned to sail at their summer house on Long Island.

A brilliant scholar, he won a place at Harvard to study chemistry, though he soon discovered that his real passion was physics. He was, however, a very intense young man, whose peers found him rather unsettling.

When he crossed the Atlantic to study for a postgraduate degree at Cambridge, he behaved in a very peculiar manner. First, having fallen out with his tutor Patrick Blackett, he poisoned an apple with chemicals from the laboratory and left it on his desk. (Fortunately for them both, Blackett didn’t eat it.)

Next, he endeavoured to force himself on a woman in a train before collapsing to the ground in floods of tears.

On another occasion, when his friend Francis Fergusson announced that he had got engaged, Oppenheimer leaped on him with a trunk strap and tried to garotte him. You didn’t have to be an Einstein to work out that sexual frustration was driving him mad. Yet there was no arguing with his sheer brainpower. The mid-1920s saw dazzling breakthroughs in the new realm of quantum physics — the study of tiny subatomic particles, such as electrons, protons and neutrons.

Oppenheimer was one of its most brilliant pioneers, publishing 16 papers in just three years. He secured a teaching job at the University of California, Berkeley — but then found a new passion: politics.

Like so many unworldly academics, he had vaguely Left-wing, even radical sympathies. Then, in 1936, he at last met a girl — the 22-year-old Jean Tatlock, a literature professor’s daughter and a keen member of the Communist Party.

Tatlock called herself a ‘complete Red’, and under her influence Oppenheimer swung farther to the Left. The couple were regular guests at salons of Californian radicals, where Oppenheimer often handed over donations for the cause.

Florence Pugh in a scene from the upcoming Oppenheimer film

Was he a card-carrying communist, Child Porn Fisting then? Probably not. He was certainly a ‘fellow traveller’, a phrase he sometimes used himself. But, although the FBI opened a file on Oppenheimer in 1941, compiling thousands of pages of reports and transcripts, they never proved that he had joined the party. Indeed, by then both his relationship with Jean Tatlock and his enthusiasm for communism had faded.

Meanwhile, Washington had joined the race to build the first nuclear weapon, inspired by reports that German scientists were planning to split a nucleus of uranium, one of the heaviest elements, which would release an enormous burst of energy in the form of an explosion.

By the autumn of 1941, Oppenheimer was being invited to secret meetings to discuss how the U.S. might develop a bomb of its own. A year later, he was invited to lunch by Colonel Leslie R. Groves — a tough-talking, hard-driving military organiser appointed to lead the top-secret Manhattan Project.

Groves believed the U.S. needed a single secret laboratory dedicated to building the super-weapon. And he wanted Oppenheimer to run it — even though this stooping, gaunt, intense physicist had never managed a team in his life.

Groves knew the FBI, among others, had doubts about Oppenheimer’s communist associations. But he believed that, deep down, the Berkeley physicist was a patriot, and was convinced that his sheer brilliance would inspire other scientists to work for him.

One major problem was finding a site for this new laboratory. But as luck would have it, the young Oppenheimer had spent his summers riding in the canyons of New Mexico. Two decades earlier, he had ridden past an isolated boys’ boarding school at Los Alamos, some 30 miles from Santa Fe. And when, on November 16, 1942, he took Groves to see it, the colonel announced it was perfect.

Two days later, the U.S. army bought the school. And so began one of the most breathtaking scientific enterprises in history, as hundreds of physicists, technicians and their families joined Oppenheimer’s team in a race to build the ultimate weapon.

Many of them feared their Nazi rivals — led by the brilliant Werner Heisenberg — had a two-year headstart. There was not a minute to lose, for if Hitler got the bomb first, the consequences for mankind would be terrifying.

Yet even as Oppenheimer got down to work, he made two mistakes that were to have catastrophic personal consequences.

First, he was still in touch with his Left-wing friends back in California. Indeed, at some point in early 1943, he was approached by one old associate, communist literature professor Haakon Chevalier, to see if he was interested in passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer said no. Disastrously, though, he didn’t immediately report the conversation to the authorities, which was to have devastating repercussions when the FBI found out about it.

Second, despite the fact that he was now married to a former biology student, Kitty Puening, and had two children, Peter and Toni, he had rekindled his affair with Tatlock. All the time the FBI were tapping his phone and reading his mail, which meant they knew he was sleeping with a communist again.

Meanwhile, the race to build the bomb continued. By early 1945 it was clear the Nazis had fallen far behind, and Hitler died on April 30 without ever getting his hands on the nuclear button.

Now the focus moved to Japan. And once President Harry Truman learned of the test at the Jornada del Muerto, he didn’t hesitate.

On August 6, 1945, news reached Los Alamos that a U.S. bomber, Enola Gay, had dropped the world’s first atom bomb on the city of Hiroshima. At least 100,000 people had been killed, and countless thousands more horrifically injured.

That night, as his team gathered in the town’s auditorium, Oppenheimer seemed jubilant, entering like a boxing champion, clasping his hands and pumping them above his head in triumph.

But as the days passed and the reality sank in, many of the Los Alamos team began to have doubts. One scientist’s wife talked of their feeling of ‘revulsion . . . an intensely personal experience of the reality of evil’.

By the time Oppenheimer left Los Alamos, in early October 1945, the Japanese had surrendered. But he now seemed a haunted man, haggard with guilt. Nine days after leaving New Mexico, he walked into the Oval Office to meet President Truman. ‘Mr President,’ he said quietly, ‘I feel I have blood on my hands.’

Another film still from Oppenheimer showing Emily Blunt and Cillian Murphy 

Truman, a tough-talking former haberdasher, frowned. ‘Never mind,’ he said brusquely, ‘it’ll come out in the wash.’

When the meeting was over, Truman called his aides. Oppenheimer, he said coldly, was just a ‘cry-baby scientist . . . I don’t ever want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again’. The irony was that the Manhattan Project had made Oppenheimer one of the most famous intellectuals in the world. He was that rare thing, a scientific celebrity, his face adorning front pages and magazine covers for week after week.

One newspaper called him the ‘Modern Prometheus’, after the Greek Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind.

But in the myths, Prometheus faces a terrible punishment, bound to a rock so that an eagle can devour his constantly regenerating liver for all eternity. And Oppenheimer, too, found no solace. For in a stunning twist, his communist past finally came back to haunt him.

As the international mood darkened in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with America gripped by Cold War paranoia, his political enemies dusted down those old FBI files.

Infuriated by his refusal to endorse their new project — a hydrogen bomb, many times deadlier than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — Washington’s anti-communist hawks came to believe that he had been working for the Soviet Union all along.

This was almost certainly untrue. Yes, Oppenheimer had once flirted with communism, and had been slow to report his old friend’s approach. But there was no evidence that he had betrayed his country.

But in a climate of simmering hysteria, with witch-hunters such as the notorious Republican senator Joseph McCarthy claiming to see enemy agents around every corner, Oppenheimer had become a target.

In April 1954, his arch-critic, the Atomic Energy Commission’s chairman Lewis Strauss, convened a month of hearings to declare him a security risk and strip him of his official clearance. To Oppenheimer’s friends, it was nothing short of a political show trial.

To his horror, even some of his old colleagues turned against him. In an infamous confrontation, his fellow physicist Edward Teller, who had devised the new H-bomb, told the hearing that America’s security should be in ‘more trustworthy hands’, and that Oppenheimer’s clearance should be formally revoked.

Teller and Strauss got their way. When the verdict came down on May 23, 1954, Oppenheimer had been effectively convicted. The news made front pages in every country in the world.

In the aftermath, Oppenheimer was a broken man. His career was effectively over, and his security clearance was never restored. As late as 1967, when he died of cancer, there were still those who wondered if he had been a Soviet spy all along.

Would any scriptwriter invent such a story? The idealistic genius who became the face of nuclear annihilation; the wartime hero who was tarred as a security risk; the modern Prometheus who stole fire from the gods, only to be betrayed and sacrificed by his own people . . .

But the Oppenheimer story isn’t just the tale of a single remarkable man. As the godfather of the atom bomb, he was one of the founders of our modern world.

Although it is almost 80 years since nuclear weapons were used in anger, we still live with the nightmares he created. In an age of suffocating international tension, with Russia on the defensive and China on the rise, which of us would dare to predict that they will never be used again?

Whether we like it or not, the world entered a new age that morning in the desert of New Mexico. And all these decades later, Oppenheimer’s words are as chilling as ever: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds . . .’

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