Extract: Inside the Centre by Ray Monk

In this condensed extract of the Oppenheimer biography, Inside the Centre, Ray Monk describes how the Los Alamos scientists responded to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

That evening at Los Alamos there was a big assembly to celebrate their success. Oppenheimer made a dramatic entrance, walking from the back of the room to the stage and, once there, clasping his hands together like a prize-winning boxer. To ecstatic cheering, Oppenheimer told the crowd that it was too early to say what the results of the bombing had been, but that ‘the Japanese didn’t like it’. His only regret, he said, was that ‘we hadn’t developed the bomb in time to use it against the Germans’. This, according to the young physicist who later recalled the event, ‘practically raised the roof ’.

atomic bomb