"Oppenheimer reveals its subject as both an expert working on behalf of the state and an intellectual with broad cultural and moral authority. Oppenheimer played a crucial role not only in defining the task of the physicist as nuclear weaponeer, but also in expounding the wider cultural meanings and moral responsibilities associated with that task. The controversy over the hydrogen bomb and Oppenheimer's public fall from grace in the 1954 loyalty-security hearings, Thorpe argues, revealed fundamental tensions at the heart of the modern technoscientific state, raising questions about the responsibility scientists should take for the technologies of death they produce." "Oppenheimer maps out changes in the roles of scientists and intellectuals in twentieth-century America, ultimately revealing transformations in Oppenheimer's persona that coincided with changing attitudes toward science in society."--BOOK JACKET.