Eric Singer, a historian specializing in The Cold War era, read Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s 2006 Pulitzer-Prize winning American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer three times. He was disappointed, however, that the 2023 movie didn’t show the hideous fallout from the atomic bombs that fell on Japan in August 1945. As an educator, he felt strongly that youngsters needed to learn not only about Oppenheimer’s ambivalence about fathering the atomic bomb but needed to be aware of the dangers of creating a nuclear world.
He understood that most students today were not likely to go through Bird and Sherwin’s 721-page tome or maybe even see the over-three-hour film. But if they did, he wondered, what would they take away from it? His students, he notes, “never ducked under their desks at school or marched against nukes in the 1980s. Nuclear war didn’t seem real to them, or to him, when he was that young.
The movie focused on the suspenseful test at Los Alamos and, later, on the unfair and cruel prosecution and persecution of Oppie, the charismatic American hero, who beat Hitler to the bomb.
What Singer wanted to do was extend the idea of Bird and Sherwin’s “triumph and tragedy” from Oppenheimer to the nation. And to make clear, once again, as Oppenheimer argued, the importance of understanding that a scientific achievement carries the burden of consequences.
Martin Sherwin, whom Singer met in graduate school, died in 2021, but Singer worked closely with Kai Bird. And thus was born Singer’s 276-page “story,” Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb, an adaptation of American Prometheus as a “Young Readers Edition.”
Destined for upper middle school grades 9 and 10 and libraries, the eminently readable book might well find a receptive audience also in college-age students and adults who may have been a bit overwhelmed by the science in the book.
An adaptation is not an abridgement, which is a shortened form of an original. An adaptation is riskier, harder to do, and challenging in attempting to rewrite an age-appropriate, fair narrative that is faithful to its source. Singer says he lost sleep many nights trying to figure out what to cut and how to present a sympathetic view of Oppenheimer and his colleagues, supported by evidence.
For one, he added graphics -- black & white photos of principal players, explosions, documents. He highlighted chapter themes, and tellingly boxed up incremental statistics on the bombs throughout the book – what nations were building them, how many they had over the years, and the approximate tonnage worldwide in comparison to the strikes on Japan and post-war tests on Bikini. His hope was- and is - to engage, educate, and persuade a new upcoming voting demographic. It’s an ardent and admirable hope, but he will need the support of parents, teachers, and librarians, newly under siege by an administration given to book bannings and curricular suppression. May the Force Be With Him.
