Oppenheimer: The ‘destroyer of worlds’ who built the atomic bomb – and how his legacy still impacts us today

Each time Vladimir Putin raises the spectre of nuclear confrontation, the trail ultimately leads back to one man. Eighty years before the Russian president invaded Ukraine, and brought the potential of such weapons back to mainstream attention, J Robert Oppenheimer was recruited to lead a team that would construct the world’s first atomic bombs. Ukraine war – follow the latest developments The Manhattan Project, set up during the Second World War in 1942, was guided by fear that if the US and its allies didn’t make them first, Hitler’s Nazi scientists would. A left-wing theoretical physicist not known for his…