A rivalry to end the world: Oppenheimer and Teller

Vivian Gornick reviews three recent biographies in The Boston Review:

Two men—both brilliant at science, both hungry to exert an influence on world affairs, both living in a time that allowed them to aggravate into existence the ability to destroy the planet, and both sufficiently neurotic that neither fulfilled his own promise as a scientist (though both betrayed friends and colleagues to hold the power they thought they had attained). Only Thomas Hardy could have done justice to the melodrama that grew out of the fateful connection between Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and the American development of nuclear weapons.

More here.  And another review by Janet Maslin in the NY Times here.