Reviewed by Jennet Conant BROTHERHOOD OF THE BOMB The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, And Edward Teller By Gregg Herken Henry Holt. 448 pp. $30 It would be hard to imagine three men as profoundly different as Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller, the three scientists most responsible for the advent of weapons of mass destruction. Each of these towering figures has been the subject of numerous biographies -- and in Teller's case, a recent autobiography -- dedicated to examining in depth his fascinating but flawed legacy. In Brotherhood of the Bomb, Gregg Herken sets himself the particularly daunting task of trying to contain all three overweening egos in one volume, which is a bit like inviting too many prima donnas to the same ball and watching them compete for the floor. Yet he succeeds in telling the vivid behind-the-scenes tale of these scientist's brilliant teamwork during World War II, and of the bristling jealousies, political intrigues and shifting loyalties that would ultimately bring them into bitter conflict. A former Yale historian who is now curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum and the author of several studies of the nuclear age, Herken writes with an assurance that enables him to cover a lot of ground swiftly, and to paint the political and scientific landscape in bold strokes. We are plunged into the story in 1939, with a tall, good-looking Midwesterner, Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the "atom-smasher," planning a machine to change the world. "By sheer force of personality more than by any power of intellect, Lawrence was a commanding presence at Berkeley," Herken writes, presiding over his weekly physics department meetings like "a medieval lord" and carving out a reputation as an enthusiastic, headstrong American in a field long dominated by Europeans. In contrast, there was the thin, gangly, otherworldly Oppenheimer, three years younger than Lawrence and the product of an upper-class Jewish family in New York, whose chain-smoking and nervous manner -- he had seen a succession of psychiatrists while attending an elite private school -- "stood in contrast to Lawrence's usually detached Olympian calm." Despite their disparate personalities and politics, the two men formed an unusually close bond, working and vacationing together and becoming members of each other's extended families. But there was an even more fundamental difference: Oppenheimer was a theorist rather than an experimentalist like Lawrence, and regarded himself as intellectually superior, though each championed the other's work. As one colleague observed ominously, "I can only think that perhaps when they were such really good friends, maybe they'd never really understood each other yet." Then there was Teller, the moody young Hungarian theorist, known for his quick temper and driving ambition. Even the affable physicist Enrico Fermi remarked that Teller was "the only monomaniac he knew who had several manias." At a Berkeley seminar in the summer of 1942, Teller made it plain that as powerful as an atomic bomb might be, he was in favor of working on the much larger hydrogen bomb, the so-called "Super," which he argued would guarantee victory to the first country that possessed it. Oppenheimer and Teller split on this issue early on and, perhaps not coincidentally, even as the Manhattan Project was being organized, Teller professed to find something suspicious about the attitude of the laboratory's new leader. He recalled "Oppie's" complaints about the restrictions that Gen. Leslie Groves was imposing on the scientists in the name of secrecy, and being taken aback by his prediction that the time would come "when we will have to do things differently and resist the military." Anyone coming to this book expecting finely drawn character studies will be disappointed, and Teller, even more so than the others, never fully emerges as a person, coming across more as a dark shadow that falls upon their paths. Nevertheless, the story is well-crafted and meticulously researched, drawing on recently declassified FBI files and documents, and it moves at a helter-skelter pace, with new players, scientific breakthroughs and momentous events flying by so fast the war seems over almost before it began. But that is because the stage is being set for another deadly battle over who would be master of the new weapons they had created, a battle that seemed all the more brutal for being waged between old friends. Oppenheimer was of the opinion, admittedly naive, that strategy and policy were better left to politicians than to scientists. In a hurry to escape his wartime duties, he vetoed Teller's recommendation that they continue researching the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb, and both Teller and Lawrence later blamed him for trying to shut down Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. While Lawrence did not share Teller's growing hatred of Oppenheimer, his own ambitions focused on his long-delayed plans for his giant accelerator, which could turn out vast amounts of plutonium for future bombs, and he looked to the government as "the engine that would drive and even accelerate postwar scientific research at Berkeley." Lawrence was essentially apolitical, but opportunity can also make for strange bedfellows, and he realized that by joining Teller's flag-waving advocacy of the hydrogen bomb he could become the recognized leader of the country's nuclear establishment. He was also smarting from the eclipse of his stature as star physicist by Oppenheimer's wartime rise, and he wanted a chance to even the score. But as Herken chronicles in wrenching detail, one small betrayal led to others. In their zeal to gain support for the H-bomb, Lawrence and Teller, "two experienced promoters," in Oppenheimer's words, turned on Oppenheimer for trying to impede their progress, and in doing so unleashed a firestorm of criticism that burned beyond their control. It culminated in the revocation of Oppenheimer's security clearance and in the Gray board's disastrous loyalty hearing, which bitterly divided the scientific community for years to come. Lawrence never had the decency to testify, though he certainly knew Oppenheimer to be no traitor. Teller, on the other hand, buried him with finely worded innuendo, on and off the stand. The most controversial part of the book is bound to be Herken's assertion that Oppenheimer -- despite his repeated denials -- was in fact a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party during the 1930s and early '40s and, furthermore, was involved with a secret propaganda cell at Berkeley. The author bases his claim largely on newly revealed letters from Haakon Chevalier, a Berkeley colleague who figured in Soviet espionage circles, and who famously wrote to Oppenheimer in 1964 attesting that they had both been members of the same communist unit. But it is unclear how damning Herken's evidence really is: It was known that Oppenheimer had a pink background, that he had been active in various communist-front organizations, and that his brother and sister-in-law, wife, and former fiancée, not to mention countless friends and students, were party members. It was always a question of degree, and, just as the Gray Board found in 1954, Herken concludes that Oppenheimer was never "disloyal" and never spied for the Soviet Union. Brotherhood of the Bomb is a gripping account of three tangled lives, but it is less a tale of loyalty than of ambition, and the sad, pointless destruction of a great man in the post-war scramble for power. Jennet Conant is the author of "Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science that Changed the Course of World War II." © 2002 The Washington Post Company