September 20, 2002 By MICHIKO KAKUTANI As Richard Rhodes's magnificent books "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (1986) and "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" (1995) so powerfully demonstrated, the story of the men who ushered us into the nuclear age is one of the great dramas in modern history: a story of scientific ambition and hubris, of personal sacrifice and betrayal, of cold war espionage and cold war paranoia. It is a story about the nervous relationship between government and technology and about science giving birth to a terrible new form of knowledge that has irrevocably shaped the dangerous world we now inhabit. The new book "Brotherhood of the Bomb" by Gregg Herken, a senior historian and curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, draws on interviews, private papers and recently declassified documents from the F.B.I. and Soviet archives to look at the personal and political maneuvering that informed the building of the bomb and the opening chapters of the cold war. The book suggests that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the wartime head of Los Alamos (who repeatedly denied belonging to the Communist Party), may have been a member of a secret Communist cell in the late 1930's and early 40's. This notion is based largely on assertions made by Haakon Chevalier, an Oppenheimer friend at the University of California, but the book finds no evidence that the physicist ever spied for the Soviet Union or allowed his political sympathies to compromise his work for the government. The book sheds new light on the charismatic physicist's tangled loyalties and draws a detailed picture of his adversaries' heated efforts (including illegal wiretaps) to push him out of government service, but Mr. Herken never pulls together his extensive research into a coherent narrative. He allows many of his leads to trickle off inconclusively and declines to situate his plodding chronicle of day-to-day events within a larger political and cultural context. Unlike Mr. Rhodes, he fails to make the science behind the building of the bomb compelling, and he fails to fully limn the social and geopolitical fallout of his subjects' work. The landmark Trinity test of the atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, is passed over in a few paragraphs, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki merit only two pages. Only passing reference is made to the destructive consequences of the bomb, and most of the discussion about the atomic scientists' reaction to the bombing of Japan is confined to descriptions of petty, egotistical spats with one another. The reader is left with no emotional appreciation of what occurred that summer, or how the balance of power in the world - not to mention the world psyche - had been shaken. In addition to Oppenheimer, Mr. Herken has chosen to focus on two other prominent scientists who played crucial roles in nuclear research: Ernest O. Lawrence, the Nobel laureate, who invented the cyclotron and presided over Berkeley's Radiation Laboratory, which looked to benefit from lucrative government financing; and Edward Teller, the Hungarian émigré physicist, who helped invent the hydrogen bomb and whose dark, brooding personality caused Richard Rhodes to dub him "the Richard Nixon of American science." These three men began as colleagues and sometimes friends. Later, as the political realities of the cold war settled in, they became rivals and sometimes bitter adversaries - divided over politics, over the relationship between science and government and over the need to develop a hydrogen bomb quickly. Unfortunately for the reader, Mr. Herken never captures the personalities of these men or the spirit of their differences. He does not use their own words, as Mr. Rhodes so deftly did, to reveal their characters. Nor does he make the world of theoretical physics, in which they lived, come alive on the page. Curiously, colleagues as influential as Niels Bohr are discussed only in passing. Similarly, when it comes to growing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union and festering worries about "atom spies," Mr. Herken does a pallid job of delineating the social and political mood of the era. He does not evoke Soviet efforts to catch up with the Americans in the nuclear race, as Mr. Rhodes did in "Dark Sun." Nor does he persuasively conjure the political atmosphere in which Oppenheimer initially cultivated left-wing friendships and later became a target of the F.B.I. and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which led to the revocation of his security clearance in 1954. The Rosenbergs are passed over in this book, and so, for the most part, is Senator Joseph McCarthy. Instead, he gives blow-by-blow accounts of encounters Oppenheimer had in the 1930's with Communist sympathizers, of F.B.I. efforts to bug his homes and offices, of the machinations of Lewis Strauss on the Atomic Energy Commission to have him removed from power and of differences Oppenheimer had with his colleagues. We get long digressions about the rivalry between Los Alamos and a second nuclear weapons lab set up at Livermore, Calif., and eye-glazing asides about technical problems at both labs. In short, a very myopic if potentially revealing book about a very momentous subject. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company