North Korea has joined the club and nobody knows what to do about it. Last year, sixty years on from the invention of the bomb, four books were published on its "inventor" or rather the leader of the inventing team at Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer was ruined in the 1954 red scare, stripped of his security clearance a day before it expired. But before that, on leaving Los Alamos, he said his pride in building the bomb ...

...must be tempered with a profound concern. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world ...then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.

The bomb would have been built anyway, by someone, though you can't blame the guy for beating himself up. On many levels he never seemed more right. Read his tragic story, brilliantly told, here.