All language subtitles for Oppenheimer.The.Real.Story.2023.720p.WEBRip.x264.AAC-[YTS.MX]eng

[suspenseful music]
[logo cracking]

[dramatic suspenseful music]

- [Narrator] In 1945, a
frail looking scientist

drove this road on his
way to the Trinity Site.

It's a sad and
depressing stretch

of vast unforgiving
desert in New Mexico,

but in colonial times,

it was the sorry end of
many travelers' dreams.

He was an ivory tower academic,

a multilinguist, a polymath,
an undoubted genius,

had never managed more
than a handful of students,

and had spent all of
his professional life

surrounded by books,
blackboards, and theorem.

Now he had built an isolated
secret city in the sky

where a scientific community
of over 6,000 people

lived and worked

on the most expensive
military scientific project

ever attempted.

He had done in months

what other global powers
had failed to do in years,

and now he stood on
the edge of discovering

if all his efforts
would come to fruition.

Just days before, he had taken
delivery of the plutonium,

which was essential to his bomb.

He'd signed a receipt for
hundreds of millions of dollars.

It was the fruits of the labors

of hundreds of thousands
of unwitting workers

spread in secret locations
across the United States.

In this rundown old ranch house,

the elements were assembled

then taken to the
test site tower.

As the lightning crackled in
the sky and the wind howled,

he lay on the floor
of the canyon,

waiting for the detonation.

[thunder rumbles]

He knew that the
fate of his nation,

the lives of millions of people,

and the future of the
world lay in his hands.

From somewhere, a few
words formed in his mind.

- "Now I am become Death,
the destroyer of worlds."

[atomic bomb booming]

[dramatic music]

- Robert Oppenheimer grew up

in a very privileged
circumstance.

[cheerful piano music]

He lived in a 10-room apartment
on the Upper West Side.

His parents had made by that
time quite a bit of money.

He had a limousine
with a chauffeur.

They had servants.

They had a house in Long Island.

They had a small sailing yacht,

which he named the Trimethy,
after the chemical compound.

- When Oppenheimer
was growing up,

more or less his only
models were his parents.

He was brought up in isolation
until he went to school,

and he went to school
comparatively late.

And anything Oppenheimer
showed an interest in,

his parents would buy things
to satisfy that interest.

If he showed any
interest in painting,

they would buy him an
easel and some paints.

One thing he showed a very
keen interest in was geology

and so they furnished him
with a collection of rocks,

he then went on trips.

He actually did,
at the age of 13,

original research in geology

and joined the New York
City geology society

and was invited by them,

they didn't know that
he was just some kid.

He was invited by them
to give a research paper.

So what was life like?

It was very privileged
but very intense,

and he always felt that
there was something

sad about his parents.

His mother had a withered hand

and she kept it very secret,

and no one was
allowed to mention it.

And the general
emotional atmosphere

in the Oppenheimer household

was rather repressed.

- It was very sheltered.

It was extremely privileged.

[cheerful piano music]

[birds chirping]

[cheerful piano music continues]

He was, you know, surrounded
by culture and art.

His mother was an artist and
a collector of modern art,

you know, Van Gogh paintings.

He once said that
his life as a child

offered no normal, healthy
way to be a bastard.

- He went to a private school,
the Ethical Culture School.

You know, he was a very
sheltered privileged young man.

- His fellow schoolmates, one
of them remembers him saying,

"Ask me a question in Latin,

and I will reply
to you in Greek,"

which was an enormously
impressive thing to do

at the age of 13

but not perhaps the
best way to win friends.

- The Ethical Culture School
was Jewish but not Jewish.

It came out of Judaism,
founded by a Reform rabbi,

but it was very much a sort of
turn of the century creation.

- Although he was finally
with other children his age,

he didn't end up
making any friends.

And until Francis
Fergusson arrived,

who arrived from the
other side of the country,

he was from the Southwest,
he was from New Mexico,

came from rather a grand
old New Mexican family,

but unlike almost all
the other children

at the Ethical Culture School,

Francis Fergusson did not come

from the Jewish community
of the Upper West Side.

And I think that had a lot to do

with the bond that
Oppenheimer formed with him.

It's very difficult
to know why exactly,

but Oppenheimer from
a very young age,

made efforts to distance
himself from the description

that almost everybody
would've given of him.

To almost everybody, he
would've been a German Jew.

He insisted he was neither
German nor Jewish. [laughs]

And so,

he was at odds with
the perception of him,

which I think is also part

of his enormously
complicated makeup.

- And I think this
was very much bound up

with an attempt to escape

from a particularly Jewish
identity and to be an American,

whatever that meant.

And that very much
influenced Oppenheimer

and he was always uncomfortable

with being identified as Jewish.

- But, you know, he
had a good childhood.

He had no traumatic experiences.

He was very privileged.

He went horseback
riding in Central Park,

and he fell in love increasingly

at the Ethical Culture
School, with science.

He focused a lot on chemistry.

- Later interest in New Mexico,

his horse riding, his sailing,

his sort of adventurousness
and risk taking in a way,

very clearly was a reaction
against this highly controlled,

almost luxurious prison
of his childhood.

- I think he had a
big ego, [laughs] yes.

He had a strong ego,

he knew he was intelligent,

and he was always
very ambitious.

- He was a little
bit precious in a way

and that led him to be
bullied by other children.

There was an incident
at a summer camp

where he was really
quite nastily bullied,

but I do think that he was aware

of his intellectual abilities

and was extremely ambitious.

He wanted to do
something special.

- So he had a year
of enforced leisure

because he became ill,

and for the first time,

he became a troublesome boy

and his parents didn't
know what to do with him.

He was difficult.

He was fed up.

He didn't want to be at home.

He wanted to be at Harvard.

He wanted to be with
super bright people.

He wanted to be studying
chemistry and physics.

And partly, I think,
to get rid of him,

his parents approached a teacher
at his school called Smith

and asked Smith to take
Robert on a trip out West.

[gentle upbeat music]

Now, the connection
with New Mexico

was provided by
Francis Fergusson,

who was the one boy at
the Ethical Culture School

with whom Oppenheimer
had a friendship.

And Fergusson was from a
well-known family in New Mexico.

[water rushing]

And so Oppenheimer went
to stay with Fergusson,

cementing their friendship,

Fergusson would go on
to Harvard as well,

but it gave Oppenheimer
a love of the Southwest

and particularly of New Mexico.

- New Mexico couldn't have
been more of a contrast

from his upbringing in New York

and the whole
environment of New York

and the Ethical Culture School,

and he became infatuated with
an older woman in her 20s,

Katherine Chaves Page.

That was the first
time that he had

really that kind of
romantic interest,

although it was
completely platonic.

- Oh, New Mexico had an
enormous impact on him.

He fell in love with the desert,

the high plains around Santa Fe,

and he rode horseback
into the Pecos Mountains.

- [Charles] That was this
sort of adventurous spirit

that was an escape from this
claustrophobic background

of his childhood, I think.

- [Kai] Just the starkness
of the geography,

he took to it.

Yeah, he fell in
love with New Mexico.

Started renting in 1929

on 135 acres up
at like 9,500 feet

in the middle of
nowhere, [laughs]

but he loved it.

It was so spartan.

That was the kind of
thing he really enjoyed.

- [Frank] We slept on
the floor, a board floor,

and we didn't have
enough covers,

and we were pretty
frozen by morning.

But [laughs] that didn't
bother Robert much,

he was a fairly hardy fellow,

although he didn't
look that way.

He looked terribly frail,
but he was pretty tough.

[hopeful music]

- A decade later, he was
always telling people,

he was quipping that
his ambition in life

was to combine physics
with New Mexico. [laughs]

And so, and he did. [laughs]

- And actually, if he
hadn't had that holiday

in the summer of
1922 in New Mexico,

then 20 years later,

the laboratory to build
the first atomic bomb

would most likely have
been built somewhere else.

- Again, he succeeded at
everything he did at Harvard

but he remained very
socially awkward.

He had a few friends,
his roommates.

You know, he was a very
intense personality

and I don't think he...

I don't think hemade any
long-term friendships there,

but he got through
it and succeeded

and went off to Cambridge,
England to study physics.

- And the most famous
physicist at that time

was Ernest Rutherford,
who was at Cambridge,

and what Oppenheimer wanted

was to work with
Ernest Rutherford.

But there was a problem there
because although as a student,

he'd shown himself to be a
brilliant theoretical physicist,

in the laboratory,
he was a disaster,

and Rutherford was
an applied physicist,

so Rutherford turned him down.

Rutherford's colleague was
a man called J.J. Thompson,

who had discovered the electron.

And as a sort of second best,

Oppenheimer chose to
work with Thompson,

who too was an
experimental physicist,

and got Oppenheimer
to work in the lab,

which he was very bad at.

And he spent a year at
Cambridge in England

and it was the most
unhappy year of his life.

He was a square peg trying
to fit into a round hole.

He wasn't a
laboratory physicist,

he was most interested
in theoretical physics,

and he also found it difficult
socially in Cambridge.

It was expected of
all the students

that they would give a
presentation every now and again

explaining what they were up to.

There's a story that Oppenheimer
gave his presentation,

chalk in hand, facing
the blackboard,

saying, "The point is, the
point is, the point is,"

and he just kept repeating
this over and over again

until he was [laughs]
gently moved to one side.

There are other reports of
people finding him curled up

in the fetus position on
the floor of the laboratory

and another story of him trying
to murder Patrick Blackett.

Patrick Blackett
was, one supposes,

represented to Oppenheimer

everything that
Oppenheimer felt he wasn't.

Patrick Blackett was
notoriously well connected.

He was very good looking.

He was very debonair.

He was superbly good
in the laboratory.

And Oppenheimer once went
on holiday to Corsica

and he said to his friends,

"Oh, I've got to get
back to Cambridge,"

and they said, "Why?"

He said, "Well, I've
left a poisoned apple

on Blackett's desk,

and I want to get back and
remove it before it kills him."

I think he found the
snobbery very difficult.

Harvard had been
explicitly anti-Semitic.

That doesn't seem to
have troubled Oppenheimer

all that much.

I think what bothered
him at Cambridge

was there was little to
no explicit antisemitism,

but I think one way or another,

he received the impression
that he wasn't one of them.

And I think this bothered
him to his very core.

Salvation came to
throw Oppenheimer a
lifeline was Max Born,

the German physicist who
became a Nobel Prize winner,

who came to Cambridge
to give a talk.

Oppenheimer got to know him,

got to discuss physics with him.

Born was so impressed
with Oppenheimer

that he invited him over to
Gottingen where Born taught

in order to do a PhD.

Most people take three
years plus to do a PhD,

Oppenheimer did his
in under 18 months.

And the result of it
is a piece of work

that is still referred to now

by people working in
physical chemistry,

the Born-Oppenheimer
Approximation as it's known.

He then sat about working
on research papers.

So within a very short time,

he'd gone from being in
a desperate situation

in Cambridge, England,

where he found himself adrift
socially and intellectually,

to being the star.

Oppenheimer had a queue
of American universities

wanting to bring him over.

- Oh, by that time, he
was already regarded

as a brilliant young
quantum physicist

who, you know, there
weren't many people

who could understand.

You and I can't understand
what quantum is about.

- Because he could
pick and choose,

he chose a very
unusual arrangement

where he spent half
the year at Caltech

and half the year at Berkeley.

- So he went off to Berkeley
and essentially founded

the Department of
Theoretical Physics

and worked there for the
next 11, 12, 13 years.

And he never, you know,

had more than a dozen
graduate students to oversee

but they all adored him.

He turned out to be a
lousy teacher initially.

- There were elements
there of traits

that would influence how
people reacted to Oppenheimer

throughout his life,

his extreme intelligence,

his refusal to make allowances

for people who weren't
quite as well educated

or as clever as he was,

and also a tendency
to show off, you know?

All of those would mark him
for the rest of his life.

- But he learned eventually
to become charismatic,

again to transform himself
into a good teacher.

- He was, by all accounts, an
extremely charismatic teacher

and you could see that by
the way that they emulated

his mannerisms and
his manner of speech.

That prefigured the motivating

role that he had as the
leader of Los Alamos.

- You know, he was a polymath.

He loved reading French
literature and poetry

and John Dunn and Hemingway.

And he also was
intrigued, at one point,

with Hinduism,

so he took up the Gita

and went to the only professor
at Berkeley who knew Sanskrit

and had this guy
teach him Sanskrit

so that he could read
the Gita in the original.

Yeah, he was very much a
polymath, very weird guy.

- When Oppenheimer
arrived in Berkeley,

he was not in the slightest
bit interested in politics.

He got to know Ernest Lawrence,

who was an applied physicist,

and in 1929, amazed Lawrence

by revealing that he had no idea

that the great
crash had happened.

So uninformed was
he about politics.

This would change
very soon after that

and what would change
it was his students.

His students were coming

from what was
increasingly recognized

as one of the up and coming,

one of the leading physics
departments in the country.

If you were a student of
Oppenheimer, that opened doors.

But in the Depression,
his students were finding

that they couldn't
get academic jobs,

and they got jobs
cleaning toilets,

and they got jobs
waiting tables and so on.

And they got to find
out what it was like

for working class people
in the Depression era.

And as they were still in
touch with Oppenheimer,

Oppenheimer got to
know what it was like.

- And he was very well read.

And in the 1930s, with the
rise of fascism in Europe,

this was very worrisome to him

and motivated him to
become more political.

- And almost all
of his ex-students

joined the Communist Party.

Now, this is in the 1930s,

and being a member of the
Communist Party was not,

in the 1930s, did not have
anything like the stigma

that it would have in the 1950s.

The Communist Party was not
something you kept quiet about.

It was not a big secret.

And Oppenheimer, it's debatable
whether he ever joined

the Communist Party.

His brother Frank did, and
his brother Frank had a card.

He was a card-carrying member
of the Communist Party.

Nobody's ever produced
a Communist Party card

identifying Robert
Oppenheimer as that.

- And then of course, there
were some women involved

who pushed him to become
even more political.

So he met Jean
Tatlock in Berkeley,

who was a young,
intelligent graduate student

studying psychology,

and they dated for
four years off and on,

very tempestuous relationship.

And Jean Tatlock was
a member of the party.

- Bit by bit, he got
drawn into politics,

and actually
throughout the '30s,

he became more and more active.

- Specifically, that
meant contributing

to the Republican side
and the Spanish Civil War.

So he gave money
to buy an ambulance

to be shipped to the Republican
government in Madrid.

He went to fundraisers.

He probably, in the
end, by 1938, '39,

he was giving about $400 a year.

- Although it didn't
have the stigma

that it would have in the '50s,

still the FBI was
not very keen on it.

And when the FBI learned

that Oppenheimer
would often be seen

at the houses of these leading
Communist Party members,

they put people on Oppenheimer

to follow him wherever he went.

- And, you know, the FBI files,

his FBI file runs to
almost 10,000 pages

and a lot of it
is simply gossip,

some of it comes from wiretaps.

Anyway, in all those
10,000 FBI pages,

you know,

the FBI had him under
a microscope for years.

There's no smoking gun,

there's no clear evidence
that he ever joined the party,

paid dues or had
a membership card.

Oppenheimer, he
was too ethereal.

I can't imagine him submitting
himself to party orders

from the local party
chapter secretary, you know.

He had too big of a ego.

And then by 1942,

you know, his ambition
was to work on

what we now know as
the Manhattan Project

because he was so fearful

that the German
physicists whom he knew,

they could make it work

and they were probably
working on it.

So given that ambition,

he became much more careful
about his associations

and donations to
charitable causes,

and, you know, he
wanted that job in 1942.

- This was the time of
the Great Depression,

the time of the
Roosevelt's New Deal,

and it was also the time
when the Communist Party

was supporting the
notion of a popular front

against fascism.

So being involved
with and sympathetic

with the Communist
Party at that time

would not have seemed
to Oppenheimer to
be in conflict with

being a loyal,
patriotic American.

He was both involved
with the Communist Party

and an admirer of
FDR, of Roosevelt.

I think, in some ways,
that political involvement,

that consciousness
of world events,

what was taking place in Germany
with the rise of the Nazis,

the persecution of the Jews,

I think all of that prepared him

for the role of
director of Los Alamos.

- The leader of the Manhattan
Project was General Groves.

General Groves was a
man of indomitable will.

It used to be said

that you couldn't create
enough fissile uranium

because you would need
to refine uranium.

Most uranium in
the world is 238,

but you need 235 to
make an atomic bomb.

You can create 235 from 238,

but it used to be said that
you'd have to transform

the whole of America
into one big factory

in order to do this.

That's what Groves
was determined to do.

He bought up enormous
areas of land in Tennessee,

and he bought up
enormous area of land

in the state of Washington,

and he built plants
on those land

specifically for
enriching uranium,

and he employed over a
hundred thousand people.

And when people give estimates

of how much the
Manhattan Project cost,

2 billion, whatever it is,

most of that money was
spent on hiring people

to work in these plants.

The most extraordinary thing,

none of the people
working in those plants

realized what they were doing.

They were trained to say,
"Look, here's a machine,"

with all these controls on it,

"when this needle goes
this way, turn this knob.

When it goes this
way, turn that knob,"

and they had no idea
what they were doing.

- Here it is, General
Groves, plutonium.

- Well, that's the
first time I've seen it,

but if you don't mind, I
wish you'd hold that under it

because after all,

there's about $50 million
in that test tube.

- Groves also realized that he
needed to get the scientists

to work on the theory
behind the bomb,

exactly how you could create,

'cause no one had created
an atomic bomb before.

And so, you know,

you needed not just
experimental physicists,

you needed people who
understood the theory.

And Groves went around the USA,

interviewing the leading
scientists of the day

and was very disappointed

because he couldn't
understand a word they said.

Until he went to California

and he went to see
Ernest Lawrence,

Oppenheimer's friend,

Oppenheimer was there,

and Oppenheimer gave Groves

such a beautifully
clear explanation

as to how nuclear fission works

and what critical mass is

and why nuclear fission
releases so much energy.

Suddenly, Groves understood it,

and he said, "I want that man
in charge of this project."

- He was a most
unlikely candidate

for being selected
as the scientific
director of Las Alamos.

You know, he'd never managed

more than a dozen
graduate students.

He had no experience,
administratively speaking.

- He'd never won a Nobel Prize.

All these other scientists
were Nobel Prize winners,

and therefore it was said,

could command the respect
of all the other scientists.

Oppenheimer was not a Nobel
Prize-winning physicist.

Secondly, he was a
disaster in the laboratory,

so why should you make this
man director of a laboratory?

And then thirdly, J. Edgar
Hoover had identified him

as a threat to the
security of the country.

- Somehow the chemistry between,

they were complete opposites

but the chemistry between
them just clicked.

And I think, in part,
this was because

Groves knew nothing
about quantum physics,

knew nothing about what
was involved technically

but he saw here was
this 34-year-old

eccentric physicist

who could talk in plain English,

and he could do so
because, you know,

he loved poetry and literature,

and so he could communicate.

- Groves wrote to J.
Edgar Hoover saying,

"Look, we don't want to continue
this discussion anymore.

I want security clearance
given for this man.

He's going to be head
of this project,"

and Groves overran
every other objection

to Oppenheimer being in charge.

And as it turned out,

it was a stroke of
genius on Groves's part

because Oppenheimer,

it's as if his whole life had
been leading up to this point.

- Oppe made the brilliant
pitch that he says:

You know, I understand you
have many security concerns,

and so what you should
do is build a secret city

in the middle of the
New Mexico desert

and bring, you know, the best
and the brightest physicists

and chemists and engineers

and put them in this little town

and put a barbed wire around it

and just let them freely
talk amongst themselves

on solving the problems,

but you'd have complete secrecy.

Well, Groves loved
that idea. [laughs]

It solved all his
security concerns.

And so he actually,
soon thereafter,

took Oppenheimer on
a tour of New Mexico.

Robert wanted the secret
city to be built there

and he took Groves to
Los Alamos Boys School,

which was about 40 miles
down the road from his cabin

that he had started
renting in 1929.

[light music]

And here, the Los
Alamos Boys School

had a dormitory and
a conference room

and, you know,
the beginnings of,

they had no idea how many
people they would need.

- It was Oppenheimer's
insistence

that this is done in Los Alamos,

and again, there would
be practical reasons

for not doing it in Los Alamos.

It's right in the hills,

getting anything there
would be a lot of hard work,

but he insisted

and so you have this
town built in Los Alamos.

And Oppenheimer,

as part of being the
director of the laboratory,

was also in charge
of who got what house

and the schooling
arrangements for the children

that would be brought there

and the washing
arrangements of the people.

And as it turned out,
he could have meetings

on domestic arrangements,

he could have
meetings on plutonium,

he could have meetings on,

you know, how exactly you're
going to drop this bomb,

he could have meetings
with von Neumann,

the very brilliant
Hungarian mathematician,

about the mathematics
involved in fission,

and very quickly, he could
master all these fields.

And so as it turned out,

he was the perfect choice to
be in charge of this operation.

- [Kai] The initial estimate
was maybe 100 people

brought together, scientists.

Well, it quickly grew to 1,000

and then 3,000.

By the end of the war,

there were 6,000 people
in this secret city.

He later said that, you know,

there was no physics being
discovered during World War II.

It was all engineering.

You know, the idea of fission
had been discovered in 1939,

so it was an open secret

among physicists in Germany
and Japan and America

that this was theoretically
possible to build a gadget

that would have an
enormous explosive power

but how to do it became
an engineering problem.

- The building of the device,
the design of the device,

the design of the bomb

and the building of
the bomb at Los Alamos

depended on receiving
the fissionable materials

from these other sites.

There was tremendous time
pressure on Los Alamos

to be ready with their
device, with their mechanism,

for when sufficient quantities

of fissionable
materials would arrive,

to have this thing ready

so that it could
be used in the war.

- Rather strangely,

Oppenheimer turned out
to be a good manager.

No one would've predicted this.

He was the archetypal
ivory tower academic,

but it turned out that
he could manage people.

- Oh, he again had
transformed himself

into a charismatic leader.

He had a signature pork pie hat,

a good eye for
drama and theatrics,

but he was, you know,
he cut a good figure.

He was handsome and charming

when he wanted to be,

particularly to
people below him.

And at Los Alamos,

he sort of treated his fellow
physicists and chemists

and engineers as
fellow students.

So he would come into the room

where everyone
was arguing about,

should we do this or
should we go this way,

or how do we fix this problem,

and he would just stand at the
back of the room and listen.

And then after 30
minutes or an hour,

he would intervene and say,

"Well, I think what you're
all saying is this,"

and he would manage in a
very brilliant, concise way

to show them the
path forward was.

- The accounts of the
scientists who worked there

often present it as the
best time of their lives,

the most engaged
they've ever been,

the closest and most energized
scientific experience

that they've ever had.

And they say, in
their reminiscences,

that that had a great deal
to do with Oppenheimer.

- [Kai] Los Alamos became
his magical city on the hill.

He was the king of it.

He really enjoyed the work.

And, you know, social life
revolved all around events,

like they had a theater,
they had a grocery store,

but most of the socializing
took place in private homes.

And Oppenheimer, you know,
had parties all the time,

encouraged people
to have a release.

[upbeat music]

You know, he continued
to go horseback riding.

[upbeat music continues]

- [Charles] They would
ski in the mountains.

Many of the scientists
were from Europe,

Enrico Fermi was an avid skier.

They would enjoy what
New Mexico had to offer

in terms of the outdoors,

cross-country skiing, hiking.

There were many parties.

It was a very young community,

young people, college age,

graduate student age in
their 20s, in their 30s.

And there were many parties,

they would drink a
lot, they would dance,

Edward Teller would
play the piano.

In some ways, it was like
college life, I think.

- And there was a lot of
drinking, [laughs] so...

But it was a weird
place and he was...

He was in charge of it all.

- And so the job of
getting the bomb built

was really just a
matter of 18 months.

They moved in in '43,

by the spring of '45,

they were ready to
test the first weapon,

which they tested
at the Trinity Site

in southern New Mexico,

which is an extraordinary
achievement.

The Nazis spent five years

and didn't even get
a working reactor.

- [Narrator] Finally,
after three years work,

the atomic experts were ready
to test their first bomb.

In the control shack was
Dr. J.R. Oppenheimer.

- The automatic
controls got it now.

Rob, this time, the
stakes are really high.

- It's going to work
all right, Robert,

and I'm sure we'll
never be sorry for it.

- Well, in 40
seconds, we'll know.

[suspenseful music]

- [Scientist] Minus 30 seconds.

[dramatic music]

[dramatic music continues]

- [Kai] There was a
great deal of pressure

leading up to the Trinity test.

Rationally, they had
every reason to believe

that it would work,

the gadget would
work as expected.

But, you know, this
is the first time

anyone had attempted this thing,

so there was a lot of tension

and particularly on the
night before the explosion.

[upbeat dramatic music]

There's this very spooky
photo of Oppenheimer

in his pork pie
hat in the shadows,

and you see the sphere
of the Trinity weapon,

and he's leaning in and you
see his sharp, angular nose.

He was up there on the top
of the tower, inspecting,

making sure that all the
plugs were in the right place.

- [Clay] The first question
was, would it work at all?

So they're all nervous wrecks.

They witnessed it from
a long distance away,

and they were told to use these
special shields and so on.

Not everyone did.

[upbeat dramatic music]

- [Kai] And, you know,
early that morning,

well, they were
outside the bunker

lying on the desert floor,

and Frank was by his
side, Frank Oppenheimer.

And, you know, they witnessed
this massive explosion

and the mushroom cloud.

[atomic bomb booming]

- But couple of things,

they said that they had no idea

that it would produce this
kind of beautiful cloud.

I mean, you hate to
talk about it that way,

but it's beautiful, number one,

and that the light flash
came first and then the heat

and only much later, the sound.

And so it wasn't a single event,

it was an event
that kept unfolding.

- Oppenheimer returned
to Frank and simply said,

"Well, it worked."

Now he's known, you know,

he has a theatrical side to him,

so at some point in
the next few days,

he was interviewed by a
"New York Times" reporter

who was assigned
to write a story.

- Few people laughed,
few people cried,

most people were silent.

- [Kai] And he, I
think, playfully,

when this reporter asked him
what went through his mind

when he saw the Trinity test,

Oppenheimer playfully said, "I
thought of the Gita stanza."

- I remembered the line
from the Hindu scripture,

the Bhagavad Gita,

"Now I am become Death,
the destroyer of worlds."

I suppose we all thought
that one way or another.

- [Kai] [laughs] You
know, a nice line,

but that's not what he
said at the Trinity test.

But that's become
part of the lore.

- Then in August 1945,

they used the uranium
bomb on Hiroshima

and they used the
plutonium bomb on Nagasaki.

The Hiroshima bomb turned
out to be more deadly.

Now, when they tested
the bomb in Trinity,

the scientists were all
delighted that it worked.

And then among several of them,

there was this ominous sense

that they were going
to be responsible

for the deaths of tens,

possibly hundreds of
thousands of people.

Oppenheimer was in
favor of using the bomb

because an argument
that he'd got

from his old friend Niels Bohr,

Niels Bohr was very
great Danish physicist

and the man whom Oppenheimer
admired above anybody else,

both as a scientist
and as a human being,

and Niels Bohr
came to Los Alamos

and would discuss
with Oppenheimer the
politics of the bomb.

And he said to Oppenheimer,

well, what you are doing could
be the most dreadful thing

that humanity is evident,
or it could be the best.

And his argument for
it being the best

was that it could
potentially put an end to war

by demonstrating a
weapon so powerful

that nations would
resolve their differences

without going to war

rather than risk unleashing
the power of this again.

Now, in order for
that argument to work,

it has to be seen just how
dreadful this weapon is,

and I think that's why
Oppenheimer was in favor

of using the weapon against
civilians at Hiroshima.

- But this is, again,
you know, a curious thing

about Robert Oppenheimer.

He was capable of
compartmentalizing his emotions

and his intellect and
his responsibilities.

After the Trinity test
and before Hiroshima,

before August 6th,

he's walking to work one day

and his secretary, Ruth Wilson,
she was walking by his side

and suddenly she
heard Robert saying,

in a whisper,

"those poor little people,
those poor little people."

Wilson turned to him and said,
"Robert, what do you mean?"

And he said, "Oh, you know,
all those women and children,

you know, when they drop
this bomb on a city,

it's going to..."

And then he fell silent.

Well, that was
the very same week

that he briefed the bombardiers

that were going to be on the
mission to drop those bombs

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
as it turned out,

and he was instructing them

in a sort of coldly
intellectual fashion

at exactly what altitude
the bomb should be detonated

so that it would have the
maximum destructive power,

and that it should be dropped
on the center of a city.

So he both understood
the ethical consequences

of killing all these
civilians, a whole city,

and yet he did his duty.

- And so in some
unpleasant sense

that really does
call into question

a lot of strategic
thinking and morality,

we used them anyway.

And you can certainly say

that the use of the
second bomb at Nagasaki

just three days
after the first one

was premature because it
didn't give the Japanese

time to absorb.

They weren't really even sure

what had happened
from Hiroshima.

And so if you'd waited
two weeks and said,

"We can just keep doing
this as long as you want,"

that's one thing,

but three days later
is pretty quick.

And so we built it,
we're gonna use it,

we can't let the war
end before we use it,

and we're gonna use one of each

to make sure that
they both work,

and we're trying to warn
Stalin about our capacity,

so that it gets very,
very, very complex

and thick and morally troubling

the farther you look into
what happens after Alamogordo.

- And after Hiroshima,

although unlike after Trinity,

there wasn't this euphoric
feeling among the scientists

and shared by Oppenheimer,

it was a much more somber mood.

Oppenheimer never felt
that he made a mistake

in being in favor of using
the bomb against civilians,

even after the war when he
was invited to do Japan.

And the thing that
Japanese journalists

most wanted to know was,

do you regret building the bomb?

Oppenheimer still
say, "No, I don't."

Immediately after
the Second World War,

Oppenheimer was the most,

he replaced Einstein as
the most famous scientist

in the United States,

and his photograph
was everywhere.

- Oh, he was a
national celebrity.

He was a very famous man,

was lauded on the covers
of "TIME" and "LIFE."

He decided very quickly,

you know, after Hiroshima, he
fell into a deep depression.

- And it's very notable
that after the war,

he dedicated
himself to politics.

He did no original
science after the war.

He still kept his directorship

of the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton,

but he himself spent most of
his time in Washington, DC,

meeting with politicians
and urging upon them

ways in which they could
use the atomic bomb

as a means for peace
rather than war,

fulfilling Niels Bohr's vision

of what the bomb could achieve.

- The late 1940s, before 1949,

people are still
trying to figure out

what's the way forward.

Are we in some kind of Cold
War or is it something else?

Is there a chance to
avoid total confrontation

with the Soviet Union?

Is there a chance to avoid
a sort of military dominance

of nuclear technology?

- And Oppenheimer drew
up this ambitious plan,

which for a short time was
accepted by the US government

to be presented to
the United Nations,

which would involve communal
ownership of all uranium

and would also involve no nation

being able to build
atomic weapons.

- [Kai] The realization
that this had happened

and what he had done
had resulted in,

well, probably close to a
quarter million deaths over time

from radiation and
the initial burn,

that sunk in.

And I think it was hard for him

to know what to do
with that knowledge.

- The difficulty with
Oppenheimer in this whole period

is, on the one hand, he is an
independently minded person,

and he has the mindset
of the scientist

and the scientist's interests
very close to his heart.

On the other hand, he's
become a very important person

within the sort of military
advising structure.

He's sort of the
top of the pyramid

when it comes to scientists

whose opinions are
being taken seriously

about things like the use of
atomic bombs, future policy.

He is the face of
this new technology,

and so he doesn't have either
the inclination or the freedom

to totally go against
the whole system.

So Oppenheimer's approach
through all of this

is to try and bend it in ways

that he thinks it
could be bent into.

- And he gets an appointment
with Harry Truman

in the Oval Office.

He was very gracious,

but he had a habit
of just bracing up

in the presence of authority

and people who clearly thought

that they were smarter
than him [laughs]

in positions of power.

And so here's the president
of the United States

and Oppenheimer's mission is
to try to convince Harry Truman

that we need to
contain this weapon

and establish an
international atomic agency

that would own in
a sovereign way,

own any factory, any laboratory
anywhere in the world

engaged in atomic research.

You know, so he's making this
argument to Harry Truman,

and Truman interrupts and says,

"Well, Dr. Oppenheimer, when
do you think the Russians

are going to get the bomb?"

And Oppenheimer is kind
of stunned and says,

"Well, I'm not sure,
Sir, but eventually."

And Harry responds,
"Well, I know. Never."

And Oppenheimer, like,
understands in that moment

that Harry Truman
understands nothing.

- Oppenheimer gets very
frustrated with Truman,

who's not a great mind,

and he blurts out,
"Something's gotta be done.

After all, I have
blood on my hands."

And Truman stopped
the meeting right then

and had Oppenheimer
escorted out, and he said,

"Don't bring that fellow
around here again.

He may have built the bomb, but
I'm the one who set it off."

And what Truman was saying is,

"What is this [speaks faintly]?

He's taking himself
pretty seriously here.

I and I alone made that decision
to use the weapons in war,

and he comes in here

whining and bleeding
about his conscience

and tell and tried to talk to me

into being more
sensitive about this?"

- [Clapper] 2201, take one.

- [Interviewer]
When he was offered

the work on the hydrogen bomb,

he did not want to do it,

yet you said to go ahead to
work on the hydrogen bomb.

- That's correct.

Well, he was like all
the scientists are,

they discover these things

and find out how
terrible they are,

and then they don't
wanna take any blame

for the consequences,
if there is blame.

But that didn't
make any difference.

He didn't have to make
the decision, I made it.

- So Oppenheimer blew
it with Harry Truman

but he continued to work to
try to restore some sanity

to sort of nuclear policy.

- And then the Soviet Union
set off an atomic bomb

and that ended all
of that discussion
practically overnight.

Nobody really was expecting it

to be quite as soon as it was.

This sets off a whole debate

over what the appropriate
American response ought to be,

and one of the big
options that's brought up

is, "Let's build
a hydrogen bomb."

So this is a weapon that uses
not just nuclear fission,

not just the splitting of
atoms, like the atomic bomb,

but uses the energy
of an atomic bomb

to set off nuclear
fusion reactions

like those that take
place in the sun.

And this is a weapon that
can be a thousand times

more powerful than
an atomic bomb.

A couple days afterwards,
Scotland Yard announces

that they have
arrested Klaus Fuchs,

a British scientist
who had confessed

to being a Soviet spy
in the United States

during World War II.

And so this is a real
shocking revelation

that comes right on the heels

of these shocking and
painful discussions.

You go from the Soviets
have the atomic bomb,

should we make an H-bomb,

okay, we're gonna
make an H-bomb,

oh, by the way, you
have no secrets.

And the more that came out
about Klaus Fuchs himself,

the worse it seemed.

Klaus Fuchs was a brilliant
mathematical physicist.

He was very highly
placed at Los Alamos.

He had a near
photographic memory.

He was an extremely quiet,
reserved person at Los Alamos.

He never really talked about
his opinions on anything.

He was so well respected that
he was used as a babysitter

by many of the other scientists

when they would go
and have parties

or things of this nature.

And to discover that this guy

who had been core to many
of the technical discussions

and had even invented some of
the core parts of the bomb,

he was one of the
co-holders of the patent

on gaseous diffusion,

which is how they enriched
uranium for the Hiroshima bomb,

I mean, this is a guy
who's at the center

of the Manhattan
Project in so many ways

and it turned out
the entire time

he was working very hard
for the United States,

but he was also working very
hard for the Soviet Union.

- Suddenly, it was
possible to imagine

a hydrogen bomb being built.

Now, hydrogen bomb,
there's almost no limit

to how big it can be.

So it could be hundreds
of times bigger than

and more deadly than
the Hiroshima bomb.

This was discussed at
the highest levels.

The question was,
should the US government

and the armed forces go ahead
with an accelerated program

to create the hydrogen bomb?

Oppenheimer argued against it

on the grounds that no
one in their right minds

would ever use such a bomb,

so what would be the
point of creating a bomb

a hundred, a thousand
times more powerful

than the one that
destroyed Hiroshima

when that bomb itself has
shown itself to be so powerful,

you don't want to
use it again ever.

[foreboding music]

And so Oppenheimer argued
against this program,

at which point
he'd already upset

the leading figures in the
army and the government.

He now became under
suspicion by them.

They began to think,
"Well, why is Oppenheimer

trying to sabotage a program

when we know that the Soviets

are busy trying to
build a hydrogen bomb?"

And so a lot of
influential figures

in the armed forces
and the government

came to think that Oppenheimer
wasn't really on their side.

He was really working
for the Soviets.

And this suspicion grew
in the McCarthy period,

in the mid '50's,
early to mid '50's,

and led to a security
case being held,

which would assess
Oppenheimer's standing.

[dramatic ominous music]

- The real instigator for
the 1954 security hearings

was Lewis Strauss.

Strauss, however, was
not only the chairman

of the board of trustees
at the institute,

he was the chairman of the
Atomic Energy Commission

appointed by the newly
elected Eisenhower,

and Oppenheimer and he clashed

and just bad chemistry.

He had an enormous ego.

He demanded attention.

Oppenheimer wasn't giving it
to him and wasn't being polite,

and he was pulling
all the strings.

He pointed the
gray panel members

who would preside
over the hearing.

He brought in the prosecutor,

there shouldn't have
been a prosecutor at all.

It wasn't a trial, it
was a security hearing.

Oppenheimer was stunned

that he was being
questioned like this.

Here, he'd been nine years
earlier, a national celebrity.

- And initially, they
basically say to Oppenheimer,

"You know, you don't have
to have any kind of hearing.

We'll just take your
security clearance

and you'll just retire,

and that'll be that and
we'll be done with it."

And Oppenheimer, somewhat
to their surprise,

wants a hearing.

He wants to contest
these charges.

- In fact, actually,
there was a moment

when Oppenheimer had decided
he was going to go through

and defend his reputation,

and he called Albert into
his office, Albert Einstein,

and explained to him
that he had to be absent.

He was gonna be down in
Washington for a few weeks

and there was this
security hearing,

and they were
questioning my loyalty.

And Einstein argued
with him and said,

"Robert, you don't need to do
this. Just walk away from it.

You don't need these people."

And Oppenheimer said,

"No, I have to
defend my reputation.

I have to retain my
security clearance

so that I can influence
national policy.

It's very important,"

and he walked out.

And Einstein turned to
his secretary and said,

"There goes a nar," the
Yiddish word for fool. [laughs]

- In a security
clearance hearing,

you have a group of people

who are gonna go over
every inch of your life,

including and especially
your absolute worst decisions

and worse than lowest moments.

And they're gonna do so

with the entire power
of the FBI behind them

and military intelligence

and maybe even the CIA
or something like this.

This is gonna be really ugly.

- So he goes to Washington

and there's this horrible
witch hunt of a trial.

It's just atrocious.

- Once the hearings get started,

it doesn't matter
that they were started

under false pretenses.

It doesn't matter
that they were started

in a way to try to rig it
against him, and they were.

They were entirely rigged
against him from the beginning.

There were illegal activities

taking part during the hearing.

They were wire
tapping Oppenheimer's
private discussions

with his lawyers

and then giving that
information to the people

who were arguing against him
and his lawyers at the hearing

so they would know ahead of time

what he was gonna
do the next day.

Totally illegal.

The three categories are
value in our character,

loyalty, and association.

Loyalty is pretty
easy, I guess, right?

Oppenheimer's working
for the US government.

Nobody really has any
credible accusation

that he's not loyal.

Character is tricky because he
lies to the security officers

and makes other
kind of blunders.

So that's actually a
pretty sore point for him

and then associations
are impossible.

I mean, half of his family
members are communists.

Many of them renounced
it and left it

but the association is there.

It's very hard to
get around that.

The character problems
are really dark.

I mean, one of
the things he does

during the Manhattan Project,

during World War II, while
he's running Los Alamos

is he goes to visit
his ex-girlfriend

and spends the night
over at her house,

the ex-girlfriend who
was a fellow traveler

and sort of introduced
him to communism.

And they ask him like,
"Was this good judgment

to spend and sleep with
your communist ex-girlfriend

while you're running
an atomic bomb project?

Is this good judgment?"

And Oppenheimer says,

"Well, I don't think
it was bad judgment.

I mean, she wasn't
really a communist.

I know she was a spy,"

but this looks bad.

This looks bad no
matter how you slice it.

They ask him, "Why did you
lie to the security officers?"

And he says, "Because
I was an idiot."

That's not a good answer.

- Anyway, it was
just a disaster.

And Kitty, who was, you
know, loyally present

throughout this whole affair,

was actually, you know,
got up on the witness stand

and was interrogated herself.

She did better in
defending Oppenheimer

than Oppenheimer did himself.

She was very feisty, insulting.

She cut right through

to the absurdity of the charges

and yet, you know, the
panel voted 2 to 1,

relatively close,

to the conclusion
that Oppenheimer

was probably a loyal American

but nevertheless
a security risk,

and so his security
clearance should be denied.

It was a real tragedy.

- Which put Oppenheimer
in the crazy situation

of having in his
office in Princeton

papers that he had written

which he was no longer
allowed now to consult,

and it tarnished his reputation
for a very long time.

And even now, when I
was working on my book,

when I went to the States,
people would ask me,

"What evidence have you found

that Oppenheimer was
working for the communists?"

And the answer to
that is none at all.

And in fact, the
fact that Oppenheimer

was kept under such
close surveillance

and was held in such suspicion

by leading members of the armed
forces and the government,

the fact that they
produced no evidence

that he was working
for the Communist Party

is itself pretty good
evidence that he wasn't.

- And this was
all in the context

of American anti-communist
hysteria and McCarthyism.

And this destroyed
Oppenheimer's power,

destroyed his career as
a scientific advisor,

marginalized him, excluded him

from, you know, having any
involvement with government

and really with the world of
nuclear weapons and policy.

And, you know, that's what
really made Oppenheimer

into this tragic figure.

[light upbeat music]

- [Clay] Now Oppenheimer
suffered a humiliation

at the hands of the
Atomic Energy Commission

and the United
States government,

which no person should
be forced to suffer

and certainly not
someone who was innocent

of the crimes that
were attributed to him.

The shattering of his confidence

in the United States government,

in the basic fairness of the
universe had to be gigantic.

- [Kai] And he became a pariah.

He was disinvited from
scheduled university lectures.

And the humiliation of
what he had gone through,

he just thought, "Well, I
need to get the family out,

and we'll all go
on an adventure,"

and he chose to go to St.
John in the Virgin Islands.

Now Oppenheimer goes
down to St. John,

the FBI is alerted
to his movements.

They send an FBI
agent to the island

to monitor with binoculars,

scout out if there are any
Russian submarines nearby

who might ferret him away.

[upbeat music]

He fell in love with St. John,

began going back
there every summer,

every December, January.

He spent a lot of
time down there

in the '50s and early '60s.

[upbeat music]

[hopeful music]

- [Eleanor] "Two years before
we had sold a little land

at the east end of our beach,

the atomic physicist
J. Robert Oppenheimer

and his wife Kitty,

they lived in Princeton where
Oppenheimer was then directing

the Institute for Advanced
Studies in absentia.

They were trying to build
an unwieldy beach cottage

designed for them
by Wallace Harrison

who had previous
architectural experience

designing the United Nations
buildings in New York.

For several years,

the Oppenheimers had been
spending vacations on St. John.

Kitty wrote to me in despair,

they wanted to come down in June

and check on the punitive
progress of their construction,

where could they possibly stay.

I first met the
Oppenheimers in 1956,

one day when I went alone
up to Trunk Bay for lunch

and they were
there on a holiday.

Robert's security
clearance had been canceled

two years before.

I hadn't followed the
case with much attention,

being far more
concerned at the time

with infinite activities
than with un-American ones.

I had only a dim impression

that a great man had
been brought low.

I was curious to observe him.

I saw it once that
he and his wife

were the most curious
couple I had ever observed.

They were got up in
routine tourist garb,

button shirts and
shorts and sandals,

but they looked
like nothing human,

too thin and frail and
pale for earthly life.

They looked as if they were
down from Mars, not Princeton,

or as if some bright
kid had made them up

with matchsticks and
his chem craft set.

Kitty was the more
humanoid of the two,

although she seemed
to have no features

except for her dark eyes.

Her voice was too
deep and hoarse

to emanate from her tiny chest.

And helplessly weak as she was,

she had the truculent stance
of a heavyweight pugilist.

I heard from other
Trunk Bay guests

that she had a drinking problem.

The problem was that she
drank a lot and got drunk,

and that drunk or sober, she
was often staggeringly rude.

'Aren't you hot
with all that hair?'

she croaked at me
on introduction

then returned to her communion
with a bottle of Danish beer.

Robert looked astoundingly
like Pinocchio

and he moved as jerkily as
a marionette on strings,

but there was nothing
wooden about his manner.

He exuded warmth and
sympathy and courtesy

along with the fumes
of his famous pipe.

His voice was gentle,
almost inaudible,

and it became softer the
more he wanted to be heard.

He asked me what my husband did,

'He worked for Rockefeller.'

Robert mused with many
pretentious puffs at his pipe.

At last, his voice was
spellbinding whisper,

he said, 'I too have taken
money for doing harm.'

This struck me as a
stunning one-liner."

- It was, for each day, the
dream of an open air place.

It was one large open space,

and when the place
was closed down,

it had this aluminium
roof that was flaps,

that would flap down to the
floor and bolt into the floor

and all you have
to do when you came

was you unbolted the flaps
and then swung them back up

so that they became the
awning over the porch.

It is absolutely beautiful wild

with the view straight
out into the water.

But they really spent
more summers here

once they had their
house built at Hawksnest.

Every August come
the anniversaries

of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

he became very silent.

It was a sad time for him.

- It was escape from
the tensity of his life

in the United States

and from the sense
that he'd been betrayed

by people that he had trusted

and people who should
have trusted him,

but I think he was
always a lonely man.

I think that the high water
mark of his conviviality

was Los Alamos.

But I think before
and after that,

he was essentially a lonely man,

lonely in the depths
of his thinking.

And, I mean, we have to face it,

Oppenheimer was
not a mature man.

He was locked into kind
of a permanent adolescence

because he had never
been normalized

in the way the rest of us get
normalized in our communities.

He had never really
participated in any community

that wasn't an artificial
one in his life.

And so he's sufficiently
lonely and eccentric

that he's looking
for safe spaces,

and Princeton was a certain
kind of a safe space

but St. John's was
a much greater one,

and when you're there,

it's, you know, beautiful
emerald seas and sands

and a native population
that couldn't care less

about whatever your life is
back in the United States.

And so I think that that was
a kind of a Shangri-la for him

that he probably would've had,

even if there had not been
the security clearance,

that he was just a man
who was not comfortable

in routine social settings.

- [Kai] He loved it.

Again, it was sort of like
New Mexico, it was spartan.

It was much better
weather, [chuckles]

but he loved the sailing.

[water crashing]

- Oppenheimer's reputation
was restored by his appearance

on the Ed Murrow
show, "See It Now."

- [Narrator] This
is "See It Now,"

edited by the partnership
of Murrow and Friendly,

presented by the Aluminum
Company of America.

- [Ray] Ed Murrow had this
idea of going to Princeton

and interviewing all the
famous people in Princeton

including Einstein
and Oppenheimer.

And he came back to New
York City from Princeton,

saying to his friend,

"We've only got one
usable interview here,"

which is the one
with Oppenheimer.

Just as Groves had found

at the beginning of
the Manhattan Project,

Oppenheimer stood head
and shoulder above

all his fellow scientists

in terms of charisma
and in terms of clarity.

He was able to explain
things in a simple way

and in a way that held
people's attention.

- [Ed Murrow] This
is a brief report

on the work and purpose
of the Institute

as seen through the eyes
and mind of one man,

it's director, Dr. J.
Robert Oppenheimer.

Dr. Oppenheimer,
why don't we begin

by your telling
me a little about

this Institute for
Advanced Study,

how it began?

- Well, I will try.

Of course, it began at the time
when I wasn't anywhere near,

and it's already a subject
for historical research.

I'm about to find someone

to see if he can find
out how it began.

- I have heard you describe
it as a decompression chamber.

- Well, it is, for many people.

There are no telephones ringing,

and you don't have to go
to committee meetings,

and you don't have to
meet classes, and the...

It's especially for the few
people who are here for life.

The first years are
quite remarkable

because most people depend
on being interrupted

in order to live,

but the work is so hard
and failure is, of course,

I guess, an inevitable
condition of success.

- Oppenheimer charmed Ed Murrow,

and through Ed Murrow's program,

charmed the whole of the
United States of America.

Suddenly, he was everybody's
favorite scientist again,

and he got invitations
to give lectures

on anything he
wanted to talk about.

He would talk about Hinduism,

he would talk about
anything he liked,

and he would have thousands of
people attend these lectures.

He had this very
arresting sentence

in one of these lectures,

"As physicists, we
have known sin."

And what he meant was that now,

because the theory
of fission and fusion

was being used to make
such deadly weapons,

you are dealing not
only with the theory

of the fundamental
parts of the universe,

you're also potentially
producing work

that can be used to kill
hundreds of thousands of people,

so in that way, the
physicist have known sin.

And Oppenheimer gave a series
of fascinating lectures

in which he would
discuss these ideas.

And he was invited
over to London

to give the Reith
lectures for the BBC

in which he chose
a similar theme,

and he became
enormously popular.

- He no longer had the
authority of an insider

within the networks
of government

who knew what were the
latest developments

with nuclear weapons

and who could speak with
that sort of expertise,

but he became a spokesman

for the role of science

in relation to modern culture.

- That was a brief glimpse
of a 2 1/2 hour conversation

with Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,

director of the Institute
for Advanced Studies.

One thing that impressed this
reporter about that institute,

was that he has never heard

so many people
say, I don't know.

These men recognize mystery,

they welcome it and
they wrestle with it.

Goodnight and good luck.

- And after the hearings,

joined and actively
participated in

an organization called the
Congress for Cultural Freedom,

which was funded by the CIA.

But many prominent intellectuals

were involved with the
Congress for Cultural Freedom

in so far as it's
sought to promote

liberal intellectual culture

as an antidote to
what they argued

was the totalitarian
culture of the Soviet Union.

And this group of intellectuals

was where Oppenheimer
kind of found

a sense of belonging
and recognition

after his marginalization
in the security hearings.

- Throughout his life,
Oppenheimer was attracted

to places of extraordinary
beauty and remoteness.

And one thing that's very
striking about these places,

the Virgin Islands, the
plateau in New Mexico,

is that they are the very
opposite of where he grew up.

[water rushing]

And I'm inclined to think

that he was looking
precisely for that.

He was looking
precisely for something

that couldn't be more different

to the Upper West
Side of Manhattan.

And I think he found it

in the countryside of
New Mexico above all,

which I think remained for him,

I think that countryside
around the Rio Grande

remained for him his ideal,

in its wildness, in its beauty,

and in its remoteness.

[light upbeat music]

He had a little hut
overlooking the valley.

This is a remote area,

and you weren't going to
bump into other people there,

whereas he grew up in the
Upper West Side of New York

where all the people around him

were part of the same community.

Somebody wrote a book
about that community

called "Our Crowd."

They recognized each other as
being part of the same crowd,

though she's part of our crowd,

and I think he didn't want to
be part of anybody's crowd.

[light music]

The strain of
working at Los Alamos

was that he chainsmoked.

And you can see, he was
always a slender man,

but you can see in the pictures

of Los Alamos and
afterwards, he's skeletal.

He's so thin and he
never looked very well.

He died in his 60s,

but he looked like
a man in his 80s.

The cancer caught up with him

shortly before
his 63rd birthday.

- [Kai] And Kitty knew

that he wanted his
ashes scattered there.

So some months after
his death in '67,

she motored out towards a
point called Carvel Rock

in Hawksnest Bay,

just off the shore from
where their cabin was.

[light music]

[water crashing]

- My parents had been
arranging for a boat

to take Dr. O's ashes with
Kitty out to Carvel Rock,

which they did.

- They cut the motor and
instead of scattering the ashes,

Kitty just dumps the urn,

still closed up, into the water.

[water crashing]

There's a splash and
then it bobs up, [laughs]

and eventually it sinks.

They watch for a while
and then it sinks.

So his ashes are in an urn

on the floor of Hawksnest Bay.

[light music]

- It will probably haunt me
still for the rest of my life.

She was a great friend.

She had just turned 33.

That she was depressed for
a lot of her adult life,

I think is understandable
when you understand

what happened to her.

One of her dreams was to be
an interpreter at the UN,

and the FBI said, no.

It's like they were visiting

so-called sins of
her father upon her

and that just was not fair.

[Erva speaks faintly]

Anyway, I lost a great friend

and the world lost a
great mind as well.

[light music]

- There is no key that
is going to unlock

the mysteries of Oppenheimer.

He's always going
to be mysterious.

His friend Rabi said that
there's no single personality

that is Oppenheimer.

There's all these sharp shafts

that make up Oppenheimer.

But he's somebody
who the outside world

insisted was a German Jew,

and he said, "No, I'm neither
German nor am I Jewish."

He insisted on defining himself.

- The tragedy of Oppenheimer

is that he was so
deeply evolved ethically

and yet so socially awkward

and so brilliant
at the same time

that these things were
never fully integrated

into his character.

- He was able to talk philosophy

with the leading
philosophers of his time.

He wrote poetry, and he was
an expert on French poetry.

Scientifically, he most likely,

if he'd lived a couple
of years longer,

would've been awarded
a Nobel Prize,

and here's something that's
so typical of Oppenheimer.

What he would've been
awarded a Nobel Prize for

are three papers that
he himself attributed

no importance to whatsoever.

This is three papers
that he wrote in 1939

on gravitational
collapse, black holes.

He was the first person

to give a complete
mathematical description

of what happens when a massive
star collapses in on itself

and becomes a black hole.

- And he was the creator
of the atomic bomb,

this use of science

for absolute destruction,

this creation of a weapon
that makes hell on earth,

a weapon of absolute terror.

So Oppenheimer, I
think, really represents

the development of reason
and of a culture of reason

which has turned against
itself and become irrational

and become destructive.

And that was the dilemma

that Oppenheimer
was wrestling with

and that's what he represents,
I think, for us today.

- No, he's an iconic figure.

The 1954 trial makes him
much more interesting

than just the father
of the atomic bomb,

but it's also interesting

that as the father
of the atomic bomb,

the man who built
the two weapons

that destroyed two
Japanese cities,

he then spent really
the rest of his life

trying to contain the bomb.

- He was an
extraordinary polymath,

and he refused to be
bound by limitations

and categorizations.

And I think recognizing the
value of such a man at this time

is quite an important
symbolic thing to do.

- And that's the price
of genius, I think,

it's when the hero is partly
responsible for the fall

that we have through tragedy,

and that's why we
can't look away.

- It is still an open question

whether humanity is going
to survive the nuclear age,

and Oppenheimer would
think this is a sad legacy.

Finally, just his personality,

his ability to transform himself

to overcome his youthful
psychological crisis,

his ability to become
a good professor,

a charismatic lecturer
after being a terrible one,

his ability to run Las
Alamos and be revered

and admired by everyone
who worked there,

all of whom, you know,
anyone we interviewed

who had been there
said, you know,

the bomb never would've
happened in 2 1/2 years

if it hadn't been
for Oppenheimer.

Again, he transforms himself

into this amazing administrator

and yet there's this tragedy
at the end of his life,

and he's, you know,
publicly humiliated,

and that too is a
important story.

You know, America goes
through these periods

of historical craziness,

and McCarthyism was
one such disease

and Oppenheimer became
the chief victim of it.

[upbeat dramatic music]

[upbeat dramatic
music continues]