Original subtitles

the city of hiroshima was destroyed in

about nine seconds by a single atomic

bomb

the man responsible for building the

bomb was a gentle and eloquent physicist

named j

robert oppenheimer this is the story of

robert oppenheimer

and the atomic bomb

stinson beach california august 7th 1945

dear oppie you are probably the most

famous man in the world today

and yet i am not sure that this letter

will reach you

but if it does i want you to know

that we are very proud of you and if

it doesn't you will know it anyway

we have been irritated by your reticence

these past few years

but under the itchy surface we knew that

it was all right

that the work was progressing but the

heart was still there

and the warm being we have known and

cherished

i can understand now as i could guess

then

the somber note in you during our last

meetings

[Music]

there is a weight in such a venture

which few men in history have had to

bear

i know that with your love of men it is

no right thing to have had a part

and a great part in a diabolical

contrivance for

destroying them but in the possibilities

of death

are also the possibilities of life

you have made history we are happy for

you

[Music]

you may well ask why uh

people with a kind hearth

and humanist feelings

why they would go and work on

weapons of mass destruction

when j robert oppenheimer was born in

1904

the atomic bomb was not yet even science

fiction

he was educated at the ethical culture

school in new york

and mastered harvard's curriculum in

three years summa [ __ ]

he laude six languages and seriously

considered becoming an architect a poet

or a scientist

but it was his love of physics that led

him to england and germany in the 1920s

where the atom was beginning to yield

its secrets to einstein rutherford and

born

european scientists would later remember

him as the

quick and eccentric young american who

devoured both theoretical physics and

16th century french poetry one of his

best friends was the young american

writer francis ferguson

well when i first knew him he knew

nothing about politics he never read the

newspaper

uh he was extremely ignorant about

practical matters and he didn't care

about them

and his whole life was in the intellect

[Music]

at the age of 25 he accepted an unusual

jewel professorship at the university of

california at berkeley and at caltech

and pasadena

he brought with him the radically new

understanding of the atom

and the principles of quantum mechanics

the kind of mechanics was comparatively

newlin

and it was though he was opening a new

world to them and he made it

tremendous tremendously exciting and

fascinating to them and in fact

very few of them didn't take then come

back and take it a second

year one of his graduate students was

robert server

i think there was i remember one russian

lightning miss kacharova her name was

who had taken it three times in the

fourth year she wanted to come back and

and roberto refused to allow her into

the car she went on a hunger strike

and forced her way in something that

might have taken me months to have

learned before

he would go over in minutes and uh

robert wilson physicist

very fast cliff and a very elegant

manner he was extremely quick and very

impatient

and had a very sharp tongue which he

used on people

he actually terrorized the students when

he

first began to teach they were

afraid they come into the same room beer

of a nasty hero martin

robert oppenheimer and his younger

brother frank were born into a wealthy

family and raised in new york city

throughout the 1930s they spent their

summers with friends at a small ranch

leased by the oppenheimer family

high in the pecos wilderness of northern

new mexico

[Music]

when we first went there we slept on the

floor

a board floor and we didn't have enough

covers

and we were pretty frozen by morning but

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

[Music]

he eventually explored a large part of

those mountains

probably knew more about them than

almost anybody else

and he would just get on this horse and

put a

chocolate bar in his pocket and be gone

for a day or two at least

sleeping out probably would see nobody

else during the whole trip

everything my brother did would sort of

be special if he went off in the woods

to

take a leak he'd come back with a flower

and not to disguise the fact that it

might leak but just to make it an

occasion i guess

it was a wonderful time for all of us

all the different guests

most of them physicists have brought

some

some ideas and new ideas with them also

we the meals were sort of strange sort

of peanut butter and vienna sausages and

whiskey

and we'd get sort of drunk when we were

high up and we'd all act kind of silly i

guess

[Music]

i've never been on a horse in my life

they gave us maps and they sent us off

on this

three-day trip now over the mountain

mountain passes around

12 500 feet

[Music]

it went out an absolute minimum of

equipment a bottle of whiskey and some

graham crackers

and food and oats for the horses

it was a rainy season finally we noticed

it didn't rain quite as much at night

so we started to ride at night and i

don't know

what we gained from riding at night

because it also rained at night

imagine this you're you're

riding on a mountain ridge at midnight

in the middle of a thunderstorm with

lightning hitting all around you

you come to a fork in the road in the

trail

and robert says this way it's

only seven miles home this way it's a

little

longer but it's much more beautiful

[Music]

[Music]

but far from the pecos wilderness far

from berkeley was adolf hitler

and robert oppenheimer was a jew with

friends and relatives in germany

he did not keep up with current events

he read novels he read philosophy books

or serious books

but uh all of a sudden and i think it

was due in large part to

hitler and to the nazi persecution of

the dew

of the jews that he suddenly uh

i think it must have been fairly

suddenly he suddenly realized that

things were getting out of hand and that

something had to be done about it by

serious people

so he began reading hokan chevalier was

a professor of french literature

at berkeley active in left-wing causes

he and oppenheimer grew to be close

friends

on one of his many trips to the east on

the train he had taken the three volumes

of the das capital and he had read them

all in the original

on his way to new york in germany in

german

in german yes and then shortly after

apparently he bought the complete works

of lenin

and read those

he was a tremendous intellect

i don't believe i have known another

person

who was quite so quick in comprehending

hans bader nobel laureate in

comprehending

both scientific and general knowledge

at berkeley read the back of ad geeta

and learn sanskrit

and was really taken by but the charm

and the kind of

general wisdom of the bhagavad-gita

and some people seem to think he was got

very

religiously involved in it but that's

not true at all

the late 1930s while america endured a

great depression

fascism seized in germany a civil war

raged in spain

and oppenheimer moved further to the

left

kitty harrison was a communist and had

lost her first husband

in the spanish civil war in 1940 she and

robert oppenheimer were married

shortly before then robert's brother

frank and his wife jackie had joined the

communist party in california

robert not a joiner stayed aloof from

formal association

but his left-wing activities did attract

official attention

as war clouds gathered in europe the fbi

added oppenheimer's name to a list of

people

to be imprisoned in the event of

national emergency

[Music]

back in 1938

khan and strassmann in germany

discovered fission

and many people realized very quickly

that it might be possible

to make atomic bombs to use

fission as an explosive to use uranium

as an

explosive i first heard about but i

think niels bohr told me i think it was

in princeton

and when i came back to colombia and i

told enrico family about it

by the end of the day he had calculated

the

uh the depth of a crater size of a

crater which one pound would uh

would give exploding the first i heard

about

fishing was a letter from oppenheimer

and the news had just gotten to berkeley

and he

he wrote to me i gave a seminar on it

that same

day and uh and uh

urbana i mean once it was one of these

ideas

you know uh when somebody told you say

how could i be so

stupid not to have seen that before

and i think even in the first letter he

mentioned the possibility of making bomb

i suppose that freeman dyson physicist

he was at that time profoundly impressed

with the precariousness of the allied

situation that after all

most of his friends were europeans many

of them in countries which had been

occupied by the germans

the germans looked as though they were

the wave of the future at that time

he said there is the danger

that this may mean the end of

western civilization

my brother viewed it as not just

something persecuting our own

relatives but as a kind of thing that

could be a wave

that would walk over the united states

as well

[Music]

he wanted to help he thought

probably the best way to do this where

he had most competence

would be in

the atomic bomb work and therefore

it was natural for him

almost necessary for him

that this is where he would put his

effort he built

the atomic bomb or he didn't build it

but he led the effort

to build the atomic bomb because he

thought this was necessary

to save western civilization

it was feared that nazi scientists were

already building an atomic bomb in 1939

when albert einstein informed president

roosevelt that such a thing was even

possible

the program roosevelt initiated was

small and had little momentum until

december 7th 1941

the day after pearl harbor america

declared war on japan and germany

we had on the one side this crazy nation

and this demon in germany

aye aye robbie and uh

these funny people who didn't know what

the western world was about to tackle

the united states

i mean there was no question in my mind

that this something

had to be done and furthermore we

weren't winning

at all i was caught up in the war effort

and and with a patriotic fever that's

hard to

imagine nowadays it's been so long since

anything of that kind has motivated amer

seems to have motivated americans and

one would have done anything that was

necessary

to get on with the war the bomb project

had a sudden urgency

the u.s army was given charge and code

named it the manhattan district

with general leslie groves in command

and secret laboratories scattered across

the country

groves put oppenheimer in charge of a

group at berkeley

to explore the basic scientific

requirements of an atomic bomb

oppenheimer who had taken to wearing a

rakish pork by hat

took pleasure in his new official title

coordinator of rapid rupture

that was the time when the

big change in his life occurred

and it must have been during that time

that the dream somehow got hold of him

of

really producing a nuclear weapon which

other people had been talking about that

he was

the fellow who really did it it is

a very different

attitude if you want to find out

the deep secrets of nature which is what

you

had wanted to do before

and on the other hand if you want to

to produce something to produce a

mechanism that works

it was a different problem different

attitude and she

completely changed to fit the new role

los alamos boys school high on a mesa 50

miles north of santa fe new mexico

not far from the oppenheimer ranch

in the summer of 1942 students began to

notice low-flying military aircraft

overhead

one student was sterling colgate it was

in the fall of

42 when this place was invaded by

an armada of bulldozers and construction

crew

suddenly we knew that the ward arrived

here and

these two uh characters showed up mr

smith and mr jones

uh one wearing a pork pie hat and the

other

suit and a normal hat and these two guys

went around as if

well one they owned the place which

evidently they did

but more than that as if their

pseudonums was a normal sort of thing to

do

my god i mean there their pictures were

in our on our physics book and we all

had physics

one is the lead theoretical physicist of

his age and the other

uh head of a major laboratory who'd done

the cyclotron and things like that

so we immediately knew that one uh

they felt that it was so important to be

oppenheimer and lawrence

that they had to have a pseudonum uh two

that they were putting megabucks

uh multi-megabucks into what seemed to

us the worst place in the world to have

a laboratory

granting oppenheimer's request for a

single isolated lab where the bomb could

be designed and built

general groves appropriated the remote

school and officially named oppenheimer

scientific director

oppenheimer's first job was to convince

scientists and their families to join

him for the duration of the war

in a place he was not allowed to

identify to work on a project he was not

always allowed to

well describe was a young assistant

professor at the university of wisconsin

stan ulam mathematician and his wife

francoise

the war was on i noticed that some other

younger colleagues especially was

disappearing

from town they couldn't tell where they

were going

it's very secret

but when i learned that i'm supposed to

go somewhere

to new mexico francoise

i wanted to know about the state of new

mexico

so i went to the library and borrowed

one of these

wpa books

on various states and there was one

volume in new mexico

then looking at it i noticed at the back

of the book

there was a list of previous borrowers

to my amazement several names of people

who just disappeared a week or two

before

were put down there as borrowers

robert porton was the private in the

army and i don't know how many people

uh viewing this program ever had the

pleasure of getting off the train at

lamey new mexico but

we've looked at it as if it were out of

siberia

it was very strange it was nothing but a

lot of sand sagebrush and

but there was a gi vehicle and when we

got in still wondering where we were and

why we were there

[Music]

scientific and military personnel arrive

from all over america many traveling

under assumed names

a station master in princeton new jersey

was baffled at the sudden demand for

one-way tickets

to the tiny station outside santa fe

it was a little bit awe-inspiring to be

in

the middle of nowhere like this and not

knowing what we were getting into

not the slightest idea

[Applause]

next stop for newly arrived personnel

was an inconspicuous building in santa

fe

dorothy mckibben was in charge of the

tiny office

santa fe was full of young fbi agents

middle-aged agents and to some of us

they were quite discernible

because they were so well dressed what

did they do

they wore gray slacks and tweed jackets

and shirt with necktie and they leaned

against the walls of buildings and they

hung around lafonda and the capital

pharmacy and all restaurants

we drove through santa fe and then a

place called espanola and then

hit some dips in the road and then

started to climb and i had never been in

mountainous country it was very

interesting

i had just finished reading the magic

mountain by

thomas mann and of course to go to this

mysterious mountain on the top of which

there would be a secret laboratory

which we would go into the doors would

slam and a few years later why we would

come out

bearing in atomic bomb

very impressive strange scenery

mountains rocks

the desert

we crossed rio grande and arrived in a

place full of little

well how to call it almost us

oppenheimer had brought scientists and

their families fresh from distinguished

campuses all over the country

ivy hall soaring campaniles vaulted

chapels

los alamos was a boom town hastily

constructed wooden buildings

dirt streets cold stoves and only five

bathtubs

there were no sidewalks the streets were

all dirt

the water situation was always bad

one young physicist was robert crone it

was not at all unusual to open your

faucet

and have worms come out everybody

was wearing western clothes jeans boots

parkas there was a feeling of mountain

resort

in addition to army camp

the mixture was unbelievable then there

was an

awful mud

the physicist edward teller had brought

a piano and played beethoven late into

the night

from his cramped quarters in a

four-family dwelling he could disturb

more nobel laureates at once than he

could have anywhere else in the world

oppenheimer had gathered the elite in

physics mathematics and chemistry

to build the atomic bomb i don't believe

there was ever before an

assembly of so many first-rate

for one task they in turn recruited

their best students

promising kids working side by side with

nobel laureates

there was no class distinction between

the

small fry and the big shots

when i first came to the to the united

states i got to know a lot of the young

people who had been at los alamos most

of them were very young

they'd just gone right into it without

even finishing their scientific training

and for them it was just the most

marvelous time of their lives

people worked hard scientists worked

around the clock and but people

made up for the lack of big city life

and it was a lot of partying

we were very young and it was just like

a camp

out liquor was short in the area

so in order to spice up the parties

we use lab alcohol lab alcohol

is 200 proof basically

which is just exactly what you're

looking for for punch

if you were in a large hall and you saw

several groups of people the largest

groups

would be hovering around oppenheimer he

was great at a party and women

simply loved him and still do

i found it extremely dashing in a sort

of

elegant way

it was for these young people not only a

great experience it was also

fun it was it was a large

yes it was a good time it was a good

time in america it was a good time to be

american it was

a time when the whole country was

pulling together

in a uh in a cause which

even now i think was just that is the

idea that the nazis would

uh nazi germany would win that war could

have led to

i seem to me a thousand years of dark

ages

and everything that we meant by

civilization could have come to an end

that's what it seemed to me was what the

fight was about or something pretty

close to that

and most americans felt that most

americans were

just as as hard as they could be

average age was 29 and their job was to

construct a mechanism which would

trigger in a millionth of a second

a violent chain reaction they had two

dance bands a soda fountain

boy scouts girl scouts a radio station

with no call letters

a cyclotron and seven thousand fire

extinguishers

somehow oppenheimer put this thing

together he was the conductor of the

orchestra or whatever it was

somehow he created this fantastic esprit

no matter who you talk to they all lived

it and and they all

i think almost without exception felt it

most strongly that without him this

wouldn't have happened it couldn't have

happened

oppenheimer had envisioned a small

community of 30 scientists and their

families

but by 1944 he was in charge of a walled

city of six thousand

the cost escalated to 56 million dollars

seven divisions

theoretical physics experimental physics

ordnance

explosives bomb physics chemistry and

metallurgy

he knew and understood everything that

went on in the laboratory

whether it was chemistry or theoretical

physics

or machine shop he could

keep it all in his head and coordinate

it

it was clear also at los alamos that he

was intellectually

superior to us the most striking

contradiction is the fact that this man

who was so

unworldly so unpolitical in his youth

such a great scholar so fond of

metaphysical poetry

should suddenly emerge as the great

administrator

who put los alamos together and produced

the atomic bomb

i saw him change from that almost

irresponsible intellectual

bohemian and radical radical

person that he was that then that i had

known it

at berkeley uh to someone who was

just completely dedicated getting on

with the war i think it was a real

stroke of genius and part of general

groves

who was not generally considered to be a

genius uh to have appointed him it was a

most improbable appointment i was

astonished

the professor and the general made an

unlikely team

when groves took charge of the manhattan

project in 1942 there was barely enough

plutonium in the world to cover the head

of a pin

and very little uranium-235

these were the only elements that could

fuel the los alamos bomb

to produce u-235 groves built a secret

44-acre building in oak ridge tennessee

in hanford washington giant reactors

labored to produce a few pounds of

plutonium

it was the most expensive scientific

project in the history of the world

general groves distrusted liberals and

yet in spite of oppenheimer's

well-documented leftist background

groves overruled the astonished security

officers who tried to block

oppenheimer's clearance

he had arguments with general groves but

i

think they were mostly about sort of

trivial things like

that the fact that people were having

too many babies and he couldn't do

anything about that and

when things came up um

that were really important i think

general crows usually supported him

he had to support robert himself against

the

intelligence people who of course well

in fact i not only wouldn't have cleared

robert i

obviously wouldn't have cleared

three-quarters of the people on the uh

at the place so why not well

i mean they were all moderately liberal

moderately left-wing people

it was a new and strange world

barbed wire bodyguard censored letters

secrets from their wives and children

well i'd written try to be so newsy when

i was in fort leonard wood and when i

came here i would write and say

i'm out here in the west and the scenery

is beautiful the weather is just

gorgeous and my mother would write back

and say well where are you really and

what are you doing and i would write

back and say i'm out here in the west

and the weather is gorgeous and the

scenery

is beautiful and she never understood

that until the war was over and i could

explain it to her

and you heard throughout the town that

they were joking and saying it's a

submarine base to make windshield wipers

for submarines

or it was a navy installation or

something like that

and they thought it was a great joke

g2 wanted a rumor spreading santa fe

with her

now all kinds of speculation about what

was going on at los

alamos they wanted to get out a rumor

that we were busy making electric

rockets and and we

we tried it we went down and

we tried to fund the bar which is

usually crowded of course that night it

was

prac now half deserted and we talked as

loudly as we could about electric

rockets but nobody seemed to pay any

attention

so then we went out to a workman's bar

much rougher in the droid dance now some

some spanish-american came along and

asked her to dance

she was trying to tell him about los

alamos and he was trying to tell her

that

what he wanted was a ranch to raise

horses

he couldn't have been less interested

and

finally i grabbed the guy at the bar and

i took him by

lapels and shook him and said you know

we're doing it right now

he was so drunk i'm sure he didn't

remember a word of

the complete flop it's not as easy as it

sounds to be a spy

back in berkeley an industrial scientist

named george eltonton had approached

oppenheimer's old friend jokan chevalier

in 1943

with a request that chevalier convinced

oppenheimer to share secrets with

russian scientists

chevalier refused and when oppenheimer

passed through berkeley on secret

business

chevalier told him about the incident

i told oppenheimer that this

was not something that he could do

anything about and that

if there were to be such exchanges they

would have to be proposed on the highest

levels of government and

it would have to be worked out in that

way and then

he agreed that this would not be

any there was no possibility of doing

anything

and that is all and uh i forgot about it

and i think that he forgot about it for

a long time too

this seemingly insignificant

conversation would later have enormous

impact on the lives of both men

in late 1944 american intelligence

learned that the german atomic bomb

effort had failed

nevertheless shortly afterwards los

alamos scientists picked up the pace and

began working

six day weeks where everything was

coming together

everything was going at a very rapid

rate we were building up to the

trinity test at that time we were

a great deal of production with of

devices to be used and the

atomic bomb were being made everybody

was working day and night

and it was very hard in the you know and

the push

to make that uh test

to stop and think i said what do you

young men do in the evening for pleasure

and they said we'd go back to the lab

and stay till midnight

as one would i remember i would walk

work almost every

every night i'd nearly drop then go home

sleep a bit and then come back

saturdays and sundays just constantly

working

[Music]

across the pacific the war raged on

against japan but in the spring of 45

there was victory in europe

the nazis had never come close to

building an atomic bomb

germany surrendered the e day

eisenhower return triumphant

i would like to have to think now that

that i at the time of the german defeat

that

i would have stopped taken stock thought

it all over very carefully

and that i would have walked away from

los alamos at that time

and i in terms of all of my everything

that i

believe in before and during and

after the war i cannot understand why i

did not

take that i make that act on the other

hand it simply was not in the air

i do not know of a single instance of

anyone

who had made that suggestion or who did

leave

the time it there might have been

someone that i didn't know

but at the time it just was not

something that was part of our lives

where our life was directed to do

one thing it's as though we had been

programmed to do that and we

as automatons were doing it amazing how

the technology

tools trap one i mean they're so

powerful that when i i was impressed

because most of the sort of fervor for

developing the bomb came in a kind of

anti-fascist fervor

against germany but when ve day came

along nobody slowed up one

little bit no one said ah well the main

thing it doesn't matter now

we all kept working and it wasn't

because we understood the significance

against japan

it was because the machinery had caught

us

in its trap and we were anxious to get

this thing to go

i organized a a a small meeting

at our building i think the title was

the impact of the

gadget on civilization

happy tried to persuade me not to have

it

i don't know quite why but he certainly

didn't try to

dissuade me on the other hand i went

ahead and did

hold the meeting and perhaps between 30

and

50 people came hobby came too

which added a certain always added tone

to any

meeting we did discuss whether we should

go on

or not and in the context of what was

happening

in the world of course it was called in

the context that perhaps what we

are we were doing was morally wrong

particularly opie pointed out that but

it would be well that the world

knew about the possibility of an atomic

bomb

rather than to be something that would

be kept secret while the

united nations was being formed on that

basis

on that logical basis we all decided

that that was right

and that we ought to go back in the

laboratory and work as hard as we could

to demonstrate a nuclear

weapon before the uh

so that the united nations would be set

up in the awareness of this

horrible thing to come the faustian

bargain is

when you sell your soul to the devil in

exchange for knowledge and power

and that of course in a way is what

oppenheimer did there's no doubt

he made this alliance with

the united states army in the person of

general groves

who gave him undreamed of resources

huge armies of people and as much money

as he could

possibly spend in order to do

physics on the grand scale in order to

create this marvelous weapon

and it was a faustian bargain if ever

there was one

and of course we are still living with

it ever since

when once you sell your soul to the

devil then there's no going back on it

well i can't tell you exactly but right

over there between here in the us

in the uh high part of the oscura

mountains there where that little peak

is on the mcdonald ranch is where they

detonated the first atomic bomb

what was this country like then not like

it is now

200 miles south of los alamos near

alamogordo new mexico

a vast unbroken stretch of prairie here

robert oppenheimer chose to test

the first atomic bomb

he named the place trinity site it had

been apache country

but in late 44 it was populated only by

a handful of cattle ranchers and

homesteaders

they called it by the spanish name

hornada

del muerto the journey of death

dave mcdonald i was put out of here in

42.

who puts you out of here the court of

engineers and

federal judge and so forth and

they said they had to have it for

air-to-air gunnery range and so forth

you see

and later on why it wound up being this

you see when they've got the atomic bomb

the working way

they come in for a place and they

selected this right here

at that time they were living that is

the people that was assembling this bomb

and preparing to shoot it was there at

my place

somewhere around five to seven hundred

people they said there

and living in my house and around it and

so forth you see with

other buildings and so forth it began

with 15 men in december

by may there were several hundred

civilians and gis working in secret

at night nearby ranchers heard gunfire

gi's hunting antelope with submachine

guns

about 1939 i think it was on the fronts

piece of time magazine that had a

picture of an atom buster at the

university of california

and when they shipped the shell in for

this experimental detonation down here

why i thought i said if i didn't think i

was crazy or something i think maybe

they're

fooling around with uh busting an atoms

or doing something with

atomic power but and i was just talking

because i certainly didn't know anything

about it

i had no conception of what an atomic

bomb was or what the

violence of in the strength of it when i

arrived there

they um they were in the process of

in the end of may of constructing a 100

foot tall tower

in this desert which was really a very

empty very

it wasn't sandy but it was a typical dry

sagebrushy

desert with one wall off to the east of

rock

and base camp which had a couple of

extra buildings but which

really was just some old ranch houses

people were feverishly setting up wires

all over the desert

building the tower building little huts

in which to put cameras and house people

at the time of the explosion

the the army had just accidentally

bombed the place a little bit before i

got there but nobody was hurt

the work had been so frantic that it was

a relief to know that it was coming to

a conclusion and we knew that they were

preparing

the big experiment to see if the gadget

as it was called would work

what did you expect i hope

what did i expect francois

i always had mixed feelings i expected

wanted it to succeed because it would

help to end the war i didn't want it to

be dangerous

there was of course it was there was a

chance that it would be very dangerous

could be very dangerous

the 11th of july 1945 an unmarked

pontiac sedan arrives at the mcdonald

ranch carrying the world's entire supply

of plutonium about 10 pounds

the courier demands a receipt

approximate value

1 billion dollars at oppenheimer's

request general groves has made a secret

arrangement with the governor of new

mexico

to evacuate the state in case of

catastrophe

now prior to the shot back in the lab

there had been some speculation that it

might be possible to explode the

atmosphere

in which case the world disappears

did you sense a lot of anxiety in your

brother

a lot of anxiety in everybody including

my brother

both whether it would work or not work

frank oppenheimer

physicist i think mostly that but also

it was you see it was a time in which

i think it his interest in in

using the bomb to help produce a better

world

priest was was was didn't happen just

after the war

but he really had hoped that truman

would tell stalin about it fairly

forthrightly of course that didn't

happen and set the stage almost at that

instant to the cold war

rather than to a warmer

humanity and so i think both of those

things seemed

everything there was wearing him right

there there was

it was building up tremendous almost

hysterical

anxiety many people feeling that we

couldn't possibly hold the test because

every time we tested some component that

had to do with the test it would fail

everybody was rushing around things did

not appear to be ready

yet there did seem to be a certain

momentum to the work that was going on

that we wouldn't

make a test i think it had been put back

several times

but on july 16th that there would be the

test come

hell or high water

memo 11 july 1700 hours

both charges completely papered work

another night shift if necessary to

complete this job

request personnel as necessary

memo 12 july 1600 hours

seal all holes in case wrap with scotch

wrap

box charges inner and outer with two

spares for each

memo 13 july 1300 hours assembly starts

remove polar cap and dummy plug gadget

now belongs to tamper people

g engineers work until 1600 with active

material insertion

dummy plug hole is covered with a clean

cloth and explosives people take over

insert he this is to be done as slowly

as the g engineers wish

remove all chains clear the deck

well i expected that what they were

working on

they were going to try

[Music]

14 july or 800 hours rig guidelines lift

a tower top

ready for x unit at 0-900 bring up

g-engineer's footstool

14 july 0-900 hours wiring of the x-unit

proceeds under the direction of the

explosives people

tower platforms should be tested with

concrete weight as per oppenheimer

detonator is placed to conform with

requirements of informer switches

he people stand by to criticize

potential rough handling

note that once detonators are on sphere

no live electrical connection can be

brought to the x unit

in form a unit or anywhere else on the

sphere

all testing must be done before sphere

is lifted to tower

after that it is too late

14 july 1700 hours gadget complete

should we have the chaplain here

the betting pool cost a dollar edward

teller bet on a blast equal to forty

five thousand tons of tnt

oppenheimer bet low three thousand tons

and ii robbie put his money on twenty

kilotons

young technicians were horrified to

overhear enrico fermi taking side bets

on the possibility

of incinerating the state of new mexico

the test was set at midnight the

prediction was there'd be 60 mile

visibility and a certain wind pattern

well it with midnight

it was raining cats and dogs lightning

and thunder

really scared about this object there in

the tower would be set off accidentally

so you can imagine the strain on

oppenheimer

i remember it was one of my

memories of that time having to go up

the the

tower to turn on a piece of equipment so

i was one of the

last not the last person by any means

but one of the last people to

get our equipment that was right next to

the bomb

uh how to have it all turned on and

tested before

before starting the test and it was

quite dramatic because lightning was

striking all around it was

quite a fair storm going on in

particular one

had a certain amount of respect for that

atomic bomb being right next to us

sparks seemed to be flying uh did give

me a little bit of a

sense of apprehension

um i think he and i were lying down

right next to each other flat in the

desert

right outside the control

hot at the time the bomb went off

and we had prepared ourselves with glass

and

when we we could hear the countdown when

it went off we all

were looking through the glass and then

we saw

what was just a tremendous

uh the overpowering

vision of this thing happening seeing

the mountains small

beside it seeing perhaps with some kind

of beauty but

awesome was what i would call it as it

slowly developed

went up in the air and made those

the whole desert light up is at noon

and appears small a large desert

the rimmed by mountains appear to be a

small place

and that was just something that once

that had happened

i was a different person from then on

[Music]

so

[Music]

oh at the time it went off it was i

think

absolutely it wasn't i knew sort of what

would happen but i didn't expect the

heat from the flash

at five miles away to be nearly that

intense

and then there was a cloud sort of the

radioactive cloud went and sort of

hovered there

and i and ken had been working on

developing escape routes

because if that thing had gone a little

bit south it would have

fallen wouldn't fall out on the camp and

we would have to get out to the

to the south rather than where the north

was a road was to the north

and um so there was this sense of this

ominous cloud

hanging over us it was so brilliant

purple with all the radioactive blowing

and it just seemed to hang there forever

of course it didn't it went and it must

have been just a very short time for

until it went out but it was very

terrifying and the thunder from the

blast um it bounced on the rocks and

then went i don't know where

else it bounced but it never seemed to

stop but not like an ordinary echo of

the thunder just kept

echoing back and forth and that jonathan

don't work on it it was a very

scary time when that when it went off

um and god i wish i could remember what

my brother said but um

i can't or but i think we just said it

worked

i think that's what we said both of us

that worked and nobody knew it was gonna

work

he was in the uh in the forward bunker

and then when he came back there he was

you know his hat you've seen pictures

that

robert's hat and so on and uh

he came to where we were in this in the

headquarters so to speak

and the way

his walk was like high noon

i think it's the best i could describe

it this kind of struck

he done it

it felt like an earthquake we lived in a

good adobe house and it just

and he said my goodness that's an

earthquake and wonder if it hurt the

house

and he got out of bed and he got up and

he says i want you to come look

the sun's rising in the wrong direction

must have been nearly 20 miles away

where this is if somebody had

set off a flash bulb right in your face

and completely blinded burn for about 30

seconds

then gradually your vision cleared you

saw this huge

orange and purple and green violently

colored boys

rolling up towards the sky so

we knew something that happened over

here and we had a car long had a radio

in it so we kept that radio on and long

noon left and told us

you know that there's ammunition that

went off we were headed

up to albuquerque to take her back to

school

and we were between paul vader and

limitar when we saw this great big

flash of light and my sister she said

what happened and that was she got to

see the light

and it just seemed like it lit up the

whole prairie all around us

was there anything odd about your sister

asking about the light yes because she

was blind

it didn't take very long i was just

after the first few minutes

that i realized sort of viscerally what

had happened and

had goose flesh

of the consequences of what what would

happen

to the world when did you find out what

happened

well it was quite a while you know and

until they begin to talk about the

cattle you know that the hair was

turning white on them like frost you

know

looked like they had frost on their

backs and so forth the way we noticed

him was

the uh where that fallout fell on the

couch he's lying on her left side while

her right side would get burned

and the particles of dust that were

radioactive would fall on her and then

they've

caused to burn like a skull and the hair

instead of coming back

red like on a hereford cow would come

back white

just like a saddle burn on a black horse

and old man max smith that had the white

store up there had a black cat just as

black as the ace of spades

and that thing had white spots all over

after the

atomic blast he sold it some tourists

for five dollars i think

curiosity

iwo jima lady gulf mindanao the marshall

islands

at okinawa alone 50 000 american

casualties

110 000 japanese casualties

the beginning of the end for japan

saturation bombing thousands of b-29s

reigning incendiary bombs on all but a

few cities

harry truman who has assumed the

presidency after roosevelt's death in

early 45

calls for total surrender our demand

has been and it remains

unconditional surrender

[Applause]

japan was in ruins most of her major

cities destroyed

tokyo reduced to rubble

more than a million civilians dead the

japanese fought on

now when the question of use came up

then i did have quite long discussions

with opie uh about how it might be used

and he

did bring up to me one day that he would

serve on a panel

to make a recommendation about the use

of the bomb

so then i suggested to him that it would

be a good idea

if it would be used in a demonstration

for example as the demonstration of

trinity where japanese

observers might have been invited to

attend

and i can remember very specifically

when oppenheimer brought up a counter

argument to that

that well supposing it didn't go off and

i turned to him

coldly and said well we could kill them

all and of course i was not

didn't say that for real but even so i

was aghast at having

even to make a point that i had said

such a bloodthirsty thing

why did the bomb get dropped on people

at hiroshima i would say

it's almost inevitable that it would

have happened

simply because all the bureaucratic

apparatus existed by that time to do it

the air force was ready and waiting

there had

been prepared big airfields in the

island of tinian in the pacific from

which you could operate

the whole machinery was ready the

president

would have had to be a man of iron will

in order to put a stop to it

the question was whether we want to save

our people and japanese as well and win

the war

or whether we want to take a chance on

being able to win the war by killing all

our young men

i don't think they would have developed

that to show at a garden party

i think they had to do it and we felt

this was our own defense

and also there was a hurricane that

would have wiped out a lot of our troops

out there

and the parole japanese hadn't been very

nice to us

john they kind of demolished our navy

without any warning

it would have come out sooner or later

in a congressional hearing

if nowhere else just when we could have

dropped the bomb

if we didn't use it and then

knowing american politics you know as

well as i do that

there'd been elections fought on the

basis that every

mother whose son was killed after such

and such a date

uh the blood is on the head of the

president

americans braced themselves for a bloody

invasion of the japanese mainland

and in those days most people did not

realize the

qualitative difference between the

atomic bomb and the number

of ordinary bombs there was really no

immediate feeling that

the world is changing as a result but

rather that it would be a good way to

win the war more quickly

so i would say it was nobody's fault

that the bomb was dropped

as usual the reason it was dropped was

just that nobody had the courage or the

foresight to say no

certainly not oppenheimer oppenheimer

gave his consent in a certain sense he

was

on a committee which advised the

secretary of war

and that committee did not take any kind

of a stand against dropping the bomb

of course we never expected i don't

think even the people who

were doing the testing expected uh the

the bomb to be thrown on

japan so fast

hiroshima a city the size of houston

one of the few cities spared the

firebombing

months earlier orders had been given to

leave several japanese cities untouched

to provide virgin targets where the

effects of the new bomb could be clearly

seen

the uh

the announcement that of hiroshima

i think i was in the hall right outside

my brother's

office and it came over the sort of

loudspeaker that

went through was distributed through

apple

um that the bomb had been dropped and

then it had devastated

that talk

the first reaction was thank god it

wasn't a dud

but before the whole

the sentence of the broadcast was

finished when something got this horror

of all the people that have been killed

and i don't know why up to then i don't

think we'd really i'd really thought of

all those flattened people

we talked often about having a

demonstration where there weren't people

maybe on the mainland so that the

military would see it

but where there weren't people and then

the thought

that they had that they'd actually

dropped it on a place where all those

people were in the image of those people

which came before any pictures of it uh

really was pretty awful

but the first thing was i'm sure it was

thank god it worked

[Music]

the first reaction which we had

was one of fulfillment

now it has been done now the work that

we have been engaged

in for so many years has

contributed to the wall

[Music]

the second reaction was of course one of

shock and

power what have we done

[Music]

what have we done

and the third reaction it shouldn't be

done again

you were very depressed i came back from

san francisco and uh

found you very depressed you as in as a

in opposition to your euphoria

when the war uh the at ve day

when we had that very nice party and uh

you started throwing the garbage cans

around

uh you were uh very depressed

and uh we didn't have a party i think

there was a party i don't even know if

we went

were you depressed yes oh yes i remember

being

just ill yeah just say uh sick

to the point that i thought it would be

um

you know vomit i was so uh overwhelmed

when it happened that that thing had

happened

still am what was willis robert's

reaction to the news from here

i i don't know i um i

i can't imagine that it was very

different

a a a feeling

that an initial feeling that thank god

it wasn't a dud

and an almost immediate horror of what

it really happened

it did bring home to one

how powerful this is

[Laughter]

the treated humans as matter

hiroshima august 6 1945

the first uranium bomb exploded with the

light so bright

it could have been seen from another

planet

more than one hundred thousand killed

forty thousand injured

twenty thousand missing

[Music]

burns blindness radiation sickness

[Music]

it took only nine seconds today even now

the victims still suffer and die

three days later a second bomb a

plutonium bomb

dropped on nagasaki 80 000 dead

in early september a scientific team

from los alamos

was sent to japan to study the effects

of the two bombs

one member of the team was robert serber

when

you know everybody you have defense

defense

mechanisms of some kind that build up in

the

under under any uh under stresses of

black kind somehow

you you get hardened to it in a couple

of days

no matter what you see and

you manage to manage to survive that way

i'm sure it happens to all soldiers in

all wars

but they i mean the thing that was

really astonishing about the whole thing

that bill penny and i wandered around

nagasaki and lightning hiroshima

you know for several weeks uh

completely completely alone on our on

our own

and we had no difficulty at all with the

people they were

perfectly friendly not what would say

not really friendly but but but there

was no antagonism visible

we wandered around the ruins among

people whose

families had all been killed we had no

feeling of danger at

all now it's a piece of the

wall of a schoolhouse in the school room

in hiroshima which about half a mile

from where the bomb went off and

it's flashburned scarred by broken glass

and you can see the shadows of the

uh of the window sash and the and the

and the cord of the uh shade

and and from the the angle of

at which this shadow was cast

we could met we could measure the height

at which the bomb

went off and this was the inhabitants

that it really went off that the height

was supposed to

erosion

after this was all over about two years

later

oppenheimer gave a talk i think at mit

it was then afterwards republished and

quoted all over the world and became one

of his most famous utterances and it

said

roughly the physicists have known sin

and this is a knowledge which they

cannot lose

and it became a kind of

motif for the for the for the whole

community of physicists

and there were violent arguments many

people who had been at los alamos

were very angry they said oppenheimer

has no right to weep in public for our

sins

what we were doing was an honest piece

of

technical work to win the war we were no

more guilty than anybody else who built

weapons

in order to win the war and he has no

right to talk about our having sinned

at the end of the war then i gave up my

clearance

and have not worked on didn't work on

nuclear energy in any

in any of its aspect on the developing

horror on bombs

i i don't

it's it's somehow um i can't feel that

it was

something that i should would not have

done um

uh or should not have done at the time

that is that the

that the reasons for doing that the

the worry about fascism the um

were quite valid the sense that um

there was almost no way of stopping this

from being done

i think it would have been good to have

stopped a little sooner maybe after ve

day

i think it certainly would have been

good never to have

used the thing on the city and certainly

never to have used two of them

they were poised to land on the beaches

of japan

and they knew that the number of

casualties would be astronomical

those people were happy for the bomb

believe me

[Applause]

i was supposed to build some sample

catching equipment to go on the third

shot

which was to be dropped on japan and i

was to go with it

however as you know japan gave up before

there was a third shot

dear hook on your letter your marvelous

warm letter

was one of the very few things that

brought warmth to us

over these troubled days

a few days after the surrender we went

over to our ranch for a little time of

solitude

horses and the slow return to sanity

we are not sure we'll be coming back to

berkeley for permanent

despite the ties that make us want to

we are not too sure of anything personal

longing

both of us so much for stability yet

knowing

that we have been put in a time and a

place

where we may not be able in conscience

to attain it

circumstances are heavy with misgiving

and far far more difficult than they

should be had we power to remake the

world

to be as we think it

[Music]

the veil of secrecy was lifted and most

americans believed the atomic bomb had

played a decisive role in ending the war

the scholarly professor the unworldly

student of metaphysical poetry

the former leftist was suddenly a

national hero

a celebrity father of the atomic bomb

in 1947 he was appointed director of the

prestigious

institute for advanced studies in

princeton he was einstein's boss

but much of his time in the post-war

years was spent in washington

where his council was eagerly sought at

the highest levels of government

he served on two dozen committees

testified frequently before congress

and was even asked to run for public

office although he advised the

government on its atomic arsenal

he argued adamantly and publicly for the

international control of atomic weapons

and his sense of what he wanted to

accomplish

when he was in the government had less

to do with physics than it had to do

with

with the with the um

sensible use of the of this awful

instrument that we'd

made

i have been asked whether in the years

to come it will be possible to kill

40 million american people in the 20

largest american

towns by the use of atomic bombs

in a single night i am afraid that the

answer to that question is yes

i have been asked oppenheimer tried

to maintain control of the atomic energy

enterprise to prevent the air force from

abusing the weapons that he had

created i think the only hope for our

future safety

must lie in a collaboration based on

confidence and good faith

with the other peoples of the world i

think he felt that

he wanted to make a big difference um

i would i argued with him quite a lot

after the war

um i felt that the

um the kind of big difference would

happen

if one really taught people a lot about

the dangers of the bomb about the

possibilities of cooperation he said

there wasn't time for this he'd been in

the washington scene

he saw that everything was moving he

felt that he had to

change things from within history again

and again

shows that we have no monopoly on ideas

but we do better with them than most

other countries

he was a philosopher king in his own

mind a man of wisdom

who could get along with other men of

wisdom who also had power

he had the way of impressing himself

very strongly as a wise man on people

who were influential

but it is certainly not possible to take

the definition of atomic energy

and the prohibition against indus

helping other nations industrially

literally

it is certainly not possible to do that

mr senator because

everything we do is contrary to it

contrary to it

[Applause]

it was a different world after the war

americans perceived a new threat

russian and chinese communism

arms control was an unpopular idea even

before the russians shocked america by

exploiting their own atomic bomb in 1949

far sooner than anyone expected

[Applause]

the arms race began in earnest and

oppenheimer's council for international

collaboration

was now less attractive to policymakers

than the advice of his fellow scientist

edward teller

even during the war years at los alamos

teller had urged the development of a

secret weapon

radically different and radically more

destructive than the atom bomb

the hydrogen bomb

the general advisory committee to the

atomic energy commission

chaired by oppenheimer issued a secret

report opposing immediate development of

the hydrogen bomb

on both technical and moral grounds

i'm sure he thought that there was

absolutely no need for

the hydrogen bomb that there was no need

really for any of these bombs

and he felt that way even though he had

worked on on the arsenal of

fission bombs despite the committee's

advice president truman initiated a

program to develop the hydrogen bomb

and scientists at los alamos began to

design the new device

robert oppenheimer was not among them

[Music]

this is an atomic bomb about the size of

the one that devastated hiroshima

by 1950 it was considered too small for

our defense

the hydrogen bomb being developed would

have one thousand times the destructive

force

one morning in november of 1952 the

pacific island of elugalab

was vaporized by the first hydrogen

blast

[Music]

all that remained was a mile wide crater

on the ocean floor

[Music]

a disbelieving america saw the russians

explode a hydrogen bomb within the same

year

[Music]

there are no secrets uh insofar as

atomic and hydrogen bomb

development is concerned from the

communists i think i don't think we have

any secrets from them at all

senator mccarthy's anti-communism

dominated the 1950s

when he mentioned oppenheimer's

left-wing past publicly it meant to some

that oppenheimer was fair game

affidavits to the fact that he had been

a member of the party that he had

recommended

uh communists or work in the a-bomb

h-bomb plants

uh a lot of close routers of course

communists that doesn't again doesn't

make him a communist

but his wife uh admittedly was a

uh the wife of a official of the

communist party

uh brother a very active feminist

mccarthy did not attack oppenheimer

directly

but he had helped create the climate

that prompted president eisenhower to

seriously consider a letter

from a former congressional aide

charging that oppenheimer was a russian

spy

thirteen years of surveillance by campus

police the fbi

military intelligence

wiretaps reports from informants as many

as five agents shattered him in a single

day

most of it was old news material

disregarded in the past by general

groves and others

when oppenheimer was considered

essential

but in 1953 when presented with the

thick dossier

eisenhower immediately ordered

oppenheimer's clearance suspended

pending hearing

he had very much the feeling that he was

giving the best to the united states

in the years during the war and after

the war

in my personal opinion he did

but others did not agree

and in 1954 he was

hauled before a tribunal

and accused of being a security risk

a risk to the united states

risk to betray secrets

the proceedings were conducted by the

atomic energy commission in secret

there were no photographers no reporters

no television

even oppenheimer's attorneys were

excluded when classified material was

discussed

at issue was whether robert oppenheimer

principal architect of the atomic bomb

could be trusted with state secrets

along with numerous accusations relating

to his left-wing past

oppenheimer was specifically accused of

opposing the hydrogen bomb

on technical political and moral grounds

and of having misled security officers

and matters relating to his old friend

ho khan chevalier

during the war oppenheimer had reported

george elton's attempts to share secrets

with the russians

he told the story in such an ambiguous

way that intelligence officers were left

with the impression

that ho khan chevalier was the center of

aspiring

and that he had contacted several

physicists

this mysterious fabrication was to cost

the unwitting chevalier his job

and was the most damaging evidence

presented at oppenheimer's hearing

this friend of mine who was the closest

human being to me really

at that time that he had betrayed me in

this way and told about me

uh a lie which uh

constituted uh if this had been true it

would have been a criminal conspiracy

for which i would have been

i could have been sentenced to a

prolonged prison term

oppenheimer never explained to chevalier

nor to anyone else

why he had for 13 years failed to undo

the lie

also damaging to oppenheimer was the

testimony of his former los alamos

colleague edward teller

the father of the hydrogen bomb had

previously complained to government

attorneys

that oppenheimer was a complex and vain

man who had for moral reasons

impeded development of the hydrogen bomb

teller was somewhat more restrained at

the hearing

but he did testify that oppenheimer

should not be granted clearance

although the majority of witnesses nobel

laureates government advisers even

general groves came to oppenheimer's

defense

it was to no avail the atomic energy

commission found that oppenheimer was a

security risk

and his clearance was never restored he

was never again asked to advise the

government of the united states

and he never again worked in nuclear

energy

he was not the same person afterwards

i think it really knocked him for luke

he felt frustrated in accomplishing what

he

hoped to do in the way of of getting

peace he felt

um really

injured by not being part of the of the

by not being respected in government and

official circles

he wanted to get back into that i think

um

i don't know why but but i i think it's

one of those things where there's a

when you get the taste of it it's hard

to not want it

i think to a certain extent it actually

almost killed him spiritually yes

it achieved just what his opponents

wanted to achieve

destroyed him

uh dr abenhammer could you tell us

uh what your thoughts are about what our

atomic policy should be

no i i i can't do that i'm not

not close enough to the

facts and i'm not close enough to the

to the thoughts of those who

are worrying about it

what your thoughts are about the uh

proposal of senator robert kennedy

that uh president johnson

uh initiate talks with the view to uh

halt the spread of nuclear weapons

it's 20 years too late

it should have been done the day after

trinity

the atomic bomb robert oppenheimer built

and the hydrogen bomb he hoped could

never be

built are now facts of life

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since the trinity blast in 1945 there

have been more than 1200 nuclear

explosions

on the face of the earth the largest has

four thousand times the force of the

bomb

that leveled hiroshima

i felt it myself the glitter of nuclear

weapons

it is irresistible if you come to them

as a scientist

to feel it's there in your hands to

release this energy that

fuels the stars to let it do your

bidding

and to perform these miracles to lift a

million tons of rock into the sky

it is something that gives people an

illusion of illimitable power

and it is in some ways responsible for

all our troubles i would say

this what you might call technical

arrogance that overcomes people

when they see what they can do with

their minds

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so

i expect the human race may live on for

a while

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and the differences between us and any

possible

opponent are not that great in fact i

don't know any part of history

where it could be proper to use one of

those very powerful bombs

nothing turned out quite as well

as one thought it would

during the war we all thought that with

this

device which was a thousand times more

powerful than anything else we could

really

influence the way nations talked about

war and this is what my brother was so

involved

with after the war because there was no

there were no vested interests there

were no manufacturers of

atomic bombs nobody knew about it one

said here is a fresh start

and it's a weapon that you can't use for

war

we can it can produce a change but it

didn't

everybody regards the atomic bomb as

just another weapon as part of our

security

we knew the world would not be the same

few people laughed

a few people cried most people were

silent

i remembered the line from the hindu

scripture the bhagavad-gita

vishnu

is trying to persuade the prince that

he should do his duty and

to impress him takes on his multi-armed

form

and says now i am become death

the destroyer of worlds

i suppose we all thought that one way or

another

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you