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I have been asked whether,

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in the years to come,
it will be possible

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to kill 40 million
American people

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by the use of atomic bombs
in a single night.

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I am afraid that the answer
to that question is yes.

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Robert Oppenheimer was
the father of the atomic bomb.

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He was this complex ball
of contradictions.

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They are weapons of aggression,

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of surprise and of terror.

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Oppenheimer
wanted the bomb to be used.

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How else would the world
know what it was?

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Dr. Oppenheimer,

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are we creating something
we may not be able to control?

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In a world of
atomic weapons, wars will cease.

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It is D-minus one for the test

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of the world's first
atomic device.

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This cultured, nonviolent man

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was responsible for birthing

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the most violent weapon
in human history.

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And he devoted the rest of
his life to trying to control

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the monster
that he had unleashed.

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If there is another world war...

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...this civilization
may go under.

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He became a political pariah.

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Is it true
that humans have already

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discovered a method
of destroying humanity?

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And it finally ruined him.

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"Now I am become Death,

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the destroyer of worlds."

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We have made a thing that,
by all standards

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of the world we grew up in,
is an evil thing.

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When I was 15,

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I had a chance
to speak to Oppenheimer alone.

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He was at a cocktail party.

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I was serving hors d'oeuvres...

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...and found Oppenheimer
standing alone.

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I said, "I think
you're some sort of a saint."

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And he was very taken aback.

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And he said, "Wh-Why would you
say that to me?"

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And I said, "Because
you had second thoughts."

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And he turned around
and picked his hat up

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and walked out the door.

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It obviously struck him in a way

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that I had never imagined.

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Oppenheimer for Cronkite,
take one.

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Dr. Oppenheimer,

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with all the inevitability
of the decision

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that history demonstrates to us,

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you still seem to suffer,
may I say,

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from a bad conscience about it.

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Is that true, sir?

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Uh, I think when you play

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a meaningful part
in bringing about the death

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of over
a hundred thousand people...

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...uh, you naturally, uh,

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don't think of that with ease.

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When you look
at the history of Oppenheimer,

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it's very difficult to find
any person in history

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sitting in
such a complex situation

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with all kinds of
impossible questions

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and very few answers.

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Everybody has their own idea

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of what Robert Oppenheimer is.

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I mean, the fact is
that he invented a weapon

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that can destroy
human life on Earth.

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I mean, don't forget
that this weapon,

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which has the capacity
to end civilization,

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was developed as a means
to save Western civilization.

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In the 1930s,
millions of Americans

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were following the news
coming out of Europe

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in their local theaters,
watching newsreels.

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And Oppenheimer was

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horrified by the rise of Hitler.

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His sense of his own
Jewishness made him immediately

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and massively aware
of the danger of fascism.

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When the war started in 1939,

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he was a professor at Berkeley.

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And that same year,

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one of his students
comes rushing into his office

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to convey the news that
fission has been discovered.

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Word has just come through
from Germany

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that the uranium atom
under neutron bombardment

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actually splits into two parts.

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Initially,
Oppenheimer can't believe it.

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He runs to the blackboard
and does some mathematics,

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and he comes
to the understanding

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that you could use fission
to generate energy.

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Einstein showed explicitly

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that if you can convert matter
into pure energy,

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the amount of energy
is extraordinary.

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It's the speed of light squared,
for crying out loud.

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They realize that from
a very small amount of matter,

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you could make power
to drive ships and planes

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and trains, whatever,
make electricity, of course.

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And they also realize
very quickly

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that it might be possible
to make

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a weapon of untold destruction.

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We were deeply worried.

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After all, the discovery
of fission was in Nazi Germany.

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Nazi
Germany could potentially build

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a nuclear bomb.

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This was the worry.
And it was very tangible.

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It was very real.

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December 7, 1941,

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a date which will live
in infamy.

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Pearl Harbor happens.

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I assert

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that this form of treachery

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shall never again endanger us.

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Now the United States

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is an active combatant
in the war.

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The idea at this point is

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we basically need to get this
done as quickly as possible,

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because we could
wake up tomorrow

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and Hitler could have
that nuclear monopoly

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that we all want to avoid.

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So, we need a place
where we can design, build, test

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and help deliver
nuclear weapons.

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But even before
we pick the place though,

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we need to find somebody
who can lead that installation.

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And virtually nobody expected
Oppenheimer to be named

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the director of
the weapons design laboratory.

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He was kind of
this ethereal personality.

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He had no record
of having big achievements.

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One of the scientists
who knew Oppenheimer said,

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"This is a man who couldn't run
a hot dog stand."

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Oppenheimer's friends felt

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that he was a divided man
not quite sure of his identity.

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He said at one point,
"From my earliest days,

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"I never did anything

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"or thought anything
or knew anyone

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where I didn't feel about myself
the deepest loathing."

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Oppenheimer was born in 1904

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and into an age of
great scientific possibility.

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The first two decades
of the 20th century

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were periods of
incredible intellectual daring.

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Electricity, automobiles, flight

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were all transforming
daily life.

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And then you had
incredible advances in science,

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and it looks like

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almost anything
could be achieved.

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Story of Robert Oppenheimer

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is really the story
of immigrant America.

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His father comes over
from Germany,

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gets a job
in the garment industry

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and makes a tremendous amount
of money,

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winds up on the Upper West Side
on Riverside Drive.

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And he's got a Picasso,
and he's got three van Goghs.

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His mother was
a Paris-trained artist

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who exhibited her work at
various galleries in Manhattan.

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She was a nervous person.

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She really didn't let
this little boy go outside.

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And he was very sheltered

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and extremely socially awkward.

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When he finally went to
camp one summer, he was so nasty

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to the other kids
that they roughed him up.

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He said later they put him
in the icehouse all night naked

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and painted him green,

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including his genitals.

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Oddly enough,
Oppenheimer didn't protest.

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He just took
his punishment stoically.

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It was a very odd reaction

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for a young boy at that age.

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Imagine this sensitive
boy, this very smart boy,

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but one who has no idea
how to deal with other people.

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Certainly not with
children his own age.

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He's had no experience.

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The real core
psychological moment

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for Oppenheimer appears to have
been when he was in college.

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And he goes to study physics
at Cambridge,

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and he doesn't do very well.

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He ends up in a laboratory

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that's really about
experimental physics,

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and he is not good at that.

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He doesn't really know how to do
an experiment with his hands.

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And he has this sort of
crisis of confidence.

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This came to a head
when he had a...

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what I think
can only be described

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as a nervous breakdown.

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One of his friends stumbled
upon him in an empty classroom

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where Oppenheimer was
standing at the blackboard.

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Muttering to himself
over and over again,

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"The point is,
the point is, the point is."

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And he could never
finish the sentence.

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And then
another one of his friends

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went to his dorm room
and heard this moaning inside

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and opened the door,

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and there was Oppenheimer
in a fetal position,

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rolling back and forth,
groaning.

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He literally came close

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to committing suicide
at that point.

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He saw a psychiatrist
as a result of this,

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and the psychiatrist said

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that he's kind of living
in his own world.

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He was having
an identity crisis,

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something we're clearer about
these days than we were then.

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His parents took him to Paris,

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where he saw
yet another psychologist,

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and in a very French way,

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prescribed a professional woman
and red wine.

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So...

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Uh, we don't know
if that happened.

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He had always been
the top of the class,

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the smartest person,

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admired for
his intellectual capability

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by all his classmates.

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And suddenly,
he was an incompetent.

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And he just couldn't deal
with that at that point.

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And what snapped him out of that

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was his discovery of theoretical
physics, of quantum physics.

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At the time, it was sort of
the golden age of physics.

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It's a very exciting time
to be a theorist.

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And if you are young
and quick and willing to think

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00:13:07,829 --> 00:13:11,124
weird ideas that nobody else
has ever thought,

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00:13:11,166 --> 00:13:13,501
you can potentially make
a huge amount of progress

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00:13:13,543 --> 00:13:14,961
and a name for yourself.

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So, when Oppenheimer
decided to move

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00:13:19,466 --> 00:13:21,968
to Göttingen in Germany to study

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00:13:22,010 --> 00:13:25,930
with Max Born,
a theoretical physicist,

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he blossomed.

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He meets
some of the leading physicists

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in Germany at the time...

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00:13:32,687 --> 00:13:36,066
Heisenberg,
who, ironically enough,

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00:13:36,107 --> 00:13:39,194
would lead
the German atomic bomb project.

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And while he's over there,

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he sort of invents
this Oppie personality.

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00:13:46,326 --> 00:13:47,994
This is where he gets the name.

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They call him Opje,
and this turns into Oppie.

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And Oppie is not
an insecure young American

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who doesn't really know
what he wants to do.

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Oppie is the brilliant guy

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00:14:00,715 --> 00:14:03,218
who is always five steps ahead
of everybody else

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and can keep everything
in his head.

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00:14:05,053 --> 00:14:08,014
Oppie is a genius who's
very eccentric and interesting

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00:14:08,056 --> 00:14:13,353
and strikes a really dashing
figure and is chain-smoking.

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00:14:13,395 --> 00:14:17,065
And you see these pictures
of him from the '20s.

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It's very Bob Dylan.

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00:14:20,568 --> 00:14:24,239
He had the eyes
of an Old Testament prophet

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inside this frail body,

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00:14:26,700 --> 00:14:29,160
and he sort of cocked himself
with his funny little

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00:14:29,202 --> 00:14:31,663
porkpie hat on top.

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00:14:32,414 --> 00:14:36,209
So, Oppie is
this sort of construction

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00:14:36,251 --> 00:14:39,671
of everything
that he would want to be.

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00:14:40,964 --> 00:14:44,592
And that recreation is
immensely successful.

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When the cancerous Nazi growth

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00:14:54,102 --> 00:14:57,022
spread farther still,
the people of Europe...

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00:14:57,063 --> 00:15:00,692
and the world...
enter the new era.

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Certainly the first
motivation for the scientists

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00:15:04,112 --> 00:15:06,573
was to beat the Germans
to the bomb.

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00:15:06,614 --> 00:15:09,159
There's nothing like
the prospect of a hanging

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00:15:09,200 --> 00:15:10,744
to concentrate the mind.

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00:15:10,785 --> 00:15:14,539
And the threat of death
of civilization as they knew it

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00:15:14,581 --> 00:15:20,670
was so great that it swept away
any ethical or moral doubts

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00:15:20,712 --> 00:15:22,297
that they might have had.

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00:15:23,089 --> 00:15:27,052
Ultimately,
whoever gets the bomb first

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00:15:27,093 --> 00:15:28,362
is not just gonna win
World War II

257
00:15:28,386 --> 00:15:30,013
but is gonna run
the entire world.

258
00:15:32,807 --> 00:15:35,310
By the summer of 1942,

259
00:15:35,352 --> 00:15:38,772
control of the atom bomb project
passes to the hands of the Army,

260
00:15:38,813 --> 00:15:42,650
under the code name
Manhattan Engineering District.

261
00:15:42,692 --> 00:15:44,861
The Manhattan Project really was

262
00:15:44,903 --> 00:15:47,280
a huge national effort.

263
00:15:47,322 --> 00:15:51,618
And to plot out
the industrial scale

264
00:15:51,659 --> 00:15:55,747
of the operation,
they chose a dynamic, burly,

265
00:15:55,789 --> 00:15:57,123
six-foot-three,

266
00:15:57,165 --> 00:16:00,293
240-pound general

267
00:16:00,335 --> 00:16:03,630
named Leslie Richard Groves.

268
00:16:04,673 --> 00:16:07,759
He hated Leslie.
He went by Dick.

269
00:16:08,885 --> 00:16:11,346
General Groves had a problem.

270
00:16:11,388 --> 00:16:13,848
He was entrusted
to hire the people

271
00:16:13,890 --> 00:16:15,350
that would build
the atomic bomb.

272
00:16:15,392 --> 00:16:18,311
But he knew
that we're talking about

273
00:16:18,353 --> 00:16:22,357
the people who are the
finest scientists in the world.

274
00:16:23,858 --> 00:16:26,027
These are prima donnas.

275
00:16:27,404 --> 00:16:29,322
And now you have to have
somebody who's gonna be

276
00:16:29,364 --> 00:16:31,199
the whipmaster.

277
00:16:31,241 --> 00:16:32,909
You have to have somebody

278
00:16:32,951 --> 00:16:35,578
that understands the physics,
who has a reputation,

279
00:16:35,620 --> 00:16:38,665
so that these prima donnas
will follow you.

280
00:16:41,960 --> 00:16:44,879
Oppenheimer and
General Groves are introduced

281
00:16:44,921 --> 00:16:47,340
in the fall of 1942.

282
00:16:47,382 --> 00:16:49,384
And these two individuals
are just about

283
00:16:49,426 --> 00:16:51,386
as different as you can imagine.

284
00:16:52,721 --> 00:16:54,973
But General Groves
saw something in him

285
00:16:55,015 --> 00:16:56,766
that apparently no one else saw.

286
00:16:58,393 --> 00:17:00,270
When meeting Oppenheimer,

287
00:17:00,311 --> 00:17:02,355
you were immediately impressed.

288
00:17:02,397 --> 00:17:04,941
You couldn't help it.

289
00:17:04,983 --> 00:17:07,527
There wasn't a better man.

290
00:17:08,862 --> 00:17:11,865
He chose Oppenheimer
against the advice

291
00:17:11,906 --> 00:17:14,826
of most of these leaders
that he had around him

292
00:17:14,868 --> 00:17:16,453
in the scientific community.

293
00:17:16,494 --> 00:17:20,915
Oppenheimer had never led
any large enterprise.

294
00:17:20,957 --> 00:17:24,794
But Oppenheimer was really good
at explaining things.

295
00:17:25,587 --> 00:17:27,380
He was extremely charming,

296
00:17:27,422 --> 00:17:29,716
and he had this ability

297
00:17:29,758 --> 00:17:32,844
to sort of hold a lot of things
in his head at once

298
00:17:32,886 --> 00:17:36,848
and keep aware of
how they all fit together.

299
00:17:38,850 --> 00:17:40,352
And this is apparently

300
00:17:40,393 --> 00:17:43,104
what General Groves
recognized in him.

301
00:17:45,523 --> 00:17:47,609
For security purposes,

302
00:17:47,650 --> 00:17:52,280
this project needs to happen
away from everything.

303
00:17:53,323 --> 00:17:55,909
So Groves tells Oppenheimer

304
00:17:55,950 --> 00:17:59,579
to just come up with a place
where this would actually work.

305
00:17:59,621 --> 00:18:02,415
And it was Oppenheimer
who suggests

306
00:18:02,457 --> 00:18:05,543
the New Mexico desert.

307
00:18:05,585 --> 00:18:08,296
So they go to scope out a site.

308
00:18:08,338 --> 00:18:10,632
It's called Los Alamos.

309
00:18:12,676 --> 00:18:14,594
Oppenheimer knew the area well.

310
00:18:14,636 --> 00:18:16,429
He had spent a lot of time here.

311
00:18:18,014 --> 00:18:21,101
When
he left New York as a young man

312
00:18:21,142 --> 00:18:24,062
and went to New Mexico...

313
00:18:25,271 --> 00:18:28,650
...that was a... just a really
important part of his life.

314
00:18:29,484 --> 00:18:32,320
Going to New Mexico
and meeting cowboys

315
00:18:32,362 --> 00:18:33,780
and riding horses.

316
00:18:33,822 --> 00:18:36,282
He just loved it.
He loved every part of it.

317
00:18:38,159 --> 00:18:41,121
He once said that
his ambition was to combine

318
00:18:41,162 --> 00:18:43,790
the two loves in his life,

319
00:18:43,832 --> 00:18:46,418
physics and New Mexico.

320
00:18:48,837 --> 00:18:51,798
And of course,
he did precisely this.

321
00:18:55,343 --> 00:18:57,220
Now, the government shows up

322
00:18:57,262 --> 00:18:59,347
with bulldozers and architects

323
00:18:59,389 --> 00:19:01,641
and laborers and craftsmen

324
00:19:01,683 --> 00:19:05,478
to build a new community
and laboratory

325
00:19:05,520 --> 00:19:08,690
where there essentially
had not been one before.

326
00:19:10,650 --> 00:19:13,028
They're starting from scratch.

327
00:19:13,778 --> 00:19:16,698
And so much of
what they were doing was unknown

328
00:19:16,740 --> 00:19:18,658
and unproven at the time.

329
00:19:18,700 --> 00:19:20,160
They didn't actually know

330
00:19:20,201 --> 00:19:21,345
that they would be able
to achieve this.

331
00:19:21,369 --> 00:19:22,662
This was all theoretical.

332
00:19:24,080 --> 00:19:26,833
They knew that they had
to get the best scientists

333
00:19:26,875 --> 00:19:30,920
if they were gonna get this
weapon before the Nazis did.

334
00:19:35,550 --> 00:19:37,052
Albert Einstein flees

335
00:19:37,093 --> 00:19:38,595
to the United States.

336
00:19:38,636 --> 00:19:41,056
He leads a vanguard
of refugee scientists,

337
00:19:41,097 --> 00:19:43,350
virtually stripping
German universities

338
00:19:43,391 --> 00:19:44,726
of their best minds.

339
00:19:46,686 --> 00:19:48,938
All of the turmoil
in Europe had forced out

340
00:19:48,980 --> 00:19:52,859
a huge number
of really top-grade physicists.

341
00:19:54,444 --> 00:19:57,530
Enrico Fermi.

342
00:19:57,572 --> 00:20:00,700
Hans Bethe.

343
00:20:00,742 --> 00:20:04,037
Edward Teller,
who famously would go on

344
00:20:04,079 --> 00:20:06,539
to develop the hydrogen bomb.

345
00:20:06,581 --> 00:20:08,708
One can sort of
go down the lists

346
00:20:08,750 --> 00:20:12,253
and find more and more and more
of these amazing people.

347
00:20:13,421 --> 00:20:15,757
Oppenheimer was
famously known for

348
00:20:15,799 --> 00:20:17,717
his intellectual sex appeal.

349
00:20:17,759 --> 00:20:19,427
And he could go
around the country

350
00:20:19,469 --> 00:20:22,097
and sort of
flash his brain to people,

351
00:20:22,138 --> 00:20:23,848
and, you know, they'd sign up.

352
00:20:24,641 --> 00:20:26,142
He would say,

353
00:20:26,184 --> 00:20:30,063
"I unfortunately can't tell you
what we're doing,

354
00:20:30,105 --> 00:20:34,192
"but I can tell you
that if we succeed,

355
00:20:34,234 --> 00:20:36,945
"it's likely to end this war,

356
00:20:36,986 --> 00:20:39,406
and it may end all war."

357
00:20:39,447 --> 00:20:40,990
Oppenheimer asked

358
00:20:41,032 --> 00:20:44,452
if I would join him
in Los Alamos.

359
00:20:44,494 --> 00:20:47,080
And I said I would be delighted.

360
00:20:47,122 --> 00:20:48,790
Like most of his students,

361
00:20:48,832 --> 00:20:53,753
I would more or less follow him
to the ends of the Earth.

362
00:20:53,795 --> 00:20:56,798
If you had the choice
of fighting the Nazis

363
00:20:56,840 --> 00:20:58,967
by going to
this exotic mountaintop

364
00:20:59,009 --> 00:21:02,137
and doing the greatest physics
in history,

365
00:21:02,178 --> 00:21:04,264
I mean, what would you do?

366
00:21:04,305 --> 00:21:05,974
I would've been
on the next train.

367
00:21:07,600 --> 00:21:08,977
I don't think people thought

368
00:21:09,019 --> 00:21:10,562
that much about
the consequences.

369
00:21:10,603 --> 00:21:12,355
You know, can we blame them?

370
00:21:12,397 --> 00:21:14,274
We were all aware of

371
00:21:14,315 --> 00:21:18,778
the fact that, in one way
or another, we were intervening

372
00:21:18,820 --> 00:21:23,867
explicitly and heavy-handedly
in the course of human history.

373
00:21:28,830 --> 00:21:31,666
By the time
the laboratory was established,

374
00:21:31,708 --> 00:21:33,043
Oppenheimer was a family man.

375
00:21:33,084 --> 00:21:35,670
He was married.
He had a little boy.

376
00:21:37,630 --> 00:21:39,924
During his tenure
as director at the laboratory,

377
00:21:39,966 --> 00:21:42,510
he had a little girl as well.

378
00:21:43,636 --> 00:21:45,680
The summer of 1939,

379
00:21:45,722 --> 00:21:47,974
he was at a cocktail party
in Berkeley,

380
00:21:48,016 --> 00:21:52,062
and a young woman named
Kitty Puening had spied him

381
00:21:52,103 --> 00:21:57,692
from across the garden and was
immediately attracted to him.

382
00:21:58,693 --> 00:22:03,698
She was a firecracker
of a young woman.

383
00:22:07,786 --> 00:22:10,997
They fell in love, and by 1940,

384
00:22:11,039 --> 00:22:12,332
she was pregnant.

385
00:22:15,835 --> 00:22:17,754
They live ever after.

386
00:22:17,796 --> 00:22:21,549
And notice I didn't say
"happily."

387
00:22:21,591 --> 00:22:25,178
They are devoted to each other.

388
00:22:25,220 --> 00:22:28,640
But it's a difficult marriage
because of

389
00:22:28,682 --> 00:22:34,020
the complexity of Robert's life,
of their personalities,

390
00:22:34,062 --> 00:22:36,648
of the environment
in which they live.

391
00:22:39,901 --> 00:22:41,611
She was an academic,

392
00:22:41,653 --> 00:22:43,446
and she was a biologist
and a botanist,

393
00:22:43,488 --> 00:22:46,491
and ultimately, that work
was all put to one side

394
00:22:46,533 --> 00:22:48,618
for the years at Los Alamos.

395
00:22:48,660 --> 00:22:50,662
I think she was very frustrated

396
00:22:50,704 --> 00:22:53,498
by being put in the position of

397
00:22:53,540 --> 00:22:55,750
a mother and a wife
and nothing else.

398
00:22:58,294 --> 00:23:01,631
She did not thrive
at Los Alamos.

399
00:23:01,673 --> 00:23:04,092
It was a lonely
and hard existence.

400
00:23:05,260 --> 00:23:08,847
And she disappeared
into the bottle somewhat.

401
00:23:13,768 --> 00:23:17,480
Oppenheimer was famous
for mixing his gin martinis.

402
00:23:19,733 --> 00:23:24,571
He persuaded his scientists to
work very hard during the week

403
00:23:24,612 --> 00:23:28,408
and to party hard
on the weekends.

404
00:23:28,450 --> 00:23:31,077
Everyone was hungover
on Sunday morning,

405
00:23:31,119 --> 00:23:33,371
but they worked a lot,
and they worked hard,

406
00:23:33,413 --> 00:23:34,664
and they worked together.

407
00:23:34,706 --> 00:23:37,167
And that was largely
Oppenheimer.

408
00:23:42,255 --> 00:23:44,716
Los Alamos
for many of these people were

409
00:23:44,758 --> 00:23:46,843
the most momentous years
of their lives.

410
00:23:50,013 --> 00:23:52,432
They felt part of something,

411
00:23:52,474 --> 00:23:56,269
part of something meaningful
and important.

412
00:23:56,311 --> 00:24:00,273
And they were led by
this very enigmatic,

413
00:24:00,315 --> 00:24:05,820
strange, bright, blue-eyed
young man whom they all admired.

414
00:24:11,659 --> 00:24:14,162
I grew up at Los Alamos.

415
00:24:16,373 --> 00:24:19,834
And my father came to Los Alamos
during the Manhattan Project.

416
00:24:21,670 --> 00:24:26,966
It was a-a curious place to live

417
00:24:27,008 --> 00:24:30,929
because they're blowing
things up three times a day.

418
00:24:32,514 --> 00:24:35,809
Explosions were at
10:00 and 12:00 and 3:00,

419
00:24:35,850 --> 00:24:37,102
so when you're in first grade,

420
00:24:37,143 --> 00:24:38,703
it means recess, lunch
and school's out.

421
00:24:40,855 --> 00:24:42,732
We were actually,
as little kids,

422
00:24:42,774 --> 00:24:45,151
connoisseurs of explosions.

423
00:24:47,195 --> 00:24:48,863
And at some point,
I asked my father,

424
00:24:48,905 --> 00:24:50,365
"What-what are you doing?"

425
00:24:50,407 --> 00:24:52,742
And he said,
"Well, we're doing something

426
00:24:52,784 --> 00:24:54,452
that has never been
done before."

427
00:24:54,494 --> 00:24:57,372
I thought, "That's got to be
pretty interesting,

428
00:24:57,414 --> 00:24:58,456
whatever it is."

429
00:25:08,675 --> 00:25:13,805
We get about a year into
the laboratory's existence,

430
00:25:13,847 --> 00:25:15,765
and we come to find
that it's gonna be

431
00:25:15,807 --> 00:25:17,350
a lot harder than we thought.

432
00:25:17,392 --> 00:25:20,228
Every little thing is hard.

433
00:25:20,270 --> 00:25:24,232
These are
some very complex machines.

434
00:25:25,567 --> 00:25:27,902
A nuclear weapon is not an idea.

435
00:25:27,944 --> 00:25:31,614
Think of a nuclear weapon
more as like a million ideas

436
00:25:31,656 --> 00:25:35,076
that have to come together
and work perfectly together.

437
00:25:36,953 --> 00:25:39,956
To make an atomic bomb,
you need the fuel for it.

438
00:25:42,584 --> 00:25:45,837
We have plutonium,
and we have enriched uranium.

439
00:25:45,879 --> 00:25:47,398
We have two different types
of material

440
00:25:47,422 --> 00:25:49,716
that we're going to try and use.

441
00:25:49,758 --> 00:25:52,886
Plutonium was
the better material to use.

442
00:25:52,927 --> 00:25:54,763
There was gonna be more of it.

443
00:25:54,804 --> 00:25:57,390
You needed less of it
to make a bomb,

444
00:25:57,432 --> 00:26:00,602
and yet it was harder
to detonate.

445
00:26:02,187 --> 00:26:07,108
The initial way to make a bomb
was called gun assembly.

446
00:26:07,150 --> 00:26:12,989
It was to take
two pieces of material

447
00:26:13,031 --> 00:26:15,241
and slam them together...

448
00:26:16,618 --> 00:26:19,329
...causing a critical mass
and an explosion.

449
00:26:19,371 --> 00:26:23,249
And that was fine if you used
highly enriched uranium.

450
00:26:23,291 --> 00:26:27,754
But one day, they discovered
it won't work with plutonium.

451
00:26:27,796 --> 00:26:31,341
The plutonium
turned out to be so reactive

452
00:26:31,383 --> 00:26:33,593
that you couldn't
fire it up a barrel

453
00:26:33,635 --> 00:26:36,262
even at 3,000 feet per second.

454
00:26:36,304 --> 00:26:37,639
It would fizzle.

455
00:26:37,681 --> 00:26:39,974
It would melt down
before it got up the barrel.

456
00:26:40,016 --> 00:26:41,476
It was a great shock.

457
00:26:41,518 --> 00:26:44,270
I mean, maybe this whole
plutonium thing had been wasted,

458
00:26:44,312 --> 00:26:47,273
hundreds of millions of dollars
to develop plutonium.

459
00:26:50,860 --> 00:26:52,278
Oppenheimer was distraught,

460
00:26:52,320 --> 00:26:54,406
and-and Los Alamos
was distraught.

461
00:26:55,490 --> 00:26:59,369
He considered resigning,
he was so depressed,

462
00:26:59,411 --> 00:27:01,454
and his friends
at the laboratory said,

463
00:27:01,496 --> 00:27:02,872
"You can't, Robert.

464
00:27:02,914 --> 00:27:04,791
"You've got to stay
and finish this work.

465
00:27:04,833 --> 00:27:07,002
It's got to happen.
We must do it."

466
00:27:07,043 --> 00:27:09,921
And-and reluctantly, he stayed.

467
00:27:12,007 --> 00:27:13,633
...war under
the supreme command of

468
00:27:13,675 --> 00:27:15,468
General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

469
00:27:15,510 --> 00:27:17,929
Allied forces have
nearly three million troops

470
00:27:17,971 --> 00:27:19,472
trained for the assault.

471
00:27:20,807 --> 00:27:22,308
On the other side
of the channel...

472
00:27:23,727 --> 00:27:25,353
...the Nazis also know

473
00:27:25,395 --> 00:27:28,231
what the Allied forces
are preparing for,

474
00:27:28,273 --> 00:27:30,859
and they are making
preparations of their own.

475
00:27:33,945 --> 00:27:35,613
Oppenheimer feared

476
00:27:35,655 --> 00:27:38,033
he was still in a race
with the Germans.

477
00:27:38,074 --> 00:27:40,535
Even as late
as the summer of '44,

478
00:27:40,577 --> 00:27:42,203
they had no real intelligence

479
00:27:42,245 --> 00:27:45,790
about where they were
on the German bomb project.

480
00:27:47,375 --> 00:27:49,794
And so, if they don't
crack the plutonium problem,

481
00:27:49,836 --> 00:27:52,213
they may not have
a bomb in time.

482
00:27:53,423 --> 00:27:56,551
Oppenheimer shifted
the laboratory into, you know,

483
00:27:56,593 --> 00:27:58,970
full-speed panic mode.

484
00:28:00,930 --> 00:28:02,599
They had had some ideas

485
00:28:02,640 --> 00:28:04,702
for other types of bomb designs,
which they had thrown around

486
00:28:04,726 --> 00:28:06,394
at the very beginning
of the project

487
00:28:06,436 --> 00:28:08,855
but dismissed 'cause
they seemed too difficult.

488
00:28:08,897 --> 00:28:11,358
But one of them
was called implosion.

489
00:28:13,234 --> 00:28:16,237
The way implosion
in a nutshell works was

490
00:28:16,279 --> 00:28:18,698
they had a solid ball
of plutonium,

491
00:28:18,740 --> 00:28:20,575
just a solid sphere of it,

492
00:28:20,617 --> 00:28:23,703
about the size of a softball,
maybe a little bit smaller.

493
00:28:23,745 --> 00:28:28,792
And this is encased by
tons of high explosives.

494
00:28:30,251 --> 00:28:33,296
And these high explosives
are really specially made,

495
00:28:33,338 --> 00:28:36,591
so that when they explode,
they're gonna end up

496
00:28:36,633 --> 00:28:40,595
sort of focusing a blast wave
onto this ball,

497
00:28:40,637 --> 00:28:42,722
pushing on the top
and pushing on the bottom

498
00:28:42,764 --> 00:28:44,391
and pushing on both sides of it.

499
00:28:44,432 --> 00:28:46,935
Every angle of this is
gonna be being pushed upon

500
00:28:46,976 --> 00:28:50,480
with a lot of explosive force.

501
00:28:50,522 --> 00:28:53,775
What you want to do
is get this pressure

502
00:28:53,817 --> 00:28:58,279
to squeeze
the plutonium target evenly.

503
00:28:58,321 --> 00:29:01,324
If it were asymmetrical,
it probably wouldn't work.

504
00:29:01,366 --> 00:29:04,744
You had to have enough pressure
quickly enough

505
00:29:04,786 --> 00:29:08,915
to smash these subatomic
particles together hard enough

506
00:29:08,957 --> 00:29:12,127
to get them to have
this a-amazing reaction.

507
00:29:13,128 --> 00:29:15,338
This is really hard to do.

508
00:29:15,380 --> 00:29:19,300
Every aspect of this is
an almost totally new problem.

509
00:29:19,342 --> 00:29:21,112
It is a technology
that would have benefited from

510
00:29:21,136 --> 00:29:22,429
another decade of development.

511
00:29:22,470 --> 00:29:25,140
And they didn't have that.
They had a year.

512
00:29:28,226 --> 00:29:30,603
Oppenheimer was
working night and day

513
00:29:30,645 --> 00:29:32,439
building the bomb.

514
00:29:32,480 --> 00:29:35,900
And as the project grew in size,
the security service

515
00:29:35,942 --> 00:29:39,154
protecting the project
also grew.

516
00:29:39,195 --> 00:29:41,656
And even though
he was beloved and admired

517
00:29:41,698 --> 00:29:43,408
by most of the scientists

518
00:29:43,450 --> 00:29:45,702
working at
the Los Alamos project,

519
00:29:45,744 --> 00:29:48,788
he had fallen under
a greater veil of suspicion

520
00:29:48,830 --> 00:29:51,958
because there were
certain aspects of his past

521
00:29:52,000 --> 00:29:54,627
that raised the possibility

522
00:29:54,669 --> 00:29:57,005
that he could be
a security risk.

523
00:30:10,685 --> 00:30:12,604
When Oppenheimer was teaching

524
00:30:12,645 --> 00:30:14,939
at the University of California
at Berkeley,

525
00:30:14,981 --> 00:30:19,819
he really was
a very unworldly man

526
00:30:19,861 --> 00:30:21,946
focused on science,

527
00:30:21,988 --> 00:30:24,908
until the Depression began.

528
00:30:27,118 --> 00:30:28,703
He discovered, to his shock,

529
00:30:28,745 --> 00:30:32,999
that his students often
didn't even have enough to eat.

530
00:30:33,041 --> 00:30:35,835
One of them told me
he was living on

531
00:30:35,877 --> 00:30:38,338
cat food, cans of cat food.

532
00:30:38,380 --> 00:30:40,382
That was the only thing
he could afford.

533
00:30:41,633 --> 00:30:46,137
Oppenheimer was changed
by this discovery

534
00:30:46,179 --> 00:30:49,015
of-of suffering
in the world, really.

535
00:30:51,685 --> 00:30:54,688
And Oppenheimer
sort of naturally,

536
00:30:54,729 --> 00:30:57,691
like many of his friends
in Berkeley at the time,

537
00:30:57,732 --> 00:31:00,402
drifted politically to the left.

538
00:31:08,410 --> 00:31:13,581
Communism was a very
appealing idea in the 1930s.

539
00:31:13,623 --> 00:31:15,208
There was no Internet.

540
00:31:15,250 --> 00:31:17,127
People didn't know
what was going on real time

541
00:31:17,168 --> 00:31:18,878
in the Soviet Union,

542
00:31:18,920 --> 00:31:21,715
where Joseph Stalin, of course,
was in the process of murdering

543
00:31:21,756 --> 00:31:24,551
20 million of his own people.

544
00:31:29,556 --> 00:31:32,225
What people here in the
United States saw instead was,

545
00:31:32,267 --> 00:31:35,520
hey, you know,
here in the Soviet Union,

546
00:31:35,562 --> 00:31:38,398
everybody is free and equal
and has a job

547
00:31:38,440 --> 00:31:41,359
and a place to live
and-and a future,

548
00:31:41,401 --> 00:31:44,738
an important role to play
in the greater collective.

549
00:31:46,781 --> 00:31:50,160
Now, if I don't know where
my next meal is coming from,

550
00:31:50,201 --> 00:31:53,371
that sounds like
a pretty good idea.

551
00:31:55,498 --> 00:31:59,919
It's debatable if Oppenheimer
ever really joined, officially,

552
00:31:59,961 --> 00:32:02,255
the Communist Party.

553
00:32:02,297 --> 00:32:04,341
But his brother did.

554
00:32:04,382 --> 00:32:06,384
Frank Oppenheimer
joined the party.

555
00:32:06,426 --> 00:32:09,554
Frank's wife Jackie
joined the party.

556
00:32:09,596 --> 00:32:12,057
Many of Oppenheimer's
close friends

557
00:32:12,098 --> 00:32:13,641
had joined the Communist Party.

558
00:32:13,683 --> 00:32:15,602
Many of his students
at Berkeley and elsewhere

559
00:32:15,643 --> 00:32:18,438
had been members of
the Communist Party as well.

560
00:32:19,647 --> 00:32:21,399
And in the mid '30s,

561
00:32:21,441 --> 00:32:24,277
he met a young woman
named Jean Tatlock,

562
00:32:24,319 --> 00:32:28,031
who was studying
to become a psychiatrist.

563
00:32:28,073 --> 00:32:30,700
Brilliant young woman.

564
00:32:30,742 --> 00:32:32,160
He fell in love with her.

565
00:32:33,828 --> 00:32:36,414
They were engaged
to be married twice.

566
00:32:36,456 --> 00:32:38,667
I think it's probably
a reasonable interpretation

567
00:32:38,708 --> 00:32:40,960
to say he was
somewhat obsessed with her.

568
00:32:41,002 --> 00:32:43,463
She was a communist.

569
00:32:43,505 --> 00:32:45,632
He was interested
in communist ideas.

570
00:32:46,758 --> 00:32:48,593
And for the next four years,

571
00:32:48,635 --> 00:32:51,638
Oppenheimer actually contributed
quite a bit of money

572
00:32:51,680 --> 00:32:53,640
to the Communist Party.

573
00:32:53,682 --> 00:32:58,103
But his political activities
began to be noticed.

574
00:33:02,023 --> 00:33:03,650
What the FBI did in those days,

575
00:33:03,692 --> 00:33:06,152
they were following
the communists.

576
00:33:06,986 --> 00:33:08,947
They would walk around
and they would take down

577
00:33:08,988 --> 00:33:10,841
the license numbers
of the cars that were parked

578
00:33:10,865 --> 00:33:13,451
in front of the house or
the building and look them up.

579
00:33:13,493 --> 00:33:15,078
That's when Oppenheimer

580
00:33:15,120 --> 00:33:17,163
first came to the attention
of the FBI.

581
00:33:17,205 --> 00:33:20,750
Even while he's
heading up the A-bomb project,

582
00:33:20,792 --> 00:33:23,920
the FBI is wiretapping
and following him.

583
00:33:23,962 --> 00:33:28,341
Military Intelligence is
constantly asking him questions.

584
00:33:28,383 --> 00:33:31,011
He was, I think,
in a strange way,

585
00:33:31,052 --> 00:33:32,512
comfortable with that because

586
00:33:32,554 --> 00:33:35,348
he knew he wasn't doing
anything wrong.

587
00:33:36,349 --> 00:33:38,518
Even when he went to visit
his old girlfriend

588
00:33:38,560 --> 00:33:41,688
when he should not have
probably done so.

589
00:33:43,648 --> 00:33:47,736
In 1943, he heard
from Jean Tatlock.

590
00:33:47,777 --> 00:33:49,821
She was going through
some emotional crisis,

591
00:33:49,863 --> 00:33:51,197
and she wanted to see him.

592
00:33:51,239 --> 00:33:53,158
He had kept in touch with Jean.

593
00:33:53,199 --> 00:33:55,410
He still loved her.

594
00:33:55,452 --> 00:33:58,121
She had rejected him.
He had married Kitty.

595
00:33:58,163 --> 00:34:03,043
But he knew that Jean Tatlock
was in a depressed state,

596
00:34:03,084 --> 00:34:04,753
and so he visited her.

597
00:34:07,881 --> 00:34:12,260
He had to leave Los
Alamos and go to San Francisco.

598
00:34:16,264 --> 00:34:18,600
And that was, of course,
just red meat

599
00:34:18,641 --> 00:34:21,102
for the, for the dog,
as it were.

600
00:34:22,062 --> 00:34:25,899
There were two guys
sitting outside the apartment.

601
00:34:25,940 --> 00:34:29,861
Jean Tatlock
was under surveillance.

602
00:34:29,903 --> 00:34:32,155
She was still a member
of the Communist Party.

603
00:34:32,947 --> 00:34:35,075
He spent the night with her.

604
00:34:35,116 --> 00:34:36,743
They had been lovers,

605
00:34:36,785 --> 00:34:39,371
and I think they probably were
lovers again that night.

606
00:34:43,500 --> 00:34:47,629
This was reported back
to Colonel Boris Pash,

607
00:34:47,671 --> 00:34:49,255
who was head of
Army Intelligence

608
00:34:49,297 --> 00:34:50,757
for all the West Coast.

609
00:34:50,799 --> 00:34:53,426
And Pash was convinced
that this was

610
00:34:53,468 --> 00:34:57,931
a serious breach of security

611
00:34:57,972 --> 00:34:59,825
and that perhaps Oppenheimer
was conveying nuclear secrets

612
00:34:59,849 --> 00:35:03,520
and atomic secrets to the
Communist Party through Tatlock.

613
00:35:05,188 --> 00:35:08,441
Sadly, tragically, she died

614
00:35:08,483 --> 00:35:11,695
just a few months later,
in the spring of 1944.

615
00:35:12,821 --> 00:35:17,659
Under mysterious circumstances,
her father found her naked

616
00:35:17,701 --> 00:35:20,704
with her head
plunged in a bathtub

617
00:35:20,745 --> 00:35:24,165
with her body slumped
over the edge of the bathtub.

618
00:35:25,625 --> 00:35:29,421
Which is a very odd way
to commit suicide.

619
00:35:29,462 --> 00:35:32,132
There's some speculation that

620
00:35:32,173 --> 00:35:34,426
perhaps she was murdered.

621
00:35:35,844 --> 00:35:40,181
Oppenheimer was horrified
and devastated by the news.

622
00:35:41,558 --> 00:35:45,145
The security officer
who informed him

623
00:35:45,186 --> 00:35:47,981
said that he wept openly,

624
00:35:48,023 --> 00:35:50,734
that he was absolutely bereft

625
00:35:50,775 --> 00:35:53,153
and actually confided
that there was nobody

626
00:35:53,194 --> 00:35:54,863
that he could speak to about it.

627
00:35:54,904 --> 00:35:59,576
So you sense, uh,
the loneliness of his grief.

628
00:36:02,662 --> 00:36:04,372
We interrupt this program

629
00:36:04,414 --> 00:36:05,540
with a special bulletin.

630
00:36:05,582 --> 00:36:07,667
President Roosevelt is dead.

631
00:36:07,709 --> 00:36:10,211
The president died
of a cerebral hemorrhage.

632
00:36:11,379 --> 00:36:13,548
April 1945 was
one of those months

633
00:36:13,590 --> 00:36:16,885
in which the fate of the world
seemed to turn on a dime.

634
00:36:18,678 --> 00:36:20,096
FDR dies,

635
00:36:20,138 --> 00:36:22,766
followed by Hitler
committing suicide.

636
00:36:22,807 --> 00:36:26,686
Hitler's
empire burns and shrivels.

637
00:36:26,728 --> 00:36:31,232
The bomb was conceived
in a kind of anti-Hitler fervor.

638
00:36:31,274 --> 00:36:34,027
By the spring of 1945,
Hitler's out of the picture.

639
00:36:34,069 --> 00:36:36,446
The Nazis are
no longer a threat.

640
00:36:36,488 --> 00:36:38,907
Hitler is not gonna build
an atomic bomb

641
00:36:38,948 --> 00:36:40,450
and drop it on New York.

642
00:36:40,492 --> 00:36:42,285
That's not gonna happen.

643
00:36:42,327 --> 00:36:45,497
But there was no way they were
not gonna finish that weapon.

644
00:36:46,956 --> 00:36:48,750
They wanted to make this happen.

645
00:36:48,792 --> 00:36:51,753
They didn't want the war to end
before it happened.

646
00:36:51,795 --> 00:36:54,005
Oppenheimer wanted the bomb
to be used,

647
00:36:54,047 --> 00:36:57,676
because how else would the world
know what it was?

648
00:36:57,717 --> 00:36:59,928
Harry S. Truman was sworn in

649
00:36:59,969 --> 00:37:01,846
as President
of the United States.

650
00:37:01,888 --> 00:37:04,557
By the time
Truman gets to the presidency,

651
00:37:04,599 --> 00:37:05,850
the wheels are in motion.

652
00:37:05,892 --> 00:37:08,103
This bomb is going to be
dropped somewhere.

653
00:37:08,144 --> 00:37:11,856
With the death of Hitler,
the target then becomes Japan.

654
00:37:13,233 --> 00:37:15,610
The never-ending air campaign

655
00:37:15,652 --> 00:37:17,696
against Japan's stolen empire
continues,

656
00:37:17,737 --> 00:37:21,950
as B-24s hammer installations
in the Palau islands.

657
00:37:25,954 --> 00:37:28,623
We were marching up
from island to island.

658
00:37:33,336 --> 00:37:37,882
Landing on the beaches against
dug-in Japanese defenses.

659
00:37:39,092 --> 00:37:44,431
Losing young men
in large numbers.

660
00:37:44,472 --> 00:37:46,016
Every day that went by

661
00:37:46,057 --> 00:37:48,977
without this bomb
being successfully tested

662
00:37:49,019 --> 00:37:51,896
was a day in which thousands
of Americans are dying.

663
00:37:51,938 --> 00:37:53,857
Thousands
of Yanks have been wounded

664
00:37:53,898 --> 00:37:56,693
and other thousands
have sacrificed their lives

665
00:37:56,735 --> 00:37:58,778
to drive a fanatical foe
from this vital base,

666
00:37:58,820 --> 00:38:01,656
the doorstep to Japan itself.

667
00:38:02,824 --> 00:38:05,201
They knew
the Japanese were defeated,

668
00:38:05,243 --> 00:38:07,787
but defeat and surrender
are two different things.

669
00:38:07,829 --> 00:38:10,915
So how do you get them
to surrender?

670
00:38:13,168 --> 00:38:17,130
In a world of
atomic weapons, wars will cease.

671
00:38:17,172 --> 00:38:19,341
And that is not a small thing.

672
00:38:21,468 --> 00:38:23,845
The way
Oppenheimer looked at the bomb

673
00:38:23,887 --> 00:38:28,808
is in a kind of
Eastern metaphysical way of

674
00:38:28,850 --> 00:38:31,644
it is a act of destruction
and creation

675
00:38:31,686 --> 00:38:33,813
potentially at the same time,

676
00:38:33,855 --> 00:38:37,567
act of war and an act of peace,

677
00:38:37,609 --> 00:38:41,363
that this thing, if mishandled,

678
00:38:41,404 --> 00:38:45,200
could end humanity, but if
properly handled and harnessed,

679
00:38:45,241 --> 00:38:47,619
could actually lead to an era

680
00:38:47,660 --> 00:38:50,330
of peace and prosperity
for the entire world.

681
00:39:01,549 --> 00:39:03,176
By the summer of '45,

682
00:39:03,218 --> 00:39:06,763
they had been working on
the implosion design for a year,

683
00:39:06,805 --> 00:39:12,560
tweaking, devising and
struggling with the challenges.

684
00:39:12,602 --> 00:39:14,062
For this thing to work,

685
00:39:14,104 --> 00:39:16,189
all of those explosives
and their detonators

686
00:39:16,231 --> 00:39:18,108
and the things powering them
and the batteries

687
00:39:18,149 --> 00:39:21,528
and everything else
has got to work perfectly.

688
00:39:21,569 --> 00:39:23,005
And there wasn't
a really good way to figure out

689
00:39:23,029 --> 00:39:24,614
if that was
actually gonna happen,

690
00:39:24,656 --> 00:39:26,991
other than setting off
a full-size test.

691
00:39:32,747 --> 00:39:34,666
They settle upon the site

692
00:39:34,708 --> 00:39:36,292
where the bomb will be tested,

693
00:39:36,334 --> 00:39:40,880
and Oppenheimer chooses
the name for the site: Trinity.

694
00:39:40,922 --> 00:39:42,632
He had been reading

695
00:39:42,674 --> 00:39:44,217
the poetry of John Donne
at the time,

696
00:39:44,259 --> 00:39:47,220
and one of those poems,
uh, include the line,

697
00:39:47,262 --> 00:39:49,305
"Batter my heart,
three-personed God,"

698
00:39:49,347 --> 00:39:53,059
a reference to the Holy Trinity
in Christianity.

699
00:39:54,019 --> 00:39:57,647
And I think that that
was a tribute to Jean Tatlock,

700
00:39:57,689 --> 00:40:00,608
because Jean and Oppie
used to read

701
00:40:00,650 --> 00:40:03,570
the poetry of John Donne in bed.

702
00:40:12,829 --> 00:40:16,416
Sunday, July 15, 1945.

703
00:40:16,458 --> 00:40:18,752
Alamogordo, New Mexico.

704
00:40:18,793 --> 00:40:20,920
It is D-minus one for the test

705
00:40:20,962 --> 00:40:23,214
of the world's first
atomic device.

706
00:40:24,299 --> 00:40:26,760
The hours
leading up to the Trinity test

707
00:40:26,801 --> 00:40:29,596
are one of
the most extraordinary moments

708
00:40:29,637 --> 00:40:32,390
of-of tension imaginable.

709
00:40:32,432 --> 00:40:34,934
The stakes,
the billions of dollars,

710
00:40:34,976 --> 00:40:37,145
the hundreds of thousands
of people who'd been involved

711
00:40:37,187 --> 00:40:41,691
in building to this one moment
of this test of this new weapon,

712
00:40:41,733 --> 00:40:43,985
all of that responsibility
falling

713
00:40:44,027 --> 00:40:46,363
very squarely
on Oppenheimer's shoulders.

714
00:40:46,404 --> 00:40:48,490
At the bomb test site,

715
00:40:48,531 --> 00:40:51,034
the scientists are working
under growing pressure.

716
00:40:51,076 --> 00:40:53,912
They are told there must be
no further delays.

717
00:40:53,953 --> 00:40:56,623
The president must know
the results of the test

718
00:40:56,664 --> 00:40:58,792
when he meets with Stalin.

719
00:40:58,833 --> 00:41:00,794
The President
of the United States

720
00:41:00,835 --> 00:41:02,796
is about to enter into
the Potsdam Conference...

721
00:41:02,837 --> 00:41:05,090
Potsdam, a city in Germany.

722
00:41:05,131 --> 00:41:06,484
He's gonna meet
with Joseph Stalin,

723
00:41:06,508 --> 00:41:08,009
Winston Churchill as well,

724
00:41:08,051 --> 00:41:09,803
and talk about
the future of Europe

725
00:41:09,844 --> 00:41:11,638
and the future
of the Pacific War.

726
00:41:11,680 --> 00:41:13,348
The president must know

727
00:41:13,390 --> 00:41:17,686
if he has a nuclear weapon
in his back pocket or not.

728
00:41:26,528 --> 00:41:28,405
Everybody was on edge,

729
00:41:28,446 --> 00:41:30,573
and they had to calm down
Oppenheimer.

730
00:41:30,615 --> 00:41:33,118
He was a bundle of nerves.

731
00:41:34,077 --> 00:41:35,704
He chain-smoked,

732
00:41:35,745 --> 00:41:37,664
which he pretty much
always did anyway.

733
00:41:38,998 --> 00:41:41,668
It was a situation
where I did not want

734
00:41:41,710 --> 00:41:44,295
Dr. Oppenheimer to get nervous.

735
00:41:46,297 --> 00:41:48,508
There's a famous picture
from that evening

736
00:41:48,550 --> 00:41:52,554
where Oppenheimer himself
crawls up the tower to the top

737
00:41:52,595 --> 00:41:55,682
where the bomb has been hoisted.

738
00:41:55,724 --> 00:41:58,268
He's checking
all the final plugs

739
00:41:58,309 --> 00:42:02,272
to make sure
that everything is in order.

740
00:42:02,313 --> 00:42:03,815
He's clearly worried,

741
00:42:03,857 --> 00:42:07,610
trying to check
every last little detail.

742
00:42:07,652 --> 00:42:09,029
Oppenheimer doesn't know

743
00:42:09,070 --> 00:42:10,572
if this thing
is gonna work at all.

744
00:42:10,613 --> 00:42:11,906
In fact, he had a bet

745
00:42:11,948 --> 00:42:13,259
with another one
of the scientists

746
00:42:13,283 --> 00:42:15,368
that it wouldn't work...
ten dollars.

747
00:42:16,161 --> 00:42:17,579
There were a hundred things

748
00:42:17,620 --> 00:42:20,206
that could be done wrong,

749
00:42:20,248 --> 00:42:24,461
any one of which
could make the test a failure.

750
00:42:24,502 --> 00:42:26,880
Everybody had doubts.

751
00:42:26,921 --> 00:42:29,049
Was it even possible?

752
00:42:29,090 --> 00:42:31,926
And then this question,
'cause nobody was really sure:

753
00:42:31,968 --> 00:42:35,055
What if we set
the whole atmosphere on fire?

754
00:42:36,806 --> 00:42:39,225
What if we set off this bomb

755
00:42:39,267 --> 00:42:41,770
and it literally sets
the air on fire

756
00:42:41,811 --> 00:42:43,772
and engulfs us all?

757
00:42:45,315 --> 00:42:48,651
The atmosphere is
made out of oxygen, after all.

758
00:42:48,693 --> 00:42:51,071
Can the oxygen of the atmosphere

759
00:42:51,112 --> 00:42:54,074
be set in flames
by an atomic bomb?

760
00:42:54,115 --> 00:42:56,701
No one knew the answer
to these questions.

761
00:43:02,540 --> 00:43:07,128
It's before dawn
on July 16, 1945.

762
00:43:07,170 --> 00:43:08,505
It was dark.

763
00:43:08,546 --> 00:43:11,925
The bomb was in the tower
a hundred feet up,

764
00:43:11,966 --> 00:43:14,010
and they were ready to go.

765
00:43:14,052 --> 00:43:18,807
Oppenheimer was in one of
the bunkers that had been built.

766
00:43:22,811 --> 00:43:24,646
Oppenheimer braced himself,

767
00:43:24,688 --> 00:43:27,607
according to some accounts
uttering the words,

768
00:43:27,649 --> 00:43:31,152
"Lord, these affairs
are hard on the heart."

769
00:43:34,072 --> 00:43:35,949
T-minus ten,

770
00:43:35,990 --> 00:43:38,910
nine, eight...

771
00:43:38,952 --> 00:43:41,204
Oppenheimer was
saying to himself,

772
00:43:41,246 --> 00:43:43,373
"I must remain conscious."

773
00:43:43,415 --> 00:43:44,874
...seven...

774
00:43:44,916 --> 00:43:46,126
"I must remain conscious."

775
00:43:46,167 --> 00:43:48,128
...six...

776
00:43:48,169 --> 00:43:50,422
Seconds are hours.

777
00:43:50,463 --> 00:43:54,217
...five, four,

778
00:43:54,259 --> 00:43:57,679
three, two...

779
00:43:57,721 --> 00:43:59,973
And all of a sudden...

780
00:44:07,188 --> 00:44:09,357
...the whole place lit up.

781
00:44:19,534 --> 00:44:21,327
One of the scientists told me

782
00:44:21,369 --> 00:44:25,123
it felt as if someone had
opened an oven door.

783
00:44:26,207 --> 00:44:28,126
Suddenly, there was
this huge heat,

784
00:44:28,168 --> 00:44:29,961
which was radiant heat,

785
00:44:30,003 --> 00:44:32,339
so it came at
the speed of light as well,

786
00:44:32,380 --> 00:44:35,383
and then this rolling thunder
of sound,

787
00:44:35,425 --> 00:44:39,512
and the first mushroom cloud
started going up.

788
00:44:39,554 --> 00:44:43,808
It was orange and purple
and blue and yellow,

789
00:44:43,850 --> 00:44:47,687
and it roiled,
and it grew as it rose.

790
00:44:47,729 --> 00:44:51,691
And a new thing, he said,
had been created on the Earth,

791
00:44:51,733 --> 00:44:54,027
a new challenge for humanity.

792
00:44:58,073 --> 00:45:00,283
People had seen explosions

793
00:45:00,325 --> 00:45:04,162
and tested bombs for decades,
but to see the size of it,

794
00:45:04,204 --> 00:45:08,249
just... it was just astonishing.

795
00:45:09,084 --> 00:45:10,919
There's never been
a moment like that

796
00:45:10,960 --> 00:45:13,713
in the history of the world.

797
00:45:13,755 --> 00:45:16,925
The view of the world,
the view of what matter is,

798
00:45:16,966 --> 00:45:21,471
what we are made of indeed,
palpably changes.

799
00:45:21,513 --> 00:45:26,559
It's an unleashing of a, of
a force never before imagined

800
00:45:26,601 --> 00:45:30,855
and could never be ignored
from this point on.

801
00:45:36,444 --> 00:45:40,156
We knew
the world would not be the same.

802
00:45:42,450 --> 00:45:45,286
A few people laughed.

803
00:45:46,705 --> 00:45:48,915
A few people cried.

804
00:45:48,957 --> 00:45:50,709
Most people were silent.

805
00:45:53,628 --> 00:45:57,799
I remembered the line
from the Hindu scripture,

806
00:45:57,841 --> 00:45:59,551
the Bhagavad Gita.

807
00:46:02,429 --> 00:46:04,180
Vishnu...

808
00:46:05,390 --> 00:46:10,061
...is trying to persuade
the prince that

809
00:46:10,103 --> 00:46:12,564
he should do his duty,

810
00:46:12,605 --> 00:46:14,941
and to impress him,

811
00:46:14,983 --> 00:46:20,363
takes on his multiarmed form
and says,

812
00:46:20,405 --> 00:46:24,993
"Now I am become Death,
the destroyer of worlds."

813
00:46:26,828 --> 00:46:30,665
I suppose we all thought that,
one way or another.

814
00:46:42,886 --> 00:46:46,806
After the test was over,
Oppenheimer had this strut.

815
00:46:46,848 --> 00:46:48,975
It was like High Noon.

816
00:46:49,017 --> 00:46:51,144
He had done it.

817
00:46:52,479 --> 00:46:55,857
Oppenheimer was very proud
of this accomplishment.

818
00:46:57,192 --> 00:46:58,526
It was a world-changing moment,

819
00:46:58,568 --> 00:47:02,155
and a lot of the scientists
realized that.

820
00:47:05,700 --> 00:47:07,369
Now came the business of

821
00:47:07,410 --> 00:47:10,038
what the government would do
with their creation.

822
00:47:12,540 --> 00:47:14,167
Groves hurried back

823
00:47:14,209 --> 00:47:16,294
to his Washington office
and cabled the news

824
00:47:16,336 --> 00:47:19,506
that the bomb experiment
had been a success

825
00:47:19,547 --> 00:47:23,468
and even more powerful than
they had anticipated.

826
00:47:24,678 --> 00:47:28,181
This information is
transmitted to Truman, who...

827
00:47:28,223 --> 00:47:30,392
entire attitude changes
at Potsdam.

828
00:47:30,433 --> 00:47:33,144
He suddenly feels like
he has a win in-in sight.

829
00:47:33,186 --> 00:47:35,855
He suddenly starts
bossing around Stalin.

830
00:47:35,897 --> 00:47:39,234
He decides the Japanese
get no concessions whatsoever.

831
00:47:40,402 --> 00:47:42,529
Truman had known
that this existed

832
00:47:42,570 --> 00:47:45,699
since he became president,
but to know it actually works

833
00:47:45,740 --> 00:47:47,826
and it's even more powerful
than we thought,

834
00:47:47,867 --> 00:47:51,413
that's a really different
position for him to be in.

835
00:47:51,454 --> 00:47:55,458
Our demand has been,
and it remains,

836
00:47:55,500 --> 00:47:59,045
unconditional surrender!

837
00:48:02,132 --> 00:48:03,633
My mom and dad

838
00:48:03,675 --> 00:48:05,885
were both veterans
of World War II, and my mom,

839
00:48:05,927 --> 00:48:09,055
she said, "You know, after...

840
00:48:09,097 --> 00:48:11,808
"after four years of this thing,

841
00:48:11,850 --> 00:48:15,228
"there was nobody really...
there was nobody going,

842
00:48:15,270 --> 00:48:18,440
'Was it ethical to use
a-a nuclear weapon?'"

843
00:48:19,816 --> 00:48:22,736
Right? Just get it over with.

844
00:48:22,777 --> 00:48:24,821
This is horrible. Like, this...

845
00:48:24,863 --> 00:48:28,241
Whatever you can do
to shorten this thing.

846
00:48:28,283 --> 00:48:31,327
Everybody was terrified
and exhausted,

847
00:48:31,369 --> 00:48:35,832
and everybody knew somebody
who knew somebody

848
00:48:35,874 --> 00:48:38,668
who was not living anymore
because of this.

849
00:48:40,587 --> 00:48:43,131
With the bomb ready to go,

850
00:48:43,173 --> 00:48:45,592
I mean, the choices
are appalling.

851
00:48:45,633 --> 00:48:47,927
You know, they know
perfectly well that if they use

852
00:48:47,969 --> 00:48:51,431
these weapons on Japanese men,
women and children in cities,

853
00:48:51,473 --> 00:48:54,267
there are gonna be a couple
hundred thousand people who die.

854
00:48:54,309 --> 00:48:59,606
But if they don't stop the war
with the bomb,

855
00:48:59,647 --> 00:49:01,775
there may be millions more
that die.

856
00:49:01,816 --> 00:49:05,320
So those seem to be
the two choices,

857
00:49:05,362 --> 00:49:07,739
but there was a third choice,

858
00:49:07,781 --> 00:49:10,909
and the third choice
was to do a demonstration.

859
00:49:10,950 --> 00:49:15,413
Maybe drop this bomb in
Tokyo Bay, kill very few people,

860
00:49:15,455 --> 00:49:17,207
make a hell of a demonstration,

861
00:49:17,248 --> 00:49:20,251
and maybe the Japanese
will surrender

862
00:49:20,293 --> 00:49:25,423
just based on having seen the
ferocious power of this thing.

863
00:49:25,465 --> 00:49:27,801
Oppenheimer rejected,
uh, that course,

864
00:49:27,842 --> 00:49:31,554
as did the planners
in Washington.

865
00:49:35,392 --> 00:49:37,727
We did think about whether, uh,

866
00:49:37,769 --> 00:49:40,522
its destructiveness, uh,

867
00:49:40,563 --> 00:49:42,315
its danger, uh,

868
00:49:42,357 --> 00:49:46,528
could be vividly demonstrated

869
00:49:46,569 --> 00:49:50,323
over a barren
and uninhabited target,

870
00:49:50,365 --> 00:49:53,326
and we were
very doubtful of that.

871
00:49:55,912 --> 00:49:59,833
Very few people would have had
a more thorough understanding

872
00:49:59,874 --> 00:50:04,212
than J. Robert Oppenheimer
of what was about to unfold

873
00:50:04,254 --> 00:50:06,297
when these weapons were used
in combat.

874
00:50:06,339 --> 00:50:09,426
Oppenheimer contemplated,
knowing that

875
00:50:09,467 --> 00:50:12,137
this destruction
would be unworldly.

876
00:50:18,393 --> 00:50:22,522
His secretary,
Anne Wilson, told me this story

877
00:50:22,564 --> 00:50:24,858
that I'm still struck by.

878
00:50:24,899 --> 00:50:26,985
After the Trinity test,

879
00:50:27,027 --> 00:50:31,156
she's walking to work one day
with Robert.

880
00:50:31,197 --> 00:50:35,452
He's a few steps ahead of her,
and he's suddenly muttering,

881
00:50:35,493 --> 00:50:39,414
"Those poor little people,
those poor little people."

882
00:50:40,915 --> 00:50:43,585
She stops him and says, "Robert,
what are you muttering about?"

883
00:50:43,626 --> 00:50:49,466
And he looked at her
and-and explained that,

884
00:50:49,507 --> 00:50:51,468
you know, the bomb
was going to be used

885
00:50:51,509 --> 00:50:53,970
on a Japanese city or two,

886
00:50:54,012 --> 00:50:57,432
and the victims were going to be

887
00:50:57,474 --> 00:51:01,394
civilians, a whole city.

888
00:51:01,436 --> 00:51:06,399
This was obviously on his mind,
painfully on his mind.

889
00:51:06,441 --> 00:51:11,905
And yet we know, that same week,
he was meeting with the generals

890
00:51:11,946 --> 00:51:14,240
who were in charge of
the bombing mission,

891
00:51:14,282 --> 00:51:16,534
and he was instructing them

892
00:51:16,576 --> 00:51:19,079
exactly how the bomb
should be dropped

893
00:51:19,120 --> 00:51:22,582
and at what altitude
it should be detonated

894
00:51:22,624 --> 00:51:26,252
for the maximum
destructive power.

895
00:51:26,294 --> 00:51:29,255
It's hard
to reconcile the sensitive,

896
00:51:29,297 --> 00:51:34,803
morally upright,
humanistic professor

897
00:51:34,844 --> 00:51:39,516
with the guy who recommends that
the bomb is dropped on cities

898
00:51:39,557 --> 00:51:42,143
and is calculating
the ideal height

899
00:51:42,185 --> 00:51:43,603
for destroying houses, right?

900
00:51:43,645 --> 00:51:45,814
How do you reconcile
those two things?

901
00:51:45,855 --> 00:51:50,860
Part of it is, I think,
Oppenheimer hoping that

902
00:51:50,902 --> 00:51:55,615
this will not be the first use
of nuclear weapons,

903
00:51:55,657 --> 00:51:58,201
that it will be the last use
of nuclear weapons.

904
00:51:58,243 --> 00:51:59,911
And if that's the case,

905
00:51:59,953 --> 00:52:02,997
then in order to ensure
that they're the last use,

906
00:52:03,039 --> 00:52:07,502
you want it to be as bad and
ugly and horrible as possible.

907
00:52:16,845 --> 00:52:20,015
By August of 1945,

908
00:52:20,056 --> 00:52:23,143
every Japanese city
of more than 50,000 people

909
00:52:23,184 --> 00:52:28,106
had basically been burned out,
except for three or four cities

910
00:52:28,148 --> 00:52:31,860
that had been deliberately
set aside for atomic bombing.

911
00:52:31,901 --> 00:52:34,904
Set aside because they had
physical characteristics

912
00:52:34,946 --> 00:52:39,868
that would allow us to see
how the bombs worked.

913
00:52:46,124 --> 00:52:49,336
Hiroshima was a flat city.

914
00:52:49,377 --> 00:52:53,882
And with the city set aside,
it was possible to see

915
00:52:53,923 --> 00:52:58,178
the effects of the bomb
all the way out to the edges.

916
00:52:58,219 --> 00:53:01,431
That's why Hiroshima was chosen.

917
00:53:09,564 --> 00:53:12,317
When I was a little kid,

918
00:53:12,359 --> 00:53:14,444
there were seven rivers
running through,

919
00:53:14,486 --> 00:53:18,156
beautiful riverbanks.

920
00:53:18,198 --> 00:53:20,033
Water was clear.

921
00:53:20,075 --> 00:53:26,539
I was running through
magical gardens, flowers,

922
00:53:26,581 --> 00:53:29,959
looking for beautiful,
beautiful insects

923
00:53:30,001 --> 00:53:32,796
of all different kinds.

924
00:53:32,837 --> 00:53:34,673
Birds chirping.

925
00:53:34,714 --> 00:53:36,633
They don't understand about war.

926
00:53:36,675 --> 00:53:40,720
It was all over,
sound of happiness.

927
00:53:45,642 --> 00:53:49,104
But the sound
of the explosion came

928
00:53:49,145 --> 00:53:51,773
like a rage over the Earth.

929
00:54:15,714 --> 00:54:17,340
A short time ago,

930
00:54:17,382 --> 00:54:22,971
an American airplane
dropped one bomb on Hiroshima.

931
00:54:23,013 --> 00:54:28,893
That bomb has more power
than 20,000 tons of TNT.

932
00:54:31,563 --> 00:54:34,274
It is an atomic bomb.

933
00:54:34,315 --> 00:54:37,986
It is a harnessing of
the basic power of the universe.

934
00:54:45,994 --> 00:54:49,039
We have spent
more than two billion dollars

935
00:54:49,080 --> 00:54:52,917
on the greatest
scientific gamble in history,

936
00:54:52,959 --> 00:54:54,336
and we have won.

937
00:55:06,848 --> 00:55:08,516
Japan could read its doom.

938
00:55:08,558 --> 00:55:11,144
This was more than
a routine bombing.

939
00:55:11,186 --> 00:55:14,147
It was the funeral pyre
of an aggressor nation.

940
00:55:41,800 --> 00:55:44,761
I remember every second.

941
00:55:47,347 --> 00:55:49,557
I've never been so helpless.

942
00:55:54,854 --> 00:55:56,856
I was under the debris

943
00:55:56,898 --> 00:56:01,695
and somehow had to crawl
to the light and come out.

944
00:56:06,908 --> 00:56:09,619
I had to go looking
for my mother.

945
00:56:22,090 --> 00:56:26,553
Seeing these miserable
dying people,

946
00:56:26,594 --> 00:56:29,889
you didn't want her
to be one of them.

947
00:56:31,933 --> 00:56:34,644
Didn't hear
one single thing about

948
00:56:34,686 --> 00:56:40,525
cousin, my mother
or my best friend.

949
00:56:47,657 --> 00:56:51,244
I would have really loved
to have died with them,

950
00:56:51,286 --> 00:56:55,415
because life after that
was so very challenging

951
00:56:55,457 --> 00:56:56,958
and so very difficult,

952
00:56:57,000 --> 00:57:00,170
physically
and especially mentally.

953
00:57:10,221 --> 00:57:14,559
A few years after
the end of the war,

954
00:57:14,601 --> 00:57:19,064
I saw the raw footage
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

955
00:57:24,861 --> 00:57:26,321
And there's no sound.

956
00:57:26,363 --> 00:57:30,158
It's just footage of people
with their skin

957
00:57:30,200 --> 00:57:33,703
and flower reverse patterns
of the kimonos

958
00:57:33,745 --> 00:57:35,705
burned into their skin

959
00:57:35,747 --> 00:57:39,250
and bodies floating
in the river.

960
00:57:39,292 --> 00:57:41,878
It was so shocking.

961
00:57:44,172 --> 00:57:47,634
And I thought, "They're all
my friends' fathers.

962
00:57:47,676 --> 00:57:51,137
Did they know
what they were doing?"

963
00:57:51,179 --> 00:57:53,848
None of it seemed
to make any sense to me

964
00:57:53,890 --> 00:57:55,642
that this was so horrible.

965
00:58:00,647 --> 00:58:02,816
As reports of that devastation

966
00:58:02,857 --> 00:58:04,901
started to come back
to Los Alamos,

967
00:58:04,943 --> 00:58:08,780
obviously this weighed
on the scientists.

968
00:58:10,365 --> 00:58:12,784
Yes, it had been a horrible war,

969
00:58:12,826 --> 00:58:14,828
but still,
tens of thousands of people

970
00:58:14,869 --> 00:58:17,038
were killed in these attacks.

971
00:58:17,831 --> 00:58:19,833
Cities were destroyed.

972
00:58:24,212 --> 00:58:29,384
And that was difficult
on a lot of the scientists.

973
00:58:29,426 --> 00:58:32,303
And I certainly think that
it was difficult on Oppenheimer

974
00:58:32,345 --> 00:58:34,889
for the rest of his life.

975
00:58:36,516 --> 00:58:40,937
Hiroshima was far more costly

976
00:58:40,979 --> 00:58:44,941
in life and suffering
and inhumane

977
00:58:44,983 --> 00:58:47,068
than it needed to have been.

978
00:58:48,695 --> 00:58:51,656
This is easy to say
after the fact.

979
00:58:58,121 --> 00:59:01,499
Oppenheimer never
apologized in any way for

980
00:59:01,541 --> 00:59:03,043
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

981
00:59:03,084 --> 00:59:06,379
He was very, very careful
and complicated

982
00:59:06,421 --> 00:59:08,381
in all statements he made about

983
00:59:08,423 --> 00:59:12,719
the moral implications of the
bomb and his involvement in it.

984
00:59:12,761 --> 00:59:15,722
And yet,
post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

985
00:59:15,764 --> 00:59:18,058
all of his actions
are the actions of

986
00:59:18,099 --> 00:59:21,519
somebody who is plagued
with guilt.

987
00:59:22,937 --> 00:59:25,398
We are gathered here,

988
00:59:25,440 --> 00:59:29,986
representatives of
the major warring powers,

989
00:59:30,028 --> 00:59:32,906
to conclude a solemn agreement

990
00:59:32,947 --> 00:59:36,242
whereby peace may be restored.

991
00:59:40,288 --> 00:59:42,665
I have received this afternoon

992
00:59:42,707 --> 00:59:45,335
a message from
the Japanese government.

993
00:59:46,753 --> 00:59:49,214
I deem this reply
a full acceptance

994
00:59:49,255 --> 00:59:52,467
of the unconditional surrender
of Japan.

995
00:59:53,426 --> 00:59:56,221
And of course,
a great many people felt

996
00:59:56,262 --> 00:59:59,391
that the atomic bomb
had ended World War II.

997
01:00:00,684 --> 01:00:02,644
Perhaps it had.

998
01:00:04,521 --> 01:00:07,941
And Robert Oppenheimer
was the guy who made it happen.

999
01:00:08,900 --> 01:00:11,444
He was in demand everywhere.

1000
01:00:11,486 --> 01:00:14,030
He was the cover story
forTime magazine,

1001
01:00:14,072 --> 01:00:15,949
once for Life magazine.

1002
01:00:15,990 --> 01:00:17,992
There scarcely was
a magazine cover

1003
01:00:18,034 --> 01:00:19,953
that he wasn't on.

1004
01:00:19,994 --> 01:00:22,914
The inaugural issue
ofPhysics Today simply showed

1005
01:00:22,956 --> 01:00:26,376
a porkpie hat
on a cyclotron control.

1006
01:00:26,418 --> 01:00:29,462
And everybody knew
the porkpie hat was Oppenheimer.

1007
01:00:31,715 --> 01:00:33,425
He becomes a rock star.

1008
01:00:33,466 --> 01:00:36,886
He is the oracle
of American science.

1009
01:00:36,928 --> 01:00:40,557
And he liked that.

1010
01:00:41,766 --> 01:00:46,146
He probably felt that
he'd finally come through it all

1011
01:00:46,187 --> 01:00:50,442
and he was no longer
the outsider.

1012
01:00:52,068 --> 01:00:55,071
Now he was not only
at the center of things

1013
01:00:55,113 --> 01:00:57,323
but that he stood
at the very top.

1014
01:01:00,702 --> 01:01:06,332
And that, I think,
was intoxicating for him.

1015
01:01:09,210 --> 01:01:13,089
But at the same time,
he felt a real responsibility

1016
01:01:13,131 --> 01:01:15,717
for having ushered this weapon
into the world.

1017
01:01:19,137 --> 01:01:21,097
Go ahead, please.

1018
01:01:22,849 --> 01:01:26,186
Automatic control has got it.

1019
01:01:26,227 --> 01:01:29,189
This time, Rab,
the stakes are kind of high.

1020
01:01:29,230 --> 01:01:31,983
It's going
to work all right, Robert.

1021
01:01:32,025 --> 01:01:33,818
I think he felt,

1022
01:01:33,860 --> 01:01:36,321
as the father of
the atomic bomb, it was his duty

1023
01:01:36,363 --> 01:01:39,199
to keep the reins
on the atomic bomb.

1024
01:01:39,240 --> 01:01:40,658
Go ahead, please.

1025
01:01:40,700 --> 01:01:42,577
Well, we'll know in 40 seconds.

1026
01:01:42,619 --> 01:01:44,621
Stay where you are.

1027
01:01:44,662 --> 01:01:46,122
Cut.

1028
01:01:47,248 --> 01:01:50,418
Within three months
of Hiroshima,

1029
01:01:50,460 --> 01:01:52,087
he was giving speeches,

1030
01:01:52,128 --> 01:01:56,716
talking about how this weapon
was a weapon for aggressors,

1031
01:01:56,758 --> 01:02:00,220
that it is a weapon of terror.

1032
01:02:00,261 --> 01:02:03,765
You know, this is the father
of the atomic bomb speaking.

1033
01:02:06,935 --> 01:02:09,771
If there is another world war...

1034
01:02:11,856 --> 01:02:13,858
...this civilization

1035
01:02:13,900 --> 01:02:16,194
may go under.

1036
01:02:21,783 --> 01:02:26,037
We need to ask ourselves

1037
01:02:26,079 --> 01:02:30,333
whether we're doing
all we can to avert that.

1038
01:02:31,292 --> 01:02:32,836
I might like to read

1039
01:02:32,877 --> 01:02:35,296
what my grandfather said
about it.

1040
01:02:35,338 --> 01:02:37,924
This is a speech where he said,

1041
01:02:37,966 --> 01:02:39,634
"But when you come
right down to it,

1042
01:02:39,676 --> 01:02:41,011
"the reason that we did this job

1043
01:02:41,052 --> 01:02:43,471
"is because it was
an organic necessity.

1044
01:02:44,431 --> 01:02:48,059
"If you are a scientist,
you cannot stop such a thing.

1045
01:02:48,101 --> 01:02:49,686
"If you are a scientist,
you believe

1046
01:02:49,728 --> 01:02:51,414
"that it's good to find out
how the world works,

1047
01:02:51,438 --> 01:02:53,982
"that it's good to find out
what realities are,

1048
01:02:54,024 --> 01:02:57,235
"that it's good
to turn over to mankind

1049
01:02:57,277 --> 01:02:59,612
"the greatest possible power
to control the world

1050
01:02:59,654 --> 01:03:04,117
and deal with it according
to its lights and values."

1051
01:03:04,159 --> 01:03:07,370
He didn't regret his role
and work during the war,

1052
01:03:07,412 --> 01:03:12,125
but he soon after turns
so strongly towards managing

1053
01:03:12,167 --> 01:03:15,003
the outcome of the science
they created.

1054
01:03:17,297 --> 01:03:19,132
He decides he doesn't want

1055
01:03:19,174 --> 01:03:21,551
to work any longer
on building more bombs.

1056
01:03:21,593 --> 01:03:24,679
He resigns from Los Alamos,
and he accepts a position

1057
01:03:24,721 --> 01:03:28,808
as director of the Institute for
Advanced Studies in Princeton,

1058
01:03:28,850 --> 01:03:32,729
where he becomes
Einstein's boss, so to speak.

1059
01:03:32,771 --> 01:03:35,690
He's probably the most famous
scientist in America,

1060
01:03:35,732 --> 01:03:39,819
and he's trying to use
that celebrity status

1061
01:03:39,861 --> 01:03:42,197
to have influence.

1062
01:03:43,406 --> 01:03:47,952
He gets an appointment with
Harry Truman in the Oval Office.

1063
01:03:47,994 --> 01:03:50,038
Oppenheimer's agenda
is to persuade

1064
01:03:50,080 --> 01:03:55,210
Harry Truman of the importance
of controlling this technology.

1065
01:03:56,419 --> 01:03:59,631
And he starts
to make this pitch.

1066
01:03:59,673 --> 01:04:02,842
And Truman interrupts him
with a question, saying,

1067
01:04:02,884 --> 01:04:05,679
"Well, Dr. Oppenheimer,
when do you think the Russians

1068
01:04:05,720 --> 01:04:08,723
are going to get this weapon
of mass destruction?"

1069
01:04:09,724 --> 01:04:14,020
And Oppenheimer is sort of
taken aback by the question

1070
01:04:14,062 --> 01:04:20,026
and says, "Well, I'm not sure
but sometime in the future."

1071
01:04:20,068 --> 01:04:24,614
And Truman interrupts again
and says, "Well, I know. Never."

1072
01:04:27,242 --> 01:04:29,452
At that point, Oppie understands

1073
01:04:29,494 --> 01:04:31,955
that Harry Truman
doesn't understand anything

1074
01:04:31,996 --> 01:04:35,583
about the physics
of this weapon.

1075
01:04:35,625 --> 01:04:41,297
And Oppenheimer, at that point,
says exactly the wrong thing.

1076
01:04:41,339 --> 01:04:44,384
He really offended
President Truman

1077
01:04:44,426 --> 01:04:48,555
by saying, "Mr. President,
I have blood on my hands."

1078
01:04:51,683 --> 01:04:53,476
This is exactly the wrong thing

1079
01:04:53,518 --> 01:04:55,478
to say to the guy
who made the decision

1080
01:04:55,520 --> 01:05:00,859
to drop two such bombs
on two Japanese cities.

1081
01:05:00,900 --> 01:05:03,445
He was trying to impress Truman.

1082
01:05:03,486 --> 01:05:06,114
He thought it was something
that Truman would like to hear,

1083
01:05:06,156 --> 01:05:08,408
and he got that wrong a lot.

1084
01:05:08,450 --> 01:05:10,744
I mean, Oppenheimer was very
charming to a lot of people,

1085
01:05:10,785 --> 01:05:12,787
but he was often not charming

1086
01:05:12,829 --> 01:05:16,082
to leaders and people
who had power over him.

1087
01:05:16,124 --> 01:05:17,751
Truman didn't believe

1088
01:05:17,792 --> 01:05:20,837
that anybody's responsibility
was greater than his.

1089
01:05:20,879 --> 01:05:24,215
Truman was just,
"Get that guy out of my office.

1090
01:05:24,257 --> 01:05:26,301
I was the one
who made the decision."

1091
01:05:27,594 --> 01:05:29,804
He ends the meeting
very abruptly

1092
01:05:29,846 --> 01:05:31,556
and later tells his aides that,

1093
01:05:31,598 --> 01:05:35,477
"I don't want to see that
crybaby scientist ever again."

1094
01:05:37,771 --> 01:05:42,442
I think the only hope
for our future safety

1095
01:05:42,484 --> 01:05:44,527
must lie in a collaboration,

1096
01:05:44,569 --> 01:05:47,238
based on confidence
and good faith,

1097
01:05:47,280 --> 01:05:48,907
with the other peoples
of the world.

1098
01:05:48,948 --> 01:05:52,952
Oppenheimer,
very early after the bombings,

1099
01:05:52,994 --> 01:05:55,080
was a part of the team
to recommend

1100
01:05:55,121 --> 01:05:56,581
international disarmament.

1101
01:05:57,665 --> 01:06:00,210
But the genie was
out of the bottle.

1102
01:06:00,251 --> 01:06:02,045
Right? Those who possess this

1103
01:06:02,087 --> 01:06:04,297
will be able to shape
the world order.

1104
01:06:04,339 --> 01:06:08,218
And very quickly,
the Soviet Union took note.

1105
01:06:11,388 --> 01:06:15,225
The Soviets
tested a bomb in 1949

1106
01:06:15,266 --> 01:06:17,686
to the shock of almost everyone.

1107
01:06:19,187 --> 01:06:20,897
President
Truman's dramatic announcement

1108
01:06:20,939 --> 01:06:24,734
that Russia has created
an atomic explosion

1109
01:06:24,776 --> 01:06:26,653
sends reporters racing
for Flushing Meadow,

1110
01:06:26,695 --> 01:06:29,948
where Russia's Vyshinsky arrives
to address the United Nations...

1111
01:06:29,989 --> 01:06:32,992
This puts the U.S. in
a really complicated position,

1112
01:06:33,034 --> 01:06:37,789
because it's no longer the only
country with nuclear weapons.

1113
01:06:39,708 --> 01:06:41,543
Suddenly,
you have the possibility

1114
01:06:41,584 --> 01:06:45,171
that if war with nuclear weapons
broke out between two states

1115
01:06:45,213 --> 01:06:47,924
that had a fair number of them,

1116
01:06:47,966 --> 01:06:51,011
they could, in a matter
of hours, destroy themselves.

1117
01:06:52,721 --> 01:06:54,139
We must all get ready now,

1118
01:06:54,180 --> 01:06:56,349
so we know how to save ourselves

1119
01:06:56,391 --> 01:06:59,102
if the atomic bomb
ever explodes near us.

1120
01:07:00,520 --> 01:07:02,397
And one of the possible options

1121
01:07:02,439 --> 01:07:05,567
scientists and policy people
lobbied for

1122
01:07:05,608 --> 01:07:09,654
was to build the hydrogen bomb
as the sort of next step.

1123
01:07:12,782 --> 01:07:14,701
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs

1124
01:07:14,743 --> 01:07:18,747
were on the order of
15 kilotons of TNT,

1125
01:07:18,788 --> 01:07:21,249
which is no small number
in and of itself.

1126
01:07:23,335 --> 01:07:26,713
When you start talking about
hydrogen bombs,

1127
01:07:26,755 --> 01:07:29,382
now we're talking about
megatons.

1128
01:07:29,424 --> 01:07:33,511
We're talking about
a million tons of TNT.

1129
01:07:34,554 --> 01:07:36,514
They're categorically different.

1130
01:07:36,556 --> 01:07:38,767
A thousand times stronger than
anything you'd see

1131
01:07:38,808 --> 01:07:41,519
in a Hiroshima
and Nagasaki bomb.

1132
01:07:42,604 --> 01:07:45,398
With one
very large hydrogen bomb,

1133
01:07:45,440 --> 01:07:46,900
you can kill
about as many people

1134
01:07:46,941 --> 01:07:49,736
as all of the people killed
in World War II.

1135
01:07:50,737 --> 01:07:54,532
And Oppenheimer could not see
any use for that.

1136
01:07:54,574 --> 01:07:57,869
He called it a genocidal weapon.

1137
01:07:59,954 --> 01:08:03,917
At the end of the
war, most people wanted to stop.

1138
01:08:03,958 --> 01:08:06,378
I did not.

1139
01:08:06,419 --> 01:08:08,213
Among the people who knew

1140
01:08:08,254 --> 01:08:11,091
a great deal about
the hydrogen bomb,

1141
01:08:11,132 --> 01:08:13,802
I was the only advocate of it.

1142
01:08:15,095 --> 01:08:18,014
Edward Teller
was a Hungarian Jew

1143
01:08:18,056 --> 01:08:22,977
who escaped from Hungary
and came to the United States.

1144
01:08:23,019 --> 01:08:26,773
During World War II,
Teller worked at Los Alamos,

1145
01:08:26,815 --> 01:08:30,443
but he became obsessed with
the idea of the hydrogen bomb,

1146
01:08:30,485 --> 01:08:33,863
even before they had
the atomic bomb.

1147
01:08:33,905 --> 01:08:36,282
Teller did very much
consider the atomic bomb

1148
01:08:36,324 --> 01:08:38,702
to be Oppenheimer's creation,

1149
01:08:38,743 --> 01:08:41,246
and he wanted something
that was bigger and better.

1150
01:08:42,497 --> 01:08:45,542
And Oppenheimer said to Teller,

1151
01:08:45,583 --> 01:08:49,838
"Go back to doing physics,
but don't build this.

1152
01:08:49,879 --> 01:08:51,798
There's no need for it."

1153
01:08:51,840 --> 01:08:54,718
Oppenheimer was
in charge of a committee

1154
01:08:54,759 --> 01:08:57,804
that had been put together
in Washington to decide:

1155
01:08:57,846 --> 01:08:59,014
What should we do?

1156
01:08:59,055 --> 01:09:02,851
Should we build a hydrogen bomb?

1157
01:09:02,892 --> 01:09:04,352
That is a question

1158
01:09:04,394 --> 01:09:07,605
in everybody's mind,
Dr. Oppenheimer.

1159
01:09:07,647 --> 01:09:13,194
Are we creating something
we may not be able to control?

1160
01:09:13,236 --> 01:09:16,322
The decision to try to make

1161
01:09:16,364 --> 01:09:19,492
or not to make the hydrogen bomb

1162
01:09:19,534 --> 01:09:21,995
touch the very basis
of our morality.

1163
01:09:22,037 --> 01:09:24,873
And the committee decision
was basically,

1164
01:09:24,914 --> 01:09:27,125
no, we shouldn't build
the hydrogen bomb.

1165
01:09:27,167 --> 01:09:30,837
If we are guided by fear alone,

1166
01:09:30,879 --> 01:09:34,507
we'll fail
in this time of crisis.

1167
01:09:34,549 --> 01:09:39,804
The answer to fear
sometimes lies in courage.

1168
01:09:40,889 --> 01:09:43,058
Oppenheimer's
opposition of the H-bomb

1169
01:09:43,099 --> 01:09:46,644
was taken very hard by people
who were in favor for it.

1170
01:09:48,605 --> 01:09:51,232
The Air Force wanted
more and more bombs

1171
01:09:51,274 --> 01:09:53,485
and bigger and bigger bombs.

1172
01:09:53,526 --> 01:09:55,695
The bigger the bomb,
in terms of its yield,

1173
01:09:55,737 --> 01:09:58,406
the more damage
one plane could do.

1174
01:09:59,199 --> 01:10:01,076
The Strategic
Air Command was focused upon

1175
01:10:01,117 --> 01:10:03,244
blowing up the Soviet Union.

1176
01:10:04,079 --> 01:10:07,374
Oppenheimer said a smarter move
would be to put resources

1177
01:10:07,415 --> 01:10:09,751
into intercepting
Soviet bombers.

1178
01:10:10,835 --> 01:10:13,046
He was going
just the opposite direction

1179
01:10:13,088 --> 01:10:14,714
from what the Air Force wanted.

1180
01:10:14,756 --> 01:10:17,592
They wanted him out.
They wanted to get rid of him.

1181
01:10:20,428 --> 01:10:24,599
By 1953, Oppenheimer
has made sufficient enemies

1182
01:10:24,641 --> 01:10:27,852
in the Washington bureaucracy.

1183
01:10:27,894 --> 01:10:30,230
And then along comes
Lewis Strauss...

1184
01:10:33,024 --> 01:10:36,069
...the new chairman of
the Atomic Energy Commission.

1185
01:10:36,111 --> 01:10:38,947
I have just returned
from the Pacific Proving Ground,

1186
01:10:38,988 --> 01:10:42,784
where I have witnessed a test
of thermonuclear weapons.

1187
01:10:42,826 --> 01:10:45,495
And Strauss knows Oppenheimer

1188
01:10:45,537 --> 01:10:48,081
and has grown
to intensely dislike him.

1189
01:10:48,123 --> 01:10:51,501
Oppenheimer had been
snappish with him once,

1190
01:10:51,543 --> 01:10:54,379
and it had deeply offended him.

1191
01:10:54,421 --> 01:10:58,717
So Strauss begins to plot

1192
01:10:58,758 --> 01:11:02,053
a means to defrock Oppenheimer.

1193
01:11:03,263 --> 01:11:05,265
And how does he do it?

1194
01:11:05,306 --> 01:11:11,104
Lewis Strauss focuses on
Oppenheimer's association

1195
01:11:11,146 --> 01:11:13,732
with left-wing friends

1196
01:11:13,773 --> 01:11:17,402
during the 1930s in Berkeley.

1197
01:11:17,444 --> 01:11:19,404
"Communism."

1198
01:11:19,446 --> 01:11:21,114
Who are the apostles of a system

1199
01:11:21,156 --> 01:11:24,701
that attempts to destroy
the American way of life?

1200
01:11:25,827 --> 01:11:30,165
During the Second World War,
the Soviet Union was our ally.

1201
01:11:30,206 --> 01:11:33,043
And that sense of
being a communist

1202
01:11:33,084 --> 01:11:36,254
or associating with communists
was not something

1203
01:11:36,296 --> 01:11:39,299
that was considered that bad.

1204
01:11:39,341 --> 01:11:42,635
It wasn't until the Cold War

1205
01:11:42,677 --> 01:11:45,889
that all of a sudden,
in retrospect,

1206
01:11:45,930 --> 01:11:50,310
anyone with any kind of legacy
of a communist past

1207
01:11:50,352 --> 01:11:52,604
is now a security threat.

1208
01:11:52,645 --> 01:11:55,565
If there were no communists
in our government,

1209
01:11:55,607 --> 01:11:59,652
why did we delay, for 18 months,

1210
01:11:59,694 --> 01:12:02,197
delay our research
on the hydrogen bomb?

1211
01:12:02,989 --> 01:12:05,700
It was from attitudes like that

1212
01:12:05,742 --> 01:12:08,620
that finally led to
the government deciding

1213
01:12:08,661 --> 01:12:11,873
they had to pull Oppenheimer's
security clearance.

1214
01:12:13,833 --> 01:12:15,377
He would have to give up

1215
01:12:15,418 --> 01:12:20,131
his security clearance
in 30 days or ask for a hearing.

1216
01:12:23,176 --> 01:12:25,679
He felt he couldn't give up
his security clearance.

1217
01:12:25,720 --> 01:12:27,013
He couldn't agree with them

1218
01:12:27,055 --> 01:12:29,015
that he wasn't fit
to serve his government.

1219
01:12:30,350 --> 01:12:32,602
He should have told them
to get lost.

1220
01:12:33,395 --> 01:12:36,690
He should have said,
"I am the atomic bomb.

1221
01:12:37,482 --> 01:12:39,901
"I won World War II.

1222
01:12:39,943 --> 01:12:41,319
Fuck off."

1223
01:12:42,237 --> 01:12:45,031
For whatever reason,
he didn't tell them to get lost.

1224
01:12:45,073 --> 01:12:46,658
He decided to fight it.

1225
01:12:48,201 --> 01:12:50,578
And before
he goes down to Washington,

1226
01:12:50,620 --> 01:12:52,372
he meets with Einstein

1227
01:12:52,414 --> 01:12:56,751
to tell him he's gonna be
absent for a few weeks,

1228
01:12:56,793 --> 01:13:01,131
and Einstein's reaction
is quite startling.

1229
01:13:02,757 --> 01:13:07,971
Albert says, "But, Robert,
you are Mr. Atomic.

1230
01:13:08,013 --> 01:13:09,931
"You don't need them.
They need you.

1231
01:13:09,973 --> 01:13:12,934
Just walk away.
Why should you go through this?"

1232
01:13:13,893 --> 01:13:18,606
And Oppenheimer shakes his head
and apparently says to Albert,

1233
01:13:18,648 --> 01:13:21,526
"Well, you don't understand."

1234
01:13:21,568 --> 01:13:23,820
And he walks away,

1235
01:13:23,862 --> 01:13:26,448
and Einstein turns
to his secretary and says,

1236
01:13:26,489 --> 01:13:29,492
"There goes a nar."

1237
01:13:29,534 --> 01:13:31,828
The Yiddish for a fool.

1238
01:13:36,833 --> 01:13:38,501
World attention
was focused this week

1239
01:13:38,543 --> 01:13:41,254
on the Atomic Energy Commission
building in Washington,

1240
01:13:41,296 --> 01:13:43,798
where a three-man board
began special hearings

1241
01:13:43,840 --> 01:13:46,968
on the security file
of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,

1242
01:13:47,010 --> 01:13:50,096
the nuclear scientist
who developed the first A-bomb.

1243
01:13:50,972 --> 01:13:55,185
The security hearing starts,
and it quickly becomes clear

1244
01:13:55,226 --> 01:13:57,145
that this is not just
a security hearing.

1245
01:13:57,187 --> 01:13:58,480
This is a trial.

1246
01:13:58,521 --> 01:14:00,273
There's a new charge

1247
01:14:00,315 --> 01:14:02,942
that the scientist opposed
the development of the H-bomb.

1248
01:14:02,984 --> 01:14:06,071
The deck is stacked
against him, and it's ugly.

1249
01:14:06,112 --> 01:14:08,073
They're wiretapping
his conversations

1250
01:14:08,114 --> 01:14:10,867
with his lawyer illegally
and giving it to the prosecution

1251
01:14:10,909 --> 01:14:13,370
so that they know
exactly what's gonna happen.

1252
01:14:13,411 --> 01:14:16,122
They are able to look
at classified FBI files.

1253
01:14:16,164 --> 01:14:17,999
He is not because
he doesn't have a clearance,

1254
01:14:18,041 --> 01:14:21,211
and he can't look at
his own FBI file as a result.

1255
01:14:22,504 --> 01:14:27,300
Oppenheimer's
involvement with Jean Tatlock,

1256
01:14:27,342 --> 01:14:30,387
the question of whether
his brother had been a communist

1257
01:14:30,428 --> 01:14:32,889
and still was,

1258
01:14:32,931 --> 01:14:36,643
those were the things
they pulled out of the files.

1259
01:14:39,312 --> 01:14:41,773
One of the most damning
pieces of evidence

1260
01:14:41,815 --> 01:14:44,359
that was brought out was

1261
01:14:44,401 --> 01:14:47,737
the fact that, during the war,
there had been a conversation

1262
01:14:47,779 --> 01:14:50,824
at his home in Berkeley
with Haakon Chevalier,

1263
01:14:50,865 --> 01:14:53,952
his old friend,
who had mentioned to him

1264
01:14:53,993 --> 01:14:56,287
that there was a way perhaps
that he could

1265
01:14:56,329 --> 01:14:59,624
leak information about the
atomic project he was working on

1266
01:14:59,666 --> 01:15:01,209
to Soviet officials.

1267
01:15:01,251 --> 01:15:03,920
Now, Oppenheimer had
dismissed it at the time,

1268
01:15:03,962 --> 01:15:07,173
but he had not
reported the incident.

1269
01:15:07,215 --> 01:15:10,051
He knew he was already on
thin ice with security people,

1270
01:15:10,093 --> 01:15:13,263
that he was suspected
because of his communist ties.

1271
01:15:13,304 --> 01:15:18,018
So he was trying to keep himself
out of hot water.

1272
01:15:18,059 --> 01:15:20,979
The problem was that,
in subsequent conversations

1273
01:15:21,021 --> 01:15:26,860
with Los Alamos security people,
he had told very evasive, vague

1274
01:15:26,901 --> 01:15:30,697
accounts of this conversation,
one after another.

1275
01:15:31,906 --> 01:15:34,075
And when they confronted
Oppenheimer

1276
01:15:34,117 --> 01:15:37,370
with these evasive versions,
they asked him,

1277
01:15:37,412 --> 01:15:38,872
"Why did you do this?

1278
01:15:38,913 --> 01:15:41,916
Why wouldn't
you have been forthright?"

1279
01:15:41,958 --> 01:15:44,252
He said, "I was an idiot."

1280
01:15:44,294 --> 01:15:48,757
And in a sense,
he sealed his own fate then.

1281
01:15:51,217 --> 01:15:53,762
He fell apart.

1282
01:15:53,803 --> 01:15:57,265
He tried to testify,
but he really fell apart.

1283
01:15:59,017 --> 01:16:02,812
He's having almost
another nervous breakdown,

1284
01:16:02,854 --> 01:16:05,357
like what he went through
as a young man.

1285
01:16:05,398 --> 01:16:10,737
He's oddly stoic,
like he was in the icehouse

1286
01:16:10,779 --> 01:16:13,615
when he was a young boy
being tormented

1287
01:16:13,656 --> 01:16:16,159
by his fellow summer campers.

1288
01:16:18,536 --> 01:16:22,957
He's resigned and
not really defending himself.

1289
01:16:24,334 --> 01:16:28,672
One person who sort of put the
nails in his coffin, of course,

1290
01:16:28,713 --> 01:16:30,840
was Edward Teller.

1291
01:16:33,176 --> 01:16:35,512
Teller testified
against Oppenheimer.

1292
01:16:35,553 --> 01:16:38,807
He said that he thought
he would feel better

1293
01:16:38,848 --> 01:16:40,392
if the security of the country

1294
01:16:40,433 --> 01:16:44,104
were in other hands
than Oppenheimer's.

1295
01:16:44,145 --> 01:16:48,358
And one of the scientists who
was close to Oppenheimer said

1296
01:16:48,400 --> 01:16:51,695
it was a matter of not only
stabbing Oppenheimer in the back

1297
01:16:51,736 --> 01:16:53,822
but twisting the blade.

1298
01:16:55,573 --> 01:16:56,991
As he was leaving,

1299
01:16:57,033 --> 01:16:58,743
he went up to shake
Oppenheimer's hand

1300
01:16:58,785 --> 01:17:01,162
and said, "I'm sorry."

1301
01:17:02,497 --> 01:17:06,793
And Oppenheimer looked him
in the eye and said,

1302
01:17:06,835 --> 01:17:09,546
"Edward,
after what you just said,

1303
01:17:09,587 --> 01:17:12,340
I don't know what that means."

1304
01:17:13,675 --> 01:17:17,220
He was obviously
a very, very brilliant man,

1305
01:17:17,262 --> 01:17:20,849
but I think
he may have underestimated

1306
01:17:20,890 --> 01:17:24,561
the power of the establishment,
the machine,

1307
01:17:24,602 --> 01:17:26,646
and the inability
of one individual

1308
01:17:26,688 --> 01:17:29,065
to stand against that.

1309
01:17:29,858 --> 01:17:33,194
The result was to be expected.

1310
01:17:36,031 --> 01:17:38,033
Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,

1311
01:17:38,074 --> 01:17:40,160
the famous scientist
whose suspension this week

1312
01:17:40,201 --> 01:17:43,705
by the Atomic Energy Commission
surprised the nation.

1313
01:17:43,747 --> 01:17:48,043
They voted to strip Oppenheimer
of his security clearance.

1314
01:17:51,338 --> 01:17:55,258
This was front-page news in the
newspapers across the country.

1315
01:17:56,885 --> 01:17:59,137
That he had recommended
communists

1316
01:17:59,179 --> 01:18:01,181
who are working
the A-bomb, H-bomb plans.

1317
01:18:01,222 --> 01:18:04,184
His wife, uh,
admittedly was, uh,

1318
01:18:04,225 --> 01:18:07,020
an official of
the Communist Party,

1319
01:18:07,062 --> 01:18:09,230
uh, brother
a very active communist.

1320
01:18:10,523 --> 01:18:14,110
He became a political pariah.

1321
01:18:14,152 --> 01:18:15,862
And that sent a chill

1322
01:18:15,904 --> 01:18:19,240
through
the scientific community.

1323
01:18:19,282 --> 01:18:22,285
If they could take down
the most famous atomic scientist

1324
01:18:22,327 --> 01:18:26,206
on the planet Earth,
then we're all vulnerable.

1325
01:18:27,749 --> 01:18:31,044
It sent
a really nefarious message

1326
01:18:31,086 --> 01:18:32,962
to all working scientists

1327
01:18:33,004 --> 01:18:38,385
to beware of weighing in
on political issues.

1328
01:18:40,553 --> 01:18:44,766
And this is a terrible thing
because we need their expertise.

1329
01:18:44,808 --> 01:18:48,520
And yet the Oppenheimer trial

1330
01:18:48,561 --> 01:18:51,064
made that difficult.

1331
01:18:57,320 --> 01:18:58,905
After the security trial,

1332
01:18:58,947 --> 01:19:01,866
Oppenheimer was never
the same guy again.

1333
01:19:02,992 --> 01:19:06,121
He was kind of
a hollow man after that.

1334
01:19:07,288 --> 01:19:09,165
What we say inside the family is

1335
01:19:09,207 --> 01:19:11,459
it hurt his feelings.

1336
01:19:15,171 --> 01:19:18,925
He didn't like it,
but he didn't talk about it.

1337
01:19:18,967 --> 01:19:21,553
He never made one statement
about it publicly.

1338
01:19:24,139 --> 01:19:26,641
He never asked for an apology,

1339
01:19:26,683 --> 01:19:29,811
and he retreated back into
where he came from.

1340
01:19:31,146 --> 01:19:33,606
He still kept his job
at Princeton,

1341
01:19:33,648 --> 01:19:37,360
but he wasn't doing
any more physics.

1342
01:19:37,402 --> 01:19:39,738
These were kind of sad years.

1343
01:19:39,779 --> 01:19:42,198
And Professor Einstein
is still here, too, isn't he?

1344
01:19:42,240 --> 01:19:46,828
Oh, yeah. Indeed he is.
Uh, indeed he is. Uh...

1345
01:19:46,870 --> 01:19:49,330
Does he ever call you up
on the telephone?

1346
01:19:49,372 --> 01:19:50,248
Hmm, sometimes.

1347
01:19:50,290 --> 01:19:52,292
I think he... he calls me,

1348
01:19:52,334 --> 01:19:54,210
uh, when he reads
in the newspapers

1349
01:19:54,252 --> 01:19:56,087
something about me
that he doesn't like,

1350
01:19:56,129 --> 01:19:58,131
and he calls me up and-and says,

1351
01:19:58,173 --> 01:20:00,175
"That's all right.
That's just right."

1352
01:20:00,216 --> 01:20:04,095
He had lost his fighting spirit.

1353
01:20:04,137 --> 01:20:08,475
He would have nothing
to do with commenting

1354
01:20:08,516 --> 01:20:13,480
on any of the issues of the day
related to nuclear weapons.

1355
01:20:13,521 --> 01:20:16,441
Dr. Oppenheimer, could you
tell us what your thoughts are

1356
01:20:16,483 --> 01:20:20,028
about what our atomic policy
should be?

1357
01:20:20,070 --> 01:20:22,322
No, I-I can't do that.

1358
01:20:22,364 --> 01:20:26,534
I'm not... not close enough
to the facts,

1359
01:20:26,576 --> 01:20:28,161
and I'm not close enough

1360
01:20:28,203 --> 01:20:32,874
to the thoughts of those
who are worrying about it.

1361
01:20:34,459 --> 01:20:37,712
Hans Bethe told me once that,

1362
01:20:37,754 --> 01:20:40,173
"Oppenheimer was smarter than
any of the rest of us."

1363
01:20:40,215 --> 01:20:43,468
He didn't win a Nobel Prize.

1364
01:20:43,510 --> 01:20:46,304
How could this man,
who evidently outshone

1365
01:20:46,346 --> 01:20:48,890
some of the greatest physicists
of the 20th century,

1366
01:20:48,932 --> 01:20:54,020
not have been more successful
in his line of work... physics...

1367
01:20:54,062 --> 01:20:55,814
than he was?

1368
01:20:55,855 --> 01:20:57,565
You can't talk about Oppenheimer

1369
01:20:57,607 --> 01:21:00,360
when you're not
talking about his science.

1370
01:21:00,402 --> 01:21:02,028
That was the part of his life.

1371
01:21:02,070 --> 01:21:03,738
When he talks about
what he loves,

1372
01:21:03,780 --> 01:21:07,200
it was that human thing
of passing knowledge around.

1373
01:21:07,242 --> 01:21:09,202
This is negative particles,

1374
01:21:09,244 --> 01:21:13,123
neutral, doubly charged,
positive and positive...

1375
01:21:13,164 --> 01:21:15,125
His work on black holes

1376
01:21:15,166 --> 01:21:17,293
should have earned him
a Nobel Prize.

1377
01:21:19,629 --> 01:21:24,551
In 1939, Oppenheimer
wrote the first paper

1378
01:21:24,592 --> 01:21:30,390
identifying the idea of
collapsing stars, a black hole.

1379
01:21:30,432 --> 01:21:34,352
So, black holes
was his original idea.

1380
01:21:34,394 --> 01:21:36,604
I mean, that's quite amazing.

1381
01:21:38,064 --> 01:21:39,399
And if a real black hole

1382
01:21:39,441 --> 01:21:42,027
had been identified
before he died...

1383
01:21:43,153 --> 01:21:46,990
...he probably would have won
a Nobel Prize for that work.

1384
01:21:49,242 --> 01:21:51,745
In 1966,

1385
01:21:51,786 --> 01:21:55,290
he was diagnosed
with esophageal cancer.

1386
01:21:55,331 --> 01:21:58,460
All that smoking over the years
had gotten to him.

1387
01:22:01,046 --> 01:22:04,716
And he died in early '67.

1388
01:22:07,427 --> 01:22:09,387
Oppenheimer's life story,

1389
01:22:09,429 --> 01:22:11,639
it's the story
of the 20th century.

1390
01:22:11,681 --> 01:22:15,477
It's the story of
our nuclear age

1391
01:22:15,518 --> 01:22:17,979
that we're still living with,

1392
01:22:18,021 --> 01:22:20,648
and that's a story
that is unfinished.

1393
01:22:20,690 --> 01:22:22,108
Will always be unfinished.

1394
01:22:26,571 --> 01:22:28,198
We have his bomb.

1395
01:22:28,239 --> 01:22:30,492
His bomb is with us.

1396
01:22:30,533 --> 01:22:33,328
And we can debate his membership
in the Communist Party

1397
01:22:33,370 --> 01:22:35,455
or we can debate the ethics

1398
01:22:35,497 --> 01:22:38,583
of bombing civilians
at Hiroshima until we drop,

1399
01:22:38,625 --> 01:22:41,044
but the fact is that we have
nuclear weapons.

1400
01:22:43,254 --> 01:22:45,090
That's the legacy.

1401
01:22:45,131 --> 01:22:50,053
And controlling those weapons,
it's a never-ending struggle.

1402
01:22:57,852 --> 01:23:01,564
It was so horrible
with a baby bomb.

1403
01:23:01,606 --> 01:23:05,485
Now they have so much
more lethal nuclear weapon.

1404
01:23:07,612 --> 01:23:09,364
There is much talk about

1405
01:23:09,406 --> 01:23:11,491
getting rid of atomic weapons.

1406
01:23:12,283 --> 01:23:16,204
I have a deep sympathy
with that.

1407
01:23:17,330 --> 01:23:23,420
Please, let's try
to find common ground.

1408
01:23:26,089 --> 01:23:31,302
I'm sure if Oppie was alive
today, he would agree with me.

1409
01:23:32,053 --> 01:23:33,763
...two, one.

1410
01:23:33,805 --> 01:23:37,475
But we mustn't fool ourselves.

1411
01:23:37,517 --> 01:23:39,644
The world is not
going to be the same

1412
01:23:39,686 --> 01:23:43,189
no matter what we do
with atomic bombs,

1413
01:23:43,231 --> 01:23:48,611
because the knowledge of how to
make them cannot be exorcized.

1414
01:23:53,742 --> 01:23:56,578
Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer

1415
01:23:56,619 --> 01:24:01,374
is perhaps best known as
the father of the atomic bomb.

1416
01:24:01,416 --> 01:24:03,043
As time has passed,

1417
01:24:03,084 --> 01:24:07,130
there are some new assessments
of his role in history.

1418
01:24:08,131 --> 01:24:10,300
In late 2022,
the Department of Energy

1419
01:24:10,342 --> 01:24:16,389
decided to vacate the decision
to have the security hearings.

1420
01:24:17,849 --> 01:24:20,060
The national tragedy
is that this hearing,

1421
01:24:20,101 --> 01:24:24,189
this McCarthy-era witch hunt,
materialized in the first place.

1422
01:24:24,981 --> 01:24:27,067
That type of thing
is not supposed to happen

1423
01:24:27,108 --> 01:24:28,902
in a country like this.

1424
01:24:28,943 --> 01:24:33,490
This is such an important
and long overdue step.

1425
01:24:34,741 --> 01:24:36,993
But at the same time,
it's kind of sad,

1426
01:24:37,035 --> 01:24:39,662
because this is something
that J. Robert Oppenheimer

1427
01:24:39,704 --> 01:24:42,332
will not get to experience
personally.

1428
01:24:44,417 --> 01:24:46,961
Science has profoundly altered

1429
01:24:47,003 --> 01:24:50,090
the conditions of man's life,

1430
01:24:50,131 --> 01:24:54,427
both materially and in ways
of the spirit as well.

1431
01:24:57,222 --> 01:24:59,140
I think we're still
talking about Oppenheimer

1432
01:24:59,182 --> 01:25:01,768
because he was so influential.

1433
01:25:01,810 --> 01:25:05,146
We have this respect
and fear of science.

1434
01:25:06,815 --> 01:25:10,402
And Oppenheimer represented
both sides of that, for sure.

1435
01:25:11,653 --> 01:25:15,156
Unquestionably,
he changed the world.

1436
01:25:15,198 --> 01:25:16,384
And he changed
the world forever.

1437
01:25:16,408 --> 01:25:17,951
There's no going back.

1438
01:25:18,743 --> 01:25:22,205
But we know that as long as men
are free to ask what they will,

1439
01:25:22,247 --> 01:25:26,376
free to say what they think,
free to think what they must,

1440
01:25:26,418 --> 01:25:28,962
science will never regress,

1441
01:25:29,004 --> 01:25:32,590
and freedom itself
will never be wholly lost.