To End All War: Oppenheimer & the Atomic Bomb (2023) - full transcript

-(clock ticking)
-(birds chirping)

J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER:
I have been asked whether,

in the years to come,
it will be possible

to kill 40 million
American people

by the use of atomic bombs
in a single night.

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

-* *
-(clock ticking)

JON ELSE: Robert Oppenheimer was
the father of the atomic bomb.

He was this complex ball
of contradictions.

OPPENHEIMER:
They are weapons of aggression,

of surprise and of terror.



RICHARD RHODES: Oppenheimer
wanted the bomb to be used.

How else would the world
know what it was?

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT:
Dr. Oppenheimer,

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

OPPENHEIMER: In a world of
atomic weapons, wars will cease.

(ticking)

NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
It is D-minus one for the test

of the world's first
atomic device.

ELSE:
This cultured, nonviolent man

was responsible for birthing

the most violent weapon
in human history.

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

the monster
that he had unleashed.

OPPENHEIMER:
If there is another world war...



...this civilization
may go under.

KAI BIRD:
He became a political pariah.

EDWARD R. MURROW: Is it true
that humans have already

discovered a method
of destroying humanity?

(cameras clicking)

ELSE:
And it finally ruined him.

OPPENHEIMER:
"Now I am become Death,

the destroyer of worlds."

(explosion booming)

We have made a thing that,
by all standards

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

(birds chirping)

ELLEN BRADBURY REID:
When I was 15,

I had a chance
to speak to Oppenheimer alone.

He was at a cocktail party.

I was serving hors d'oeuvres...

(faint chatter)

...and found Oppenheimer
standing alone.

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

And he was very taken aback.

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

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

And he turned around
and picked his hat up

and walked out the door.

It obviously struck him in a way

that I had never imagined.

MAN: Oppenheimer for Cronkite,
take one.

(film beeps)

WALTER CRONKITE:
Dr. Oppenheimer,

with all the inevitability
of the decision

that history demonstrates to us,

you still seem to suffer,
may I say,

from a bad conscience about it.

Is that true, sir?

Uh, I think when you play

a meaningful part
in bringing about the death

of over
a hundred thousand people...

...uh, you naturally, uh,

don't think of that with ease.

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: When you look
at the history of Oppenheimer,

it's very difficult to find
any person in history

sitting in
such a complex situation

with all kinds of
impossible questions

and very few answers.

(ticking)

ELSE:
Everybody has their own idea

of what Robert Oppenheimer is.

I mean, the fact is
that he invented a weapon

that can destroy
human life on Earth.

I mean, don't forget
that this weapon,

which has the capacity
to end civilization,

was developed as a means
to save Western civilization.

-(newsreel music playing)
-(bell clanging)

(shouting in German)

(crowd chanting in German)

BIRD: In the 1930s,
millions of Americans

were following the news
coming out of Europe

in their local theaters,
watching newsreels.

And Oppenheimer was

horrified by the rise of Hitler.

NOLAN: His sense of his own
Jewishness made him immediately

and massively aware
of the danger of fascism.

(bell tolling)

BIRD:
When the war started in 1939,

he was a professor at Berkeley.

And that same year,

one of his students
comes rushing into his office

to convey the news that
fission has been discovered.

MAN: Word has just come through
from Germany

that the uranium atom
under neutron bombardment

actually splits into two parts.

BIRD: Initially,
Oppenheimer can't believe it.

He runs to the blackboard
and does some mathematics,

and he comes
to the understanding

that you could use fission
to generate energy.

Einstein showed explicitly

that if you can convert matter
into pure energy,

the amount of energy
is extraordinary.

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

(crackling)

RHODES: They realize that from
a very small amount of matter,

you could make power
to drive ships and planes

and trains, whatever,
make electricity, of course.

And they also realize
very quickly

that it might be possible
to make

a weapon of untold destruction.

(Hitler shouting in German)

(crowd chanting)

We were deeply worried.

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

MAREENA ROBINSON SNOWDEN: Nazi
Germany could potentially build

a nuclear bomb.

This was the worry.
And it was very tangible.

It was very real.

(plane engines buzzing)

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT:
December 7, 1941,

a date which will live
in infamy.

Pearl Harbor happens.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT:
I assert

that this form of treachery

shall never again endanger us.

(cheering, applause)

ALAN CARR:
Now the United States

is an active combatant
in the war.

The idea at this point is

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

because we could
wake up tomorrow

and Hitler could have
that nuclear monopoly

that we all want to avoid.

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

and help deliver
nuclear weapons.

But even before
we pick the place though,

we need to find somebody
who can lead that installation.

And virtually nobody expected
Oppenheimer to be named

the director of
the weapons design laboratory.

He was kind of
this ethereal personality.

He had no record
of having big achievements.

One of the scientists
who knew Oppenheimer said,

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

RHODES:
Oppenheimer's friends felt

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

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

"I never did anything

"or thought anything
or knew anyone

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

(ticking)

JENNET CONANT:
Oppenheimer was born in 1904

and into an age of
great scientific possibility.

The first two decades
of the 20th century

were periods of
incredible intellectual daring.

Electricity, automobiles, flight

were all transforming
daily life.

And then you had
incredible advances in science,

and it looks like

almost anything
could be achieved.

DAVID EISENBACH:
Story of Robert Oppenheimer

is really the story
of immigrant America.

His father comes over
from Germany,

gets a job
in the garment industry

and makes a tremendous amount
of money,

winds up on the Upper West Side
on Riverside Drive.

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

HERKEN: His mother was
a Paris-trained artist

who exhibited her work at
various galleries in Manhattan.

RHODES:
She was a nervous person.

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

BIRD:
And he was very sheltered

and extremely socially awkward.

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

to the other kids
that they roughed him up.

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

and painted him green,

including his genitals.

Oddly enough,
Oppenheimer didn't protest.

He just took
his punishment stoically.

It was a very odd reaction

for a young boy at that age.

RHODES: Imagine this sensitive
boy, this very smart boy,

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

Certainly not with
children his own age.

He's had no experience.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: The real core
psychological moment

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

And he goes to study physics
at Cambridge,

and he doesn't do very well.

He ends up in a laboratory

that's really about
experimental physics,

and he is not good at that.

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

And he has this sort of
crisis of confidence.

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

what I think
can only be described

as a nervous breakdown.

One of his friends stumbled
upon him in an empty classroom

where Oppenheimer was
standing at the blackboard.

EISENBACH: Muttering to himself
over and over again,

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

BIRD: And he could never
finish the sentence.

MARTIN J. SHERWIN: And then
another one of his friends

went to his dorm room
and heard this moaning inside

and opened the door,

and there was Oppenheimer
in a fetal position,

rolling back and forth,
groaning.

He literally came close

to committing suicide
at that point.

EISENBACH: He saw a psychiatrist
as a result of this,

and the psychiatrist said

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

RHODES: He was having
an identity crisis,

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

BIRD:
His parents took him to Paris,

where he saw
yet another psychologist,

and in a very French way,

prescribed a professional woman
and red wine.

(laughs) So...

Uh, we don't know
if that happened.

SHERWIN: He had always been
the top of the class,

the smartest person,

admired for
his intellectual capability

by all his classmates.

And suddenly,
he was an incompetent.

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

And what snapped him out of that

was his discovery of theoretical
physics, of quantum physics.

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

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

And if you are young
and quick and willing to think

weird ideas that nobody else
has ever thought,

you can potentially make
a huge amount of progress

and a name for yourself.

BIRD: So, when Oppenheimer
decided to move

to Göttingen in Germany to study

with Max Born,
a theoretical physicist,

he blossomed.

He meets
some of the leading physicists

in Germany at the time--

Heisenberg,
who, ironically enough,

would lead
the German atomic bomb project.

WELLERSTEIN:
And while he's over there,

he sort of invents
this Oppie personality.

This is where he gets the name.

They call him Opje,
and this turns into Oppie.

And Oppie is not
an insecure young American

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

Oppie is the brilliant guy

who is always five steps ahead
of everybody else

and can keep everything
in his head.

Oppie is a genius who's
very eccentric and interesting

and strikes a really dashing
figure and is chain-smoking.

And you see these pictures
of him from the '20s.

It's very Bob Dylan.

ELSE: He had the eyes
of an Old Testament prophet

inside this frail body,

and he sort of cocked himself
with his funny little

porkpie hat on top.

WELLERSTEIN: So, Oppie is
this sort of construction

of everything
that he would want to be.

And that recreation is
immensely successful.

(ticking)

NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
When the cancerous Nazi growth

spread farther still,
the people of Europe--

and the world--
enter the new era.

RHODES: Certainly the first
motivation for the scientists

was to beat the Germans
to the bomb.

There's nothing like
the prospect of a hanging

to concentrate the mind.

And the threat of death
of civilization as they knew it

was so great that it swept away
any ethical or moral doubts

that they might have had.

WELLERSTEIN: Ultimately,
whoever gets the bomb first

is not just gonna win
World War II

but is gonna run
the entire world.

* *

NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
By the summer of 1942,

control of the atom bomb project
passes to the hands of the Army,

under the code name
Manhattan Engineering District.

CARR:
The Manhattan Project really was

a huge national effort.

RHODES: And to plot out
the industrial scale

of the operation,
they chose a dynamic, burly,

six-foot-three,

240-pound general

named Leslie Richard Groves.

He hated Leslie.
He went by Dick.

General Groves had a problem.

He was entrusted
to hire the people

that would build
the atomic bomb.

But he knew
that we're talking about

the people who are the
finest scientists in the world.

These are prima donnas.

And now you have to have
somebody who's gonna be

the whipmaster.

You have to have somebody

that understands the physics,
who has a reputation,

so that these prima donnas
will follow you.

CARR: Oppenheimer and
General Groves are introduced

in the fall of 1942.

And these two individuals
are just about

as different as you can imagine.

But General Groves
saw something in him

that apparently no one else saw.

GROVES:
When meeting Oppenheimer,

you were immediately impressed.

You couldn't help it.

There wasn't a better man.

RHODES: He chose Oppenheimer
against the advice

of most of these leaders
that he had around him

in the scientific community.

Oppenheimer had never led
any large enterprise.

But Oppenheimer was really good
at explaining things.

WELLERSTEIN:
He was extremely charming,

and he had this ability

to sort of hold a lot of things
in his head at once

and keep aware of
how they all fit together.

And this is apparently

what General Groves
recognized in him.

EISENBACH:
For security purposes,

this project needs to happen
away from everything.

So Groves tells Oppenheimer

to just come up with a place
where this would actually work.

And it was Oppenheimer
who suggests

the New Mexico desert.

So they go to scope out a site.

It's called Los Alamos.

CARR:
Oppenheimer knew the area well.

He had spent a lot of time here.

CHARLES OPPENHEIMER: When
he left New York as a young man

and went to New Mexico...

...that was a-- just a really
important part of his life.

Going to New Mexico
and meeting cowboys

and riding horses.

He just loved it.
He loved every part of it.

BIRD: He once said that
his ambition was to combine

the two loves in his life,

physics and New Mexico.

And of course,
he did precisely this.

CARR:
Now, the government shows up

with bulldozers and architects

and laborers and craftsmen

to build a new community
and laboratory

where there essentially
had not been one before.

SNOWDEN:
They're starting from scratch.

And so much of
what they were doing was unknown

and unproven at the time.

They didn't actually know

that they would be able
to achieve this.

This was all theoretical.

ELSE: They knew that they had
to get the best scientists

if they were gonna get this
weapon before the Nazis did.

(crowd chanting)

(ship horn blowing)

NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
Albert Einstein flees

to the United States.

He leads a vanguard
of refugee scientists,

virtually stripping
German universities

of their best minds.

WELLERSTEIN: All of the turmoil
in Europe had forced out

a huge number
of really top-grade physicists.

Enrico Fermi.

Hans Bethe.

Edward Teller,
who famously would go on

to develop the hydrogen bomb.

One can sort of
go down the lists

and find more and more and more
of these amazing people.

Oppenheimer was
famously known for

his intellectual sex appeal.

And he could go
around the country

and sort of
flash his brain to people,

and, you know, they'd sign up.

RHODES:
He would say,

"I unfortunately can't tell you
what we're doing,

"but I can tell you
that if we succeed,

"it's likely to end this war,

and it may end all war."

ROBERT CHRISTY:
Oppenheimer asked

if I would join him
in Los Alamos.

And I said I would be delighted.

Like most of his students,

I would more or less follow him
to the ends of the Earth.

If you had the choice
of fighting the Nazis

by going to
this exotic mountaintop

and doing the greatest physics
in history,

I mean, what would you do?

I would've been
on the next train.

I don't think people thought

that much about
the consequences.

You know, can we blame them?

OPPENHEIMER:
We were all aware of

the fact that, in one way
or another, we were intervening

explicitly and heavy-handedly
in the course of human history.

CARR: By the time
the laboratory was established,

Oppenheimer was a family man.

He was married.
He had a little boy.

During his tenure
as director at the laboratory,

he had a little girl as well.

BIRD:
The summer of 1939,

he was at a cocktail party
in Berkeley,

and a young woman named
Kitty Puening had spied him

from across the garden and was
immediately attracted to him.

She was a firecracker
(laughs) of a young woman.

They fell in love, and by 1940,

she was pregnant.

(laughs)

SHERWIN:
They live ever after.

And notice I didn't say
"happily." (laughs)

They are devoted to each other.

But it's a difficult marriage
because of

the complexity of Robert's life,
of their personalities,

of the environment
in which they live.

NOLAN:
She was an academic,

and she was a biologist
and a botanist,

and ultimately, that work
was all put to one side

for the years at Los Alamos.

I think she was very frustrated

by being put in the position of

a mother and a wife
and nothing else.

CONANT: She did not thrive
at Los Alamos.

It was a lonely
and hard existence.

And she disappeared
into the bottle somewhat.

Oppenheimer was famous
for mixing his gin martinis.

(laughter)

He persuaded his scientists to
work very hard during the week

and to party hard
on the weekends.

RHODES: Everyone was hungover
on Sunday morning,

but they worked a lot,
and they worked hard,

and they worked together.

And that was largely
Oppenheimer.

BIRD: Los Alamos
for many of these people were

the most momentous years
of their lives.

They felt part of something,

part of something meaningful
and important.

And they were led by
this very enigmatic,

strange, bright, blue-eyed
young man whom they all admired.

REID:
I grew up at Los Alamos.

And my father came to Los Alamos
during the Manhattan Project.

It was a-a curious place to live

because they're blowing
things up three times a day.

(explosion rumbles)

Explosions were at
10:00 and 12:00 and 3:00,

so when you're in first grade,

it means recess, lunch
and school's out.

(excited chatter)

We were actually,
as little kids,

connoisseurs of explosions.

And at some point,
I asked my father,

"What-what are you doing?"

And he said,
"Well, we're doing something

that has never been
done before."

I thought, "That's got to be
pretty interesting,

whatever it is."

* *

CARR: We get about a year into
the laboratory's existence,

and we come to find
that it's gonna be

a lot harder than we thought.

Every little thing is hard.

These are
some very complex machines.

A nuclear weapon is not an idea.

Think of a nuclear weapon
more as like a million ideas

that have to come together
and work perfectly together.

To make an atomic bomb,
you need the fuel for it.

(electrical warbling)

CARR: We have plutonium,
and we have enriched uranium.

We have two different types
of material

that we're going to try and use.

Plutonium was
the better material to use.

There was gonna be more of it.

You needed less of it
to make a bomb,

and yet it was harder
to detonate.

(electrical popping)

The initial way to make a bomb
was called gun assembly.

It was to take
two pieces of material

and slam them together...

(explosion)

...causing a critical mass
and an explosion.

And that was fine if you used
highly enriched uranium.

But one day, they discovered
it won't work with plutonium.

The plutonium
turned out to be so reactive

that you couldn't
fire it up a barrel

even at 3,000 feet per second.

It would fizzle.

It would melt down
before it got up the barrel.

NORRIS:
It was a great shock.

I mean, maybe this whole
plutonium thing had been wasted,

hundreds of millions of dollars
to develop plutonium.

WELLERSTEIN:
Oppenheimer was distraught,

and-and Los Alamos
was distraught.

RHODES: He considered resigning,
he was so depressed,

and his friends
at the laboratory said,

"You can't, Robert.

"You've got to stay
and finish this work.

It's got to happen.
We must do it."

And-and reluctantly, he stayed.

(filmstrip rattling)

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: ...war under
the supreme command of

General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Allied forces have
nearly three million troops

trained for the assault.

(crowd cheering)

On the other side
of the channel...

-(shouting in German)
-(crowd chanting in German)

...the Nazis also know

what the Allied forces
are preparing for,

and they are making
preparations of their own.

(Hitler shouting in German)

BIRD:
Oppenheimer feared

he was still in a race
with the Germans.

Even as late
as the summer of '44,

they had no real intelligence

about where they were
on the German bomb project.

CARR: And so, if they don't
crack the plutonium problem,

they may not have
a bomb in time.

NORRIS: Oppenheimer shifted
the laboratory into, you know,

full-speed panic mode.

WELLERSTEIN:
They had had some ideas

for other types of bomb designs,
which they had thrown around

at the very beginning
of the project

but dismissed 'cause
they seemed too difficult.

But one of them
was called implosion.

The way implosion
in a nutshell works was

they had a solid ball
of plutonium,

just a solid sphere of it,

about the size of a softball,
maybe a little bit smaller.

And this is encased by
tons of high explosives.

And these high explosives
are really specially made,

so that when they explode,
they're gonna end up

sort of focusing a blast wave
onto this ball,

pushing on the top
and pushing on the bottom

and pushing on both sides of it.

Every angle of this is
gonna be being pushed upon

with a lot of explosive force.

What you want to do
is get this pressure

to squeeze
the plutonium target evenly.

If it were asymmetrical,
it probably wouldn't work.

You had to have enough pressure
quickly enough

to smash these subatomic
particles together hard enough

to get them to have
this a-amazing reaction.

WELLERSTEIN:
This is really hard to do.

Every aspect of this is
an almost totally new problem.

It is a technology
that would have benefited from

another decade of development.

And they didn't have that.
They had a year.

CONANT: Oppenheimer was
working night and day

building the bomb.

And as the project grew in size,
the security service

protecting the project
also grew.

And even though
he was beloved and admired

by most of the scientists

working at
the Los Alamos project,

he had fallen under
a greater veil of suspicion

because there were
certain aspects of his past

that raised the possibility

that he could be
a security risk.

* *

RHODES:
When Oppenheimer was teaching

at the University of California
at Berkeley,

he really was
a very unworldly man

focused on science,

until the Depression began.

He discovered, to his shock,

that his students often
didn't even have enough to eat.

One of them told me
he was living on

cat food, cans of cat food.

That was the only thing
he could afford.

Oppenheimer was changed
by this discovery

of-of suffering
in the world, really.

BIRD: And Oppenheimer
sort of naturally,

like many of his friends
in Berkeley at the time,

drifted politically to the left.

CARR: Communism was a very
appealing idea in the 1930s.

There was no Internet.

People didn't know
what was going on real time

in the Soviet Union,

where Joseph Stalin, of course,
was in the process of murdering

20 million of his own people.

(gunfire)

What people here in the
United States saw instead was,

hey, you know,
here in the Soviet Union,

everybody is free and equal
and has a job

and a place to live
and-and a future,

an important role to play
in the greater collective.

(crowd cheering)

Now, if I don't know where
my next meal is coming from,

that sounds like
a pretty good idea.

It's debatable if Oppenheimer
ever really joined, officially,

the Communist Party.

But his brother did.

Frank Oppenheimer
joined the party.

Frank's wife Jackie
joined the party.

Many of Oppenheimer's
close friends

had joined the Communist Party.

Many of his students
at Berkeley and elsewhere

had been members of
the Communist Party as well.

BIRD:
And in the mid '30s,

he met a young woman
named Jean Tatlock,

who was studying
to become a psychiatrist.

Brilliant young woman.

He fell in love with her.

NOLAN: They were engaged
to be married twice.

I think it's probably
a reasonable interpretation

to say he was
somewhat obsessed with her.

She was a communist.

He was interested
in communist ideas.

BIRD:
And for the next four years,

Oppenheimer actually contributed
quite a bit of money

to the Communist Party.

But his political activities
began to be noticed.

HERKEN:
What the FBI did in those days,

they were following
the communists.

They would walk around
and they would take down

the license numbers
of the cars that were parked

in front of the house or
the building and look them up.

That's when Oppenheimer

first came to the attention
of the FBI.

EISENBACH: Even while he's
heading up the A-bomb project,

the FBI is wiretapping
and following him.

Military Intelligence is
constantly asking him questions.

RHODES: He was, I think,
in a strange way,

comfortable with that because

he knew he wasn't doing
anything wrong.

Even when he went to visit
his old girlfriend

when he should not have
probably done so.

In 1943, he heard
from Jean Tatlock.

She was going through
some emotional crisis,

and she wanted to see him.

He had kept in touch with Jean.

He still loved her.

She had rejected him.
He had married Kitty.

But he knew that Jean Tatlock
was in a depressed state,

and so he visited her.

RHODES: He had to leave Los
Alamos and go to San Francisco.

And that was, of course,
just red meat

for the, for the dog,
as it were.

There were two guys
sitting outside the apartment.

BIRD: Jean Tatlock
was under surveillance.

She was still a member
of the Communist Party.

RHODES:
He spent the night with her.

They had been lovers,

and I think they probably were
lovers again that night.

(engine starts)

BIRD: This was reported back
to Colonel Boris Pash,

who was head of
Army Intelligence

for all the West Coast.

And Pash was convinced
that this was

a serious breach of security

and that perhaps Oppenheimer
was conveying nuclear secrets

and atomic secrets to the
Communist Party through Tatlock.

Sadly, tragically, she died

just a few months later,
in the spring of 1944.

Under mysterious circumstances,
her father found her naked

with her head
plunged in a bathtub

with her body slumped
over the edge of the bathtub.

Which is a very odd way
to commit suicide.

There's some speculation that

perhaps she was murdered.

Oppenheimer was horrified
and devastated by the news.

The security officer
who informed him

said that he wept openly,

that he was absolutely bereft

and actually confided
that there was nobody

that he could speak to about it.

So you sense, uh,
the loneliness of his grief.

(radio static crackling)

RADIO ANNOUNCER:
We interrupt this program

with a special bulletin.

President Roosevelt is dead.

The president died
of a cerebral hemorrhage.

April 1945 was
one of those months

in which the fate of the world
seemed to turn on a dime.

FDR dies,

followed by Hitler
committing suicide.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: Hitler's
empire burns and shrivels.

ELSE: The bomb was conceived
in a kind of anti-Hitler fervor.

By the spring of 1945,
Hitler's out of the picture.

The Nazis are
no longer a threat.

Hitler is not gonna build
an atomic bomb

and drop it on New York.

That's not gonna happen.

But there was no way they were
not gonna finish that weapon.

RHODES:
They wanted to make this happen.

They didn't want the war to end
before it happened.

Oppenheimer wanted the bomb
to be used,

because how else would the world
know what it was?

NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
Harry S. Truman was sworn in

as President
of the United States.

EISENBACH: By the time
Truman gets to the presidency,

the wheels are in motion.

This bomb is going to be
dropped somewhere.

With the death of Hitler,
the target then becomes Japan.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
The never-ending air campaign

against Japan's stolen empire
continues,

as B-24s hammer installations
in the Palau islands.

We were marching up
from island to island.

Landing on the beaches against
dug-in Japanese defenses.

Losing young men
in large numbers.

Every day that went by

without this bomb
being successfully tested

was a day in which thousands
of Americans are dying.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: Thousands
of Yanks have been wounded

and other thousands
have sacrificed their lives

to drive a fanatical foe
from this vital base,

the doorstep to Japan itself.

NORRIS: They knew
the Japanese were defeated,

but defeat and surrender
are two different things.

So how do you get them
to surrender?

OPPENHEIMER: In a world of
atomic weapons, wars will cease.

And that is not a small thing.

EISENBACH: The way
Oppenheimer looked at the bomb

is in a kind of
Eastern metaphysical way of

it is a act of destruction
and creation

potentially at the same time,

act of war and an act of peace,

that this thing, if mishandled,

could end humanity, but if
properly handled and harnessed,

could actually lead to an era

of peace and prosperity
for the entire world.

(playful chatter)

CONANT:
By the summer of '45,

they had been working on
the implosion design for a year,

tweaking, devising and
struggling with the challenges.

WELLERSTEIN:
For this thing to work,

all of those explosives
and their detonators

and the things powering them
and the batteries

and everything else
has got to work perfectly.

And there wasn't
a really good way to figure out

if that was
actually gonna happen,

other than setting off
a full-size test.

HERKEN:
They settle upon the site

where the bomb will be tested,

and Oppenheimer chooses
the name for the site: Trinity.

CARR:
He had been reading

the poetry of John Donne
at the time,

and one of those poems,
uh, include the line,

"Batter my heart,
three-personed God,"

a reference to the Holy Trinity
in Christianity.

HERKEN: And I think that that
was a tribute to Jean Tatlock,

because Jean and Oppie
used to read

the poetry of John Donne in bed.

(ticking)

NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
Sunday, July 15, 1945.

Alamogordo, New Mexico.

It is D-minus one for the test

of the world's first
atomic device.

NOLAN: The hours
leading up to the Trinity test

are one of
the most extraordinary moments

of-of tension imaginable.

The stakes,
the billions of dollars,

the hundreds of thousands
of people who'd been involved

in building to this one moment
of this test of this new weapon,

all of that responsibility
falling

very squarely
on Oppenheimer's shoulders.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
At the bomb test site,

the scientists are working
under growing pressure.

They are told there must be
no further delays.

The president must know
the results of the test

when he meets with Stalin.

CARR: The President
of the United States

is about to enter into
the Potsdam Conference--

Potsdam, a city in Germany.

He's gonna meet
with Joseph Stalin,

Winston Churchill as well,

and talk about
the future of Europe

and the future
of the Pacific War.

The president must know

if he has a nuclear weapon
in his back pocket or not.

NORRIS:
Everybody was on edge,

and they had to calm down
Oppenheimer.

He was a bundle of nerves.

RHODES:
He chain-smoked,

which he pretty much
always did anyway.

GROVES: It was a situation
where I did not want

Dr. Oppenheimer to get nervous.

There's a famous picture
from that evening

where Oppenheimer himself
crawls up the tower to the top

where the bomb has been hoisted.

He's checking
all the final plugs

to make sure
that everything is in order.

He's clearly worried,

trying to check
every last little detail.

WELLERSTEIN:
Oppenheimer doesn't know

if this thing
is gonna work at all.

EISENBACH:
In fact, he had a bet

with another one
of the scientists

that it wouldn't work--
ten dollars.

OPPENHEIMER:
There were a hundred things

that could be done wrong,

any one of which
could make the test a failure.

NYE:
Everybody had doubts.

Was it even possible?

And then this question,
'cause nobody was really sure:

What if we set
the whole atmosphere on fire?

SNOWDEN:
What if we set off this bomb

and it literally sets
the air on fire

and engulfs us all?

KAKU: The atmosphere is
made out of oxygen, after all.

Can the oxygen of the atmosphere

be set in flames
by an atomic bomb?

No one knew the answer
to these questions.

RHODES: It's before dawn
on July 16, 1945.

It was dark.

The bomb was in the tower
a hundred feet up,

and they were ready to go.

Oppenheimer was in one of
the bunkers that had been built.

CARR:
Oppenheimer braced himself,

according to some accounts
uttering the words,

"Lord, these affairs
are hard on the heart."

(civil defense siren blaring)

MAN (over speaker):
T-minus ten,

nine, eight...

RHODES: Oppenheimer was
saying to himself,

-"I must remain conscious."
-(ticking)

MAN:
...seven...

"I must remain conscious."

MAN:
...six...

CARR:
Seconds are hours.

MAN:
...five, four,

three, two...

RHODES:
And all of a sudden...

(explosion booming)

...the whole place lit up.

One of the scientists told me

it felt as if someone had
opened an oven door.

Suddenly, there was
this huge heat,

which was radiant heat,

so it came at
the speed of light as well,

and then this rolling thunder
of sound,

and the first mushroom cloud
started going up.

It was orange and purple
and blue and yellow,

and it roiled,
and it grew as it rose.

And a new thing, he said,
had been created on the Earth,

a new challenge for humanity.

NYE:
People had seen explosions

and tested bombs for decades,
but to see the size of it,

just... it was just astonishing.

NOLAN: There's never been
a moment like that

in the history of the world.

The view of the world,
the view of what matter is,

what we are made of indeed,
palpably changes.

It's an unleashing of a, of
a force never before imagined

and could never be ignored
from this point on.

OPPENHEIMER: We knew
the world would not be the same.

A few people laughed.

A few people cried.

Most people were silent.

(sniffles)

I remembered the line
from the Hindu scripture,

the Bhagavad Gita.

Vishnu...

...is trying to persuade
the prince that

he should do his duty,

and to impress him,

takes on his multiarmed form
and says,

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

I suppose we all thought that,
one way or another.

* *

CARR: After the test was over,
Oppenheimer had this strut.

It was likeHigh Noon.

He had done it.

Oppenheimer was very proud
of this accomplishment.

It was a world-changing moment,

and a lot of the scientists
realized that.

Now came the business of

what the government would do
with their creation.

CONANT:
Groves hurried back

to his Washington office
and cabled the news

that the bomb experiment
had been a success

and even more powerful than
they had anticipated.

This information is
transmitted to Truman, who...

entire attitude changes
at Potsdam.

He suddenly feels like
he has a win in-in sight.

He suddenly starts
bossing around Stalin.

He decides the Japanese
get no concessions whatsoever.

Truman had known
that this existed

since he became president,
but to know it actually works

and it's even more powerful
than we thought,

that's a really different
position for him to be in.

Our demand has been,
and it remains,

-unconditional surrender!
-(applause)

(filmstrip slowing to a stop)

NYE:
My mom and dad

were both veterans
of World War II, and my mom,

she said, "You know, after...

"after four years of this thing,

"there was nobody really...
there was nobody going,

'Was it ethical to use
a-a nuclear weapon?'"

Right? Just get it over with.

This is horrible. Like, this--

Whatever you can do
to shorten this thing.

Everybody was terrified
and exhausted,

and everybody knew somebody
who knew somebody

who was not living anymore
because of this.

ELSE:
With the bomb ready to go,

I mean, the choices
are appalling.

You know, they know
perfectly well that if they use

these weapons on Japanese men,
women and children in cities,

there are gonna be a couple
hundred thousand people who die.

But if they don't stop the war
with the bomb,

there may be millions more
that die.

So those seem to be
the two choices,

but there was a third choice,

and the third choice
was to do a demonstration.

Maybe drop this bomb in
Tokyo Bay, kill very few people,

make a hell of a demonstration,

and maybe the Japanese
will surrender

just based on having seen the
ferocious power of this thing.

Oppenheimer rejected,
uh, that course,

as did the planners
in Washington.

(playful chatter)

OPPENHEIMER:
We did think about whether, uh,

its destructiveness, uh,

its danger, uh,

could be vividly demonstrated

over a barren
and uninhabited target,

and we were
very doubtful of that.

Very few people would have had
a more thorough understanding

than J. Robert Oppenheimer
of what was about to unfold

when these weapons were used
in combat.

Oppenheimer contemplated,
knowing that

this destruction
would be unworldly.

(wind whistling softly)

BIRD: His secretary,
Anne Wilson, told me this story

that I'm still struck by.

After the Trinity test,

she's walking to work one day
with Robert.

He's a few steps ahead of her,
and he's suddenly muttering,

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

She stops him and says, "Robert,
what are you muttering about?"

And he looked at her
and-and explained that,

you know, the bomb
was going to be used

on a Japanese city or two,

and the victims were going to be

civilians, a whole city.

This was obviously on his mind,
painfully on his mind.

And yet we know, that same week,
he was meeting with the generals

who were in charge of
the bombing mission,

and he was instructing them

exactly how the bomb
should be dropped

and at what altitude
it should be detonated

for the maximum
destructive power.

WELLERSTEIN: It's hard
to reconcile the sensitive,

morally upright,
humanistic professor

with the guy who recommends that
the bomb is dropped on cities

and is calculating
the ideal height

for destroying houses, right?

How do you reconcile
those two things?

Part of it is, I think,
Oppenheimer hoping that

this will not be the first use
of nuclear weapons,

that it will be the last use
of nuclear weapons.

And if that's the case,

then in order to ensure
that they're the last use,

you want it to be as bad and
ugly and horrible as possible.

RHODES:
By August of 1945,

every Japanese city
of more than 50,000 people

had basically been burned out,
except for three or four cities

that had been deliberately
set aside for atomic bombing.

Set aside because they had
physical characteristics

that would allow us to see
how the bombs worked.

Hiroshima was a flat city.

And with the city set aside,
it was possible to see

the effects of the bomb
all the way out to the edges.

That's why Hiroshima was chosen.

HIDEKO TAMURA:
When I was a little kid,

there were seven rivers
running through,

beautiful riverbanks.

Water was clear.

I was running through
magical gardens, flowers,

looking for beautiful,
beautiful insects

of all different kinds.

Birds chirping.

They don't understand about war.

It was all over,
sound of happiness.

But the sound
of the explosion came

like a rage over the Earth.

(explosion rumbling)

TRUMAN:
A short time ago,

an American airplane
dropped one bomb on Hiroshima.

That bomb has more power
than 20,000 tons of TNT.

It is an atomic bomb.

It is a harnessing of
the basic power of the universe.

We have spent
more than two billion dollars

on the greatest
scientific gamble in history,

and we have won.

(explosion rumbling)

NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
Japan could read its doom.

This was more than
a routine bombing.

It was the funeral pyre
of an aggressor nation.

* *

TAMURA:
I remember every second.

I've never been so helpless.

I was under the debris

and somehow had to crawl
to the light and come out.

I had to go looking
for my mother.

Seeing these miserable
dying people,

you didn't want her
to be one of them.

Didn't hear
one single thing about

cousin, my mother
or my best friend.

I would have really loved
to have died with them,

because life after that
was so very challenging

and so very difficult,

physically
and especially mentally.

REID: A few years after
the end of the war,

I saw the raw footage
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And there's no sound.

It's just footage of people
with their skin

and flower reverse patterns
of the kimonos

burned into their skin

and bodies floating
in the river.

It was so shocking.

And I thought, "They're all
my friends' fathers.

Did they know
what they were doing?"

None of it seemed
to make any sense to me

that this was so horrible.

(Geiger counter
clicking rapidly)

CARR:
As reports of that devastation

started to come back
to Los Alamos,

obviously this weighed
on the scientists.

Yes, it had been a horrible war,

but still,
tens of thousands of people

were killed in these attacks.

Cities were destroyed.

And that was difficult
on a lot of the scientists.

And I certainly think that
it was difficult on Oppenheimer

for the rest of his life.

Hiroshima was far more costly

in life and suffering
and inhumane

than it needed to have been.

This is easy to say
after the fact.

-(birds chirping)
-(clock ticking)

NOLAN: Oppenheimer never
apologized in any way for

Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He was very, very careful
and complicated

in all statements he made about

the moral implications of the
bomb and his involvement in it.

And yet,
post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

all of his actions
are the actions of

somebody who is plagued
with guilt.

(radio static crackles)

DOUGLAS MacARTHUR:
We are gathered here,

representatives of
the major warring powers,

to conclude a solemn agreement

whereby peace may be restored.

(crowd cheering)

TRUMAN:
I have received this afternoon

a message from
the Japanese government.

I deem this reply
a full acceptance

of the unconditional surrender
of Japan.

ELSE: And of course,
a great many people felt

that the atomic bomb
had ended World War II.

Perhaps it had.

And Robert Oppenheimer
was the guy who made it happen.

ROY GLAUBER:
He was in demand everywhere.

He was the cover story
forTime magazine,

once forLife magazine.

There scarcely was
a magazine cover

that he wasn't on.

HERKEN: The inaugural issue
ofPhysics Today simply showed

a porkpie hat
on a cyclotron control.

And everybody knew
the porkpie hat was Oppenheimer.

(lively chatter)

CONANT:
He becomes a rock star.

He is the oracle
of American science.

And he liked that.

He probably felt that
he'd finally come through it all

and he was no longer
the outsider.

Now he was not only
at the center of things

but that he stood
at the very top.

(applause)

And that, I think,
was intoxicating for him.

But at the same time,
he felt a real responsibility

for having ushered this weapon
into the world.

MAN:
Go ahead, please.

Automatic control has got it.

This time, Rab,
the stakes are kind of high.

ISIDOR ISAAC RABI: It's going
to work all right, Robert.

ELSE:
I think he felt,

as the father of
the atomic bomb, it was his duty

to keep the reins
on the atomic bomb.

MAN:
Go ahead, please.

Well, we'll know in 40 seconds.

MAN:
Stay where you are.

Cut.

BIRD: Within three months
of Hiroshima,

he was giving speeches,

talking about how this weapon
was a weapon for aggressors,

that it is a weapon of terror.

You know, this is the father
of the atomic bomb speaking.

OPPENHEIMER:
If there is another world war...

...this civilization

may go under.

We need to ask ourselves

whether we're doing
all we can to avert that.

CHARLES OPPENHEIMER:
I might like to read

what my grandfather said
about it.

This is a speech where he said,

"But when you come
right down to it,

"the reason that we did this job

"is because it was
an organic necessity.

"If you are a scientist,
you cannot stop such a thing.

"If you are a scientist,
you believe

"that it's good to find out
how the world works,

"that it's good to find out
what realities are,

"that it's good
to turn over to mankind

"the greatest possible power
to control the world

and deal with it according
to its lights and values."

He didn't regret his role
and work during the war,

but he soon after turns
so strongly towards managing

the outcome of the science
they created.

BIRD:
He decides he doesn't want

to work any longer
on building more bombs.

He resigns from Los Alamos,
and he accepts a position

as director of the Institute for
Advanced Studies in Princeton,

where he becomes
Einstein's boss, so to speak.

He's probably the most famous
scientist in America,

and he's trying to use
that celebrity status

to have influence.

He gets an appointment with
Harry Truman in the Oval Office.

Oppenheimer's agenda
is to persuade

Harry Truman of the importance
of controlling this technology.

And he starts
to make this pitch.

And Truman interrupts him
with a question, saying,

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

are going to get this weapon
of mass destruction?"

And Oppenheimer is sort of
taken aback by the question

and says, "Well, I'm not sure
but sometime in the future."

And Truman interrupts again
and says, "Well, I know. Never."

At that point, Oppie understands

that Harry Truman
doesn't understand anything

about the physics
of this weapon.

And Oppenheimer, at that point,
says exactly the wrong thing.

RHODES: He really offended
President Truman

by saying, "Mr. President,
I have blood on my hands."

(explosion rumbling)

BIRD:
This is exactly the wrong thing

to say to the guy
who made the decision

to drop two such bombs
on two Japanese cities.

He was trying to impress Truman.

He thought it was something
that Truman would like to hear,

and he got that wrong a lot.

I mean, Oppenheimer was very
charming to a lot of people,

but he was often not charming

to leaders and people
who had power over him.

WELLERSTEIN:
Truman didn't believe

that anybody's responsibility
was greater than his.

Truman was just,
"Get that guy out of my office.

I was the one
who made the decision."

BIRD: He ends the meeting
very abruptly

and later tells his aides that,

"I don't want to see that
crybaby scientist ever again."

I think the only hope
for our future safety

must lie in a collaboration,

based on confidence
and good faith,

with the other peoples
of the world.

SNOWDEN: Oppenheimer,
very early after the bombings,

was a part of the team
to recommend

international disarmament.

But the genie was
out of the bottle.

Right? Those who possess this

will be able to shape
the world order.

And very quickly,
the Soviet Union took note.

(explosion rumbling)

NORRIS: The Soviets
tested a bomb in 1949

to the shock of almost everyone.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: President
Truman's dramatic announcement

that Russia has created
an atomic explosion

sends reporters racing
for Flushing Meadow,

where Russia's Vyshinsky arrives
to address the United Nations...

This puts the U.S. in
a really complicated position,

because it's no longer the only
country with nuclear weapons.

Suddenly,
you have the possibility

that if war with nuclear weapons
broke out between two states

that had a fair number of them,

they could, in a matter
of hours, destroy themselves.

(civil defense siren blaring)

NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
We must all get ready now,

so we know how to save ourselves

if the atomic bomb
ever explodes near us.

And one of the possible options

scientists and policy people
lobbied for

was to build the hydrogen bomb
as the sort of next step.

(explosion rumbling)

SNOWDEN:
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs

were on the order of
15 kilotons of TNT,

which is no small number
in and of itself.

When you start talking about
hydrogen bombs,

now we're talking about
megatons.

We're talking about
a million tons of TNT.

They're categorically different.

A thousand times stronger than
anything you'd see

in a Hiroshima
and Nagasaki bomb.

ELSE: With one
very large hydrogen bomb,

you can kill
about as many people

as all of the people killed
in World War II.

And Oppenheimer could not see
any use for that.

He called it a genocidal weapon.

EDWARD TELLER: At the end of the
war, most people wanted to stop.

I did not.

Among the people who knew

a great deal about
the hydrogen bomb,

I was the only advocate of it.

RHODES: Edward Teller
was a Hungarian Jew

who escaped from Hungary
and came to the United States.

During World War II,
Teller worked at Los Alamos,

but he became obsessed with
the idea of the hydrogen bomb,

even before they had
the atomic bomb.

HERKEN: Teller did very much
consider the atomic bomb

to be Oppenheimer's creation,

and he wanted something
that was bigger and better.

CONANT:
And Oppenheimer said to Teller,

"Go back to doing physics,
but don't build this.

There's no need for it."

RHODES: Oppenheimer was
in charge of a committee

that had been put together
in Washington to decide:

What should we do?

Should we build a hydrogen bomb?

That is a question

in everybody's mind,
Dr. Oppenheimer.

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

The decision to try to make

or not to make the hydrogen bomb

touch the very basis
of our morality.

And the committee decision
was basically,

no, we shouldn't build
the hydrogen bomb.

If we are guided by fear alone,

we'll fail
in this time of crisis.

The answer to fear
sometimes lies in courage.

WELLERSTEIN: Oppenheimer's
opposition of the H-bomb

was taken very hard by people
who were in favor for it.

RHODES: The Air Force wanted
more and more bombs

and bigger and bigger bombs.

The bigger the bomb,
in terms of its yield,

the more damage
one plane could do.

HERKEN: The Strategic
Air Command was focused upon

blowing up the Soviet Union.

Oppenheimer said a smarter move
would be to put resources

into intercepting
Soviet bombers.

RHODES: He was going
just the opposite direction

from what the Air Force wanted.

They wanted him out.
They wanted to get rid of him.

BIRD: By 1953, Oppenheimer
has made sufficient enemies

in the Washington bureaucracy.

And then along comes
Lewis Strauss...

(applause)

...the new chairman of
the Atomic Energy Commission.

STRAUSS: I have just returned
from the Pacific Proving Ground,

where I have witnessed a test
of thermonuclear weapons.

BIRD:
And Strauss knows Oppenheimer

and has grown
to intensely dislike him.

RHODES: Oppenheimer had been
snappish with him once,

and it had deeply offended him.

So Strauss begins to plot

a means to defrock Oppenheimer.

SHERWIN:
And how does he do it?

Lewis Strauss focuses on
Oppenheimer's association

with left-wing friends

during the 1930s in Berkeley.

MAN (over TV):
"Communism."

Who are the apostles of a system

that attempts to destroy
the American way of life?

During the Second World War,
the Soviet Union was our ally.

And that sense of
being a communist

or associating with communists
was not something

that was considered that bad.

It wasn't until the Cold War

that all of a sudden,
in retrospect,

anyone with any kind of legacy
of a communist past

is now a security threat.

If there were no communists
in our government,

why did we delay, for 18 months,

delay our research
on the hydrogen bomb?

RHODES:
It was from attitudes like that

that finally led to
the government deciding

they had to pull Oppenheimer's
security clearance.

CHARLES OPPENHEIMER:
He would have to give up

his security clearance
in 30 days or ask for a hearing.

He felt he couldn't give up
his security clearance.

He couldn't agree with them

that he wasn't fit
to serve his government.

ELSE: He should have told them
to get lost.

He should have said,
"I am the atomic bomb.

"I won World War II.

Fuck off."

For whatever reason,
he didn't tell them to get lost.

He decided to fight it.

BIRD: And before
he goes down to Washington,

he meets with Einstein

to tell him he's gonna be
absent for a few weeks,

and Einstein's reaction
is quite startling.

Albert says, "But, Robert,
you are Mr. Atomic.

"You don't need them.
They need you.

Just walk away.
Why should you go through this?"

And Oppenheimer shakes his head
and apparently says to Albert,

"Well, you don't understand."

And he walks away,

and Einstein turns
to his secretary and says,

"There goes a nar."

The Yiddish for a fool.

(fanfare plays)

TV ANNOUNCER: World attention
was focused this week

on the Atomic Energy Commission
building in Washington,

where a three-man board
began special hearings

on the security file
of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,

the nuclear scientist
who developed the first A-bomb.

The security hearing starts,
and it quickly becomes clear

that this is not just
a security hearing.

This is a trial.

TV ANNOUNCER:
There's a new charge

that the scientist opposed
the development of the H-bomb.

WELLERSTEIN: The deck is stacked
against him, and it's ugly.

They're wiretapping
his conversations

with his lawyer illegally
and giving it to the prosecution

so that they know
exactly what's gonna happen.

They are able to look
at classified FBI files.

He is not because
he doesn't have a clearance,

and he can't look at
his own FBI file as a result.

RHODES: Oppenheimer's
involvement with Jean Tatlock,

the question of whether
his brother had been a communist

and still was,

those were the things
they pulled out of the files.

CONANT: One of the most damning
pieces of evidence

that was brought out was

the fact that, during the war,
there had been a conversation

at his home in Berkeley
with Haakon Chevalier,

his old friend,
who had mentioned to him

that there was a way perhaps
that he could

leak information about the
atomic project he was working on

to Soviet officials.

Now, Oppenheimer had
dismissed it at the time,

but he had not
reported the incident.

He knew he was already on
thin ice with security people,

that he was suspected
because of his communist ties.

So he was trying to keep himself
out of hot water.

The problem was that,
in subsequent conversations

with Los Alamos security people,
he had told very evasive, vague

accounts of this conversation,
one after another.

And when they confronted
Oppenheimer

with these evasive versions,
they asked him,

"Why did you do this?

Why wouldn't
you have been forthright?"

He said, "I was an idiot."

And in a sense,
he sealed his own fate then.

RHODES:
He fell apart.

He tried to testify,
but he really fell apart.

BIRD: He's having almost
another nervous breakdown,

like what he went through
as a young man.

He's oddly stoic,
like he was in the icehouse

when he was a young boy
being tormented

by his fellow summer campers.

He's resigned and
not really defending himself.

One person who sort of put the
nails in his coffin, of course,

was Edward Teller.

HERKEN: Teller testified
against Oppenheimer.

He said that he thought
he would feel better

if the security of the country

were in other hands
than Oppenheimer's.

And one of the scientists who
was close to Oppenheimer said

it was a matter of not only
stabbing Oppenheimer in the back

but twisting the blade.

RHODES:
As he was leaving,

he went up to shake
Oppenheimer's hand

and said, "I'm sorry."

And Oppenheimer looked him
in the eye and said,

"Edward,
after what you just said,

I don't know what that means."

NOLAN: He was obviously
a very, very brilliant man,

but I think
he may have underestimated

the power of the establishment,
the machine,

and the inability
of one individual

to stand against that.

BIRD:
The result was to be expected.

(fanfare plays)

TV ANNOUNCER:
Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,

the famous scientist
whose suspension this week

by the Atomic Energy Commission
surprised the nation.

They voted to strip Oppenheimer
of his security clearance.

This was front-page news in the
newspapers across the country.

That he had recommended
communists

who are working
the A-bomb, H-bomb plans.

His wife, uh,
admittedly was, uh,

an official of
the Communist Party,

uh, brother
a very active communist.

BIRD:
He became a political pariah.

KAKU:
And that sent a chill

through
the scientific community.

If they could take down
the most famous atomic scientist

on the planet Earth,
then we're all vulnerable.

BIRD: It sent
a really nefarious message

to all working scientists

to beware of weighing in
on political issues.

And this is a terrible thing
because we need their expertise.

And yet the Oppenheimer trial

made that difficult.

RHODES:
After the security trial,

Oppenheimer was never
the same guy again.

He was kind of
a hollow man after that.

CHARLES OPPENHEIMER:
What we say inside the family is

it hurt his feelings.

He didn't like it,
but he didn't talk about it.

He never made one statement
about it publicly.

He never asked for an apology,

and he retreated back into
where he came from.

BIRD: He still kept his job
at Princeton,

but he wasn't doing
any more physics.

These were kind of sad years.

MURROW: And Professor Einstein
is still here, too, isn't he?

Oh, yeah. Indeed he is.
Uh, indeed he is. Uh...

Does he ever call you up
on the telephone?

Hmm, sometimes.

I think he... he calls me,

uh, when he reads
in the newspapers

something about me
that he doesn't like,

and he calls me up and-and says,

"That's all right.
That's just right."

SHERWIN:
He had lost his fighting spirit.

He would have nothing
to do with commenting

on any of the issues of the day
related to nuclear weapons.

MAN: Dr. Oppenheimer, could you
tell us what your thoughts are

about what our atomic policy
should be?

No, I-I can't do that.

I'm not... not close enough
to the facts,

and I'm not close enough

to the thoughts of those
who are worrying about it.

RHODES:
Hans Bethe told me once that,

"Oppenheimer was smarter than
any of the rest of us."

He didn't win a Nobel Prize.

How could this man,
who evidently outshone

some of the greatest physicists
of the 20th century,

not have been more successful
in his line of work-- physics--

than he was?

CHARLES OPPENHEIMER:
You can't talk about Oppenheimer

when you're not
talking about his science.

That was the part of his life.

When he talks about
what he loves,

it was that human thing
of passing knowledge around.

This is negative particles,

neutral, doubly charged,
positive and positive...

CHARLES OPPENHEIMER:
His work on black holes

should have earned him
a Nobel Prize.

SHERWIN: In 1939, Oppenheimer
wrote the first paper

identifying the idea of
collapsing stars, a black hole.

So, black holes
was his original idea.

I mean, that's quite amazing.

And if a real black hole

had been identified
before he died...

...he probably would have won
a Nobel Prize for that work.

BIRD:
In 1966,

he was diagnosed
with esophageal cancer.

All that smoking over the years
had gotten to him.

(clock ticking)

And he died in early '67.

Oppenheimer's life story,

it's the story
of the 20th century.

It's the story of
our nuclear age

that we're still living with,

and that's a story
that is unfinished.

Will always be unfinished.

(explosion rumbling)

ELSE:
We have his bomb.

His bomb is with us.

And we can debate his membership
in the Communist Party

or we can debate the ethics

of bombing civilians
at Hiroshima until we drop,

but the fact is that we have
nuclear weapons.

That's the legacy.

And controlling those weapons,
it's a never-ending struggle.

(explosion rumbling)

It was so horrible
with a baby bomb.

Now they have so much
more lethal nuclear weapon.

OPPENHEIMER:
There is much talk about

getting rid of atomic weapons.

I have a deep sympathy
with that.

TAMURA: Please, let's try
to find common ground.

I'm sure if Oppie was alive
today, he would agree with me.

MAN:
...two, one.

OPPENHEIMER:
But we mustn't fool ourselves.

The world is not
going to be the same

no matter what we do
with atomic bombs,

because the knowledge of how to
make them cannot be exorcized.

-(insects chirring)
-(wind whistling softly)

JUDY WOODRUFF:
Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer

is perhaps best known as
the father of the atomic bomb.

As time has passed,

there are some new assessments
of his role in history.

In late 2022,
the Department of Energy

decided to vacate the decision
to have the security hearings.

The national tragedy
is that this hearing,

this McCarthy-era witch hunt,
materialized in the first place.

That type of thing
is not supposed to happen

in a country like this.

This is such an important
and long overdue step.

But at the same time,
it's kind of sad,

because this is something
that J. Robert Oppenheimer

will not get to experience
personally.

OPPENHEIMER:
Science has profoundly altered

the conditions of man's life,

both materially and in ways
of the spirit as well.

NYE: I think we're still
talking about Oppenheimer

because he was so influential.

We have this respect
and fear of science.

And Oppenheimer represented
both sides of that, for sure.

NOLAN: Unquestionably,
he changed the world.

And he changed
the world forever.

There's no going back.

But we know that as long as men
are free to ask what they will,

free to say what they think,
free to think what they must,

science will never regress,

and freedom itself
will never be wholly lost.

* *

(slides clicking)

(explosion rumbling)

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(explosion booming)

* *

(lighter clicks)

(explosion rumbling)

(music fades)