- In 1945, a frail looking scientist
drove this road on his way to the Trinity Site.
It's a sad and depressing stretch
of vast unforgiving desert in New Mexico,
but in colonial times,
it was the sorry end of many travelers' dreams.
He was an ivory tower academic,
a multilinguist, a polymath, an undoubted genius,
had never managed more than a handful of students,
and had spent all of his professional life
surrounded by books, blackboards, and theorem.
Now he had built an isolated secret city in the sky
where a scientific community of over 6,000 people
lived and worked
on the most expensive military scientific project
ever attempted.
He had done in months
what other global powers had failed to do in years,
and now he stood on the edge of discovering
if all his efforts would come to fruition.
Just days before, he had taken delivery of the plutonium,
which was essential to his bomb.
He'd signed a receipt for hundreds of millions of dollars.
It was the fruits of the labors
of hundreds of thousands of unwitting workers
spread in secret locations across the United States.
In this rundown old ranch house,
the elements were assembled
then taken to the test site tower.
As the lightning crackled in the sky and the wind howled,
he lay on the floor of the canyon,
waiting for the detonation.
He knew that the fate of his nation,
the lives of millions of people,
and the future of the world lay in his hands.
From somewhere, a few words formed in his mind.
- "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
- Robert Oppenheimer grew up
in a very privileged circumstance.
He lived in a 10-room apartment on the Upper West Side.
His parents had made by that time quite a bit of money.
He had a limousine with a chauffeur.
They had servants.
They had a house in Long Island.
They had a small sailing yacht,
which he named the Trimethy, after the chemical compound.
- When Oppenheimer was growing up,
more or less his only models were his parents.
He was brought up in isolation until he went to school,
and he went to school comparatively late.
And anything Oppenheimer showed an interest in,
his parents would buy things to satisfy that interest.
If he showed any interest in painting,
they would buy him an easel and some paints.
One thing he showed a very keen interest in was geology
and so they furnished him with a collection of rocks,
he then went on trips.
He actually did, at the age of 13,
original research in geology
and joined the New York City geology society
and was invited by them,
they didn't know that he was just some kid.
He was invited by them to give a research paper.
So what was life like?
It was very privileged but very intense,
and he always felt that there was something
sad about his parents.
His mother had a withered hand
and she kept it very secret,
and no one was allowed to mention it.
And the general emotional atmosphere
in the Oppenheimer household
was rather repressed.
- It was very sheltered.
It was extremely privileged.
He was, you know, surrounded by culture and art.
His mother was an artist and a collector of modern art,
you know, Van Gogh paintings.
He once said that his life as a child
offered no normal, healthy way to be a bastard.
- He went to a private school, the Ethical Culture School.
You know, he was a very sheltered privileged young man.
- His fellow schoolmates, one of them remembers him saying,
"Ask me a question in Latin,
and I will reply to you in Greek,"
which was an enormously impressive thing to do
at the age of 13
but not perhaps the best way to win friends.
- The Ethical Culture School was Jewish but not Jewish.
It came out of Judaism, founded by a Reform rabbi,
but it was very much a sort of turn of the century creation.
- Although he was finally with other children his age,
he didn't end up making any friends.
And until Francis Fergusson arrived,
who arrived from the other side of the country,
he was from the Southwest, he was from New Mexico,
came from rather a grand old New Mexican family,
but unlike almost all the other children
at the Ethical Culture School,
Francis Fergusson did not come
from the Jewish community of the Upper West Side.
And I think that had a lot to do
with the bond that Oppenheimer formed with him.
It's very difficult to know why exactly,
but Oppenheimer from a very young age,
made efforts to distance himself from the description
that almost everybody would've given of him.
To almost everybody, he would've been a German Jew.
He insisted he was neither German nor Jewish.
And so,
he was at odds with the perception of him,
which I think is also part
of his enormously complicated makeup.
- And I think this was very much bound up
with an attempt to escape
from a particularly Jewish identity and to be an American,
whatever that meant.
And that very much influenced Oppenheimer
and he was always uncomfortable
with being identified as Jewish.
- But, you know, he had a good childhood.
He had no traumatic experiences.
He was very privileged.
He went horseback riding in Central Park,
and he fell in love increasingly
at the Ethical Culture School, with science.
He focused a lot on chemistry.
- Later interest in New Mexico,
his horse riding, his sailing,
his sort of adventurousness and risk taking in a way,
very clearly was a reaction against this highly controlled,
almost luxurious prison of his childhood.
- I think he had a big ego, yes.
He had a strong ego,
he knew he was intelligent,
and he was always very ambitious.
- He was a little bit precious in a way
and that led him to be bullied by other children.
There was an incident at a summer camp
where he was really quite nastily bullied,
but I do think that he was aware
of his intellectual abilities
and was extremely ambitious.
He wanted to do something special.
- So he had a year of enforced leisure
because he became ill,
and for the first time,
he became a troublesome boy
and his parents didn't know what to do with him.
He was difficult.
He was fed up.
He didn't want to be at home.
He wanted to be at Harvard.
He wanted to be with super bright people.
He wanted to be studying chemistry and physics.
And partly, I think, to get rid of him,
his parents approached a teacher at his school called Smith
and asked Smith to take Robert on a trip out West.
Now, the connection with New Mexico
was provided by Francis Fergusson,
who was the one boy at the Ethical Culture School
with whom Oppenheimer had a friendship.
And Fergusson was from a well-known family in New Mexico.
And so Oppenheimer went to stay with Fergusson,
cementing their friendship,
Fergusson would go on to Harvard as well,
but it gave Oppenheimer a love of the Southwest
and particularly of New Mexico.
- New Mexico couldn't have been more of a contrast
from his upbringing in New York
and the whole environment of New York
and the Ethical Culture School,
and he became infatuated with an older woman in her 20s,
Katherine Chaves Page.
That was the first time that he had
really that kind of romantic interest,
although it was completely platonic.
- Oh, New Mexico had an enormous impact on him.
He fell in love with the desert,
the high plains around Santa Fe,
and he rode horseback into the Pecos Mountains.
- That was this sort of adventurous spirit
that was an escape from this claustrophobic background
of his childhood, I think.
- Just the starkness of the geography,
he took to it.
Yeah, he fell in love with New Mexico.
Started renting in 1929
on 135 acres up at like 9,500 feet
in the middle of nowhere,
but he loved it.
It was so spartan.
That was the kind of thing he really enjoyed.
- We slept on the floor, a board floor,
and we didn't have enough covers,
and we were pretty frozen by morning.
But that didn't bother Robert much,
he was a fairly hardy fellow,
although he didn't look that way.
He looked terribly frail, but he was pretty tough.
- A decade later, he was always telling people,
he was quipping that his ambition in life
was to combine physics with New Mexico.
And so, and he did.
- And actually, if he hadn't had that holiday
in the summer of 1922 in New Mexico,
then 20 years later,
the laboratory to build the first atomic bomb
would most likely have been built somewhere else.
- Again, he succeeded at everything he did at Harvard
but he remained very socially awkward.
He had a few friends, his roommates.
You know, he was a very intense personality
and I don't think he...
I don't think hemade any long-term friendships there,
but he got through it and succeeded
and went off to Cambridge, England to study physics.
- And the most famous physicist at that time
was Ernest Rutherford, who was at Cambridge,
and what Oppenheimer wanted
was to work with Ernest Rutherford.
But there was a problem there because although as a student,
he'd shown himself to be a brilliant theoretical physicist,
in the laboratory, he was a disaster,
and Rutherford was an applied physicist,
so Rutherford turned him down.
Rutherford's colleague was a man called J.J. Thompson,
who had discovered the electron.
And as a sort of second best,
Oppenheimer chose to work with Thompson,
who too was an experimental physicist,
and got Oppenheimer to work in the lab,
which he was very bad at.
And he spent a year at Cambridge in England
and it was the most unhappy year of his life.
He was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole.
He wasn't a laboratory physicist,
he was most interested in theoretical physics,
and he also found it difficult socially in Cambridge.
It was expected of all the students
that they would give a presentation every now and again
explaining what they were up to.
There's a story that Oppenheimer gave his presentation,
chalk in hand, facing the blackboard,
saying, "The point is, the point is, the point is,"
and he just kept repeating this over and over again
until he was gently moved to one side.
There are other reports of people finding him curled up
in the fetus position on the floor of the laboratory
and another story of him trying to murder Patrick Blackett.
Patrick Blackett was, one supposes,
represented to Oppenheimer
everything that Oppenheimer felt he wasn't.
Patrick Blackett was notoriously well connected.
He was very good looking.
He was very debonair.
He was superbly good in the laboratory.
And Oppenheimer once went on holiday to Corsica
and he said to his friends,
"Oh, I've got to get back to Cambridge,"
and they said, "Why?"
He said, "Well, I've left a poisoned apple
on Blackett's desk,
and I want to get back and remove it before it kills him."
I think he found the snobbery very difficult.
Harvard had been explicitly anti-Semitic.
That doesn't seem to have troubled Oppenheimer
all that much.
I think what bothered him at Cambridge
was there was little to no explicit antisemitism,
but I think one way or another,
he received the impression that he wasn't one of them.
And I think this bothered him to his very core.
Salvation came to throw Oppenheimer a lifeline was Max Born,
the German physicist who became a Nobel Prize winner,
who came to Cambridge to give a talk.
Oppenheimer got to know him,
got to discuss physics with him.
Born was so impressed with Oppenheimer
that he invited him over to Gottingen where Born taught
in order to do a PhD.
Most people take three years plus to do a PhD,
Oppenheimer did his in under 18 months.
And the result of it is a piece of work
that is still referred to now
by people working in physical chemistry,
the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation as it's known.
He then sat about working on research papers.
So within a very short time,
he'd gone from being in a desperate situation
in Cambridge, England,
where he found himself adrift socially and intellectually,
to being the star.
Oppenheimer had a queue of American universities
wanting to bring him over.
- Oh, by that time, he was already regarded
as a brilliant young quantum physicist
who, you know, there weren't many people
who could understand.
You and I can't understand what quantum is about.
- Because he could pick and choose,
he chose a very unusual arrangement
where he spent half the year at Caltech
and half the year at Berkeley.
- So he went off to Berkeley and essentially founded
the Department of Theoretical Physics
and worked there for the next 11, 12, 13 years.
And he never, you know,
had more than a dozen graduate students to oversee
but they all adored him.
He turned out to be a lousy teacher initially.
- There were elements there of traits
that would influence how people reacted to Oppenheimer
throughout his life,
his extreme intelligence,
his refusal to make allowances
for people who weren't quite as well educated
or as clever as he was,
and also a tendency to show off, you know?
All of those would mark him for the rest of his life.
- But he learned eventually to become charismatic,
again to transform himself into a good teacher.
- He was, by all accounts, an extremely charismatic teacher
and you could see that by the way that they emulated
his mannerisms and his manner of speech.
That prefigured the motivating
role that he had as the leader of Los Alamos.
- You know, he was a polymath.
He loved reading French literature and poetry
and John Dunn and Hemingway.
And he also was intrigued, at one point,
with Hinduism,
so he took up the Gita
and went to the only professor at Berkeley who knew Sanskrit
and had this guy teach him Sanskrit
so that he could read the Gita in the original.
Yeah, he was very much a polymath, very weird guy.
- When Oppenheimer arrived in Berkeley,
he was not in the slightest bit interested in politics.
He got to know Ernest Lawrence,
who was an applied physicist,
and in 1929, amazed Lawrence
by revealing that he had no idea
that the great crash had happened.
So uninformed was he about politics.
This would change very soon after that
and what would change it was his students.
His students were coming
from what was increasingly recognized
as one of the up and coming,
one of the leading physics departments in the country.
If you were a student of Oppenheimer, that opened doors.
But in the Depression, his students were finding
that they couldn't get academic jobs,
and they got jobs cleaning toilets,
and they got jobs waiting tables and so on.
And they got to find out what it was like
for working class people in the Depression era.
And as they were still in touch with Oppenheimer,
Oppenheimer got to know what it was like.
- And he was very well read.
And in the 1930s, with the rise of fascism in Europe,
this was very worrisome to him
and motivated him to become more political.
- And almost all of his ex-students
joined the Communist Party.
Now, this is in the 1930s,
and being a member of the Communist Party was not,
in the 1930s, did not have anything like the stigma
that it would have in the 1950s.
The Communist Party was not something you kept quiet about.
It was not a big secret.
And Oppenheimer, it's debatable whether he ever joined
the Communist Party.
His brother Frank did, and his brother Frank had a card.
He was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.
Nobody's ever produced a Communist Party card
identifying Robert Oppenheimer as that.
- And then of course, there were some women involved
who pushed him to become even more political.
So he met Jean Tatlock in Berkeley,
who was a young, intelligent graduate student
studying psychology,
and they dated for four years off and on,
very tempestuous relationship.
And Jean Tatlock was a member of the party.
- Bit by bit, he got drawn into politics,
and actually throughout the '30s,
he became more and more active.
- Specifically, that meant contributing
to the Republican side and the Spanish Civil War.
So he gave money to buy an ambulance
to be shipped to the Republican government in Madrid.
He went to fundraisers.
He probably, in the end, by 1938, '39,
he was giving about $400 a year.
- Although it didn't have the stigma
that it would have in the '50s,
still the FBI was not very keen on it.
And when the FBI learned
that Oppenheimer would often be seen
at the houses of these leading Communist Party members,
they put people on Oppenheimer
to follow him wherever he went.
- And, you know, the FBI files,
his FBI file runs to almost 10,000 pages
and a lot of it is simply gossip,
some of it comes from wiretaps.
Anyway, in all those 10,000 FBI pages,
you know,
the FBI had him under a microscope for years.
There's no smoking gun,
there's no clear evidence that he ever joined the party,
paid dues or had a membership card.
Oppenheimer, he was too ethereal.
I can't imagine him submitting himself to party orders
from the local party chapter secretary, you know.
He had too big of a ego.
And then by 1942,
you know, his ambition was to work on
what we now know as the Manhattan Project
because he was so fearful
that the German physicists whom he knew,
they could make it work
and they were probably working on it.
So given that ambition,
he became much more careful about his associations
and donations to charitable causes,
and, you know, he wanted that job in 1942.
- This was the time of the Great Depression,
the time of the Roosevelt's New Deal,
and it was also the time when the Communist Party
was supporting the notion of a popular front
against fascism.
So being involved with and sympathetic
with the Communist Party at that time
would not have seemed to Oppenheimer to be in conflict with
being a loyal, patriotic American.
He was both involved with the Communist Party
and an admirer of FDR, of Roosevelt.
I think, in some ways, that political involvement,
that consciousness of world events,
what was taking place in Germany with the rise of the Nazis,
the persecution of the Jews,
I think all of that prepared him
for the role of director of Los Alamos.
- The leader of the Manhattan Project was General Groves.
General Groves was a man of indomitable will.
It used to be said
that you couldn't create enough fissile uranium
because you would need to refine uranium.
Most uranium in the world is 238,
but you need 235 to make an atomic bomb.
You can create 235 from 238,
but it used to be said that you'd have to transform
the whole of America into one big factory
in order to do this.
That's what Groves was determined to do.
He bought up enormous areas of land in Tennessee,
and he bought up enormous area of land
in the state of Washington,
and he built plants on those land
specifically for enriching uranium,
and he employed over a hundred thousand people.
And when people give estimates
of how much the Manhattan Project cost,
2 billion, whatever it is,
most of that money was spent on hiring people
to work in these plants.
The most extraordinary thing,
none of the people working in those plants
realized what they were doing.
They were trained to say, "Look, here's a machine,"
with all these controls on it,
"when this needle goes this way, turn this knob.
When it goes this way, turn that knob,"
and they had no idea what they were doing.
- Here it is, General Groves, plutonium.
- Well, that's the first time I've seen it,
but if you don't mind, I wish you'd hold that under it
because after all,
there's about $50 million in that test tube.
- Groves also realized that he needed to get the scientists
to work on the theory behind the bomb,
exactly how you could create,
'cause no one had created an atomic bomb before.
And so, you know,
you needed not just experimental physicists,
you needed people who understood the theory.
And Groves went around the USA,
interviewing the leading scientists of the day
and was very disappointed
because he couldn't understand a word they said.
Until he went to California
and he went to see Ernest Lawrence,
Oppenheimer's friend,
Oppenheimer was there,
and Oppenheimer gave Groves
such a beautifully clear explanation
as to how nuclear fission works
and what critical mass is
and why nuclear fission releases so much energy.
Suddenly, Groves understood it,
and he said, "I want that man in charge of this project."
- He was a most unlikely candidate
for being selected as the scientific director of Las Alamos.
You know, he'd never managed
more than a dozen graduate students.
He had no experience, administratively speaking.
- He'd never won a Nobel Prize.
All these other scientists were Nobel Prize winners,
and therefore it was said,
could command the respect of all the other scientists.
Oppenheimer was not a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.
Secondly, he was a disaster in the laboratory,
so why should you make this man director of a laboratory?
And then thirdly, J. Edgar Hoover had identified him
as a threat to the security of the country.
- Somehow the chemistry between,
they were complete opposites
but the chemistry between them just clicked.
And I think, in part, this was because
Groves knew nothing about quantum physics,
knew nothing about what was involved technically
but he saw here was this 34-year-old
eccentric physicist
who could talk in plain English,
and he could do so because, you know,
he loved poetry and literature,
and so he could communicate.
- Groves wrote to J. Edgar Hoover saying,
"Look, we don't want to continue this discussion anymore.
I want security clearance given for this man.
He's going to be head of this project,"
and Groves overran every other objection
to Oppenheimer being in charge.
And as it turned out,
it was a stroke of genius on Groves's part
because Oppenheimer,
it's as if his whole life had been leading up to this point.
- Oppe made the brilliant pitch that he says:
You know, I understand you have many security concerns,
and so what you should do is build a secret city
in the middle of the New Mexico desert
and bring, you know, the best and the brightest physicists
and chemists and engineers
and put them in this little town
and put a barbed wire around it
and just let them freely talk amongst themselves
on solving the problems,
but you'd have complete secrecy.
Well, Groves loved that idea.
It solved all his security concerns.
And so he actually, soon thereafter,
took Oppenheimer on a tour of New Mexico.
Robert wanted the secret city to be built there
and he took Groves to Los Alamos Boys School,
which was about 40 miles down the road from his cabin
that he had started renting in 1929.
And here, the Los Alamos Boys School
had a dormitory and a conference room
and, you know, the beginnings of,
they had no idea how many people they would need.
- It was Oppenheimer's insistence
that this is done in Los Alamos,
and again, there would be practical reasons
for not doing it in Los Alamos.
It's right in the hills,
getting anything there would be a lot of hard work,
but he insisted
and so you have this town built in Los Alamos.
And Oppenheimer,
as part of being the director of the laboratory,
was also in charge of who got what house
and the schooling arrangements for the children
that would be brought there
and the washing arrangements of the people.
And as it turned out, he could have meetings
on domestic arrangements,
he could have meetings on plutonium,
he could have meetings on,
you know, how exactly you're going to drop this bomb,
he could have meetings with von Neumann,
the very brilliant Hungarian mathematician,
about the mathematics involved in fission,
and very quickly, he could master all these fields.
And so as it turned out,
he was the perfect choice to be in charge of this operation.
- The initial estimate was maybe 100 people
brought together, scientists.
Well, it quickly grew to 1,000
and then 3,000.
By the end of the war,
there were 6,000 people in this secret city.
He later said that, you know,
there was no physics being discovered during World War II.
It was all engineering.
You know, the idea of fission had been discovered in 1939,
so it was an open secret
among physicists in Germany and Japan and America
that this was theoretically possible to build a gadget
that would have an enormous explosive power
but how to do it became an engineering problem.
- The building of the device, the design of the device,
the design of the bomb
and the building of the bomb at Los Alamos
depended on receiving the fissionable materials
from these other sites.
There was tremendous time pressure on Los Alamos
to be ready with their device, with their mechanism,
for when sufficient quantities
of fissionable materials would arrive,
to have this thing ready
so that it could be used in the war.
- Rather strangely,
Oppenheimer turned out to be a good manager.
No one would've predicted this.
He was the archetypal ivory tower academic,
but it turned out that he could manage people.
- Oh, he again had transformed himself
into a charismatic leader.
He had a signature pork pie hat,
a good eye for drama and theatrics,
but he was, you know, he cut a good figure.
He was handsome and charming
when he wanted to be,
particularly to people below him.
And at Los Alamos,
he sort of treated his fellow physicists and chemists
and engineers as fellow students.
So he would come into the room
where everyone was arguing about,
should we do this or should we go this way,
or how do we fix this problem,
and he would just stand at the back of the room and listen.
And then after 30 minutes or an hour,
he would intervene and say,
"Well, I think what you're all saying is this,"
and he would manage in a very brilliant, concise way
to show them the path forward was.
- The accounts of the scientists who worked there
often present it as the best time of their lives,
the most engaged they've ever been,
the closest and most energized scientific experience
that they've ever had.
And they say, in their reminiscences,
that that had a great deal to do with Oppenheimer.
- Los Alamos became his magical city on the hill.
He was the king of it.
He really enjoyed the work.
And, you know, social life revolved all around events,
like they had a theater, they had a grocery store,
but most of the socializing took place in private homes.
And Oppenheimer, you know, had parties all the time,
encouraged people to have a release.
You know, he continued to go horseback riding.
- They would ski in the mountains.
Many of the scientists were from Europe,
Enrico Fermi was an avid skier.
They would enjoy what New Mexico had to offer
in terms of the outdoors,
cross-country skiing, hiking.
There were many parties.
It was a very young community,
young people, college age,
graduate student age in their 20s, in their 30s.
And there were many parties,
they would drink a lot, they would dance,
Edward Teller would play the piano.
In some ways, it was like college life, I think.
- And there was a lot of drinking, so...
But it was a weird place and he was...
He was in charge of it all.
- And so the job of getting the bomb built
was really just a matter of 18 months.
They moved in in '43,
by the spring of '45,
they were ready to test the first weapon,
which they tested at the Trinity Site
in southern New Mexico,
which is an extraordinary achievement.
The Nazis spent five years
and didn't even get a working reactor.
- Finally, after three years work,
the atomic experts were ready to test their first bomb.
In the control shack was Dr. J.R. Oppenheimer.
- The automatic controls got it now.
Rob, this time, the stakes are really high.
- It's going to work all right, Robert,
and I'm sure we'll never be sorry for it.
- Well, in 40 seconds, we'll know.
- Minus 30 seconds.
- There was a great deal of pressure
leading up to the Trinity test.
Rationally, they had every reason to believe
that it would work,
the gadget would work as expected.
But, you know, this is the first time
anyone had attempted this thing,
so there was a lot of tension
and particularly on the night before the explosion.
There's this very spooky photo of Oppenheimer
in his pork pie hat in the shadows,
and you see the sphere of the Trinity weapon,
and he's leaning in and you see his sharp, angular nose.
He was up there on the top of the tower, inspecting,
making sure that all the plugs were in the right place.
- The first question was, would it work at all?
So they're all nervous wrecks.
They witnessed it from a long distance away,
and they were told to use these special shields and so on.
Not everyone did.
- And, you know, early that morning,
well, they were outside the bunker
lying on the desert floor,
and Frank was by his side, Frank Oppenheimer.
And, you know, they witnessed this massive explosion
and the mushroom cloud.
- But couple of things,
they said that they had no idea
that it would produce this kind of beautiful cloud.
I mean, you hate to talk about it that way,
but it's beautiful, number one,
and that the light flash came first and then the heat
and only much later, the sound.
And so it wasn't a single event,
it was an event that kept unfolding.
- Oppenheimer returned to Frank and simply said,
"Well, it worked."
Now he's known, you know,
he has a theatrical side to him,
so at some point in the next few days,
he was interviewed by a "New York Times" reporter
who was assigned to write a story.
- Few people laughed, few people cried,
most people were silent.
- And he, I think, playfully,
when this reporter asked him what went through his mind
when he saw the Trinity test,
Oppenheimer playfully said, "I thought of the Gita stanza."
- I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture,
the Bhagavad Gita,
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
I suppose we all thought that one way or another.
- You know, a nice line,
but that's not what he said at the Trinity test.
But that's become part of the lore.
- Then in August 1945,
they used the uranium bomb on Hiroshima
and they used the plutonium bomb on Nagasaki.
The Hiroshima bomb turned out to be more deadly.
Now, when they tested the bomb in Trinity,
the scientists were all delighted that it worked.
And then among several of them,
there was this ominous sense
that they were going to be responsible
for the deaths of tens,
possibly hundreds of thousands of people.
Oppenheimer was in favor of using the bomb
because an argument that he'd got
from his old friend Niels Bohr,
Niels Bohr was very great Danish physicist
and the man whom Oppenheimer admired above anybody else,
both as a scientist and as a human being,
and Niels Bohr came to Los Alamos
and would discuss with Oppenheimer the politics of the bomb.
And he said to Oppenheimer,
well, what you are doing could be the most dreadful thing
that humanity is evident, or it could be the best.
And his argument for it being the best
was that it could potentially put an end to war
by demonstrating a weapon so powerful
that nations would resolve their differences
without going to war
rather than risk unleashing the power of this again.
Now, in order for that argument to work,
it has to be seen just how dreadful this weapon is,
and I think that's why Oppenheimer was in favor
of using the weapon against civilians at Hiroshima.
- But this is, again, you know, a curious thing
about Robert Oppenheimer.
He was capable of compartmentalizing his emotions
and his intellect and his responsibilities.
After the Trinity test and before Hiroshima,
before August 6th,
he's walking to work one day
and his secretary, Ruth Wilson, she was walking by his side
and suddenly she heard Robert saying,
in a whisper,
"those poor little people, those poor little people."
Wilson turned to him and said, "Robert, what do you mean?"
And he said, "Oh, you know, all those women and children,
you know, when they drop this bomb on a city,
it's going to..."
And then he fell silent.
Well, that was the very same week
that he briefed the bombardiers
that were going to be on the mission to drop those bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as it turned out,
and he was instructing them
in a sort of coldly intellectual fashion
at exactly what altitude the bomb should be detonated
so that it would have the maximum destructive power,
and that it should be dropped on the center of a city.
So he both understood the ethical consequences
of killing all these civilians, a whole city,
and yet he did his duty.
- And so in some unpleasant sense
that really does call into question
a lot of strategic thinking and morality,
we used them anyway.
And you can certainly say
that the use of the second bomb at Nagasaki
just three days after the first one
was premature because it didn't give the Japanese
time to absorb.
They weren't really even sure
what had happened from Hiroshima.
And so if you'd waited two weeks and said,
"We can just keep doing this as long as you want,"
that's one thing,
but three days later is pretty quick.
And so we built it, we're gonna use it,
we can't let the war end before we use it,
and we're gonna use one of each
to make sure that they both work,
and we're trying to warn Stalin about our capacity,
so that it gets very, very, very complex
and thick and morally troubling
the farther you look into what happens after Alamogordo.
- And after Hiroshima,
although unlike after Trinity,
there wasn't this euphoric feeling among the scientists
and shared by Oppenheimer,
it was a much more somber mood.
Oppenheimer never felt that he made a mistake
in being in favor of using the bomb against civilians,
even after the war when he was invited to do Japan.
And the thing that Japanese journalists
most wanted to know was,
do you regret building the bomb?
Oppenheimer still say, "No, I don't."
Immediately after the Second World War,
Oppenheimer was the most,
he replaced Einstein as the most famous scientist
in the United States,
and his photograph was everywhere.
- Oh, he was a national celebrity.
He was a very famous man,
was lauded on the covers of "TIME" and "LIFE."
He decided very quickly,
you know, after Hiroshima, he fell into a deep depression.
- And it's very notable that after the war,
he dedicated himself to politics.
He did no original science after the war.
He still kept his directorship
of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,
but he himself spent most of his time in Washington, DC,
meeting with politicians and urging upon them
ways in which they could use the atomic bomb
as a means for peace rather than war,
fulfilling Niels Bohr's vision
of what the bomb could achieve.
- The late 1940s, before 1949,
people are still trying to figure out
what's the way forward.
Are we in some kind of Cold War or is it something else?
Is there a chance to avoid total confrontation
with the Soviet Union?
Is there a chance to avoid a sort of military dominance
of nuclear technology?
- And Oppenheimer drew up this ambitious plan,
which for a short time was accepted by the US government
to be presented to the United Nations,
which would involve communal ownership of all uranium
and would also involve no nation
being able to build atomic weapons.
- The realization that this had happened
and what he had done had resulted in,
well, probably close to a quarter million deaths over time
from radiation and the initial burn,
that sunk in.
And I think it was hard for him
to know what to do with that knowledge.
- The difficulty with Oppenheimer in this whole period
is, on the one hand, he is an independently minded person,
and he has the mindset of the scientist
and the scientist's interests very close to his heart.
On the other hand, he's become a very important person
within the sort of military advising structure.
He's sort of the top of the pyramid
when it comes to scientists
whose opinions are being taken seriously
about things like the use of atomic bombs, future policy.
He is the face of this new technology,
and so he doesn't have either the inclination or the freedom
to totally go against the whole system.
So Oppenheimer's approach through all of this
is to try and bend it in ways
that he thinks it could be bent into.
- And he gets an appointment with Harry Truman
in the Oval Office.
He was very gracious,
but he had a habit of just bracing up
in the presence of authority
and people who clearly thought
that they were smarter than him
in positions of power.
And so here's the president of the United States
and Oppenheimer's mission is to try to convince Harry Truman
that we need to contain this weapon
and establish an international atomic agency
that would own in a sovereign way,
own any factory, any laboratory anywhere in the world
engaged in atomic research.
You know, so he's making this argument to Harry Truman,
and Truman interrupts and says,
"Well, Dr. Oppenheimer, when do you think the Russians
are going to get the bomb?"
And Oppenheimer is kind of stunned and says,
"Well, I'm not sure, Sir, but eventually."
And Harry responds, "Well, I know. Never."
And Oppenheimer, like, understands in that moment
that Harry Truman understands nothing.
- Oppenheimer gets very frustrated with Truman,
who's not a great mind,
and he blurts out, "Something's gotta be done.
After all, I have blood on my hands."
And Truman stopped the meeting right then
and had Oppenheimer escorted out, and he said,
"Don't bring that fellow around here again.
He may have built the bomb, but I'm the one who set it off."
And what Truman was saying is,
"What is this?
He's taking himself pretty seriously here.
I and I alone made that decision to use the weapons in war,
and he comes in here
whining and bleeding about his conscience
and tell and tried to talk to me
into being more sensitive about this?"
- 2201, take one.
When he was offered
the work on the hydrogen bomb,
he did not want to do it,
yet you said to go ahead to work on the hydrogen bomb.
- That's correct.
Well, he was like all the scientists are,
they discover these things
and find out how terrible they are,
and then they don't wanna take any blame
for the consequences, if there is blame.
But that didn't make any difference.
He didn't have to make the decision, I made it.
- So Oppenheimer blew it with Harry Truman
but he continued to work to try to restore some sanity
to sort of nuclear policy.
- And then the Soviet Union set off an atomic bomb
and that ended all of that discussion practically overnight.
Nobody really was expecting it
to be quite as soon as it was.
This sets off a whole debate
over what the appropriate American response ought to be,
and one of the big options that's brought up
is, "Let's build a hydrogen bomb."
So this is a weapon that uses not just nuclear fission,
not just the splitting of atoms, like the atomic bomb,
but uses the energy of an atomic bomb
to set off nuclear fusion reactions
like those that take place in the sun.
And this is a weapon that can be a thousand times
more powerful than an atomic bomb.
A couple days afterwards, Scotland Yard announces
that they have arrested Klaus Fuchs,
a British scientist who had confessed
to being a Soviet spy in the United States
during World War II.
And so this is a real shocking revelation
that comes right on the heels
of these shocking and painful discussions.
You go from the Soviets have the atomic bomb,
should we make an H-bomb,
okay, we're gonna make an H-bomb,
oh, by the way, you have no secrets.
And the more that came out about Klaus Fuchs himself,
the worse it seemed.
Klaus Fuchs was a brilliant mathematical physicist.
He was very highly placed at Los Alamos.
He had a near photographic memory.
He was an extremely quiet, reserved person at Los Alamos.
He never really talked about his opinions on anything.
He was so well respected that he was used as a babysitter
by many of the other scientists
when they would go and have parties
or things of this nature.
And to discover that this guy
who had been core to many of the technical discussions
and had even invented some of the core parts of the bomb,
he was one of the co-holders of the patent
on gaseous diffusion,
which is how they enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb,
I mean, this is a guy who's at the center
of the Manhattan Project in so many ways
and it turned out the entire time
he was working very hard for the United States,
but he was also working very hard for the Soviet Union.
- Suddenly, it was possible to imagine
a hydrogen bomb being built.
Now, hydrogen bomb, there's almost no limit
to how big it can be.
So it could be hundreds of times bigger than
and more deadly than the Hiroshima bomb.
This was discussed at the highest levels.
The question was, should the US government
and the armed forces go ahead with an accelerated program
to create the hydrogen bomb?
Oppenheimer argued against it
on the grounds that no one in their right minds
would ever use such a bomb,
so what would be the point of creating a bomb
a hundred, a thousand times more powerful
than the one that destroyed Hiroshima
when that bomb itself has shown itself to be so powerful,
you don't want to use it again ever.
And so Oppenheimer argued against this program,
at which point he'd already upset
the leading figures in the army and the government.
He now became under suspicion by them.
They began to think, "Well, why is Oppenheimer
trying to sabotage a program
when we know that the Soviets
are busy trying to build a hydrogen bomb?"
And so a lot of influential figures
in the armed forces and the government
came to think that Oppenheimer wasn't really on their side.
He was really working for the Soviets.
And this suspicion grew in the McCarthy period,
in the mid '50's, early to mid '50's,
and led to a security case being held,
which would assess Oppenheimer's standing.
- The real instigator for the 1954 security hearings
was Lewis Strauss.
Strauss, however, was not only the chairman
of the board of trustees at the institute,
he was the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission
appointed by the newly elected Eisenhower,
and Oppenheimer and he clashed
and just bad chemistry.
He had an enormous ego.
He demanded attention.
Oppenheimer wasn't giving it to him and wasn't being polite,
and he was pulling all the strings.
He pointed the gray panel members
who would preside over the hearing.
He brought in the prosecutor,
there shouldn't have been a prosecutor at all.
It wasn't a trial, it was a security hearing.
Oppenheimer was stunned
that he was being questioned like this.
Here, he'd been nine years earlier, a national celebrity.
- And initially, they basically say to Oppenheimer,
"You know, you don't have to have any kind of hearing.
We'll just take your security clearance
and you'll just retire,
and that'll be that and we'll be done with it."
And Oppenheimer, somewhat to their surprise,
wants a hearing.
He wants to contest these charges.
- In fact, actually, there was a moment
when Oppenheimer had decided he was going to go through
and defend his reputation,
and he called Albert into his office, Albert Einstein,
and explained to him that he had to be absent.
He was gonna be down in Washington for a few weeks
and there was this security hearing,
and they were questioning my loyalty.
And Einstein argued with him and said,
"Robert, you don't need to do this. Just walk away from it.
You don't need these people."
And Oppenheimer said,
"No, I have to defend my reputation.
I have to retain my security clearance
so that I can influence national policy.
It's very important,"
and he walked out.
And Einstein turned to his secretary and said,
"There goes a nar," the Yiddish word for fool.
- In a security clearance hearing,
you have a group of people
who are gonna go over every inch of your life,
including and especially your absolute worst decisions
and worse than lowest moments.
And they're gonna do so
with the entire power of the FBI behind them
and military intelligence
and maybe even the CIA or something like this.
This is gonna be really ugly.
- So he goes to Washington
and there's this horrible witch hunt of a trial.
It's just atrocious.
- Once the hearings get started,
it doesn't matter that they were started
under false pretenses.
It doesn't matter that they were started
in a way to try to rig it against him, and they were.
They were entirely rigged against him from the beginning.
There were illegal activities
taking part during the hearing.
They were wire tapping Oppenheimer's private discussions
with his lawyers
and then giving that information to the people
who were arguing against him and his lawyers at the hearing
so they would know ahead of time
what he was gonna do the next day.
Totally illegal.
The three categories are value in our character,
loyalty, and association.
Loyalty is pretty easy, I guess, right?
Oppenheimer's working for the US government.
Nobody really has any credible accusation
that he's not loyal.
Character is tricky because he lies to the security officers
and makes other kind of blunders.
So that's actually a pretty sore point for him
and then associations are impossible.
I mean, half of his family members are communists.
Many of them renounced it and left it
but the association is there.
It's very hard to get around that.
The character problems are really dark.
I mean, one of the things he does
during the Manhattan Project,
during World War II, while he's running Los Alamos
is he goes to visit his ex-girlfriend
and spends the night over at her house,
the ex-girlfriend who was a fellow traveler
and sort of introduced him to communism.
And they ask him like, "Was this good judgment
to spend and sleep with your communist ex-girlfriend
while you're running an atomic bomb project?
Is this good judgment?"
And Oppenheimer says,
"Well, I don't think it was bad judgment.
I mean, she wasn't really a communist.
I know she was a spy,"
but this looks bad.
This looks bad no matter how you slice it.
They ask him, "Why did you lie to the security officers?"
And he says, "Because I was an idiot."
That's not a good answer.
- Anyway, it was just a disaster.
And Kitty, who was, you know, loyally present
throughout this whole affair,
was actually, you know, got up on the witness stand
and was interrogated herself.
She did better in defending Oppenheimer
than Oppenheimer did himself.
She was very feisty, insulting.
She cut right through
to the absurdity of the charges
and yet, you know, the panel voted 2 to 1,
relatively close,
to the conclusion that Oppenheimer
was probably a loyal American
but nevertheless a security risk,
and so his security clearance should be denied.
It was a real tragedy.
- Which put Oppenheimer in the crazy situation
of having in his office in Princeton
papers that he had written
which he was no longer allowed now to consult,
and it tarnished his reputation for a very long time.
And even now, when I was working on my book,
when I went to the States, people would ask me,
"What evidence have you found
that Oppenheimer was working for the communists?"
And the answer to that is none at all.
And in fact, the fact that Oppenheimer
was kept under such close surveillance
and was held in such suspicion
by leading members of the armed forces and the government,
the fact that they produced no evidence
that he was working for the Communist Party
is itself pretty good evidence that he wasn't.
- And this was all in the context
of American anti-communist hysteria and McCarthyism.
And this destroyed Oppenheimer's power,
destroyed his career as a scientific advisor,
marginalized him, excluded him
from, you know, having any involvement with government
and really with the world of nuclear weapons and policy.
And, you know, that's what really made Oppenheimer
into this tragic figure.
- Now Oppenheimer suffered a humiliation
at the hands of the Atomic Energy Commission
and the United States government,
which no person should be forced to suffer
and certainly not someone who was innocent
of the crimes that were attributed to him.
The shattering of his confidence
in the United States government,
in the basic fairness of the universe had to be gigantic.
- And he became a pariah.
He was disinvited from scheduled university lectures.
And the humiliation of what he had gone through,
he just thought, "Well, I need to get the family out,
and we'll all go on an adventure,"
and he chose to go to St. John in the Virgin Islands.
Now Oppenheimer goes down to St. John,
the FBI is alerted to his movements.
They send an FBI agent to the island
to monitor with binoculars,
scout out if there are any Russian submarines nearby
who might ferret him away.
He fell in love with St. John,
began going back there every summer,
every December, January.
He spent a lot of time down there
in the '50s and early '60s.
- "Two years before we had sold a little land
at the east end of our beach,
the atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer
and his wife Kitty,
they lived in Princeton where Oppenheimer was then directing
the Institute for Advanced Studies in absentia.
They were trying to build an unwieldy beach cottage
designed for them by Wallace Harrison
who had previous architectural experience
designing the United Nations buildings in New York.
For several years,
the Oppenheimers had been spending vacations on St. John.
Kitty wrote to me in despair,
they wanted to come down in June
and check on the punitive progress of their construction,
where could they possibly stay.
I first met the Oppenheimers in 1956,
one day when I went alone up to Trunk Bay for lunch
and they were there on a holiday.
Robert's security clearance had been canceled
two years before.
I hadn't followed the case with much attention,
being far more concerned at the time
with infinite activities than with un-American ones.
I had only a dim impression
that a great man had been brought low.
I was curious to observe him.
I saw it once that he and his wife
were the most curious couple I had ever observed.
They were got up in routine tourist garb,
button shirts and shorts and sandals,
but they looked like nothing human,
too thin and frail and pale for earthly life.
They looked as if they were down from Mars, not Princeton,
or as if some bright kid had made them up
with matchsticks and his chem craft set.
Kitty was the more humanoid of the two,
although she seemed to have no features
except for her dark eyes.
Her voice was too deep and hoarse
to emanate from her tiny chest.
And helplessly weak as she was,
she had the truculent stance of a heavyweight pugilist.
I heard from other Trunk Bay guests
that she had a drinking problem.
The problem was that she drank a lot and got drunk,
and that drunk or sober, she was often staggeringly rude.
'Aren't you hot with all that hair?'
she croaked at me on introduction
then returned to her communion with a bottle of Danish beer.
Robert looked astoundingly like Pinocchio
and he moved as jerkily as a marionette on strings,
but there was nothing wooden about his manner.
He exuded warmth and sympathy and courtesy
along with the fumes of his famous pipe.
His voice was gentle, almost inaudible,
and it became softer the more he wanted to be heard.
He asked me what my husband did,
'He worked for Rockefeller.'
Robert mused with many pretentious puffs at his pipe.
At last, his voice was spellbinding whisper,
he said, 'I too have taken money for doing harm.'
This struck me as a stunning one-liner."
- It was, for each day, the dream of an open air place.
It was one large open space,
and when the place was closed down,
it had this aluminium roof that was flaps,
that would flap down to the floor and bolt into the floor
and all you have to do when you came
was you unbolted the flaps and then swung them back up
so that they became the awning over the porch.
It is absolutely beautiful wild
with the view straight out into the water.
But they really spent more summers here
once they had their house built at Hawksnest.
Every August come the anniversaries
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
he became very silent.
It was a sad time for him.
- It was escape from the tensity of his life
in the United States
and from the sense that he'd been betrayed
by people that he had trusted
and people who should have trusted him,
but I think he was always a lonely man.
I think that the high water mark of his conviviality
was Los Alamos.
But I think before and after that,
he was essentially a lonely man,
lonely in the depths of his thinking.
And, I mean, we have to face it,
Oppenheimer was not a mature man.
He was locked into kind of a permanent adolescence
because he had never been normalized
in the way the rest of us get normalized in our communities.
He had never really participated in any community
that wasn't an artificial one in his life.
And so he's sufficiently lonely and eccentric
that he's looking for safe spaces,
and Princeton was a certain kind of a safe space
but St. John's was a much greater one,
and when you're there,
it's, you know, beautiful emerald seas and sands
and a native population that couldn't care less
about whatever your life is back in the United States.
And so I think that that was a kind of a Shangri-la for him
that he probably would've had,
even if there had not been the security clearance,
that he was just a man who was not comfortable
in routine social settings.
- He loved it.
Again, it was sort of like New Mexico, it was spartan.
It was much better weather,
but he loved the sailing.
- Oppenheimer's reputation was restored by his appearance
on the Ed Murrow show, "See It Now."
- This is "See It Now,"
edited by the partnership of Murrow and Friendly,
presented by the Aluminum Company of America.
- Ed Murrow had this idea of going to Princeton
and interviewing all the famous people in Princeton
including Einstein and Oppenheimer.
And he came back to New York City from Princeton,
saying to his friend,
"We've only got one usable interview here,"
which is the one with Oppenheimer.
Just as Groves had found
at the beginning of the Manhattan Project,
Oppenheimer stood head and shoulder above
all his fellow scientists
in terms of charisma and in terms of clarity.
He was able to explain things in a simple way
and in a way that held people's attention.
- This is a brief report
on the work and purpose of the Institute
as seen through the eyes and mind of one man,
it's director, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Dr. Oppenheimer, why don't we begin
by your telling me a little about
this Institute for Advanced Study,
how it began?
- Well, I will try.
Of course, it began at the time when I wasn't anywhere near,
and it's already a subject for historical research.
I'm about to find someone
to see if he can find out how it began.
- I have heard you describe it as a decompression chamber.
- Well, it is, for many people.
There are no telephones ringing,
and you don't have to go to committee meetings,
and you don't have to meet classes, and the...
It's especially for the few people who are here for life.
The first years are quite remarkable
because most people depend on being interrupted
in order to live,
but the work is so hard and failure is, of course,
I guess, an inevitable condition of success.
- Oppenheimer charmed Ed Murrow,
and through Ed Murrow's program,
charmed the whole of the United States of America.
Suddenly, he was everybody's favorite scientist again,
and he got invitations to give lectures
on anything he wanted to talk about.
He would talk about Hinduism,
he would talk about anything he liked,
and he would have thousands of people attend these lectures.
He had this very arresting sentence
in one of these lectures,
"As physicists, we have known sin."
And what he meant was that now,
because the theory of fission and fusion
was being used to make such deadly weapons,
you are dealing not only with the theory
of the fundamental parts of the universe,
you're also potentially producing work
that can be used to kill hundreds of thousands of people,
so in that way, the physicist have known sin.
And Oppenheimer gave a series of fascinating lectures
in which he would discuss these ideas.
And he was invited over to London
to give the Reith lectures for the BBC
in which he chose a similar theme,
and he became enormously popular.
- He no longer had the authority of an insider
within the networks of government
who knew what were the latest developments
with nuclear weapons
and who could speak with that sort of expertise,
but he became a spokesman
for the role of science
in relation to modern culture.
- That was a brief glimpse of a 2 1/2 hour conversation
with Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,
director of the Institute for Advanced Studies.
One thing that impressed this reporter about that institute,
was that he has never heard
so many people say, I don't know.
These men recognize mystery,
they welcome it and they wrestle with it.
Goodnight and good luck.
- And after the hearings,
joined and actively participated in
an organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
which was funded by the CIA.
But many prominent intellectuals
were involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom
in so far as it's sought to promote
liberal intellectual culture
as an antidote to what they argued
was the totalitarian culture of the Soviet Union.
And this group of intellectuals
was where Oppenheimer kind of found
a sense of belonging and recognition
after his marginalization in the security hearings.
- Throughout his life, Oppenheimer was attracted
to places of extraordinary beauty and remoteness.
And one thing that's very striking about these places,
the Virgin Islands, the plateau in New Mexico,
is that they are the very opposite of where he grew up.
And I'm inclined to think
that he was looking precisely for that.
He was looking precisely for something
that couldn't be more different
to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
And I think he found it
in the countryside of New Mexico above all,
which I think remained for him,
I think that countryside around the Rio Grande
remained for him his ideal,
in its wildness, in its beauty,
and in its remoteness.
He had a little hut overlooking the valley.
This is a remote area,
and you weren't going to bump into other people there,
whereas he grew up in the Upper West Side of New York
where all the people around him
were part of the same community.
Somebody wrote a book about that community
called "Our Crowd."
They recognized each other as being part of the same crowd,
though she's part of our crowd,
and I think he didn't want to be part of anybody's crowd.
The strain of working at Los Alamos
was that he chainsmoked.
And you can see, he was always a slender man,
but you can see in the pictures
of Los Alamos and afterwards, he's skeletal.
He's so thin and he never looked very well.
He died in his 60s,
but he looked like a man in his 80s.
The cancer caught up with him
shortly before his 63rd birthday.
- And Kitty knew
that he wanted his ashes scattered there.
So some months after his death in '67,
she motored out towards a point called Carvel Rock
in Hawksnest Bay,
just off the shore from where their cabin was.
- My parents had been arranging for a boat
to take Dr. O's ashes with Kitty out to Carvel Rock,
which they did.
- They cut the motor and instead of scattering the ashes,
Kitty just dumps the urn,
still closed up, into the water.
There's a splash and then it bobs up,
and eventually it sinks.
They watch for a while and then it sinks.
So his ashes are in an urn
on the floor of Hawksnest Bay.
- It will probably haunt me still for the rest of my life.
She was a great friend.
She had just turned 33.
That she was depressed for a lot of her adult life,
I think is understandable when you understand
what happened to her.
One of her dreams was to be an interpreter at the UN,
and the FBI said, no.
It's like they were visiting
so-called sins of her father upon her
and that just was not fair.
Anyway, I lost a great friend
and the world lost a great mind as well.
- There is no key that is going to unlock
the mysteries of Oppenheimer.
He's always going to be mysterious.
His friend Rabi said that there's no single personality
that is Oppenheimer.
There's all these sharp shafts
that make up Oppenheimer.
But he's somebody who the outside world
insisted was a German Jew,
and he said, "No, I'm neither German nor am I Jewish."
He insisted on defining himself.
- The tragedy of Oppenheimer
is that he was so deeply evolved ethically
and yet so socially awkward
and so brilliant at the same time
that these things were never fully integrated
into his character.
- He was able to talk philosophy
with the leading philosophers of his time.
He wrote poetry, and he was an expert on French poetry.
Scientifically, he most likely,
if he'd lived a couple of years longer,
would've been awarded a Nobel Prize,
and here's something that's so typical of Oppenheimer.
What he would've been awarded a Nobel Prize for
are three papers that he himself attributed
no importance to whatsoever.
This is three papers that he wrote in 1939
on gravitational collapse, black holes.
He was the first person
to give a complete mathematical description
of what happens when a massive star collapses in on itself
and becomes a black hole.
- And he was the creator of the atomic bomb,
this use of science
for absolute destruction,
this creation of a weapon that makes hell on earth,
a weapon of absolute terror.
So Oppenheimer, I think, really represents
the development of reason and of a culture of reason
which has turned against itself and become irrational
and become destructive.
And that was the dilemma
that Oppenheimer was wrestling with
and that's what he represents, I think, for us today.
- No, he's an iconic figure.
The 1954 trial makes him much more interesting
than just the father of the atomic bomb,
but it's also interesting
that as the father of the atomic bomb,
the man who built the two weapons
that destroyed two Japanese cities,
he then spent really the rest of his life
trying to contain the bomb.
- He was an extraordinary polymath,
and he refused to be bound by limitations
and categorizations.
And I think recognizing the value of such a man at this time
is quite an important symbolic thing to do.
- And that's the price of genius, I think,
it's when the hero is partly responsible for the fall
that we have through tragedy,
and that's why we can't look away.
- It is still an open question
whether humanity is going to survive the nuclear age,
and Oppenheimer would think this is a sad legacy.
Finally, just his personality,
his ability to transform himself
to overcome his youthful psychological crisis,
his ability to become a good professor,
a charismatic lecturer after being a terrible one,
his ability to run Las Alamos and be revered
and admired by everyone who worked there,
all of whom, you know, anyone we interviewed
who had been there said, you know,
the bomb never would've happened in 2 1/2 years
if it hadn't been for Oppenheimer.
Again, he transforms himself
into this amazing administrator
and yet there's this tragedy at the end of his life,
and he's, you know, publicly humiliated,
and that too is a important story.
You know, America goes through these periods
of historical craziness,
and McCarthyism was one such disease
and Oppenheimer became the chief victim of it.