Original subtitles

(dramatic music) (bomb exploding)

- [Narrator] On August 29, 1949,

four years after the American bombing of Hiroshima,

the USSR prepares to fire its first atomic bomb.

(speaking in foreign language)

Stalin owed this astonishing speed

to a remarkable spy plan at the very heart

of the United States.

With ruthless efficiency,

it allowed him to find out all the nuclear

discoveries made by the Manhattan Project.

The success of this huge operation

was due to an exceptional woman

whose achievement has remained a secret until today.

(dramatic music)

(speaking in foreign language)

(gun firing)

- [Narrator] On June 22, 1941,

Hitler opened his eastern borders

and three million German soldiers

invaded Russian territory with an aim

to annihilate the Red Army.

Three months later, the Germans were at

the gates of Moscow.

On the night of October 12, 1941,

Stalin asked to meet with Vassily Zarubin,

Elizabeth's husband, who was an important Soviet agent.

Stalin told him to leave for the United States immediately

on a mission with his wife.

(speaking in foreign language)

(crowd cheering)

- [Narrator] Elizabeth and her husband arrived

in Germany and witnessed the terrifying rise

of Nazism and anti-Semitism.

Elizabeth was a committed and militant Jew,

but she didn't run from this horrific

storm of anti-Jewish persecution.

Instead, she risked her life to create networks

and to lay down the foundations of her recruitment work.

(dramatic music)

(speaking in foreign language)

(soft dramatic music)

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] So Ruben had known Margarita Konenkova

for a long time as the wife of sculptor Konenkov,

who made the famous statue of Einstein in Princeton.

She recruited her in 1936.

(speaking in foreign language)

(dramatic music)

On January 6, 1939,

a news item upset the scientific world.

Two German scholars, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman,

published an article in which they demonstrated

the possibility of splitting uranium.

Nazi Germany was moving towards nuclear weaponry.

Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist of Jewish origin,

who immigrated to the USA,

was the first to react to this article.

- He'd been thinking about fission

and the possibility of a nuclear weapon

for a very long time.

And so he understood the implications

as well as probably anyone.

He wanted to warn the president of the United States

about this discovery,

but he recognized that he didn't have any name recognition.

And so he was in no position to approach the president.

So he went to Albert Einstein.

Einstein, of course, was world famous at the time,

just as he is today.

And he convinced Einstein to co-author a letter

with him and they sent it to the president

of the United States.

- [Narrator] This letter is dated August 2, 1939.

In his response, Roosevelt informs of his decision

to form a committee to study the use of uranium.

It's the first step of the future American atomic program.

- That's how the Manhattan Project got its start.

It wasn't known as the Manhattan Project at the time.

There was simply a committee known as

the Uranium Advisory Committee which handled

the affairs of this research.

But the Manhattan Project would take

several more years to come into existence.

(speaking in foreign language)

(dramatic music)

December 7, 1941.

Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor

suddenly changed history.

The United States, which had until then been

ambiguously neutral,

immediately joined in the war.

Roosevelt's Uranium Advisory Committee,

who'd been seen as apathetic,

now took on a new sense of purpose.

(speaking in foreign language)

- The Manhattan Project really was an enormous

national effort.

The project employed nearly 130,000 people.

The thing is, you're not going to have an atomic bomb

if you don't have enriched uranium or plutonium

to put in it, and so many of the people

involved in the project were construction workers.

They were building some of the largest buildings

ever erected before.

Specifically, Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

And the main mission at the time was to enrich uranium.

The other big laboratory was at Hanford, Washington.

And they were trying to enrich plutonium there.

And so these were very important missions.

There would have been no atomic weapons

had it not been for Oak Ridge and Hanford

and the people who had been working there.

- [Narrator] In Moscow, work was also being done

on the nuclear front.

Even if he didn't believe it or didn't want

to believe in the bomb,

Stalin was informed by his intelligence services

that the Americans were going down the atomic route.

(speaking in foreign language)

- The Soviets had really good scientists,

but the industrialized, the western portion

of that country was decimated during World War II.

- [Narrator] In September 1942,

Stalin assigned the implementation of the atomic plan

to Lavrentii Beria,

chief of internal and external security for the USSR.

(speaking in foreign language)

On September 17, 1942,

the American authorities named Leslie Groves

as the director of the atomic bomb project.

A colonel who they had promoted to general

for that very reason,

he's the one who christened it the Manhattan Project.

- Groves was not a scientist.

He was an engineer.

He had just finished building the Pentagon.

And he thought because of building the Pentagon

right before World War II,

that he should get a combat assignment

somewhere in Europe or the Pacific.

So he was disappointed when he was told

he was going to be the head of this top secret project.

- [Narrator] Less than a month after his appointment,

on the 8th of October, Groves met Oppenheimer at Berkeley.

The 25th of February, 1943,

although not everyone was in agreement,

Grove selected Oppenheimer as the scientific

director of the Manhattan Project.

And so it was this man who would go down in history

as the father of the first atomic bomb.

- Robert Oppenheimer's a very complex man.

His parents were German immigrants,

but he was born in New York City,

so he was a US citizen.

It was known early on that he was brilliant,

and he went to the Ethical Culture School in New York City.

And there were sometimes that the teacher sent

him to the library because he knew more

than the teacher did.

He went through Harvard University in three years

as an undergraduate,

and so he was offered positions

around the United States,

but he took the position at University of Berkeley

to do the works on the cyclotron.

And so that kind of brought then nuclear physics west

because he said for physics it was a desert.

There was nothing going on there.

- [Narrator] Groves and Oppenheimer,

the soldier and the scientist.

The mythical pair behind the American atomic journey.

Two very different characters who actually formed

the perfect team to drive forward

this atomic project.

- I think why he chose Oppenheimer,

there were a couple reasons.

One is because he was not a scientist.

Oppenheimer was able to explain in non-scientific terms

what the Manhattan Project was about.

The other reason was because Oppenheimer

was young and hungry for fame.

There were other more senior scientific physicists

who could've been picked,

but Groves said I want somebody who is hungry,

who will go do the hard work seven days a week,

as many hours as they can.

Not to rest and say, you know, I already have a Nobel Prize.

Wanted somebody who would work really hard

and he saw that Oppenheimer was that driven.

- [Narrator] The first mission that Groves

assigned to Oppenheimer was to choose

and recruit other scientists.

It was a fantastic challenge.

Oppenheimer became a sort of scientific coach,

in charge of the most extraordinary team

of scientists the world had ever seen.

- Oppenheimer was able first of all to recruit

scientific talent from around the country.

He would go to somebody and say,

we're working on this top secret project.

I can't tell you what it is,

but if you sign up for this,

then you'll come to a very beautiful part of

the United States and you will work

on a very important war effort.

Oppenheimer didn't specifically recruit all of them.

He spent his time recruiting the leadership

of the laboratory.

People like Robert Bacher who I mentioned,

tried to bring in the Hans Bethes

and the Enrico Fermis of the world.

And of course they all had graduate students

working for them.

And they brought in their graduate students

and who they trusted, who they liked,

who they knew were competent.

It was just incredibly rich collection

of scientific talent.

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] Oppenheimer was recruited by Groves,

despite strong hesitation due to his political past.

But the issue of his real feelings towards

communism remained a shadow over him

being selected as head of the atomic program.

- During the Great Depression,

Oppenheimer then became politicized

and started supporting left wing causes.

Last reason why, in the '30s,

people at the universities around the country

supported communism was as this rising tide

of fascism and Nazism was sweeping through Europe,

it seemed the only people who were opposing that

were people connected with the communists.

So he became then radicalized, politicized,

and before World War II,

the FBI had Robert Oppenheimer on their

custodial detention list.

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] General Groves then faced

the second great challenge of the organization of his plan.

He'd have to assemble under one roof

all the scientists he recruited

who were scattered throughout universities

all over the United States.

- There were scientists scattered around

the country at the different universities,

and for them to communicate with each other,

they couldn't just pick up the phone.

They had to write it out.

They gave it to a courier who put it in

his briefcase that was handcuffed to him,

and then that courier took a train across the country.

So it had to have a central laboratory.

- The requirements for the weapons design laboratory,

that it had to be remote,

the land had to be relatively easy to acquire.

It had to be defensible.

It had to be far inland.

They were worried about commando raids.

You know, commandos being landed on submarines.

They thought that things near the coastline

were much more susceptible to that.

And there are some wide open areas

which could be used for high explosive tests

and things like that.

- [Narrator] Groves sent several officers

to look for an appropriate location.

But none of them came back with a satisfactory suggestion.

So Oppenheimer invited General Groves

to accompany him on an exploration

of the magnificent scenery in New Mexico,

and quickly persuaded him that this would be

the ideal location.

- Oppenheimer had come to New Mexico as a young man.

He had been sick for a year.

He was sent to New Mexico to kind of regain his health.

The kind of the final month of his convalescence,

he came to northern New Mexico and fell in love

with northern New Mexico.

- Los Alamos was selected by Robert Oppenheimer.

It was the ideal location.

And General Groves approved the selection.

- [Narrator] The incredible logistics

behind the Manhattan Project would now

invade the stunning western backdrop.

Now the country's best scientists,

who came here from many different states,

would be able to start their work here.

Everything was yet to be built,

and ground was yet to be broken,

but the Los Alamos atomic program could now begin.

- Back during the 1800s,

you may remember the gold rush.

And so wherever somebody discovered gold,

a little town would pop up overnight

and it was known as a boom town.

And I think that Los Alamos is very much

an atomic boom town.

They built a laboratory in a matter of months.

They had to build living quarters,

they had to build administrative building,

buildings for handling materials like

uranium and plutonium.

All of this was done very, very quickly.

(speaking in foreign language)

Originally Los Alamos was going to be

a military site and everyone here was

going to be in the military, including Oppenheimer.

He was going to be a lieutenant colonel.

He had already ordered his uniforms.

The problem was that the scientists

that he was trying to recruit were already

doing important war research elsewhere as civilians.

- I'm an academic.

We are very independent.

We teach how we want to teach.

Nobody tells us how we're to teach.

That's pretty different than military.

So there was clashes with that,

with very intelligent scientists

who felt that the military were dampening them,

were constricting them.

But still, there were attempts to try

to get the scientists to abide by the military rules.

There was a wonderful man by the name

of Richard Feynman,

who was the joker there.

He was a jokster.

And he would go out, he would find a gap in the fence,

he would go out and then he'd come back in

the checkpoint, and then he'd go sneak out,

and then he'd come back in.

And they said, "When did you go out?"

He was just coming in all the time.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] This strained relationship

between the military and the scientists in Los Alamos

shows the human side of the project.

From the very beginning,

the suspicion of treachery by the scientists

from more diverse backgrounds remained unchanged.

(speaking in foreign language)

- People were recruited based on their scientific talent.

Then they were evaluated,

their background was evaluated after that.

And that really was not a big problem.

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] The scientific and military powers

were forced to get along in order for

the atomic research to succeed.

Both men who embodied these powers,

who formed a mutual relationship of trust,

would both agree on modes of operation,

often against some opposition.

- Groves did not want that knowledge to be shared.

He wanted to be compartmentalized.

This was somewhat of a conflict between

the scientists and military,

because the scientists were saying

we need to know what everybody's working on.

So Oppenheimer pushed for more communication

between the scientists and in-between the sites.

And ultimately Groves begrudgingly allowed that.

He didn't want to.

You have to realize, Allen,

there's a difference between security and secrecy.

Scientists self-impose secrecy.

They recognized that it was important

to keep a lot of this information secret

because of the consequences.

(speaking in foreign language)

- For most of the nuclear physicists,

the specter of Nazis getting the bomb first

motivated them to work very hard.

Oppenheimer had family in Germany that were killed.

Enrico Fermi had to flee Italy

because his wife was Jewish.

I mean, this was very real and it was very personal

for some of the physicists.

- [Narrator] The scientific research carried

out in Los Alamos was unique,

but often terrifying for the scientists.

As for the first time in history,

scientists were working on the development

of a weapon that could destroy all of humanity.

Which scientist wouldn't question deep down

their role in this apocalyptic project?

(speaking in foreign language)

- They knew what they were doing.

Nobody wanted to drop a nuclear weapon on a city.

But they recognized that if they did,

it might more quickly end the most horrific

conflict in the history of mankind.

So it was balancing these different thoughts.

Oppenheimer himself is a great example.

I think that Oppenheimer would have been

happier if nuclear weapons were just

a physical impossibility.

But they were a possibility,

and he recognized what atomic weapons would do,

and I think that it really played on his conscious,

that he had brought this type of technology

into the world.

- Sometimes his face looks really tortured

and troubled and/or somewhere else.

I mean, studying the photographs of him,

it's like what's going on behind that face of his

because it does show on his face

that some things are troubling to him or even tortured.

(speaking in foreign language)

(bomb exploding)

(speaking in foreign language)

- You can have fairly extreme political leanings

in one direction or another.

That doesn't necessarily mean that you're going

to be a traitor to your country.

- I feel Oppenheimer was a loyal US citizen.

And he was approached indirectly

to give some secrets about Los Alamos to the Soviets.

And he said he didn't think that was a proper avenue.

If that should happen, it should come from

people higher than him in the government,

should come from an exchange based between

the US government and the Soviet government,

who were our allies.

So I feel that once the United States got into the war,

once he became part of the Manhattan Project,

he was a loyal US citizen and would not

have leaked information.

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] Klaus Fuchs was a real soldier,

and his pro-communist activism was publicly known.

Arrested in the United States in 1950,

he spent nine years in American prison.

Once free he returned to East Germany

where he was welcomed back as a national hero

and received a military medal.

(speaking in foreign language)

- Ted Hall was just a teenage kid.

He graduated from Harvard at 18 years old.

He came to work at Los Alamos.

He did critical mass studies.

Basically how much material do you need

to make an atomic bomb work.

And so he was involved in both the Little Boy

and the Fat Man programs.

So he was in a position to get lots of

very sensitive information out.

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] A few months before at the end

of the summer of 1944,

Elizabeth Zarubin and her husband were suddenly

called back to Moscow by the KGB.

The organization that Elizabeth set up was

working all by itself,

and the spy operations were coming to a successful finish.

The information that had been uncovered

from Los Alamos kept supplying

the Soviet atomic laboratories.

But the unexpected departure of this couple of spies

was very surprising,

and it was accompanied by rumors of scandal and betrayal.

(speaking in foreign language)

- There were some politicians who thought

with an atomic weapon,

then the rest of the 20th century

will be the American century.

And we have some documents that show

that even before the war was over,

some of the politicians in the administration

were thinking that.

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] The explosion of the Soviet bomb

in Kazakhstan led to a new change

in historical events.

The United States were no longer the only ones

to detonate the ultimate weapon.

The USSR had now reached the rank of a superpower,

and would now be treated as a United States equal.

- People in the United States were shocked

when it was discovered that Soviets

had a nuclear weapon.

People in Washington, policymakers,

they generally believed that the Soviets

were anywhere from two years to 10 years behind,

and I think most people were closer

to the two year mark,

but in August of 1949,

no one was expecting that.

- The impasse that now exists regarding

the international control of atomic energy

must be broken.

And assembly must face this question squarely

for the sake of mankind and for the piece of the world.

(bomb exploding)

(speaking in foreign language)

(soft instrumental music)