Original subtitles

In August of 1945,

the city of Hiroshima was destroyed in about nine seconds

by a single atomic bomb.

The man responsible for building the bomb was a gentle and

eloquent physicist named J. Robert Oppenheimer.

This is the story of Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb.

Stinson Beach, California.

August 7th, 1945.

"Dear Oppie, you're probably the most famous man in the world

today and yet I am not sure that this letter will reach you.

But if it does, I want you to know

that we are very proud of you.

And if it doesn't, you will know it anyway.

We have been irritated by your reticence these past few years,

but under the itchy surface we knew that it was all right.

That the work was progressing, but the heart was still there

and the warm-being we have known and cherished.

I can understand now, as I could guess then,

the somber note in you during our last meetings.

There is a weight in such a venture,

which few men in history history have had to bear.

I know that with your love of men,

it is no light thing to have had a part, and a great part,

in a diabolical contrivance for destroying them.

But in the possibilities of death

are also the possibilities of life.

You have made history.

We are happy for you."

You, me, we ask:

Why people...

with a kind heart and humanist feelings,

why they would go and work on

weapons of mass destruction?

When J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in 1904,

the atomic bomb was not yet even science fiction.

He was educated at the Ethical Culture School in New York

and mastered Harvard's curriculum in three years,

summa cum laude.

He spoke six languages and seriously considered becoming

an architect, a poet, or a scientist.

But it was his love of physics that led him to England

and Germany in the 1920s, where the atom was beginning to yield its

secrets to Einstein, Rutherford, and Bohr.

European scientists would later remember him as the quick

and eccentric young American who devoured both theoretical

physics and 16th-century French poetry.

One of his best friends was the young American writer,

Francis Fergusson.

Well when I first knew him, he knew nothing about politics;

he never read the newspaper.

He was extremely ignorant about practical matters and he didn't

care about them.

His whole life was in the intellect.

At the age of 25. he accepted an unusual

dual professorship at the University of California at Berkeley

and at CalTech in Pasadena.

He brought with him the radically new understanding of

the atom and the principles of quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics was comparatively new then,

and he was opening a new world to them.

And he made it tremendously exciting and

fascinating to them.

In fact, very few of them didn't come and take it a second year.

One of his graduate students was Robert Serber.

I think there was... I remember one Russian lady,

Miss Kocherova, her name was, who had taken it three times,

and the fourth year, she wanted to come back and Robert refused to allow

her into the course. She went on a hunger strike.

And forced her way in.

Something that might've taken me months to have learned before,

he would go over in minutes.

Robert Wilson, physicist.

Very fast clip, and a very elegant manner.

He was extremely quick,

and very impatient, had a very sharp tongue,

which he used on people.

He would actually terrorize the students when he first began to teach.

We were afraid to come into the same room for fear of a nasty remark.

Robert Oppenheimer and his younger brother, Frank,

were born into a wealthy family and raised in New York City.

Throughout the 1930s, they spent their summers with friends at a

small ranch, leased by the Oppenheimer family,

high in the Pecos Wilderness of Northern New Mexico.

When we first went there, we slept on the floor...

a board floor, and we didn't have enough covers and we were pretty

frozen by morning.

But that didn't bother Robert much,

he was a fairly hardy fellow, although he didn't look that way.

He looked terribly frail.

But he was pretty tough.

He eventually explored a large part of those mountains,

probably knew more about them than almost anybody else.

And he would just get on his horse and put a chocolate bar

in his pocket and be gone for a day or two,

at least, sleeping out,

probably would see nobody else during the whole trip.

Everything my brother did was certainly special.

If he went off in the woods to take a leak,

he'd come back with a flower.

And not to disguise the fact that he made a leak,

but just to make it an occasion, I guess.

It was a wonderful time for all of us.

All the different guests, most of them physicists,

brought some ideas and new ideas with them.

Also the meals were sort of strange,

sort of peanut butter and Vienna sausages and whisky.

And we'd get sort of drunk when we were high up and we'd all act

kind of silly, I guess.

I'd never been on a horse in my life.

They gave us maps and they sent us off on this three-day trip.

Now over the mountain, mountain passes are 12,500 feet.

We went out on the absolute minimum of equipment:

a bottle of whisky, and some graham crackers,

and oats for the horses.

It was the rainy season finally we noticed it didn't

rain quite as much at night.

So we started to ride at night.

I don't know what we gained from riding at night,

because it also rained at night.

Imagine this: you're...

out riding on a mountain ridge at midnight

in the middle of a thunderstorm, lightning hitting all around you.

You come to a fork in the road in the trail and Robert says,

"This way, it's only seven miles home.

This way it's a little longer but it's much more beautiful."

But far from the Pecos Wilderness,

far from Berkeley, was Adolph Hitler.

And Robert Oppenheimer was a Jew

with friends and relatives in Germany.

He did not keep up with current events,

he read novels or he read philosophy books or serious books.

But all of a sudden, and I think it was due in large part to

Hitler and to the Nazi persecution of the Jews,

that he suddenly... I think it must've been fairly suddenly,

he suddenly realized that things were getting out of hand and

that something had to be done about it by serious people.

So he began reading.

Haakon Chevalier was a professor of

French literature at Berkeley, active in left-wing causes.

He and Oppenheimer grew to be close friends.

On one of his many trips to the East,

on the train he had taken to the three volumes of 'Das Kapital'

and he had read them all in the original on his way to New York.

- In German?

In German, yes.

And then shortly after, apparently he bought the

complete works of Lenin and read those.

He was a tremendous intellect.

I don't believe I have known another person who was quite so

quick in comprehending.

Hans Bethe, Nobel Laureate.

In comprehending both scientific and general knowledge.

At Berkeley, he had read the Bhagavad Gita and learned Sanskrit,

and was really taken by the charm and the kind of general

wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita.

Some people seem to think he was... got very religiously involved in it,

but that was not true at all.

The late 1930s.

While America endured a Great Depression,

fascism seethed in Germany, a civil war raged in Spain,

and Oppenheimer moved further to the left.

Kitty Harrison was a communist and had lost her first husband

in the Spanish Civil War.

In 1940, she and Robert Oppenheimer were married.

Shortly before then, Robert's brother Frank and his wife Jackie

had joined the Communist Party in California.

Robert, not a joiner, stayed aloof from formal association

but his left-wing activities did attract official attention.

As war clouds gathered in Europe,

the FBI added Oppenheimer's name to a list of people to be

imprisoned in the event of national emergency.

Back in 1938,

Hahn and Strassmann in Germany discovered fission.

And many people realized very quickly that it might be

possible to make atomic bombs, to use fission as an explosive.

To use uranium as an explosive.

I first heard about it, I think Niels Bohr told me,

I think it was in Princeton.

And when I came back to Columbia and I told Enrico Fermi about it,

by the end of the day he had calculated the depth of a crater

the size of a crater, of which one pound would give exploding.

The first I heard about fission was a letter from Oppenheimer.

The news had just gotten to Berkeley and he wrote to me.

I gave a seminar on it that same day at Urbana.

It was one of these ideas, when somebody told him,

he'd say, "How could I be so stupid not to have seen that before?"

And I think, even in the first letter,

he mentioned the possibility of making the bomb.

I supposed that...

Freeman Dyson, physicist.

He was, at that time, profoundly impressed with the

precariousness of the Allied situation.

That after all, most of his friends were Europeans,

many of them in countries which had been occupied by the Germans.

The Germans looked as though they were the wave of the future

at that time.

He said this: "The danger that this may mean

the end of Western civilization."

My brother viewed it as not just something persecuting

our own relatives, but as a kind of thing that could be a wave that

would walk over the United States as well.

He wanted to help, he thought probably the best way to do this,

where he had the most competence,

would be in the atomic bomb work.

And therefore it was natural for him,

or it was necessary for him, that this is where he would put his effort.

He built the atomic bomb... or he didn't build it but he led

the effort, to build the atomic bomb because he thought

this was necessary to save Western civilization.

It was feared that Nazi scientists were

already building an atomic bomb in 1939 when Albert Einstein

informed president Roosevelt that such a thing was even possible.

The program Roosevelt initiated was small and had little

momentum until December 7th, 1941.

The day after Pearl Harbor,

America declared war on Japan and Germany.

We had on the one side, this crazy nation and this demon

in Germany.

I.I. Rabi.

And these funny people who didn't know what the Western

world was about to tackle the United States.

I mean, there was no question in my mind that something had to be done

and furthermore, we weren't winning at all.

I was caught up in the war effort with a patriotic fever

that's hard to imagine nowadays, it's been so long since anything

of that kind seems to have motivated Americans.

And one would have done anything that was necessary

to get on with the war.

The bomb project had a sudden urgency.

The US Army was given charge and codenamed it The Manhattan District,

with General Leslie Groves in command,

and secret laboratories scattered across the country.

Groves put Oppenheimer in charge of a group at Berkeley,

to explore the basic scientific requirements of an atomic bomb.

Oppenheimer, who had taken to wearing a rakish pork pie hat,

took pleasure in his new official title,

Coordinator of Rapid Rupture.

That was the time when the big change in his life occurred.

And it must have been during that time that...

the dream somehow got ahold of him,

of really producing a nuclear weapon,

which other people had been talking about

but he was the fellow who really did it.

It is a very different attitude if you want to find out...

the deep secrets of nature, which is what he had wanted to do before,

and on the other hand if you want to produce something,

to produce a mechanism that works.

It was a different problem, a different attitude and he

completely changed to fit the new role.

The Los Alamos Boys School,

high on a mesa 50 miles north of Santa Fe, New Mexico,

not far from the Oppenheimer ranch.

In the summer of 1942, students began to notice low-flying

military aircraft overhead.

One student was Stirling Colgate.

It was in the fall of '42 when this place was invaded by

an armada of bulldozers and construction crew.

And suddenly we knew that the war had arrived here and these

two characters showed up, a Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones,

one wearing a porkpie hat and other a suit and a normal hat.

And these two guys went around as if,

well one, they owned the place, which evidently they did,

but more than that as if their pseudonyms

was a normal sort of thing to do.

My God, I mean there their pictures were in our physics book

and we all had physics.

One is the lead theoretical physicist of his age and the

other head of a major laboratory who had done the Cyclotron

and things like that.

So we immediately knew that one, they felt that it was so

important to be Oppenheimer and Lawrence

that they had to have a pseudonym.

Two, that they were putting megabucks... multi-megabucks,

into what seemed to us the worst place in the world to have a laboratory.

Granting Oppenheimer's request

for a single, isolated lab where the bomb could be designed and built,

General Groves appropriated the remote school

and officially named Oppenheimer Scientific Director.

Oppenheimer's first job was to convince scientists and their

families to join him for the duration of the war in a place

he was not allowed to identify, to work on a project he was not

always allowed to describe.

I was a young assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Stan Ulam, mathematician,

and his wife, Françoise.

The war was on.

I noticed that some other, younger colleagues especially,

were disappearing from town.

They couldn't tell where they were going;

it was very secretive.

But when I learned that I was supposed to go somewhere to New Mexico,

Françoise wanted to know about the state of New Mexico

So I went to the library and borrowed one of these WPA books

on various states and there was one volume on New Mexico.

Then looking at it, I noticed that on the back of the book,

there was a list of previous borrowers.

To my amazement, several names of people who just disappeared

a week or two before were put down there as borrowers.

Robert Porten was a private in the army.

I don't know how many people viewing this program ever had

the pleasure of getting off a train at Lamy, New Mexico,

but we looked at it as if it were out of Siberia.

I was very strange, there was nothing but a lot of sand,

sagebrush, but there was a G.I. vehicle and we got in still

wondering where we were and why we were there.

Scientific and military personnel

arrived from all over America, many traveling under assumed names.

A station master in Princeton, New Jersey was baffled at the

sudden demand for one-way tickets to the tiny station

outside Santa Fe.

It was a little bit awe-inspiring to be

in the middle of nowhere like this and not knowing what we were getting into,

not the slightest idea.

Next stop for newly arrived personnel was an

inconspicuous building in Santa Fe.

Dorothy McKibbin was in charge of the tiny office.

Santa Fe was full of young FBI agents,

middle-aged agents, and to some of us

they were quite discernible because

they were so well-dressed.

- What did they do?

They wore gray slacks and tweed jackets and shirts with neckties

and they leaned against the walls of buildings and they hung

around La Fonda and the Capitol Pharmacy and all the restaurants.

We drove through Santa Fe in a place called Espanola and then

hit some dips in the road and then started to climb.

And I had never been in mountainous country,

it was very interesting.

I had just finished reading 'The Magic Mountain'

by Thomas Mann,

And of course to go to this mysterious mountain and the top of which

there would be a secret laboratory,

which we would go into,

the doors would slam and a few years later lightning would come out

bearing an atomic bomb.

Very impressive, strange scenery, mountains,

rocks, the desert.

We crossed Rio Grande and arrived in a place full of little...

how to call it... almost huts.

Oppenheimer had brought scientists and their

families fresh from distinguished campuses all over the country.

Ivied halls, soaring campaniles, vaulted chapels.

Los Alamos was a boomtown: hastily constructed wooden

buildings, dirt streets, coal stoves,

and only five bathtubs.

There were no sidewalks, 

the streets were all dirt.

The water situation was always bad.

One young physicist was Robert Krohn.

It was not at all unusual to open your faucet

and have worms come out.

Everybody was wearing Western clothes

jeans boots, parkas.

There was a feeling of mountain resort,

in addition to army camp.

The mixture was unbelievable.

Then there was the awful mud.

The physicist Edward Teller had brought a

piano and played Beethoven late into the night from his cramped

quarters in a four-family dwelling,

he could disturb more Nobel laureates at once than he could

have anywhere else in the world.

Oppenheimer had gathered the elite in physics,

mathematics, and chemistry to build the atomic bomb.

I don't believe there was ever before an assembly of so many

first-rate people for one task.

They in turn recruited their best students,

promising kids working side-by-side with Nobel laureates.

There was no class distinction between the

small fry and the big shots.

When I first came to the United States,

I got to know a lot of the young people who had been at Los Alamos.

Most of them were very young. They'd just gone right into it

without even finishing their scientific training.

And for them it was just the most marvelous time of their lives.

People worked hard.

scientists worked around the clock and the people made up for

the lack of big city life and there was a lot of partying.

We were very young and it was just like a camp out.

Liquor was short in the area, so in order to spice up the parties,

we used lab alcohol.

Lab alcohol is...

200 proof, basically.

Which is just exactly what you're looking for for punch.

If you were in a large hall and you saw

several groups of people, the largest groups would be hovering

around Oppenheimer.

He was great at a party and women simply loved him

and still do.

I found him extremely dashing in a sort of

elegant way.

It was, for these young people, not only a great experience,

it was also fun.

It as a lot.

Yes, it was a good time.

It was a good time in America, it was a good time to be American.

It was a time when the whole country was pulling together in

a cause which even now I think was just.

That is the idea that Nazi Germany would win that war

could have led to, it seemed to me, a 1,000 years of Dark Ages

and everything that we meant by civilization could have come to an end.

That's what it seemed to me was what the fight was about,

or something pretty close to that.

And most Americans felt that and most Americans were in it just

as hard as they could be.

Their average age was 29 and their job was to

construct a mechanism, which would trigger in a millionth of a second,

a violent chain reaction.

They had two dance bands, a soda fountain,

boy scouts, girl scouts, a radio station with no call letters,

A Cyclotron, and 7,000 fire extinguishers.

Somehow, Oppenheimer put this thing together.

He was the conductor of the orchestra,

or whatever it was.

Somehow he created this fantastic esprit.

No matter who you talked to, they all lived it and they all,

I think almost without exception,

felt it most strongly that without him this wouldn't have happened,

it couldn't have happened.

Oppenheimer had envisioned a small community of

30 scientists and their families,

but by 1944, he was in charge of a walled city of 6,000.

The cost escalated to 56 million dollars.

Seven divisions: theoretical physics,

experimental physics, ordinance, explosives,

bomb physics, chemistry, and metallurgy.

He knew and understood everything that went

on in the laboratory, whether it was chemistry or theoretical

physics or machine shop.

He could keep it all in his head and coordinate it.

It was clear, also at Los Alamos,

that he was intellectually superior to us.

The most striking contradiction is the fact that this man who

was so unworldly, so unpolitical in his youth,

such a great scholar, so fond of metaphysical poetry,

should suddenly emerge as the great administrator

who put Los Alamos together and produced the atomic bomb.

I saw him change from that almost irresponsible

intellectual, bohemian...

- And radical.

Radical person that he was and that I had known at Berkeley...

to someone who was just completely dedicated to getting on with the war.

I think it was a real stroke of genius on the part of General Groves,

who was not generally considered to be a genius,

to have appointed him.

It was a most improbable appointment.

I was astonished.

The professor and the general made an unlikely team.

When Groves took charge of the Manhattan Project in 1942,

there was barely enough plutonium in the world to cover

the head of a pin.

And very little uranium-235.

These were the only elements that could fuel the Los Alamos bomb.

To produce U-235, Groves built a secret 44-acre building

in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

In Hanford, Washington, giant reactors labored to produce a

few pounds of plutonium.

It was the most expensive scientific project in the

history of the world.

General Groves distrusted liberals,

and yet in spite of Oppenheimer's well-documented

leftist background, Groves overruled the astonished

security officers who had tried to block Oppenheimer's clearance.

He had arguments with General Groves,

but I think they were mostly about trivial things like the

fact that the people were having too many babies and he couldn't

do anything about that.

When things came up that were really important,

I think General Groves usually supported him.

He had to support Robert himself against the intelligence

people who, of course... well, the fact that they not only

wouldn't have cleared Robert, they obviously wouldn't have

cleared three-quarters of the people at Los Alamos.

- Why not?

Well, I mean they were all moderately liberal,

moderately left-wing people.

It was a new and strange world.

Barbed wire, bodyguards, censored letters.

Secrets from their wives and children.

Well I'd written, tried to be so newsy when I was in

Fort Atlantic Wood and when I came here,

I would write and say, "I'm out here in the West and the scenery

is beautiful, the weather is just gorgeous."

And my mother would write back and say,

"Well, where are you really? And what are you doing?"

And I would write back, "I'm out here in the West and the weather

is gorgeous and the scenery is beautiful."

And she never understood that until the war was over and I

could explain that to her.

And you heard throughout the town that they were joking and

saying. "It's a submarine base to make windshield wipers for submarines."

Or, "It was a navy installation,"

or something like that.

And they felt it was a great joke.

G2 wanted a rumor spreading in Santa Fe,

with all kinds of speculation about what was going on at Los Alamos.

They wanted to get out a rumor that we were busy making

electric rockets.

And we tried it, we went down and we tried it on the bar,

which was usually crowded.

Of course that night, it was half-deserted and we talked as

loudly as we could about electric rockets,

but nobody seemed to pay any attention.

So then we went out to a workman's bar,

much rougher and Char would dance and then some

Spanish-American came along and asked her to dance.

She was trying to tell him about Los Alamos and he was trying to

tell her that what he wanted was a ranch to raise horses.

He couldn't have been less interested.

Finally I grabbed the guy at the bar and I took him by the lapels

and shook him and said, "You know what we're doing at Los Alamos?"

He was so drunk, I'm sure he didn't remember a word of it.

A complete flop, it's not as easy as it sounds to be a spy.

Back in Berkeley, an industrial scientist named

George Eltenton had approached Oppenheimer's old friend Haakon Chevalier

in 1943 with a request that Chevalier convince

Oppenheimer to share secrets with Russian scientists.

Chevalier refused and when Oppenheimer passed through

Berkeley on secret business, Chevalier told him about the incident.

I told Oppenheimer that this was not something that he could

do anything about and that if there were to be such exchanges,

it would have to be proposed on the highest levels of government

and it would have to be worked out in that way.

And then he agreed that this would not be... there was no

possibility of doing anything.

And that is all and I forgot about it and I think that he

forgot about it for a long time too.

This seemingly insignificant conversation would

later have enormous impact on the lives of both men.

In late 1944, American intelligence learned that the

German atomic bomb effort had failed.

Nevertheless, shortly afterwards Los Alamos scientists picked up

the pace and began working six-day weeks.

Everything was coming together, everything was going at a very

rapid rate.

We were building up to the Trinity Test.

At that time, a great deal of production with devices to be

used in the atomic bomb were being made.

Everybody was working day and night,

it was very hard and the push to make that test...

to stop and think.

I said, 'What are you young men doing in the evening for pleasure?

And they said, "We go back to the lab and stay until midnight."

I remember I would work almost every night,

would nearly drop, then go home, sleep a bit,

and then come back.

Saturdays and Sundays, just constantly working.

Across the Pacific,

the war raged on against Japan, but in the spring of '45,

there was victory in Europe.

The Nazis had never come close to building an atomic bomb.

Germany surrendered.

V-E Day.

Eisenhower returned triumphant.

I would like to think now that I,

at the time of the German defeat,

I would have stopped, taken stock, thought it all over very carefully,

and that I would have walked away

from Los Alamos at that time.

And I, in terms of all of everything that I believe in

before, and during, and after the war,

I cannot understand why I did not take that and make that act.

On the other hand, it simply was not in the air,

I do not know of a single instance of anyone who had made

that suggestion or who did leave at the time.

There might have been someone that I didn't know.

but at the time, it just was not something that was part of our lives.

Our life was directed to do one thing,

it’s as though we had been programmed to do that and as

automatons, we're doing it.

Amazing how the technology, tools to trap one,

were so powerful.

I was impressed because most of the sort of fervor for

developing the bomb came at a kind of anti-fascist fervor

against Germany.

But when V-E day came along, nobody slowed up one little bit.

No one said "Ah, but the main thing,

well it doesn't matter now."

We all kept working and it wasn't because we understood the

significance against Japan, it was because the machinery had

caught us in this trap and we were anxious to get this thing to go.

I organized a small meeting at our building,

the title was "The Impact of the Gadget on Civilization."

Oppie tried to persuade me not to have it.

I don't know quite why, but he certainly did try to dissuade me.

On the other hand, I went ahead and did hold the meeting,

and perhaps between 30 and 50 people came.

Oppie came too, which always added a tone to any meeting.

We did discuss whether we should go on or not,

and in the context of what was happening in the world.

Of course, it was called in the context that perhaps what we

were doing was morally wrong.

Particularly Oppie pointed out that it would be well that the

world knew about the possibility of an atomic bomb,

rather than it being something that would be kept secret while

the United Nations was being formed.

On that basis, on that logical basis, we all decided that that was right

and that we ought to go back in the laboratory

and work as hard as we could to demonstrate a nuclear weapon

before the, so that the United Nations would be set up

in the awareness of this horrible thing to come.

The Faustian bargain is when you sell your soul to the devil

in exchange for knowledge and power.

And that of course, in a way, is what Oppenheimer did,

there's no doubt.

He made this alliance with the United States army

in the person of General Groves, who gave him undreamed of resources,

huge armies of people,

and as much money as he could possibly spend

in order to do physics on the grand scale,

in order to create this marvelous weapon.

And it was a Faustian bargain, if ever there was one.

And of course we are still living with it ever since.

When once you sell your soul to the devil,

then there's no going back on it.

Well, I can't tell you exactly, but right over there between

here and the high part of the Oscura Mountains over there,

where the little peak is on the McDonald ranch,

is where they detonated the first atomic bomb.

- What was this country like then?

Not like it is now.

200 miles south of Los Alamos,

near Alamogordo, New Mexico, a vast unbroken stretch of prairie.

Here, Robert Oppenheimer chose to test the first atomic bomb.

He named the place "Trinity Site,"

it had been Apache country, but in late '44,

it was populated only by a handful of cattle ranchers and homesteaders.

They called it by the Spanish name,

Jornada Del Muerto, the journey of death.

Dave McDonald.

I was put out of here in '42.

- Who put you out of here?

A core of engineers and a federal judge,

and so forth.

Said that they had to have it for air-to-air gunnery range

and so forth you see.

And later on while it wound up being this,

you see, when they got the atomic bomb to work in quiet,

they'd come in for a place and they selected this right here.

That time they were living... that is,

the people that were assembling this bomb and were preparing to

shoot it, they're at my place.

Somewhere around 500 to 700 people,

they said there.

And living in my house and around it and so forth,

with other buildings.

It began with 15 men in December,

by May there were several hundred civilians and G.Is

working in secret.

At night, nearby ranchers heard gunfire.

G.Is. hunting antelope with submachine guns.

About 1939, I think it was on the front piece of Time Magazine,

they had a picture of an atom buster at the University of California.

And when they shipped the shell in for this

experimental detonation down here, why I thought,

I said, "If I didn't think I was crazy or something,

I think maybe they were fooling around with busting atoms

or doing something with atomic power."

And then I was just talking

because I certainly didn't know anything about it.

I had no conception of what an atomic bomb was or what the

violence of it and the strength of it.

When I arrived there, they were in the process in the end of May

of constructing a 100-foot-tall tower in this desert.

Which was really a very empty, a very... it wasn't sandy,

but it was typical dry, sage brush-y desert with one wall

off to the east of rock.

And a base camp, which had a couple of extra buildings.

but which really was just some old ranch houses.

People were feverishly setting up wires all over the desert,

building the tower, building little huts in which to put

cameras and house people at the time of the explosion.

The army had just accidentally bombed the place a little bit

before I got there, but nobody was hurt.

The work had been so frantic that it was a relief to know

that it was coming to a conclusion and we knew that they

were preparing the big experiment to see if the gadget,

as it was called, would work.

- What did you expect?

I hope... what did I expect?

Françoise Ulam.

I had mixed feelings, I expected... wanted it to succeed

because it would help to end the war.

I didn't want it to be dangerous.

Of course, there was a chance that it would be very dan-

could be very dangerous.

The 11th of July 1945.

An unmarked Pontiac sedan arrives at the McDonald Ranch

carrying the world's entire supply of plutonium,

about ten pounds.

The courier demands a receipt, approximate value: $1 billion.

At Oppenheimer's request, General Groves has made a secret

arrangement with the governor of New Mexico to evacuate the state

in case of catastrophe.

Now prior to the shot, back in the lab,

there had been some speculation that it might be possible to

explode the atmosphere, in which case the world disappears.

- Did you sense a lot of anxiety in your brother?

A lot of anxiety in everybody, including my brother.

Both whether it would work or not work.

Frank Oppenheimer, physicist.

I think mostly bad, but also it was a time in which...

his interest in using the bomb to help produce a better world.

Peace didn't happen just after the war,

but he really had hope that Truman would tell Stalin about it,

fairly forthrightly.

Of course that didn't happen and set the stage almost at that

instant to the Cold War, rather than to a warmer humanity.

And so I think both of those things seemed...

everything there was worrying him back then.

It was building up tremendous, a most hysterical anxiety.

Many people feeling that we couldn't possibly hold the test

because every time we tested some component that had to do

with the test, it would fail.

Everybody was rushing around, things did not appear to be ready.

Yet, there did seem to be a certain momentum to the work

that was going on that we wouldn't make a test.

I think it had been put back several times,

but on July 16th there would be a test come hell or high water.

Memo: "11 July 1700 hours.

Both charges completely papered.

Work another night shift if necessary to complete this job.

Request personnel as necessary."

Memo: "12 July 1600 hours.

Seal all holes in case.

Wrap with Scotch wrap.

Box charges, inner and outer, with two spares for each."

Memo: "13 July 1300 hours.

Assembly starts.

Remove polar cap and dummy plug.

Gadget now belongs to tamper people.

G engineers work until 1600 with active material insertion.

Dummy plughole is covered with a clean cloth

and explosives people take over.

Insert HE.

This is to be done as slowly as the G engineer's wish.

Remove all chains.

Clear the deck."

Well, I expected that what they were

working on, they were going to try.

"14 July 0800 hours.

Rig guide lines. Lift to tower top.

Ready for X unit at 0900. Bring up G engineer's footstool.

14 July 0900 hours.

Wiring of the X unit proceeds under the direction of the

explosives people.

Tower platform should be tested with concrete weight as per Oppenheimer.

Detonators placed to conform with requirements of informer switches.

HE people standby to criticize potential rough handling.

Note that once detonators are on sphere,

no live electrical connection could be brought to the X unit,

informer unit, or anywhere else on the sphere.

All testing must be done before sphere is lifted to tower.

After that it is too late.

14 July 1700 hours.

Gadget complete.

Should we have the chaplain here?"

The betting pool cost a dollar.

Edward Teller bet on a blast equal to 45,000 tons of TNT.

Oppenheimer bet low, 3,000 tons.

And I.I. Rabi put his money on 20 kilotons.

Young technicians were horrified to overhear Enrico Fermi

taking side bets on the possibility of incinerating the state of New Mexico.

The test was set at midnight. The prediction was there'd be

16-mile visibility and a certain wind pattern.

Well at midnight, it was raining cats and dogs,

lightning and thunder.

We were really scared about this object there in the tower

would be set-off accidentally.

So you can imagine the strain on Robert Oppenheimer.

I remember... it was one of my memories of that time

having to go up the tower to turn on a piece of equipment.

So I was one of the last- not the last person by any means

but one of the last people to get our equipment that was right

next to the bomb...

to have it all turned on and tested before starting the test.

And it was quite dramatic because lightning was striking

all around; there was quite a fierce storm going on.

In particular, one had a certain amount of respect for that

atomic bomb being right next to sparks that seemed to be flying.

It did give me a little bit of a sense of apprehension.

I think he and I were lying down right next to each other,

flat on the desert right outside the control hut,

at the time the bomb went off.

We had prepared ourselves with glass and we could hear the

countdown when it went off, we all were looking through the glass.

Then we saw what was just a tremendous...

overpowering vision of this thing happening,

seeing the mountains small beside it,

seeing perhaps some kind of beauty,

but awesome is what I would call it as it slowly developed,

went up in the air and made the whole desert light up as if noon,

and appear small, a large desert rimmed by mountains

appeared to be a small place.

And that was just something... that once that had happened,

I was a different person from then on.

At the time it went off, it was absolutely... I knew sort of what

would happen, I didn't expect the heat from the flash at

5 miles away to be nearly that intense.

And then there was a cloud, the radioactive cloud went and sort

of hovered there.

And I and Ken had been working on developing escape routes

because if that thing had gone a little bit south,

it would have fallen out on the camp and we would have to get

out to the south rather than where the road was to the north.

So there was this sense of this ominous cloud hanging over us,

it was so brilliant purple with all the radioactive blowing.

And it just seemed to hang there forever... of course it didn't,

it must've been a very short time until it went up.

But it was very terrifying and the thunder from that blast,

it bounced on the rocks and then went... I don't know where else

it bounced, but it never seemed to stop.

not like an ordinary echo of a thunder.

It just kept echoing back and forth and that drowned out and

then what not.

It was a very scary time when it went off.

And God, I wish I could remember what my brother said,

but I can't.

But I think we just said. "It worked."

I think that's what we said, both of us.

"It worked."

And nobody knew it was gonna work.

He was in the forward bunker, but then when he came back,

there he was with his hat you've seen pictures

of Robert's hat and so on.

And he came to where we were in the headquarters,

so to speak.

And the way his walk was like 'High Noon'.

I think that's the best I could describe it,

this kind of strut.

He'd done it.

It felt like an earthquake. We lived in a good

adobe house and it just shhh-

And he said, "My goodness, that's an earthquake.

I wonder if it hurt the house?"

And he got out of bed and he got up and he said,

"I want you to come look- the sun's rising in the wrong direction."

I must've been nearly 20 miles away,

it was as if somebody set off a flashbulb right into your face.

And it completely blinded burn for about 30 seconds,

then gradually your vision cleared and you saw this huge

orange-and-purple-and-green violently colored balls rolling

up towards the sky.

So we knew something had happened over here and we had a

car along that had a radio in it.

So we kept that radio on along at noon

they up and told us that there's an ammunition that went off.

We were headed up to Albuquerque to take her back to

school and we were between Polvadera and Lemitar when we

saw this great big flash of light.

And my sister, she said, "What happened?

And she got to see the light and it just seemed like it lit up

the whole prairie all around us.

- Was there anything odd about your sister

asking you about the light?

Yes, because she was blind.

It didn't take very long, that was sort of just after the

first few minutes, that I realized sort of viscerally

what had happened.

And I had gooseflesh all over, of the consequences...

what would happen to the world.

- When did you find out what happened?

Well, it was quite a while, you know, til we get talking about the cattle

and the hair was turning white on them

like frost, you know?

Like they had frost on the backs and so forth.

The way we noticed them was where that fallout fell on the cow,

she's lying on her left side while her right side would get burned.

And the particles of dust that were radioactive would fall on her

and they caused a burn like a scald. And the hair,

instead of coming back red like on a Hereford cow

would come back white.

Just like a saddle burn on a black horse.

And old man Mac Smith that had the white store up there had a

black cat just as black as the ace of spades and that thing had

white spots all over it.

After the atomic blast, he sold it to some tourist

for five dollars I think, as a curiosity.

Iwo Jima, Leyte Gulf,

Mindanao, the Marshall Islands.

At Okinawa alone, 50,000 American casualties.

110,000 Japanese casualties.

The beginning of the end for Japan: saturation bombing,

thousands of B-29s raining incendiary bombs on all but a few cities.

Harry Truman, who has assumed the presidency after Roosevelt's

death in early '45, calls for total surrender.

Our demand has been, and it remains,

unconditional surrender.

Japan was in ruins,

most of her major cities destroyed.

Tokyo reduced to rubble.

More than a million civilians dead.

The Japanese fought on.

Now, when the question of use came up,

then I did have quite long discussions with Oppie

about how it might be used.

And he did bring up to me one day that he would serve on a

panel to make a recommendation about the use of the bomb.

So then I suggested to him that it would be a good idea if it

would be used in a demonstration.

For example, as a demonstration of Trinity where Japanese

observers might have been invited to attend.

And I can remember very specifically when Oppenheimer

brought up a counterargument to that,

that "Well, supposing it didn't go off."

And I turned to him coldly and said,

"Well we can kill 'em all."

Of course. I was not- I didn't say that for real.

But even so. I was aghast at having even... to make a point,

that I had said such a bloodthirsty thing.

Why did the bomb get dropped on people at Hiroshima?

I would say it's almost inevitable that it would've

happened simply because all the bureaucratic operators existed

by that time to do it.

The Air Force was ready and waiting,

they had prepared big airfields in the island of

Tinian in the Pacific from which you could operate.

The whole machinery was ready; the president would have had to

be a man of iron will in order to put a stop to it.

The question was whether we want to save our people...

and Japanese as well, and win the war or whether we want to take a

chance on being able to win the war by killing all our young men.

I don't think they would have developed that

to show at a garden party.

I think they had to do it, and we felt this was our own defense.

And also there was a hurricane that would've wiped out a lot of

our troops out there.

And the poor old Japanese hadn't been very nice to us, John.

They kind of demolished our Navy without any warning.

It would've come out sooner or later in a Congressional hearing

if nowhere else, just when we could've dropped the bomb if

we didn't use it.

And then knowing American politics,

you know as well as I do, that there'd been elections fought on

the basis that every mother whose son was killed after

such-and-such a date, the blood is on the head of the president.

Americans braced themselves for a bloody invasion

of the Japanese mainland.

In those days, most people did not realize the qualitative

difference between the atomic bomb and the number of ordinary bombs.

There was really no immediate feeling that the world is

changing as it is now, but rather that it would be a good

way to win the war more quickly.

So I would say it was nobody's fault that the bomb was dropped.

As usual, the reason it was dropped was just that nobody had

the courage or the foresight to say no...

certainly not Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer gave his consent in a certain sense.

He was on a committee which advised the Secretary of War

and that committee did not take any kind of a stand against dropping the bomb.

Of course we never expected I don't think even the people

who were doing the testing expected the bomb to be

thrown on Japan so fast.

Hiroshima, a city the size of Houston.

One of the few cities spared the firebombing.

Months earlier, orders had been given to leave several Japanese

cities untouched to provide virgin targets where the effects

of the new bomb could be clearly seen.

The announcement of Hiroshima, I think I was in the hall

right outside my brother's office and it came over the loudspeaker

that went through... was transmitted throughout.

That the bomb had been dropped and it had devastated...

I thought the first reaction, "Thank God it wasn't a dud."

But before that whole sentence of the broadcast was finished,

one certainly got this horror of all the people that had been killed.

And I don't know why... up to then,

I don't think I'd really thought of all those flattened people.

We had talked often about having a demonstration where there

weren't people.

Maybe on the mainland so that the military would see it,

but where there weren't people.

And then the thought that they had actually dropped it on a

place where all those people and the image of those people,

which came before any pictures of it,

really was pretty awful.

But the first thing, I'm sure, was "Thank God it worked."

The first reaction,

which we had, was one of fulfillment.

"Now it has been done.

Now the work we have been engaged in for so many years has

contributed to the war."

The second reaction was, of course,

one of shock and horror, "What have we done?

What have we done?"

And the third reaction, "It shouldn't be done again."

You were very depressed.

I came back from San Francisco and found you very depressed.

In opposition to your euphoria at V-E day

when we had that very nice party and you started throwing the

garbage cans around.

You were very depressed and we didn t have a party.

I think there was a party, I don't even know if we went.

- Were you depressed?

- Oh, yes. - Absolutely.

I remember being just ill.

Just sick.

Sick to the point where I thought it would be,

you know, vomit.

I was so overwhelmed when it happened,

that that thing had happened.

Still am.

- What was Robert's reaction to the news from Hiroshima?

I don't know.

I can't imagine that it was very different.

An inital feeling that "Thank God it wasn't a dud,"

and then almost immediate horror of what had really happened.

It did bring home to one, how powerful this is.

They treated humans as matter.

Hiroshima, August 6th 1945.

The first uranium bomb exploded with a light so bright,

it could have been seen from another planet.

More than 100,000 killed, 40,000 injured,

20,000 missing.

Burns, blindness, radiation sickness.

It took only nine seconds.

Today, even now, the victims still suffer and die.

Three days later a second bomb, a plutonium bomb,

dropped on Nagasaki.

80,000 dead.

In early September, a scientific team from Los Alamos was sent

to Japan to study the effects of the two bombs.

One member of the team was Robert Serber.

Everybody, we have defense mechanisms of some kind that

build up under stresses of that kind,

somehow, you get hardened to it in a couple of days,

no matter what you see.

And you manage to survive that way.

I'm sure it happens to all soldiers in all wars.

I mean, the thing that was really astonishing about the

whole thing, though Penny and I wandered around Nagasaki and

Hiroshima, for several weeks... completely alone,

on our on.

And we had no difficulty at all with the people,

they were perfectly friendly.

Not well, I would say not really friendly,

but there was no antagonism visible.

We wandered around the ruins among people whose families had

all been killed.

We had no feeling of danger at all.

It's a piece of the wall of a schoolroom in Hiroshima,

about half a mile from where the bomb went off.

And it's flash-burned and scarred by broken glass.

As you can see, the shadows of the window sash and the...

and the cord of the shade.

And from the angle at which this shadow was cast,

we can measure the height at which the bomb went off.

And this was the evidence that it really went off at the height

it was supposed to in Hiroshima.

After this was all over about two years later,

Oppenheimer gave a talk at MIT.

It was then afterwards republished and quoted all over

the world and became one of his most famous utterances.

And it said, roughly, "The physicists have known sin,

and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."

And it became a kind of...

motif for the whole community of physicists.

And there were violent arguments.

Many people who had been at Los Alamos were very angry.

They said, "Oppenheimer has no right to weep in public for us

since what we were doing was an honest piece of technical work

to win the war; we were no more guilty than anyone else who

built weapons in order to win the war.

And he has no right to talk about our having sinned."

At the end of the war, I gave up my clearance and have not worked on

didn't work on nuclear energy in any of its aspects,

on the development or of on bombs.

I... I don't, it's somehow...

I can't feel that it was something

I would not have done or should not have done at the time.

That is, the... reasons for doing it,

the worry about fascism that were quite valid,

the sense that there almost no way of stopping this from being done.

I think it would have been good to have stopped a little sooner,

maybe a little after V-E Day.

I think it certainly would have been good never to have

used the thing on a city, and certainly never to have used two of them.

They were poised to land on the beaches

of Japan and they knew that the number of casualties would be astronomical.

Those people were happy for the bomb,

believe me.

I was supposed to build some sample-catching equipment to go

on the third shot, which was to be dropped on Japan,

and I was to go with it.

However, as you know, Japan gave up before there was a third shot.

"Dear Haakon.

Your letter, your marvelous warm letter,

was one of very few things that brought warmth to us

over these troubled days.

A few days after the surrender, we went over to our ranch for a

little time of solitude, horses. and the slow return to sanity.

We are not sure we'll be coming back to Berkeley for permanent,

despite the ties that make us want to.

We are not too sure of anything personal.

Longing, both of us, so much for stability.

Yet knowing that we have been put in a time and a place where

we may not be able in conscience to attain it.

The circumstances are heavy with misgiving

and far, far more difficult than they should be.

that we power to remake the world to be as we think it."

The veil of secrecy was lifted and most Americans believed

the atomic bomb had played a decisive role in ending the war.

The scholarly professor, the unworldly student of metaphysical poetry,

the former leftist, was suddenly a national hero,

a celebrity, father of the atomic bomb.

In 1947, he was appointed the director of the prestigious

Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

He was Einstein's boss.

But much of his time in the post-war years was spent

in Washington, where his council was eagerly sought

at the highest levels of government.

He served on two dozen committees,

testified frequently before Congress,

and was even asked to run for public office.

Although he advised the government on its atomic arsenal,

he argued adamantly and publicly

for the international control of atomic weapons.

And his sense of what he wanted to accomplish when he was

in the government had less to do with physics than it had to do with

the sensible use of this awful instrument that we made.

I have been asked whether, in the years to come,

it will be possible to kill 40 million American people.

in the 20 largest American towns by the use of atomic bombs in a single night.

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

I have been asked...

Oppenheimer tried to maintain control of the

atomic energy enterprise to prevent the Air Force

from abusing the weapons that he had created.

I think the only hope for our future safety must lie in

a collaboration based on confidence and good faith with

the other peoples of the world.

I think he felt that he wanted to make a big difference.

I argued with him quite a lot after the war.

I felt that the kind of big difference would happen if one

really taught people a lot about the dangers of the bomb,

about the possibilities of cooperation.

He said there wasn't time for this.

He'd been in the Washington scene,

he saw that everything was moving.

He felt that he had to change things from within.

History again and again shows that we have no monopoly on ideas,

but we do better with them than most other countries.

He was a philosopher king in his own mind,

a man of wisdom who could get along with other men of wisdom

who also had power.

He had a way of impressing himself very strongly as a wise man

on people who were influential.

But it is certainly not possible to take the definition

of atomic energy and the prohibition against indu-

helping other nations industrially, literally.

It is certainly not possible to do that, Mr. Senator.

Because everything we do is contrary to it.

- Everything we do is what?

Contrary to it!

It was a different world after the war.

Americans perceived a new threat: Russian and Chinese communism.

Arms control was an unpopular idea,

even before the Russians shocked America by exploding their own

atomic bomb in 1949, far sooner than anyone expected.

The arms race began in earnest and Oppenheimer's council for

international collaboration was now less attractive

to policymakers than the advice of his fellow scientist, Edward Teller.

Even during the war years at Los Alamos,

Teller had urged the development of a secret weapon,

radically different and radically more destructive than

the atom bomb: the hydrogen bomb.

The General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission

chaired by Oppenheimer issued a secret report,

opposing immediate development of the hydrogen bomb

on both technical and moral grounds.

I'm sure he thought that there was an

absolute no need for the hydrogen bomb,

that there was no need really for any of these bombs.

And he felt that way even though he had worked on

the arsenal of the fission bomb.

Despite the Committee's advice,

President Truman initiated a program to develop the hydrogen bomb

and scientists at Los Alamos began to design the new device.

Robert Oppenheimer was not among them.

This is an atomic bomb, about the size of the one

that devastated Hiroshima.

By 1950, it was considered too small for our defense.

The hydrogen bomb being developed,

would have 1,000 times the destructive force.

One morning in November of 1952,

the Pacific island of Elugelab,

was vaporized by the first hydrogen blast.

All that remained was a mile wide crater on the ocean floor.

A disbelieving America saw the Russians explode a hydrogen bomb

within the same year.

There are no secrets insofar as atomic and hydrogen bomb

developments concern from the communists.

I don't think we have any secrets from them at all.

Senator McCarthy's anti-Communism

dominated the 1950s.

When he mentioned Oppenheimer's left-wing past publicly,

it meant to some that Oppenheimer was fair game.

Affidavits to the effect that he had been a member of the Party,

that he had recommended communists for work in the

A-bomb, H-bomb plants.

Lotta close relatives, of course, communists.

That doesn't make him a communist,

but his wife admittedly was the wife of...

an official of the Communist Party.

A brother, a very active communist.

McCarthy did not attack Oppenheimer directly,

but he had helped create the climate that prompted

President Eisenhower to seriously consider a letter from a former

Congressional aide, charging that Oppenheimer was a Russian spy.

13 years of surveillance by campus police,

the FBI, and military intelligence.

Wire taps, reports from informants

as many as five agents shadowed him in a single day.

Most of it was old news, material disregarded in the past

by General Groves and others when Oppenheimer was considered essential.

But in 1953, when presented with a thick dossier,

Eisenhower immediately ordered Oppenheimer's clearance suspended,

pending a hearing.

He had very much the feeling that he was giving the best to

the United States, in the years during the war and after the war.

In my personal opinion, he did.

But others did not agree.

And in 1954, he was hauled before a tribunal...

and accused of being a security risk, a risk to the United States.

A risk to betray secrets.

The proceedings were conducted by

the Atomic Energy Commission in secret.

There were no photographers, no reporters, no television.

Even Oppenheimer's attorneys were excluded when classified

material was discussed.

At issue was whether Robert Oppenheimer,

principle architect of the atomic bomb,

could be trusted with state secrets.

Along with numerous accusations relating to his left-wing past,

Oppenheimer was specifically accused of opposing

the hydrogen bomb on technical, political, and moral grounds.

And of having misled security officers in matters relating to

his old friend Haakon Chevalier.

During the war, Oppenheimer had reported George Eltenton's

attempts to share secrets with the Russians.

He told the story in such an ambiguous way,

that intelligence officers were left with the impression that

Haakon Chevalier was the center of a spy ring and that he had

contacted several physicists.

This mysterious fabrication was to cost the unwitting

Chevalier his job and was the most damaging evidence presented

at Oppenheimer's hearing.

This friend of mine, who was the closest human being to me

really, at that time, that he had betrayed me in this way,

And told about me a lie which constituted,

if this had been true, it would have been a criminal conspiracy

for which I would have been...

I could have been sentenced to a pretty long prison term.

Oppenheimer never explained to Chevalier

nor to anyone else why he had, for 13 years,

failed to undo the lie.

Also damaging to Oppenheimer was the testimony of his former

Los Alamos colleague, Edward Teller.

The father of the hydrogen bomb had previously complained

to government attorneys that Oppenheimer was a complex

and vain man who had, for moral reasons,

impeded development of the hydrogen bomb.

Teller was somewhat more restrained at the hearing,

but he did testify that Oppenheimer should not be

granted clearance.

Although the majority of witnesses,

Nobel laureates, government advisors,

even General Groves, came to Oppenheimer's defense,

it was to no avail.

The Atomic Energy Commission found that Oppenheimer was a

security risk and his clearance was never restored.

He was never again asked to advise the government of the

United States and he never again worked in nuclear energy.

He was not the same person afterwards.

I think it really knocked him for a loop.

He felt frustrated in accomplishing what he hoped to do

in the way of getting peace.

He felt really injured by not being part of the...

by not being respected in government and official circles.

He wanted to get back into that I think.

I don't know why, but I think it's one of these things where

you get the taste of it, it's hard to not want it.

I think to a certain extent, it actually almost killed him

spiritually, yes.

It achieved just what his opponents wanted to achieve.

Destroyed him.

- What, Oppenheimer, could you tell us...

what your thoughts are about what our atomic policy should be?

No, I can't do that.

I'm not close enough to the facts and I'm not close enough

to the thoughts of those who are worrying about it.

- What your thoughts are about the proposal

of Senator Robert Kennedy that President Johnson initiate talks

with a view to halt the spread of nuclear weapons?

It's 20 years too late.

It should've been done the day after Trinity.

The atomic bomb Robert Oppenheimer built,

and the hydrogen bomb he hoped could never be built, are now facts of life.

Since the Trinity blast in 1945, there have been more than

1,200 nuclear explosions on the face of the earth.

The largest has 4,000 times the force of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima.

I felt it myself,

the glitter of nuclear weapons.

It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist,

to feel it's there in your hands,

to release this energy that fuels the stars.

To let it do your bidding.

To perform these miracles to lift a million tons of rock into the sky.

It is something that gives people an illusion of

illimitable power and it is in some ways,

responsible for all our troubles,

I would say.

This, what you might call, technical arrogance that

overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.

I expect the human race may live on for a while

and the differences between us and any possible opponent

are not that great.

In fact, I don't know any part of history

where it would be proper to use one of those very powerful bombs.

Nothing turned out quite as well as one

thought it would.

During the war, we all thought that with this device,

which was a 1,000 times more powerful than anything else,

we could really influence the way nations talked about war.

And this is what my brother was so involved with after the war,

because there were no vested interests,

there were no manufacturers of atomic bombs.

Nobody knew about it.

He once said, "Here is a fresh start,

a weapon that you can't use for war.

It can produce a change."

But it didn't.

Everybody regards the atomic bomb as just another weapon,

as part of our security.

We knew the world would not be the same.

Few people laughed, few people cried,

most people were silent.

I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture,

the Bhagavad Gita:

Vishnu...

is trying to persuade the prince that...

he should do his duty

and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form,

and says, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

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