All language subtitles for The Day After Trinity - J. Robert Oppenheimer

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.