To End All War: Oppenheimer & the Atomic Bomb

I have

been asked whether, in the years to come,

it will be possible to kill 40 million American people

by the use of atomic bombs in a single night.

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

Robert Oppenheimer was the father of the atomic bomb.

He was this complex ball of contradictions.

They are weapons of aggression, of surprise and of terror.

Oppenheimer wanted the bomb to be used.

How else would the world know what it

was? Dr. Oppenheimer,

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

In a world of atomic weapons, wars will cease.

It is D-minus one for the

test of the world's first atomic device.

This cultured, nonviolent man was responsible for birthing

the most violent weapon in human history.

He devoted the rest of his life to trying

to control the monster he had unleashed.

If there is another world war…

this civilization may go under.

He became a political pariah. Is it

true that humans have already discovered

a method of destroying humanity?

And it finally ruined him. "Now I am become Death,

the destroyer of worlds."

We have made a thing that, by all the standards of the world we grew up in,

is an evil thing.

[Bradbury Reid] When I was 15,

I had a chance to speak to Oppenheimer alone.

He was at a cocktail party.

I was serving hors d'oeuvres…

...and found Oppenheimer standing alone.

I said, "I think you're some sort of a saint." And he was very taken aback.

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

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

And he turned around and picked his hat up and walked out the door.

It obviously struck him in a way that I had never imagined.

Oppenheimer for Cronkite, take

one. Dr. Oppenheimer,

with all the inevitability of the decision that history demonstrates to us,

you still seem to suffer, may I say, from a bad conscience about it.

Is that true, sir? Uh, I think when you play a meaningful part

in bringing about the death of over a

hundred thousand people… uh, you naturally,

uh, don't think of that with ease.

When you look at the history of Oppenheimer,

it's very difficult to find any person in

history sitting in such a complex situation

with all kinds of impossible questions and very few answers.

Everybody has their own idea of what Robert Oppenheimer is.

I mean, the fact is that he invented a weapon

that can destroy human life on Earth.

I mean, don't forget that this weapon,

which has the capacity to end civilization,

was developed as a means to save Western civilization.

In the 1930s, millions of Americans

were following the news coming out of Europe

in their local theaters, watching newsreels.

And Oppenheimer was horrified by the rise of Hitler.

His sense of his own Jewishness made him immediately and massively aware

of the danger of fascism.

When the war started in 1939, he was a professor at Berkeley.

And that same year, one of his students comes rushing into his office

to convey the news that fission has been discovered.

Word has just come through from Germany

that the uranium atom under neutron

bombardment actually splits into two parts.

Initially, Oppenheimer can't believe it.

He runs to the blackboard and does some mathematics,

and he comes to the understanding that

you could use fission to generate energy.

Einstein showed explicitly that if you can convert matter into pure energy,

the amount of energy is extraordinary.

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

They realize that from a very small amount of matter,

you could make power to drive ships and planes

and trains, whatever, make electricity, of course.

And they also realize very quickly

that it might be possible to make a weapon of untold destruction.

- -

We were deeply worried.

After all, the discovery of fission was in

Nazi Germany. [airplane passing overhead]

Nazi Germany could potentially build a nuclear bomb.

This was the worry, and it was very tangible, it was very real.

December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.

Pearl Harbor happens.

I assert that this form of treachery

shall never again endanger us.

Now the United States is an active combatant in the war.

The idea at this point is,

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

because we could wake up tomorrow,

and Hitler could have that nuclear monopoly that we all want to avoid.

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

and help deliver nuclear weapons. But even before we pick the place though,

we need to find somebody who can lead that installation.

And virtually nobody expected Oppenheimer to be named

the director of the weapons design laboratory.

He was kind of this ethereal personality.

He had no record of having big achievements.

One of the scientists who knew Oppenheimer said,

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

stand." Oppenheimer's friends felt

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

He said at one point, "From my earliest days, I never did anything

or thought anything or knew anyone

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

Oppenheimer was born in 1904

and into an age of great scientific possibility.

The first two decades of the 20th century

were periods of incredible intellectual daring.

Electricity, automobiles, flight were all transforming daily life.

And then you had incredible advances in science,

and it looks like almost anything could be achieved.

The story of Oppenheimer

is really the story of immigrant America.

His father comes over from Germany, gets a job in the garment industry

and makes a tremendous amount of money,

winds up on the Upper West Side on Riverside Drive.

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

His mother was a Paris-trained artist

who exhibited her work at various galleries in Manhattan.

She was a nervous person.

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

And he was very sheltered and extremely socially awkward.

When he finally went to camp one summer,

he was so nasty to the other kids that they roughed him up.

He said later they put him in the icehouse

all night, naked, and painted him green,

including his genitals. Oddly enough, Oppenheimer didn't protest.

He just took his punishment stoically.

It was a very odd reaction for a young boy at that age.

Imagine this sensitive boy, this very smart boy,

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

Certainly not with children his own age. He's had no experience.

The real core psychological moment for Oppenheimer

appears to have been when he was in college.

And he goes to study physics at Cambridge, and he doesn't do very well.

He ends up in a laboratory that's really about experimental physics,

and he is not good at that.

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

And he has this sort of crisis of confidence.

This came to a head when he had a--

what I think can only be described as a nervous breakdown.

One of his friends stumbled upon him in an empty classroom

where Oppenheimer was standing at the blackboard.

Muttering to himself over and over again,

"The point is… the point is… the point is…"

And he could never finish the sentence.

And then another one of his friends

went to his dorm room and heard this moaning inside and opened the door,

and there was Oppenheimer in a fetal position,

-rolling back and forth, groaning. -

He literally came close to committing suicide at that point.

He saw a psychiatrist as a result of this,

and the psychiatrist said that he's kind of living in his own world.

He was having an identity crisis,

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

His parents took him to Paris, where he saw yet another psychologist,

and in a very French way prescribed a professional woman and red wine.

So… Uh, we don't know if that happened.

He had always been the top of the class, the smartest person,

admired for his intellectual capability by all his classmates.

And suddenly, he was an incompetent.

And he just couldn't deal with that at that

point. And what snapped him out of that

was his discovery of theoretical physics, of quantum physics.

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

It was a very exciting time to be a theorist. And if you are young and quick

and willing to think weird ideas that nobody else has ever thought,

you can potentially make a huge amount of progress and a name for yourself.

So, when Oppenheimer decided to move to Gottingen in Germany

to study with Max Born, a theoretical physicist, he blossomed.

He meets some of the leading physicists in Germany at the time.

Heisenberg, who, ironically enough,

would lead the German atomic bomb project.

And while he's over there,

he sort of invents this Oppie personality.

This is where he gets the name. They

call him Opje, and this turns into Oppie.

And Oppie is not an insecure young American

who doesn't really know what he wants to do. Oppie is the brilliant guy

who is always five steps ahead of everybody

else and can keep everything in his head.

Oppie is a genius who's very eccentric and interesting

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

And you see these pictures of him from the '20s. It's very Bob Dylan.

He had the eyes of an Old Testament prophet inside this frail body,

and he sort of cocked himself with his funny little porkpie hat on top.

So, Oppie is this sort of construction

of everything that he would want to be. And

that re-creation is immensely successful.

When the cancerous Nazi growth spread farther still,

the people of Europe, and the world, entered a new era.

Certainly the first motivation for the scientists

was to beat the Germans to the bomb.

There's nothing like the prospect of a hanging to concentrate the mind.

And the threat of death of civilization as they knew it was so great