-(clock ticking) -(birds chirping) j. robert oppenheimer: 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.

-♪ -(clock ticking) jon else: robert oppenheimer was the father of the atomic bomb. he was this complex ball of contradictions. oppenheimer: they are weapons of aggression, of surprise and of terror. richard rhodes: oppenheimer wanted the bomb to be used. how else would the world know what it was? eleanor roosevelt: dr. oppenheimer, are we creating something we may not be able to control? oppenheimer: in a world of atomic weapons, wars will cease. (ticking) newsreel narrator: it is d-minus one for the test of the world's first atomic device. else: this cultured, nonviolent man was responsible for birthing the most violent weapon in human history. and he devoted the rest of his life to trying to control the monster that he had unleashed. oppenheimer: if there is another world war...

...this civilization may go under. kai bird: he became a political pariah. edward r. murrow: is it true that humans have already discovered a method of destroying humanity? (cameras clicking) else: and it finally ruined him. oppenheimer: "now i am become death, the destroyer of worlds." (explosion booming) we have made a thing that, by all standards of the world we grew up in, is an evil thing. (birds chirping) ellen 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...

(faint chatter) ...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, "wh-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 wa that i had never imagined. man: oppenheimer for cronkite, take one. (film beeps) walter cronkite: 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. christopher nolan: 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. (ticking) else: 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. -(newsreel music playing) -(bell clanging)

(shouting in german) (crowd chanting in german) bird: 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. nolan: his sense of his own jewishness made him immediately and massively aware of the danger of fascism. (bell tolling) bird: 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. man: word has just come through from germany that the uranium atom under neutron bombardment actually splits into two parts.

bird: 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. (crackling) rhodes: 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. (hitler shouting in german) (crowd chanting) we were deeply worried. after all, the discovery of fission was in nazi germany.

mareena robinson snowden: nazi germany could potentially build a nuclear bomb. this was the worry. and it was very tangible. it was very real. (plane engines buzzing) franklin d. roosevelt: december 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. pearl harbor happens. franklin d. roosevelt: i assert that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us. (cheering, applause) alan carr: 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, tes

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." rhodes: 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 mysel the deepest loathing."

(ticking) jennet conant: 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, fligh were all transforming daily life. and then you had incredible advances in science, and it looks like almost anything could be achieved. david eisenbach: story of robert 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.

herken: his mother was a paris-trained artist who exhibited her work at various galleries in manhattan. rhodes: she was a nervous person. she really didn't let this little boy go outside. bird: and he was very sheltered and extremely socially awkward. rhodes: 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.

rhodes: 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. alex wellerstein: 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 d an experiment with his hands. and he has this sort of crisis of confidence. bird: 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.

eisenbach: muttering to himself over and over again, "the point is, the point is, the point is." bird: and he could never finish the sentence. martin j. sherwin: 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. eisenbach: he saw a psychiatrist as a result of this, and the psychiatrist said that he's kind of living in his own world. rhodes: he was having an identity crisis, something we're clearer about these days than we were then. bird: 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. (laughs) so...

uh, we don't know if that happened. sherwin: 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 tha was his discovery of theoretica physics, of quantum physics. at the time, it was sort of the golden age of physics. it's 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. bird: so, when oppenheimer decided to move to göttingen 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. wellerstein: 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. else: 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. wellerstein: so, oppie is this sort of construction of everything that he would want to be. and that recreation is immensely successful. ♪ ♪ engineered to minimize noise. and built for adventure. which can also be your own quiet cabin in the woods. the fully electric q8 e-tron. an electric vehicle that recharges you. how we get there matters. (vo) red hot deal days are here. only until may 29th. get a bundle of your choice on us.

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wellerstein: ultimately, whoever gets the bomb first is not just gonna win world war ii but is gonna run the entire world. ♪ newsreel narrator: by the summer of 1942, control of the atom bomb projec passes to the hands of the army under the code name manhattan engineering district. carr: the manhattan project really was a huge national effort. rhodes: and to plot out the industrial scale of the operation, they chose a dynamic, burly, six-foot-three, 240-pound general named leslie richard groves. he hated leslie. he went by dick. general groves had a problem. he was entrusted to hire the people that would build the atomic bomb. but he knew that we're talking about the people who are the finest scientists in the world.

these are prima donnas. and now you have to have somebody who's gonna be the whipmaster. you have to have somebody that understands the physics, who has a reputation, so that these prima donnas will follow you. carr: oppenheimer and general groves are introduced in the fall of 1942. and these two individuals are just about as different as you can imagine. but general groves saw something in him that apparently no one else saw groves: when meeting oppenheimer, you were immediately impressed. you couldn't help it. there wasn't a better man. rhodes: he chose oppenheimer against the advice of most of these leaders that he had around him in the scientific community. oppenheimer had never led any large enterprise. but oppenheimer was really good at explaining things.

wellerstein: he was extremely charming, and he had this ability to sort of hold a lot of things in his head at once and keep aware of how they all fit together. and this is apparently what general groves recognized in him. eisenbach: for security purposes, this project needs to happen away from everything. so groves tells oppenheimer to just come up with a place where this would actually work. and it was oppenheimer who suggests the new mexico desert. so they go to scope out a site. it's called los alamos. carr: oppenheimer knew the area well. he had spent a lot of time here. charles oppenheimer: when he left new york as a young man and went to new mexico...

...that was a-- just a really important part of his life. going to new mexico and meeting cowboys and riding horses. he just loved it. he loved every part of it. bird: he once said that his ambition was to combine the two loves in his life, physics and new mexico. and of course, he did precisely this. carr: now, the government shows up with bulldozers and architects and laborers and craftsmen to build a new community and laboratory where there essentially had not been one before. snowden: they're starting from scratch. and so much of what they were doing was unknow and unproven at the time. they didn't actually know that they would be able to achieve this. this was all theoretical.

else: they knew that they had to get the best scientists if they were gonna get this weapon before the nazis did. (crowd chanting) (ship horn blowing) newsreel narrator: albert einstein flees to the united states. he leads a vanguard of refugee scientists, virtually stripping german universities of their best minds. wellerstein: all of the turmoil in europe had forced out a huge number of really top-grade physicists. enrico fermi. hans bethe. edward teller, who famously would go on to develop the hydrogen bomb. one can sort of go down the lists and find more and more and more of these amazing people. oppenheimer was famously known for his intellectual sex appeal. and he could go around the country and sort of flash his brain to people,

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mer asked becausif i would join himeing sharein los alamos. world. and i said i would be delighted like most of his students, i would more or less follow him to the ends of the earth.

if you had the choice of fighting the nazis by going to this exotic mountaintop and doing the greatest physics in history, i mean, what would you do? i would've been on the next train. i don't think people thought that much about the consequences. you know, can we blame them? oppenheimer: we were all aware of the fact that, in one way or another, we were intervening explicitly and heavy-handedly in the course of human history. carr: by the time the laboratory was established, oppenheimer was a family man. he was married. he had a little boy. during his tenure as director at the laboratory, he had a little girl as well. bird: the summer of 1939, he was at a cocktail party in berkeley, and a young woman named kitty puening had spied him

from across the garden and was immediately attracted to him. she was a firecracker (laughs) of a young woman. they fell in love, and by 1940, she was pregnant. (laughs) sherwin: they live ever after. and notice i didn't say "happily." (laughs) they are devoted to each other. but it's a difficult marriage because of the complexity of robert's life of their personalities, of the environment in which they live. nolan: she was an academic, and she was a biologist and a botanist, and ultimately, that work was all put to one side for the years at los alamos. i think she was very frustrated by being put in the position of

a mother and a wife and nothing else. conant: she did not thrive at los alamos. it was a lonely and hard existence. and she disappeared into the bottle somewhat. oppenheimer was famous for mixing his gin martinis. (laughter) he persuaded his scientists to work very hard during the week and to party hard on the weekends. rhodes: everyone was hungover on sunday morning, but they worked a lot, and they worked hard, and they worked together. and that was largely oppenheimer. bird: los alamos for many of these people were the most momentous years of their lives. they felt part of something,

part of something meaningful and important. and they were led by this very enigmatic, strange, bright, blue-eyed young man whom they all admired reid: i grew up at los alamos. and my father came to los alamos during the manhattan project. it was a-a curious place to live because they're blowing things up three times a day. (explosion rumbles) explosions were at 10:00 and 12:00 and 3:00, so when you're in first grade, it means recess, lunch and school's out. (excited chatter) we were actually, as little kids, connoisseurs of explosions. and at some point, i asked my father, "what-what are you doing?" and he said, "well, we're doing something

that has never been done before." i thought, "that's got to be pretty interesting, whatever it is." ♪ i don't know how long it's been there. long enough to produce eggs, it seems. it would appear that it has begun moving towards us! visionworks. see the difference.

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carr: we get about a year into the laboratory's existence, now you're the bird sand we come to find that it's gonna be a lot harder than we thought. every little thing is hard. these are some very complex machines.

a nuclear weapon is not an idea. think of a nuclear weapon more as like a million ideas that have to come together and work perfectly together. to make an atomic bomb, you need the fuel for it. (electrical warbling) carr: we have plutonium, and we have enriched uranium. we have two different types of material that we're going to try and use. plutonium was the better material to use. there was gonna be more of it. you needed less of it to make a bomb, and yet it was harder to detonate. (electrical popping) the initial way to make a bomb was called gun assembly. it was to take two pieces of material and slam them together... (explosion) ...causing a critical mass and an explosion. and that was fine if you used highly enriched uranium.

but one day, they discovered it won't work with plutonium. the plutonium turned out to be so reactive that you couldn't fire it up a barrel even at 3,000 feet per second. it would fizzle. it would melt down before it got up the barrel. norris: it was a great shock. i mean, maybe this whole plutonium thing had been wasted, hundreds of millions of dollars to develop plutonium. wellerstein: oppenheimer was distraught, and-and los alamos was distraught. rhodes: he considered resigning, he was so depressed, and his friends at the laboratory said, "you can't, robert. "you've got to stay and finish this work. it's got to happen. we must do it." and-and reluctantly, he stayed. (filmstrip rattling) newsreel narrator: ...war under the supreme command of general dwight d. eisenhower. allied forces have nearly three million troops trained for the assault. (crowd cheering) on the other side of the channel...

-(shouting in german) -(crowd chanting in german) ...the nazis also know what the allied forces are preparing for, and they are making preparations of their own. (hitler shouting in german) bird: oppenheimer feared he was still in a race with the germans. even as late as the summer of '44, they had no real intelligence about where they were on the german bomb project. carr: and so, if they don't crack the plutonium problem, they may not have a bomb in time. norris: oppenheimer shifted the laboratory into, you know, full-speed panic mode. wellerstein: they had had some ideas for other types of bomb designs which they had thrown around at the very beginning of the project but dismissed 'cause they seemed too difficult. but one of them was called implosion. the way implosion in a nutshell works was they had a solid ball of plutonium, just a solid sphere of it, about the size of a softball, maybe a little bit smaller.

and this is encased by tons of high explosives. and these high explosives are really specially made, so that when they explode, they're gonna end up sort of focusing a blast wave onto this ball, pushing on the top and pushing on the bottom and pushing on both sides of it every angle of this is gonna be being pushed upon with a lot of explosive force. what you want to do is get this pressure to squeeze the plutonium target evenly. if it were asymmetrical, it probably wouldn't work. you had to have enough pressure quickly enough to smash these subatomic particles together hard enough to get them to have this a-amazing reaction. wellerstein: this is really hard to do. every aspect of this is an almost totally new problem. it is a technology that would have benefited from

another decade of development. and they didn't have that. they had a year. conant: oppenheimer was working night and day building the bomb. and as the project grew in size, the security service protecting the project also grew. and even though he was beloved and admired by most of the scientists working at the los alamos project, he had fallen under a greater veil of suspicion because there were certain aspects of his past that raised the possibility that he could be a security risk. ♪ rhodes: when oppenheimer was teaching at the university of california at berkeley, he really was a very unworldly man focused on science,

until the depression began. he discovered, to his shock, that his students often didn't even have enough to eat. one of them told me he was living on cat food, cans of cat food. that was the only thing he could afford. oppenheimer was changed by this discovery of-of suffering in the world, really. bird: and oppenheimer sort of naturally, like many of his friends in berkeley at the time, drifted politically to the left. carr: communism was a very appealing idea in the 1930s. there was no internet. people didn't know what was going on real time in the soviet union, where joseph stalin, of course, was in the process of murdering

20 million of his own people. (gunfire) what people here in the united states saw instead was, hey, you know, here in the soviet union, everybody is free and equal and has a job and a place to live and-and a future, an important role to play in the greater collective. (crowd cheering) now, if i don't know where my next meal is coming from, that sounds like a pretty good idea. it's debatable if oppenheimer ever really joined, officially, the communist party. but his brother did. frank oppenheimer joined the party. frank's wife jackie joined the party. many of oppenheimer's close friends had joined the communist party. many of his students at berkeley and elsewhere had been members of the communist party as well. bird: and in the mid '30s,

he met a young woman named jean tatlock, who was studying to become a psychiatrist. brilliant young woman. he fell in love with her. nolan: they were engaged to be married twice. i think it's probably a reasonable interpretation to say he was somewhat obsessed with her. she was a communist. he was interested in communist ideas. bird: and for the next four years, oppenheimer actually contributed quite a bit of money to the communist party. but his political activities began to be noticed. herken: what the fbi did in those days, they were following the communists. they would walk around and they would take down the license numbers of the cars that were parked in front of the house or the building and look them up. that's when oppenheimer first came to the attention of the fbi. eisenbach: even while he's heading up the a-bomb project, the fbi is wiretapping and following him.

military intelligence is constantly asking him questions. rhodes: he was, i think, in a strange way, comfortable with that because he knew he wasn't doing anything wrong. even when he went to visit his old girlfriend when he should not have probably done so. in 1943, he heard from jean tatlock. she was going through some emotional crisis, and she wanted to see him. he had kept in touch with jean. he still loved her. she had rejected him. he had married kitty. but he knew that jean tatlock was in a depressed state, and so he visited her. rhodes: he had to leave los alamos and go to san francisco. and that was, of course, just red meat for the, for the dog, as it were.

there were two guys sitting outside the apartment. bird: jean tatlock was under surveillance. she was still a member of the communist party. rhodes: he spent the night with her. they had been lovers, and i think they probably were lovers again that night. (engine starts) bird: this was reported back to colonel boris pash, who was head of army intelligence for all the west coast. and pash was convinced that this was a serious breach of security and that perhaps oppenheimer was conveying nuclear secrets and atomic secrets to the communist party through tatlock sadly, tragically, she died just a few months later, in the spring of 1944. under mysterious circumstances, her father found her naked with her head plunged in a bathtub with her body slumped over the edge of the bathtub.

which is a very odd way to commit suicide. there's some speculation that perhaps she was murdered. oppenheimer was horrified and devastated by the news. the security officer who informed him said that he wept openly, that he was absolutely bereft and actually confided that there was nobody that he could speak to about it so you sense, uh, the loneliness of his grief.

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the president died of a cerebral hemorrhage. april 1945 was one of those months in which the fate of the world seemed to turn on a dime. fdr dies, followed by hitler committing suicide. newsreel narrator: hitler's empire burns and shrivels. else: the bomb was conceived in a kind of anti-hitler fervor. by the spring of 1945, hitler's out of the picture. the nazis are no longer a threat. hitler is not gonna build an atomic bomb and drop it on new york. that's not gonna happen. but there was no way they were not gonna finish that weapon. rhodes: they wanted to make this happen. they didn't want the war to end before it happened. oppenheimer wanted the bomb to be used, because how else would the world know what it was? newsreel narrator: harry s. truman was sworn in as president of the united states. eisenbach: by the time truman gets to the presidency, the wheels are in motion. this bomb is going to be dropped somewhere.

with the death of hitler, the target then becomes japan. newsreel narrator: the never-ending air campaign against japan's stolen empire continues, as b-24s hammer installations in the palau islands. we were marching up from island to island. landing on the beaches against dug-in japanese defenses. losing young men in large numbers. every day that went by without this bomb being successfully tested was a day in which thousands of americans are dying. newsreel narrator: thousands of yanks have been wounded and other thousands have sacrificed their lives to drive a fanatical foe from this vital base, the doorstep to japan itself. norris: they knew the japanese were defeated, but defeat and surrender are two different things.

so how do you get them to surrender? oppenheimer: in a world of atomic weapons, wars will cease. and that is not a small thing. eisenbach: the way oppenheimer looked at the bomb is in a kind of eastern metaphysical way of it is a act of destruction and creation potentially at the same time, act of war and an act of peace, that this thing, if mishandled, could end humanity, but if properly handled and harnessed, could actually lead to an era of peace and prosperity for the entire world. (playful chatter) conant: by the summer of '45, they had been working on the implosion design for a year,

tweaking, devising and struggling with the challenges. wellerstein: for this thing to work, all of those explosives and their detonators and the things powering them and the batteries and everything else has got to work perfectly. and there wasn't a really good way to figure out if that was actually gonna happen, other than setting off a full-size test. herken: they settle upon the site where the bomb will be tested, and oppenheimer chooses the name for the site: trinity. carr: he had been reading the poetry of john donne at the time, and one of those poems, uh, include the line, "batter my heart, three-personed god," a reference to the holy trinity in christianity. herken: and i think that that was a tribute to jean tatlock, because jean and oppie used to read the poetry of john donne in bed (ticking)

newsreel narrator: sunday, july 15, 1945. alamogordo, new mexico. it is d-minus one for the test of the world's first atomic device. nolan: the hours leading up to the trinity test are one of the most extraordinary moments of-of tension imaginable. the stakes, the billions of dollars, the hundreds of thousands of people who'd been involved in building to this one moment of this test of this new weapon, all of that responsibility falling very squarely on oppenheimer's shoulders. newsreel narrator: at the bomb test site, the scientists are working under growing pressure. they are told there must be no further delays. the president must know the results of the test when he meets with stalin. carr: the president of the united states is about to enter into the potsdam conference-- potsdam, a city in germany. he's gonna meet with joseph stalin,

winston churchill as well, and talk about the future of europe and the future of the pacific war. the president must know if he has a nuclear weapon in his back pocket or not. norris: everybody was on edge, and they had to calm down oppenheimer. he was a bundle of nerves. rhodes: he chain-smoked, which he pretty much always did anyway. groves: it was a situation where i did not want dr. oppenheimer to get nervous. there's a famous picture from that evening where oppenheimer himself crawls up the tower to the top where the bomb has been hoisted he's checking all the final plugs to make sure that everything is in order. he's clearly worried, trying to check every last little detail.

wellerstein: oppenheimer doesn't know if this thing is gonna work at all. eisenbach: in fact, he had a bet with another one of the scientists that it wouldn't work-- ten dollars. oppenheimer: there were a hundred things that could be done wrong, any one of which could make the test a failure. nye: everybody had doubts. was it even possible? and then this question, 'cause nobody was really sure: what if we set the whole atmosphere on fire? snowden: what if we set off this bomb and it literally sets the air on fire and engulfs us all? kaku: the atmosphere is made out of oxygen, after all. can the oxygen of the atmospher be set in flames by an atomic bomb? no one knew the answer to these questions. rhodes: it's before dawn on july 16, 1945.

it was dark. the bomb was in the tower a hundred feet up, and they were ready to go. oppenheimer was in one of the bunkers that had been built carr: oppenheimer braced himself, according to some accounts uttering the words, "lord, these affairs are hard on the heart." (civil defense siren blaring) man (over speaker): t-minus ten, nine, eight... rhodes: oppenheimer was saying to himself, -"i must remain conscious." -(ticking) man: ...seven... "i must remain conscious." man: ...six... carr: seconds are hours. man: ...five, four, three, two... rhodes: and all of a sudden... (explosion booming)

...the whole place lit up. one of the scientists told me it felt as if someone had opened an oven door. suddenly, there was this huge heat, which was radiant heat, so it came at the speed of light as well, and then this rolling thunder of sound, and the first mushroom cloud started going up. it was orange and purple and blue and yellow, and it roiled, and it grew as it rose. and a new thing, he said, had been created on the earth, a new challenge for humanity. nye: people had seen explosions and tested bombs for decades, but to see the size of it, just... it was just astonishing.

nolan: there's never been a moment like that in the history of the world. the view of the world, the view of what matter is, what we are made of indeed, palpably changes. it's an unleashing of a, of a force never before imagined and could never be ignored from this point on. oppenheimer: we knew the world would not be the same. a few people laughed. a few people cried. most people were silent. (sniffles) i remembered the line from the hindu scripture, the bhagavad gita. vishnu... ...is trying to persuade the prince that

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carr: after the test was over, oppenheimer had this strut. doc? it was likehigh noon. he had done it. oppenheimer was very proud of this accomplishment. it was a world-changing moment, and a lot of the scientists realized that. now came the business of what the government would do with their creation. conant: groves hurried back to his washington office and cabled the news that the bomb experiment had been a success and even more powerful than they had anticipated. this information is transmitted to truman, who... entire attitude changes at potsdam. he suddenly feels like he has a win in-in sight. he suddenly starts bossing around stalin.

he decides the japanese get no concessions whatsoever. truman had known that this existed since he became president, but to know it actually works and it's even more powerful than we thought, that's a really different position for him to be in. our demand has been, and it remains, -unconditional surrender! -(applause) (filmstrip slowing to a stop) nye: my mom and dad were both veterans of world war ii, and my mom, she said, "you know, after... "after four years of this thing "there was nobody really... there was nobody going, 'was it ethical to use a-a nuclear weapon?'" right? just get it over with. this is horrible. like, this-- whatever you can do to shorten this thing. everybody was terrified and exhausted, and everybody knew somebody who knew somebody

who was not living anymore because of this. else: with the bomb ready to go, i mean, the choices are appalling. you know, they know perfectly well that if they use these weapons on japanese men, women and children in cities, there are gonna be a couple hundred thousand people who die but if they don't stop the war with the bomb, there may be millions more that die. so those seem to be the two choices, but there was a third choice, and the third choice was to do a demonstration. maybe drop this bomb in tokyo bay, kill very few people make a hell of a demonstration, and maybe the japanese will surrender just based on having seen the ferocious power of this thing. oppenheimer rejected, uh, that course, as did the planners in washington. (playful chatter) oppenheimer: we did think about whether, uh,

its destructiveness, uh, its danger, uh, could be vividly demonstrated over a barren and uninhabited target, and we were very doubtful of that. very few people would have had a more thorough understanding than j. robert oppenheimer of what was about to unfold when these weapons were used in combat. oppenheimer contemplated, knowing that this destruction would be unworldly. (wind whistling softly) bird: his secretary, anne wilson, told me this story that i'm still struck by. after the trinity test, she's walking to work one day with robert. he's a few steps ahead of her, and he's suddenly muttering, "those poor little people, those poor little people."

she stops him and says, "robert what are you muttering about?" and he looked at her and-and explained that, you know, the bomb was going to be used on a japanese city or two, and the victims were going to be civilians, a whole city. this was obviously on his mind, painfully on his mind. and yet we know, that same week he was meeting with the general who were in charge of the bombing mission, and he was instructing them exactly how the bomb should be dropped and at what altitude it should be detonated for the maximum destructive power. wellerstein: it's hard to reconcile the sensitive, morally upright, humanistic professor with the guy who recommends that the bomb is dropped on cities

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rhodes: by august of 1945, every japanese city of more than 50,000 people had basically been burned out, except for three or four cities that had been deliberately set aside for atomic bombing. set aside because they had physical characteristics that would allow us to see how the bombs worked. hiroshima was a flat city. and with the city set aside, it was possible to see the effects of the bomb all the way out to the edges. that's why hiroshima was chosen hideko tamura: when i was a little kid, there were seven rivers running through, beautiful riverbanks.

water was clear. i was running through magical gardens, flowers, looking for beautiful, beautiful insects of all different kinds. birds chirping. they don't understand about war. it was all over, sound of happiness. but the sound of the explosion came like a rage over the earth. (explosion rumbling) truman: a short time ago,

an american airplane dropped one bomb on hiroshima. that bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of tnt. it is an atomic bomb. it is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe we have spent more than two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history, and we have won. (explosion rumbling) newsreel narrator: japan could read its doom. this was more than a routine bombing. it was the funeral pyre of an aggressor nation. ♪

tamura: i remember every second. i've never been so helpless. i was under the debris and somehow had to crawl to the light and come out. i had to go looking for my mother.

seeing these miserable dying people, you didn't want her to be one of them. didn't hear one single thing about cousin, my mother or my best friend. i would have really loved to have died with them, because life after that was so very challenging and so very difficult, physically and especially mentally. reid: a few years after the end of the war, i saw the raw footage of hiroshima and nagasaki.

and there's no sound. it's just footage of people with their skin and flower reverse patterns of the kimonos burned into their skin and bodies floating in the river. it was so shocking. and i thought, "they're all my friends' fathers. did they know what they were doing?" none of it seemed to make any sense to me that this was so horrible. (geiger counter clicking rapidly) carr: as reports of that devastation started to come back to los alamos, obviously this weighed on the scientists. yes, it had been a horrible war but still, tens of thousands of people were killed in these attacks.

cities were destroyed. and that was difficult on a lot of the scientists. and i certainly think that it was difficult on oppenheimer for the rest of his life.

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hiroshima was far more costly in life and suffering and inhumane than it needed to have been. this is easy to say after the fact. -(birds chirping) -(clock ticking) nolan: oppenheimer never apologized in any way for

hiroshima and nagasaki. he was very, very careful and complicated in all statements he made about the moral implications of the bomb and his involvement in it. and yet, post-hiroshima and nagasaki, all of his actions are the actions of somebody who is plagued with guilt. (radio static crackles) douglas macarthur: we are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored. (crowd cheering) truman: i have received this afternoon a message from the japanese government. i deem this reply a full acceptance of the unconditional surrender of japan. else: and of course, a great many people felt that the atomic bomb had ended world war ii.

perhaps it had. and robert oppenheimer was the guy who made it happen. roy glauber: he was in demand everywhere. he was the cover story fortime magazine, once forlife magazine. there scarcely was a magazine cover that he wasn't on. herken: the inaugural issue ofphysics today simply showed a porkpie hat on a cyclotron control. and everybody knew the porkpie hat was oppenheimer. (lively chatter) conant: he becomes a rock star. he is the oracle of american science. and he liked that. he probably felt that he'd finally come through it al and he was no longer the outsider. now he was not only at the center of things but that he stood at the very top. (applause)

and that, i think, was intoxicating for him. but at the same time, he felt a real responsibility for having ushered this weapon into the world. man: go ahead, please. automatic control has got it. this time, rab, the stakes are kind of high. isidor isaac rabi: it's going to work all right, robert. else: i think he felt, as the father of the atomic bomb, it was his duty to keep the reins on the atomic bomb. man: go ahead, please. well, we'll know in 40 seconds. man: stay where you are. cut. bird: within three months of hiroshima, he was giving speeches, talking about how this weapon was a weapon for aggressors, that it is a weapon of terror.

you know, this is the father of the atomic bomb speaking. oppenheimer: if there is another world war... ...this civilization may go under. we need to ask ourselves whether we're doing all we can to avert that. charles oppenheimer: i might like to read what my grandfather said about it. this is a speech where he said, "but when you come right down to it, "the reason that we did this job "is because it was an organic necessity. "if you are a scientist, you cannot stop such a thing. "if you are a scientist, you believe "that it's good to find out how the world works, "that it's good to find out what realities are, "that it's good to turn over to mankind "the greatest possible power to control the world and deal with it according to its lights and values."

he didn't regret his role and work during the war, but he soon after turns so strongly towards managing the outcome of the science they created. bird: he decides he doesn't want to work any longer on building more bombs. he resigns from los alamos, and he accepts a position as director of the institute fo advanced studies in princeton, where he becomes einstein's boss, so to speak. he's probably the most famous scientist in america, and he's trying to use that celebrity status to have influence. he gets an appointment with harry truman in the oval office oppenheimer's agenda is to persuade harry truman of the importance of controlling this technology. and he starts to make this pitch. and truman interrupts him with a question, saying,

"well, dr. oppenheimer, when do you think the russians are going to get this weapon of mass destruction?" and oppenheimer is sort of taken aback by the question and says, "well, i'm not sure but sometime in the future." and truman interrupts again and says, "well, i know. never. at that point, oppie understands that harry truman doesn't understand anything about the physics of this weapon. and oppenheimer, at that point, says exactly the wrong thing. rhodes: he really offended president truman by saying, "mr. president, i have blood on my hands." (explosion rumbling) bird: this is exactly the wrong thing to say to the guy who made the decision to drop two such bombs on two japanese cities.

he was trying to impress truman. he thought it was something that truman would like to hear, and he got that wrong a lot. i mean, oppenheimer was very charming to a lot of people, but he was often not charming to leaders and people who had power over him. wellerstein: truman didn't believe that anybody's responsibility was greater than his. truman was just, "get that guy out of my office. i was the one who made the decision." bird: he ends the meeting very abruptly and later tells his aides that, "i don't want to see that crybaby scientist ever again."

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right? those who possess this will be able to shape the world order. and very quickly, the soviet union took note. (explosion rumbling) norris: the soviets tested a bomb in 1949 to the shock of almost everyone. newsreel narrator: president truman's dramatic announcement that russia has created an atomic explosion sends reporters racing for flushing meadow, where russia's vyshinsky arrives to address the united nations... this puts the u.s. in a really complicated position, because it's no longer the only country with nuclear weapons. suddenly, you have the possibility that if war with nuclear weapon broke out between two states that had a fair number of them, they could, in a matter of hours, destroy themselves. (civil defense siren blaring) newsreel narrator: we must all get ready now, so we know how to save ourselve if the atomic bomb ever explodes near us.

and one of the possible options scientists and policy people lobbied for was to build the hydrogen bomb as the sort of next step. (explosion rumbling) snowden: the hiroshima and nagasaki bombs were on the order of 15 kilotons of tnt, which is no small number in and of itself. when you start talking about hydrogen bombs, now we're talking about megatons. we're talking about a million tons of tnt. they're categorically different a thousand times stronger than anything you'd see in a hiroshima and nagasaki bomb. else: with one very large hydrogen bomb, you can kill about as many people as all of the people killed in world war ii. and oppenheimer could not see any use for that. he called it a genocidal weapon.

edward teller: at the end of the war, most people wanted to stop. i did not. among the people who knew a great deal about the hydrogen bomb, i was the only advocate of it. rhodes: edward teller was a hungarian jew who escaped from hungary and came to the united states. during world war ii, teller worked at los alamos, but he became obsessed with the idea of the hydrogen bomb, even before they had the atomic bomb. herken: teller did very much consider the atomic bomb to be oppenheimer's creation, and he wanted something that was bigger and better. conant: and oppenheimer said to teller, "go back to doing physics, but don't build this. there's no need for it." rhodes: oppenheimer was in charge of a committee that had been put together in washington to decide: what should we do? should we build a hydrogen bomb

that is a question in everybody's mind, dr. oppenheimer. are we creating something we may not be able to control? the decision to try to make or not to make the hydrogen bomb touch the very basis of our morality. and the committee decision was basically, no, we shouldn't build the hydrogen bomb. if we are guided by fear alone, we'll fail in this time of crisis. the answer to fear sometimes lies in courage. wellerstein: oppenheimer's opposition of the h-bomb was taken very hard by people who were in favor for it. rhodes: the air force wanted more and more bombs and bigger and bigger bombs. the bigger the bomb, in terms of its yield, the more damage one plane could do. herken: the strategic air command was focused upon

blowing up the soviet union. oppenheimer said a smarter move would be to put resources into intercepting soviet bombers. rhodes: he was going just the opposite direction from what the air force wanted. they wanted him out. they wanted to get rid of him. bird: by 1953, oppenheimer has made sufficient enemies in the washington bureaucracy. and then along comes lewis strauss... (applause) ...the new chairman of the atomic energy commission. strauss: i have just returned from the pacific proving ground, where i have witnessed a test of thermonuclear weapons. bird: and strauss knows oppenheimer and has grown to intensely dislike him. rhodes: oppenheimer had been snappish with him once, and it had deeply offended him. so strauss begins to plot a means to defrock oppenheimer.

sherwin: and how does he do it? lewis strauss focuses on oppenheimer's association with left-wing friends during the 1930s in berkeley. man (over tv): "communism." who are the apostles of a system that attempts to destroy the american way of life? during the second world war, the soviet union was our ally. and that sense of being a communist or associating with communists was not something that was considered that bad. it wasn't until the cold war that all of a sudden, in retrospect, anyone with any kind of legacy of a communist past is now a security threat. if there were no communists in our government, why did we delay, for 18 months, delay our research on the hydrogen bomb?

rhodes: it was from attitudes like that that finally led to the government deciding they had to pull oppenheimer's security clearance. charles oppenheimer: he would have to give up his security clearance in 30 days or ask for a hearing he felt he couldn't give up his security clearance. he couldn't agree with them that he wasn't fit to serve his government. else: he should have told them to get lost. he should have said, "i am the atomic bomb. "i won world war ii. fuck off." for whatever reason, he didn't tell them to get lost he decided to fight it. bird: and before he goes down to washington, he meets with einstein to tell him he's gonna be absent for a few weeks, and einstein's reaction is quite startling.

albert says, "but, robert, you are mr. atomic. "you don't need them. they need you. just walk away. why should you go through this?" and oppenheimer shakes his head and apparently says to albert, "well, you don't understand." and he walks away, and einstein turns to his secretary and says, "there goes a nar." the yiddish for a fool.

(♪♪) (♪♪) try dietary supplements from voltaren, for healthy joints. try dietary supplements from voltaren, (fanfare plays) tv announcer: world attention was focused this week on the atomic energy commission building in washington, where a three-man board began special hearings on the security file of dr. j. robert oppenheimer,

the nuclear scientist who developed the first a-bomb. the security hearing starts, and it quickly becomes clear that this is not just a security hearing. this is a trial. tv announcer: there's a new charge that the scientist opposed the development of the h-bomb. wellerstein: the deck is stacked against him, and it's ugly. they're wiretapping his conversations with his lawyer illegally and giving it to the prosecution so that they know exactly what's gonna happen. they are able to look at classified fbi files. he is not because he doesn't have a clearance, and he can't look at his own fbi file as a result. rhodes: oppenheimer's involvement with jean tatlock, the question of whether his brother had been a communis and still was, those were the things they pulled out of the files. conant: one of the most damning pieces of evidence that was brought out was

the fact that, during the war, there had been a conversation at his home in berkeley with haakon chevalier, his old friend, who had mentioned to him that there was a way perhaps that he could leak information about the atomic project he was working on to soviet officials. now, oppenheimer had dismissed it at the time, but he had not reported the incident. he knew he was already on thin ice with security people, that he was suspected because of his communist ties. so he was trying to keep himsel out of hot water. the problem was that, in subsequent conversations with los alamos security people he had told very evasive, vague accounts of this conversation, one after another. and when they confronted oppenheimer with these evasive versions, they asked him, "why did you do this? why wouldn't you have been forthright?" he said, "i was an idiot."

and in a sense, he sealed his own fate then. rhodes: he fell apart. he tried to testify, but he really fell apart. bird: he's having almost another nervous breakdown, like what he went through as a young man. he's oddly stoic, like he was in the icehouse when he was a young boy being tormented by his fellow summer campers. he's resigned and not really defending himself. one person who sort of put the nails in his coffin, of course, was edward teller. herken: teller testified against oppenheimer. he said that he thought he would feel better if the security of the country were in other hands than oppenheimer's. and one of the scientists who was close to oppenheimer said

it was a matter of not only stabbing oppenheimer in the bac but twisting the blade. rhodes: as he was leaving, he went up to shake oppenheimer's hand and said, "i'm sorry." and oppenheimer looked him in the eye and said, "edward, after what you just said, i don't know what that means." nolan: he was obviously a very, very brilliant man, but i think he may have underestimated the power of the establishment, the machine, and the inability of one individual to stand against that. bird: the result was to be expected. (fanfare plays) tv announcer: dr. j. robert oppenheimer, the famous scientist whose suspension this week by the atomic energy commission surprised the nation. they voted to strip oppenheimer of his security clearance.

this was front-page news in the newspapers across the country. that he had recommended communists who are working the a-bomb, h-bomb plans. his wife, uh, admittedly was, uh, an official of the communist party, uh, brother a very active communist. bird: he became a political pariah. kaku: and that sent a chill through the scientific community. if they could take down the most famous atomic scientist on the planet earth, then we're all vulnerable. bird: it sent a really nefarious message to all working scientists to beware of weighing in on political issues. and this is a terrible thing because we need their expertise

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rhodes: after the security trial, oppenheimer was never the same guy again.. he was kind of a hollow man after that. charles oppenheimer: what we say inside the family is it hurt his feelings. he didn't like it, but he didn't talk about it. he never made one statement about it publicly. he never asked for an apology, and he retreated back into where he came from. bird: he still kept his job at princeton, but he wasn't doing any more physics. these were kind of sad years. murrow: and professor einstein is still here, too, isn't he? oh, yeah. indeed he is. uh, indeed he is. uh...

does he ever call you up on the telephone? hmm, sometimes. i think he... he calls me, uh, when he reads in the newspapers something about me that he doesn't like, and he calls me up and-and says, "that's all right. that's just right." sherwin: he had lost his fighting spirit. he would have nothing to do with commenting on any of the issues of the day related to nuclear weapons. man: dr. oppenheimer, could you tell us what your thoughts are about what our atomic policy should be? no, i-i can't do that. i'm not... not close enough to the facts, and i'm not close enough to the thoughts of those who are worrying about it. rhodes: hans bethe told me once that, "oppenheimer was smarter than any of the rest of us." he didn't win a nobel prize.

how could this man, who evidently outshone some of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, not have been more successful in his line of work-- physics-- than he was? charles oppenheimer: you can't talk about oppenheimer when you're not talking about his science. that was the part of his life. when he talks about what he loves, it was that human thing of passing knowledge around. this is negative particles, neutral, doubly charged, positive and positive... charles oppenheimer: his work on black holes should have earned him a nobel prize. sherwin: in 1939, oppenheimer wrote the first paper identifying the idea of collapsing stars, a black hole. so, black holes was his original idea. i mean, that's quite amazing. and if a real black hole had been identified before he died... ...he probably would have won a nobel prize for that work.

bird: in 1966, he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. all that smoking over the years had gotten to him. (clock ticking) and he died in early '67. oppenheimer's life story, it's the story of the 20th century. it's the story of our nuclear age that we're still living with, and that's a story that is unfinished. will always be unfinished. (explosion rumbling) else: we have his bomb. his bomb is with us. and we can debate his membership in the communist party or we can debate the ethics of bombing civilians at hiroshima until we drop, but the fact is that we have nuclear weapons. that's the legacy.

and controlling those weapons, it's a never-ending struggle. (explosion rumbling) it was so horrible with a baby bomb. now they have so much more lethal nuclear weapon. oppenheimer: there is much talk about getting rid of atomic weapons. i have a deep sympathy with that. tamura: please, let's try to find common ground. i'm sure if oppie was alive today, he would agree with me. man: ...two, one. oppenheimer: but we mustn't fool ourselves. the world is not going to be the same no matter what we do with atomic bombs, because the knowledge of how to make them cannot be exorcized.

-(insects chirring) -(wind whistling softly) judy woodruff: physicist j. robert oppenheimer is perhaps best known as the father of the atomic bomb. as time has passed, there are some new assessments of his role in history. in late 2022, the department of energy decided to vacate the decision to have the security hearings. the national tragedy is that this hearing, this mccarthy-era witch hunt, materialized in the first place. that type of thing is not supposed to happen in a country like this. this is such an important and long overdue step. but at the same time, it's kind of sad, because this is something that j. robert oppenheimer will not get to experience personally.

oppenheimer: science has profoundly altered the conditions of man's life, both materially and in ways of the spirit as well. nye: i think we're still talking about oppenheimer because he was so influential. we have this respect and fear of science. and oppenheimer represented both sides of that, for sure. nolan: unquestionably, he changed the world. and he changed the world forever. there's no going back. but we know that as long as men are free to ask what they will, free to say what they think, free to think what they must, science will never regress, and freedom itself will never be wholly lost. ♪ (slides clicking)

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(explosion rumbling) (music fades) trevor velinor: our 911 dispatch got a call, someone's missing. there's a woman who allegedly fell overboard. and that's all we know. we sent divers out. we did aerial searches. and nothing? and nothing. it is almost like a vanishing act. time is ticking here. >> and nothing. >> and nothing. >> it is almost like a