45,000 soldiers had been imprisoned. almost 13,000 had died. today at noon, american history tv will be live from andersonville national historic site, where ceremony remembering the soldiers. keynote speakers include command of the army daniel daily. and leslie gordon. they will all take your questions before and after the ceremony. again, that is today starting at noon eastern on c-span3. >> in august of 1945, 70 years ago, american forces dropped two atomic bombs over japan. one in hiroshima, the other in nagasaki. up next teacher gruen recalls graduating from northwestern university --dieter gruen recalls graduating from northwestern university and joining the atomic bomb project. he discusses government support for science from the 1940's to the present day.

this hour 20 minutes of oral history is from the voices of the manhattan project, created by the heritage foundation and los alamos historical society. mr. gruen: i was born on november 21, 1922 in waldorf, germany. interviewer: where is that? mr. gruen: waldorf is a small village near the town of [indiscernible] which is near the better-known weimar. town of weimar. that is just south. interviewer: what was your childhood like? mr. gruen: my childhood was

very, very pleasant. my father was the principal of a school. my mother and my father had a devoted marriage. i had one brother older than i. and i grew up in that village. went to primary school there. and and did all the things that small children, little boys do, including using a roller skate on a steep hill and scaring my mother out of her skull with my derring-do. [laughter]

interviewer: was it mountainous? rollerskating on a steep hill? mr. gruen: no, this was a hill in the village. on top of the hill there was a church. the countryside was hilly, not mountainous. but a very beautiful region where my family and i did a good deal of hiking on weekends. it was a very, very pleasant countryside. at that time. interviewer: how did you happen to wind up in the united states in the manhattan project? mr. gruen: well, you ask a very interesting question. the short answer is that i was

no longer able to go to school because the hitler jugen would beat me up after school. it became clear that if i wanted to survive, i would have to leave. fortunately, i had relatives in little rock, arkansas who took me into their home. there is an interesting sidelight connected with that. my uncle was a personal friend of senator joseph taylor robinson.

who was the majority leader of the senate during the first roosevelt administration and health to pass, for example, the glass-steagall act and many other important pieces of legislation. my uncle had approached him on my behalf. he wrote a letter to the american ambassador in berlin. so, when i arrived there in the summer of 1937 to pick up my visa, they rolled out the red carpet for me.

[laughter] i was a 14-year-old, unimportant person. i came to this country, went to high school in little rock. and then my parents were also able to get a visa. they left in early 1939, just before war was declared in europe. we reunited in chicago. and so i have been a chicagoan ever since. how did i get on the manhattan project? i began as a student at northwestern university in 1941. just before pearl harbor. was the policy of the united states government,

enunciated in fact by president franklin delano roosevelt that they recognize that this war would depend on america's industrial might and would require the best scientific and engineering talent that would be available. and so encouraged students who were within a couple of years of graduation to continue their studies. so, i was able to continue studying science, chemistry, and physics at northwestern and received my baccalaureate degree cum laude in 1944. i was supposed to go to work at the metallurgical laboratories

on the campus of the university of chicago, which was part of the manhattan project. but in 1944 the net labs, as they were called, had already achieved their primary objectives. the first one, under the leadership of an rico fermi, -- an rico fermi -- an ricoen --rico fermi -- enrico fermi,

was finished in 1942. the second, revolving around the plutonium discovered 1940 at berkeley was to develop a separations process that could be scaled and used for kilogram quantities separation of plutonium. that too has been accomplished by 1943. when i had finished my studies the met labs were not there , anymore. so, i went to oak ridge to work on the uranium project. so, i did that. i got on a train and went from chicago and then took a bus to

oak ridge. in september of 1944. that is how i got on the manhattan project. interviewer: so, did any of your colleagues also get swept up in the manhattan project? or were you just singled out among your colleagues to go? mr. gruen: at northwestern, as far as i know, i was the only one to go on the manhattan project. my mentor, professor irving, was a consultant to the manhattan project. he did important work on biological materials at northwestern. as far as i know, i am the only one who actually went to work on

the manhattan project from northwestern. >> do you remember what they told you that you would be working on? it was top secret. how did they recruit you? [laughter] mr. gruen: well, when i got to oak ridge i said that i wanted to be in the research division rather than the engineering aspects of the work. so, i was assigned to work with a man who later actually became the director of the oak ridge

national laboratory. but when i worked for him he was the director of the chemistry part of the research program. at oak ridge. and i went into his office. and he went to a safe. he opened the safe and pulled out a handbook of physics and chemistry and he opened it up to a table of the elements and appointed to uranium and said -- this is what we're working on. [laughter] well, uranium had a codename that had been invented by the british. it was called to the -- tube

alloy. the uranium produced in great britain was produced by the tube alloy company. the codename for it -- we were not allowed to use uranium and our conversations about the work -- was tube alloy. i have reports from those days with two alloy in the title. -- tube alloy in the title. that's what i was working on. mr. gruen: -- interviewer: your boss, what was his name? mr. gruen: i cannot bring it up at the moment. it will occur to me. interviewer: eugene? mr. gruen: no, not him. interviewer: did you know him? mr. gruen: i did not, no.

interviewer: because he had a laboratory, but it was the wide 12 campus. -- y-12 campus. mr. gruen: i was at that campus. he was a famous mathematician. i met him many years later, actually, on a visit to israel. it turned out that he and i were both visiting the university and staying in the same hotel. we knew each other just very, very casually. that was my only contact with him. interviewer: so, you worked on y-12. what research were you involved in? the chemistry? mr. gruen: the chemistry, with

several different areas of the chemical aspects of the project. for example, the ion beams in the calutrons began as uranium tetrachloride. we developed processes for the synthesis of large quantities of very pure uranium tetrachloride. these were encapsulated, heated, and then the paper of uranium tetrachloride was ionized by

energetic electron particle beams to make uranium ion beams that were then separated into uranium 235 and uranium 238. so, then it became another chemical project to separate the uranium from the graphite collectors. the mass spectrometers, there were collectors made of graphite into which the uranium ions were injected. about the only way that you could recover the uranium was to burn graphite. in oxygen. and then you are left with uranium oxide. so, one of the tasks i was given was to synthesize an indicator, a color dye that would be stable in very concentrated nitric

acid. the reason for this is that in the final stages of separation, uranium oxide was dissolved, or uranium peroxide was dissolved in nitric acid and then extracted, the uranium nitrate was extracted into an organic solid. that determined the columns of the interface between the aqueous phase and the organic phase. i succeeded in producing entirely new material, a very brilliantly blue colored material. one microgram was sufficient to color a leader of solution and was perfectly stable in nitric acid solutions.

so, i did a number of different projects. most people do not think about chemical problems related to the separation of uranium isotopes. a physical thing. but it turns out there are a number of important technical problems that had he resolved. so, when i came to a bridge in september of 1944 -- when i came to the ridge in september of 1944, the place was in an uproar. because the cal you drawn -- the magnets have burned out. they had to be shipped back. so, the project was delayed. production was delayed. but when i arrived, those magnets were back and had been reassembled.

the all for in the beta process, we made kilogram quantities of uranium 255 between september of 1944 and about april or may of 1945. this was shipped to los alamos and found its way into what became the hiroshima bomb. it was a uranium bomb which had never been tested. in fact, hiroshima was a test for that first atomic bomb. the nagasaki mom was a plutonium bomb that had been tested.

the uranium bomb had never been tested. that was the end result of our labors. interviewer: interesting, you mentioned that chemistry played an important part of this whole process of extracting the you 235. but this might report, which was written at the end of the war doesn't talk about chemistry. it was still classified. mr. gruen: it was still classified? the chemistry part? interviewer: you guys are still heroes, but the credit goes to the physicists because that's

what they can talk about, but the chemists for years have been these silent, unsung heroes. mr. gruen: well, these reports that i wrote were declassified and i was able to get them many years later. if you were interested, i could make those available to you. yeah, there was some chemistry involved in doing all of this. it's one of the untold parts of the story. interviewer: tell me a little bit about your inventions. you talked a little bit about inventing this unique dye. or you told by a supervisor to figure it out? and then you figured it out by

yourself? how did that happen? mr. gruen: well, my group leader said that we needed such a thing. i went by bus from oak ridge to knoxville several times, to the university of knoxville library. and i, as an undergraduate, had synthesized in an organic chemistry lab copper that was heart of one of the experiments in the chemistry lab. an organic chemistry lab. so, i had the idea that if one could attach certain groups to this molecule, it should be possible to make it

water-soluble. there were hints in the literature that this could be done by using fused sulfuric acid. so, i went into the lab and tried it and work. so, that is how it came to be. on my own without guidance. this was a good thing. it was used at oak ridge. the people who had this problem were pretty happy with the result. interviewer: so, it enabled them to -- why don't you explain again the difference that it made in the process. mr. gruen: well, if you have a

-- to liquids -- two liquids second touch each other, both colorless, you cannot tell where one of them ends and the other begins. if i put a dye in one of the liquids, then it's very clear where the interface is. if you are extracting someone -- something from one liquid to the other, then you want to know where that separation occurs so you can make the actual separation. it's just a visual way of -- it's a visual sensor. interviewer: one of the things that the national parks service wants to do in reviewing the manhattan project is to mine it for all of the science and technology lessons.

this would be a good example for students to try to understand high school chemistry. mr. gruen: that's a good idea. lots of things were developed there. of all the things that were rediscovered years later, very laboriously they had already been done. that's right. mr. gruen: -- interviewer: so, did you get the sense that there was a lot of innovation going on in the manhattan project? mr. gruen: oh, the whole thing was innovation. the calutrons had been invented by ernest orlando lawrence, who had received the nobel for the cyclotron. he was one of the great scientists. glenn seaboarg, who i got to know later and we became very good friends, was one of the great scientists and a man who influenced my life in a very profound way. these were great men, yes.

they made lots of innovations. [laughter] an amazing generation of scientists. interviewer: well, it didn't take just a nobel prize wehner. it was young people like yourself. it was young people like yourself.

how did they empower you to be innovators? mr. gruen: well, in my experience, just talking vy subjectively, that kind of empowerment comes from the individual, very largely. you either have it or you don't. you can't make somebody do something new. a scientist is a man or a woman who does or says something new. you know, not everyone can do that. i don't know how you -- you can

encourage people to work and to study. to get real innovation, it's a good question. i don't know how to answer it really. interviewer: the manhattan project was certainly a crucible for innovation. something like 6500 patents were done in secret. that probably understates how many new gadgets and approaches and whatever. mr. gruen: only 6000? [laughter] interviewer: only 6000. this was all in less than three years. mr. gruen: well, it's a new field, of course. it was a totally new field and it unleashed a tremendous amount of scientific creativity.

if you have an environment in which you tell people that there is a certain goal you want to achieve and we will give you the resources to build it and the manpower, then you can get a lot accomplished. particularly if you don't insist that every experiment has to be written according to certain safety standards. [laughter] every chemical has to be in next. unique materials, science, data sheets, safety sheets. i'm all in favor of safety. i've never had a laboratory accident. but the emphasis that is put on safety today i think exceeds

what is required to do laboratory and it has gotten to the point where it inhibits them in laboratory work. but that's just my opinion. i'm not advocating unsafe if we had had to do that in those days, we couldn't have achieved what we did in a short period. interviewer: how much did you know about what was going on in

the plan? did you know it would be used for an atomic bomb? how much did you understand? dieter: i knew it was going to be used for an atomic bomb. the work that was done, i knew nothing about. i knew nothing about bomb design or any problems associated with those weapons. we knew what we had to do in order to make good quantities of uranium 235. that was about the extent of our knowledge. we certainly didn't have an overall grasp.

interviewer: did you just figure that out on your own? dieter: no one told us, no one talked about it. wondering what we were doing and why we were doing it. we had to come to certain conclusions. there was no discussion from management about what was going on. interviewer: what did you think at the time? and did you have a sense how explosive this weapon would be? did you ever question if this was the right thing to do?

dieter: before the bomb was dropped? no. i didn't think about it. and none of my colleagues talked about it. the atmosphere, we were under pressure to get something done. and my personal feeling was we have to win the war, for obvious reasons. but the consequence of what we were doing was something i

thought about only afterwards. and then i became very involved in that. after the war. interviewer: t want to talk about that? -- do you want to talk about that? dieter: after the hiroshima and nagasaki bombs were dropped and the war was over, it is very hard to reconstruct the feeling that existed in this country

about atomic work. people talked about adams -- about atoms as if it were something new and totally unexpected and mysterious and secret. if you talk to a person on the street about atoms, it is very hard to reconstruct the intense people -- the intense feeling people had about it, the atomic science. one of the messages we had was that there are no secrets about atoms and there is no defense against atomic weapons. so we started an organization called the oak ridge engineers and scientists.

we wanted to create public awareness of what urgency there is in presenting anything like this from happening again. together with two colleagues, we sent a letter to more than 100 of the outstanding personalities of the time. people who had been involved in the bomb project and others.

two scientists, including albert einstein. we raised the question what would have to be done to prevent nuclear weapons from being used in war. we received replies from almost every letter we had sent out. very thoughtful replies. i still have those. there was one from outward -- from albert einstein, in which he said the only solution would be a world government. i am still waiting for that. [laughter] i followed closely the hearings that were taken place on capitol hill on the mcmahon act that advocated civilian control. and the may act in the house

that advocated military control. there were people in our organization -- rumor had it at the conclusion of every hearings -- every hearing on these bills, we had a transfer of those hearings. i stayed up for hours condensing these into a newspaper article. the following day i would drive to knoxville and deliver that to the knoxville journal. the mcmahon bill actually established the national labs. i think they were established as a result of the passage of the

mcmahon act. in a way my entire life has been involved with argon national laboratory i guess the manhattan project was a very formative experience. in led to the place where i did all of the work that i continued for so many years. interviewer: you went back to chicago and argon international laboratory was born as a result of the mcmahon act.

dieter: argon was established in april of 1946 i went back to chicago from oak ridge, i left oak ridge in april of 1946. i went back to start graduate work with my former mentor. i was doing that when i was approached to join argon. i wanted to finish what i had started and i left after a year that i have gotten a masters degree from northwestern. went to work at argon.

and it was possible for me to continue graduate work from the university of chicago while i was working at argon. i did my dissertation on the magnetics of neptune em -- of neptunium compounds, that's 93 . he was very interested in my work, because i was able to show in very great detail they packed a hypothesis. it was the correct picture for the electronic structure. that was a very fruitful period.

i had worked at argon in chemical problems associated with the building of a nuclear submarine. argon became the national center for the develop meant of nuclear reactors, power reactors. argon was established as the center for the development of power reactors. the first power reactor was a nuclear submarine reactor. there was a very important chemical problems that had to be solved.

that was one of the first things. interviewer: what was that problem? dieter: this akoni him -- the --the zirconium contained halfmium. in order for zirconium to be used as a cladding, the hafnium had to be removed. to remove hafnium from those in akoni him -- from the zirc onium, and the zirconium being resistant to corrosion, all

the zirconium did not contain any hafnium. the chemical process is to remove the hafnium. it's not an easy thing. interviewer: they say one of the problems of the german effort to make an atomic bomb was that the businesses didn't consult with

the chemists about the impurities and the graphite. dieter: the germans did not realize that all graphite contains -- that's absolutely right. they were able to get the manufacturers of the graphite used in chicago to be going wrong -- to be boron free. [laughter] interviewer: they are pretty heavy, too. i thought they cut a football team or some type of thing

involved. in setting up the lattice. dieter: are you sure it was a football team? interviewer: maybe they banned football at that time. dieter: it was built under the west stands of the football stadium. interviewer: i feel like it was columbia. they had built some graphite. dieter: there was a very famous lady involved. she was a close associate of -- when i was a graduate student at the university, leona woods came walking into our lab one time because my mentor was using a new technique.

they want to know how this worked. he looked around for five minutes and said, oh, i see. i see how this works. interviewer: that's great. i didn't realize that they were together after the war as well. that is for me and leona woods. dieter: when i was a student

there starting in 1947, our apartment was on 53rd street. university avenue. fermi would write his bike past our apartment every morning at 8:00. i would look at my window and it was time to get up and get dressed. he was a professor at the university after the war until he died. interviewer: was he a good professor? dieter: he was the most marvelous teacher. i listened to his lecture and understood everything he said. great lecture.

and great teacher. he would have lunch with his undergraduates every day in the commons. you would see him there talking to students. interviewer: i don't think it was too common to have women scientists. leona was his right hand. dieter: she was very close to him. those were great days at the university of chicago. leona finally married.

interviewer: what was teller like? dieter: he lived really close to where we were but i didn't know him. i would see him but i don't know him personally. i don't really know very much about his personality. but i found out from other people who didn't know him. interviewer: did you ever meet some arm? dieter: i met him, but again i didn't know him. i knew year re--- i knew yuri. he ws actually my graduate advisor at the university. interviewer: you are in good hands as a student. dieter: the best.

i was very fortunate. interviewer: you mentioned on the side of hiking in the great smoky's -- can you tell us more about your life in oak ridge, what it was like in those days? dieter: i lived in a dormitory with construction workers of k 25. it was just being held when i arrived there. and that was quite an experience. [laughter]

interviewer: where was this dormitory? dieter: west village 54. it was on the outskirts of town. we had a very interesting group of young scientists there. several others became addicted. we would go whenever we had the chance. the park was dedicated by president roosevelt in 1937, i believe. we were there just two years later when it was in the tourist attraction that it is now. there is a place that is a valley surrounded by hills. and that houses a community of

early english settlers. and they still spoke sort of elizabethan speech. they had been isolated for 100 years. still a functioning community of the church. and they had not yet been evicted, even though that was part of the great smoky national park. sort of the tail end. that was fascinating. -- that was a fascinating experience for me. and we talked about every subject under the sun.

as i said before it was a very formative period in many ways. interviewer: were you single during this time? dieter: yes. interviewer: how were the numbers in terms of single women and single men in your favor? there were a lot of women, weren't there? dieter: many of the people that were married, fortunately they invited me over for dinner. that was good. the number of uncommitted ladies was not that large. the food was horrible.

there was nothing to drink. it was dry. you had to go to kentucky to get some liquor. oak ridge was dry. but they were manned by women. these were mostly high school girls, totally untrained. they manned the control panels. they did a good job.

even if they were uneducated, they were very faithful workers. interviewer: you had fun on the weekends. did you work hard during the week? dieter: yes. interviewer: were there shifts dieter: what i was doing in the research part of the lab, we had a normal 825 kind of hours -- eight to five kind of ours. we never burned the midnight oil. we have free time over the evening and was intense. interviewer: when did you meet

your wife? dieter: i met my wife the fall of 1947. we were both graduate students at the university of chicago. she was in psychology, i was in science. that is how we met. interviewer: you are employed by argonne. what did she do? dieter: after she got her degree she became director of psychological services in our school system in chicago.

she had a career there. later she went into private practice and she was in private practice for about 20 years. my work on -- work at argon was strongly influenced by my experiences in the manhattan project. reflecting back to what i did through most of my life, i would have to say that my scientific work had its origins in the realization that nuclear power was something really new and important, and that there were two sides. one constructive, and one

destructive. it can be used as a nonpolluting alternative source of energy. for the rest of my scientific life i devoted myself to the solution of this very daunting and challenging problem of how to create a sustainable nonpolluting global energy source. over the years that has become a very important and very pressing problem, because we are now in a situation where we are polluting the planet with greenhouse gases and it could lead to making the

planet uninhabitable. it is absolutely essential if we are to continue living a civilized life that requires a lot of energy, and there are 7 billion of us and now that do whatever we can end as quickly as possible to find a new energy source. so i spent many years on nuclear fission power reactors. i was a u.s. delegate at the

second international, on peaceful use of atomic energy. it took place in geneva switzerland. i have maintained that interest all my life. later on i began to be interested in problems associated with the practical use of fusion energy. and a lot of fundamental work associated with problems that are encountered when you try to operate plasma machines that would produce power. it became clear as the years

went on that worldwide efforts were mounted both for fission reactors and fusion reactors that define such an alternative source. it is maybe the most challenging task that faces science and technology today. extremely challenging. i have finally come to the conclusion that because of the problems that are encountered with fission reactors, chernobyl, three mile island, fukushima, there are problems associated not only with operating these machines but

also in the storing of these massive amounts of radioactivity and in this country there has been no nuclear reactor built in 40 years. you have to ask yourself why that is. fusion reactors have been under serious development for 54 years now. none had achieved breakeven conditions. that means you get as much energy out as you put in to get a self-sustaining plasma that gives you back as much energy as he put income -- energy as you put in to make

the plasma. achieved.ot been that is only the beginning. clear, at least not to me, that fusion reactors, power reactors can be built. you are trying to produce conditions that exist on the sun here on earth. i have come to the conclusion that we do not have an alternative energy source available to us. the sun. it has been there forever, it has given us life. it has produced all of the fossil fuels we are quickly.ng up very

it took 100 million or more years to produce. so, the sun has been around, the sun will be around, and we have to learn how to use it more efficiently in order for solar power to be able to compete with nuclear power. large scalen, the use of solar power depends on making it cheaper, economically competetive with the conventional coal-fired power plants. retirementng my years developing a new approach

to using solar power more efficiently to make it twice as efficient. to make the conversion twice as efficient as it is now. to double the power from sunshine. that is what i am working on. if i trace the connection, the interest back, i end up with the manhattan project. i think there is a direct connection now between what i do now and all those years ago. that is kind of amusing. succeed. you

>> i hope so too. well, i mean, it's a -- -- a difficult situation for someone in my position. suchnow, there are competitions for funding these days to get something done, to do, to set up experiments. to follow these ideas, at my age, is not an easy task. have to get some young graduate students who can work with you. >> i have no problem finding

graduate students or post-doctoral students to work on this problem, if i could pay them. it.'d be glad to work on they have to support their families before they can do this. is, i find that that something that has changed in is myamental way. that perception. today, people are focused on short-term gain. it used to be much easier to get funding. notve a feeling that it is

easy to get funding for what you are involved in either. to get people involved in seething where they don't immediate financial gain. i am concerned that this country is going to fall behind. i hope i am wrong. know.t

they used to say science, the endless frontier. i think he was right. it is not going to stop. if we don't push the envelope, other people are going to do it. and they will develop the technologies of the future. i think that is the inevitable result of a lack of concern in funding science. i don't know how to change that.

people like me are in a unique position to contribute a national debate about these issues. we spend a large fraction of what one might call the modern scientific and technological age. much of what has happened theoretically in quantum physics to nanoscience in the have70 years, when you the kind of perspective that you can get when you have lived through it and have been active, you may be a will to contribute something. but, that resource is not being

tapped. ever's nobody who has asked me for an opinion about these matters. i don't know how you do it from your perspective. the fact that you have to persuade people to support the project you are involved in and they don't immediately recognize this as a very important period in this country's history, eight

-- a defining period, and to increase public awareness of where we are now compared to where we are then and then gaining some insight and wisdom from the way things have developed. people hold in their palms more power than had existed from the moon.auts on the they don't even think about the fact that when they use the smartphone, they have to recharge it every night, and you are just plugging it into the wall. but suppose the wall didn't

recharge the battery? they don't make the connection between the energy you are using when you use a cell phone and the enormous amounts of power that are required to do all the computing that is done in the world today. people talk lively about the electric automobile. if we had 100 million electric automobiles in this country and at theg them in all same time, you would blow a national fuse. they are nonpolluting and they don't make the connection to the power that is

required to run this. there has been an information technology revolution. what we need is an energy technology revolution. we have to think about how to bring that about. so, your friends at the , i'm sure of energy they want to do something, but they keep cutting back on budgets at the department of energy. my message for today. scientific research is basically not being funded, because the

industrial research labs, i read just the other day, gm has put 30 million dollars into a inventors't takes ideas and translates them into products. if gm is supporting a company that commercializes inventions they should be making in their own labs, they music fin-- profitable to it outsource innovation rather than doing it in house. that is what has happened to

industrial research. many companies had labs but closed them. they are not supporting research anymore. i don't-- on the editorial appliedr the journal of physics. they still invite me to the lunches. the number of manuscripts coming america isa to larger. the chinese papers are submitted in larger numbers than u.s.

journals.u.s. i feel very lucky to have experienced that. too.h other people could, and, that's just the way it is. need another manhattan project. i kid you not. we could do it. manhattananother

project for solar power, we could do it. we could make solar power twoomically compatible in or three years. interviewer: are you concerned there's so much in the public domain about how the bomb was built and the ingredients were countrieshat other can use that information? >> centrifuges was just in its infancy during the manhattan project. that technology has come to such an extent that it is not the way that uranium 235 has.

i doubt there is anything in the manhattan project's secret literature that would have any bearing on centrifuge technology. i don't know. it could be, but i doubt it. get aey are going to nuclear weapon, that's for sure. if they don't already have it. interviewer: how do you feel that the use of the atomic bomb on japan? dieter: there is a story that oppenheimer walked into truman's office and said, i have blood on my hands. and that is the last time truman ever spoke to him.

what choice did the commander have at that moment in history except to authorize dropping the atomic bomb? he didn't have a choice. as gruesome as it was and horrified as i and my colleagues were at that time, i feel it was the correct decision. it brought an end to the most horrible war, saved millions of lives, american and japanese soldiers.

do i feel a personal responsibility? of course. i took part in that. was it the correct decision? i think so. men talked to quite a few who were in europe, fighting in europe, and at the end of the european war, they were sent to new york and transferred to san francisco and they were on their way to japan. when the bombs were dropped, they were very happy that they didn't have to fight in the pacific.

several guys who were in that position. know, but, we must not let it happen again. if iran gets the bomb and drops it on israel, that will be world war iii. that will be the end of all of us. that is my feeling. interviewer: how long can you suppose it would have been that some videos would have figured it out? dieter: the fear was germany would get the bomb because

fission had been discovered in 1938. anyoneody thought that gets the bomb, it would be germany. that-- the fact that you now have almost a dozen nations that have nuclear weapons shows that if a technology is possible and has been demonstrated it will be replicated. there's no way of stopping it. if the united states had not done it, instead of starting five years, it would have taken we or fifteen years, by now,

would have a nuclear armed world, even without the manhattan project. don't you think so? the nuclear weapon is no harder to make money smartphone. -- to make than a smartphone. i have seen how they make chips. it is a pretty sophisticated operation. at least as sophisticated as making an atomic bomb. interviewer: what should the next generation to to prevent other people from using this technology? dieter: a good question.

we asked that question in 1945. albert einstein told us we needed a world government. we have the genie out of the bottle and we can't put it back. interviewer: to what do you credit the fact that we haven't had an armageddon in the last 70 years? dieter: we haven't had a leader

crazy enough to pull the trigger. you would have to be insane to do it. i shudder to think what would happen if terrorists would get a hold of it. >> at noon, american history tv will be live from the national historic

site. we will also take your questions before and after the ceremony on facebook. that is today studied at noon, eastern. good evening, ladies and gentlemen. i am speaking to you tonight at a very serious moment in our history. the cabinet is convening. the state department and army and navy officials are meeting with the president all afternoon. in fact, the japanese ambassador was talking to the present. -- resident at the very time that japan was bombing our citizens in hawaii in the philippines and sinking when of our transports loaded with its lumber on the way. tomorrow morning, members of congress will be ready for action. >> eleanor roosevelt is the

longest-serving first lady. for an unprecedented 12 years, all the while, her husband, unknown to the public, was physically limited by the effects of polio. she dedicated her life to social changes, and her legacy continues today. she is discussed as a possible face of the $10 bill. on c-span'sevelt, original series, first ladies, examining the public and private lives of the women who fill the lady and theirst influence on the presidency, from marshall washington -- from martha washington to michelle obama. sundays at 8:00. >> american artifacts takes you to historic places. down pennsylvania avenue from the white house is the white house visitor center, which offers a look at how the

executive mansion functions. center with the curator who shows is the desk franklin roosevelt used for his fireside chats. we see recreational items such as radios, bowling balls, for the first families. >> my name is john sandwich. book a mu to the white house visitor's center, which is just a short walk away from the white house it health. for anyone going on the white house tour, it will help you understand what you are saying and bring more context and meaning to the white house. for those who cannot go on a white house tour, this is really inexperienced experience in its own right, as well. you are here in the white house visitor center. based on fiveally different themes to tell the white house story.