the court as the interpreter of the constitution. >> marbury versus madison is probably the most famous case this court ever decided. discussion, akhil sloan.mar and cliff premieres live this monday at 9:00 eastern on c-span, c-span 3, and c-span radio. for background on this case what you watch, order your copy of " companion book. in august 1940 5, 70 years ago, american forces dropped two atomic bombs over japan. one in hiroshima, another in not

the sake. we would hear next from mourad murray peshkin. he talks about the spies infiltrating the site. this 45 minute oral history is from the voices of manhattan losect, created by the alamos historical society. >> they were looking for programs in which we could serve usefully.

i really believe there was something else behind it. a man first world war, named henry moseley, consider the most promising young atomic scientist in the country had, against the advice of his friends and colleagues volunteered to fight in the imagery,. that was a shocking thing for the entire science community. i think that our professors were really trying to save us. it was not that los alamos needed me. >> tell us about your road to los alamos. informed by one of my professors that there was this serve andhere i could make use of what little training in physics i artie had, and it would be a really good thing to

do. it was completely secret. i would be somewhere in the united states, by would not be able to tell my family where, and would not see them again until the end of the war. that was really all they would tell me, except that they advised me to go that way. i did. what happened was at the end of the semester, i informed by board that i was ready. i was drafted, sent to basic , anding in the louisiana somewhere in the middle of the basic training, i was pulled out , and sent, very dramatically, on a train was about 10 other young men with orders, which east to oakirst ridge, the north to cincinnati, and so on.

finally, to a train which took .s to los alamos it was a very interesting demonstration. i realize later of the power of the project. not only could they pull us out, just when people were needed to fight an immature, but even, when traveling, whenever we got to any station, we were given immediate priority. in st. louis, we were given our .wn railroad car ,hen we arrived at los alamos and found this train ourselves in the middle of a desert. we could have sat down and cried, except we were ashamed. after a while, a car came and took us to los alamos.

also, in the army was david green glass, a notorious by. barracks. in my my contact with him was indirect, but it had some effects. we had a mutual friend, a fellow an apartment in albuquerque, where he met his wife on the weekends. she was also in the army, but not at los alamos, but nearby. at one time, his wife was away greenglassonths, came to him and begged him to let him use the apartment for his wife to stay. she was in her last part of pregnancy. he seemed rather pathetic. just likedim, and like intensely, as did i, by the way.

he asked me my opinion, and i said, don't do it, this guy is nothing but trouble. he did it anyway because he felt like a dog in the manger. that was the apartment where lass gave his secret information to his brother-in-law, julius rosenberg. in the end, my friend had serious problems with the security people with that after the war. even rubbed off a little on me because i defended him. wereonsequences for me minor, mainly because i was lucky that mccarthyism was just over, when they got to me. >> [indiscernible] did you know him?

>> very slightly. i don't think he knew me at all. you have to understand that i was a very insignificant player. feynmanrking for take -- feynman on a trivial level. he needed to do numerical calculations that involved very .aborious hand calculation i did that for him, a lot. had the kind of electronic pocket calculator that you can buy today for $50, he would not have needed me at all. luckily for me, he did not have a. i have opportunity of being with time.ts and lots of the it was fascinating. it was wonderful. i don't think i did so much for him.

>> tell us about him. feynman was different from anyone else i had ever met. i met many great physicist. he was a very intuitive person. he looked at everything in a different way. his way was always clear and better than the way you would have thought by yourself. were there is clear. the minute he said it, you can see exactly how you should do that. it was absolutely impossible to imitate him. when i was aain student at cornell. he was one of my professors. himcan learn physics from wonderfully. you got all of these great insights. you could not learn to do physics like that because only he could do that.

his idea of a proof was to give two examples of a mathematical proof. he had so much insight and he could pick those two examples in a way that they tested every week point. mere mortals had to actually prove it. when we grumbled, as i sometimes did, that his troops were not rigorous, he would say, do you know what rigor mortis is? it means died of too much rigor. one way of explaining how it was with him is you could go to his lectures, and they weren't magnificent, but you could no more learn how to do physics that way then you could learn to dance by watching a ballerina. it just cannot be done. exposure to neutrons. i was working on theory.

i did not have any exposure to neutrons at all. uncle in the laboratory, who were doing experimental work, that no oneisks would except under the pressures of a war. after all, other young men like us were in trenches in france. they did experiments that today would be considered dangerous. wasmost extreme example luis lowden. i was in another part of the same group after the war that he was in. they were doing what we call critical assemblies, in order to learn more about the interaction between neutrons and plutonium. but they were doing was they have the two halves of a plutonium bomb. the lower half was on a table, held in place, of course.

the upper half was gradually being lowered. as it got closer, the neutron activity became greater and greater because the neutrons that were created in one half or more more likely to strike the other half, as they came closer together. by seeing how the level of neutron activity, which they click,onitor, and here every time a neutron was encountered, was to see how that depended on the distance between the two. , you may ask, the war was over, why were they doing such a dangerous experiment. worse than that. it had been agreed that you never lower, you only raised -- if you dropped it, and the two came together, you had, not a bomb that would make a physical explosion, but an explosion of

neutrons. for whatever reason, they were lowering it, and they dropped it. hemisphere,e upper his hands on it. he threw it away. of course, it was all over. there was a burst of neutrons. no one heard anything. they all -- the fact that he threw it away was irrelevant. i think it expanded enough to exterminate the reaction. they all ran out the door. i was told -- i was not present. there was an armed guard. whenever you have plutonium, .here was an armed soldier he was standing next to the door. he was the last one out of the room. he did not know anything had happened at all during 10 days later, he died.

beginning, why were they doing such an insanely dangerous experiment, when the war was over. the only answer i can give, that makes any sense, to me -- i never asked any the people involved -- the only answer i it was thelly is momentum. this is what they did. it was scientifically fascinating. information was not needed in such a hurry anymore, but it would have been against the culture of the time and place to stop and say, this is too dangerous, let's not do it. after the trinity explosion, oppenheim is said the scientists in. no known s

i had not heard any statements saying this was not at wise thing to do. i was a 19-year-old kid. know that that statement century began to the discussion, but it was a bit of a shock when we heard about it. >> up until the trinity, what was the atmosphere? where people nervous? >> the people i talked with all thought it would work. i don't know what kind of odds, but better than money. we certainly hoped it would work. we did not really think about the consequences.

let me supplement that a little. you know, the war against germany and it pretty early. we were fighting japan. the hatred of japan and the japanese was really pervasive. i would like to think it wasn't significantly racial, but it probably was. when the bomb exploded over arrested ine cheers. the more people dead, the better. feel about the intention to drop a second bomb? , at the time.d it i'm sorry. the decision to drop the second

the, even at the time, i had my doubts about that. .eemed unnecessary we had not given them time to organize themselves to surrender. , even the m burke, does not successfully surrender, he has to get the general to agree to stop fighting. >> [indiscernible] >> the only people who went to trinity are those who had werehing to do their, or leaders of the project. >> did you know what was going on? >> sure. yes, i did know what was going

on. >> [inaudible] [indiscernible] >> life at los alamos was not just work. .here was fun in a particular way, being in a war tends to be fun, if you are not in danger, and seeing destruction, and all that stuff. everybody knows what he has to do. there are no doubts about what you will do in the long term future. it isn't easy life, if you, and your loved ones are not really victims of the war. one of the things that happened to me was almost a comic opera. after the trinity test, a few days later, well, almost immediately after the test, a

few people went in to measure the radiation -- they went into the crater that it had left. this is a crater of about 10 couple hundreda feet in diameter, i don't know exactly. volunteers were needed to go in so dig out some blast gauges that one can figure out how strong the blast had been. i, and other members of the group, there were five of us altogether, volunteered. partly, out of curiosity. i think we had a feeling that a lot of the experimenters had been exposed to chemical activity, and we had not. the idea was we would drive across the desert to that spot, and the bee would go in and dig out those blast gauges. we had a map that showed where

they were before the explosion. so, we did that. .e drove in their we got out, and walked on this famous green glass that was all over the place. we dug out those gauges. we had radiation gauges on us, very primitive ones. we never reached the level of radiation that would cause us to retreat in those days. it would have, i suppose. we came out, and were of course .overed in radioactive dust we stripped off our clothes and put it in the trunk of the car. there were these five naked men doesn't.cross the does a no one wore clothes, except me, i was driving, and the pedal was

hot, i wore socks. then, we showered, and went home. it was very funny. >> the next thing, from your notes, as well, philip morrison. >> philip morrison. after the war ended, my group of activated -- about creative. i was left alone. philip morrison was building a very novel type of reactor. him, if isee could work with him, he said, sure. wealways had use for hands worked on building this reactor.

it was surrounded by its own guards,d had its own and its own machine gun tower on one corner. night i had a really scary experience there. i went down to work on something. i was alone in this concrete building that we had bills to build this reactor. the guards were very nervous. been -- alleged to be an invasion, i'm sure there had not. a guard was doing the rounds, checking things out. hadprevious night, they gone in there to do that, and found unconscious on the floor. he claims that an intruder

slugged him. philip morrison, who was in charge of the project, believed he had been swinging on one of the hooks on the ceiling, and crashed into something. however that may be, i was alone, the guards were nervous, they told me to stay away from the windows. i had not been there for half an hour until i knew there was no use in my staying. i wanted to leave. i wanted to call them and tell them i was about to come out the door. by that time, i told them, and they said, come out the door. i said, nothing doing, come out and get me. they did. i tell you the story to illustrate the level of tension around the place. phil was a remarkable man. he was by trade a theoretical physicist, but was one of the people who armed the bomb.

he was leaving this project, building this reactor. he was very versatile, and working with him was really quite inspiring. he was also a man who walked with a cane, and could not stand straight. he had been a victim of polio as a child. .ut, he seemed eight feet tall after the war, he was one of my professors at los alamos. phil had been one of the first few people to go into japan after the bombing, and talk with people. he was so horrified by what he saw, he became a tireless crusader against the use of nuclear weapons, and tried and many ways to get this thing under control. he was a person that had a lot of trouble during mccarthyism because his generation did not

hed communism so threatening was persecuted by one of the congressional committees. the reason they were after him was very interesting. they were really after oppenheimer. they did not have a handle on him yet. they were going after his former students, of whom phil was one, and frightened them into implicating oppenheimer, saying that he had been a member of the communist party, which he may well have been. it was very interesting that phil, like many of his fellows in that class, was furious with oppenheimer because oppenheimer was visibly throwing these people to the walls to protect

himself. angry as they were to him, they were willing to take horrible down, rather than taken because of his symbolic value and importance. it is absolutely certainly true -- being questioned by this committee, he refused to testify on some untried constitutional grounds that could have landed him in jail. his good luck was that this was an executive session. if he had done it in an open session, they could not have let him off the hope. phil morrison was my professor at cornell after the war, where i still remain closely associated with him. time,this, or during that when the congressional committee was after him, the fbi was trailing him around.

we had many humorous incidents of things they did. it was serious for him. luckily,nure, otherwise, they probably would have fired him. he never let anything stop him in his campaign to get nuclear energy under control. effortsireless in his also to fight mccarthyism, not only for his own benefit, but for the benefit of others. to whom thison country is normally and ominousn debt. >> what do you think of the degree of secrecy? >> yeah, secrecy. that is a very hard question.

, tedd david greenglass hall, and perhaps there were other leaks too. general growth would have liked to have treated the place like a prison camp. it was not that way. oppenheimer felt we would make much better progress in people could share problems and solutions. i'm sure that if they had really clamped down, if none of us was , ifwed to leave the mesa the exterior fomite, if they had monitored closely whom we spoke to and when, rather than relying on us to use discretion, i'm sure the leaks would have been slower. hand, someone knew

the only important secret before he came to los alamos. that was that we felt we could do it, and we work working on it. all the rest, it helps them to know some things, but that was the big thing. that is when stalin knew he had to get his guys working on it. secret available? the soviets knew about our project from the big go. go.the get they knew about the project. they were provided with marvelous technological information, i'm sure. to the moscow institute at the time, the russian equivalent to los alamos . this in 1980

something. , earlier. 1970 something. kurt chadh they had this intuition about nuclear reaction rates. they made measurements of various kinds. now we know why he had the information from fuchs. i should add to that, i know nothing about these things directly, only from what i have read. from everything i have read, and also from knowing can vary slightly, i do not believe that greenglass could give them .nything useful

that he would, sure. that he could, i doubt it. he was a machinist. was.s in the army, as i luckily for me, i did not associate with him because i did not like him. >> did you know ted hall? >> no. well, it know ted hall .robably met him when he became famous later, i barely remembered him. >> [indiscernible] >> should we have else that bomb

, and having built it, should we have used it? are just issues which reflections of a person who has been thinking about it for many years. it has little to do with my experience directly at los alamos. i was not part of any of these decision processes. it was known, not by us, that the germans had given up around 1942, i think, certainly by 1944. we were building it because we were in a race with the germans. boy, that was some powerful incentive to work on it. the warinly knew when ended that we were no longer in a race with germany. we continued to work on it at

the same pace, taking the same deadly risks, without giving it , most of us.ught there was one person who actually left the project. there must have been others who had grave doubts. i did not. we were working on it. we still had a war with japan. won,ar with japan was but we did not pay much attention to it. i think we even relished in the idea of using this weapon on the japanese, at least many of us did. i'm afraid i did. builtshould we have dev that bomb? investors by, i think the answer is yes, but for a totally different reasons than what i just mentioned. thean ramsey, who was on

plane that accompanied the bom b said in a public speech, that i heard, an answer to a similar question. if we had not use the bomb -- that bomb to end that war, it is highly probable that it would have been used to start the next war. .ore than likely by us that is a very adjusting statement. we would not have done the that showed us quite how horrible the consequences were, and we would have had a lot more of them, and others would have used them on us. it does not speak to the question, should we have the bomb, but it is related to it. once the vision had been discovered in 1939, it was

obvious to every physicist in the world that the possibility of making a bomb existed. it was not quite obvious that it a fewsucceed, but only relatively easy experiments were needed to find out how many extra neutrons per fusion, things like that. we, and the russians -- the , could, they were then not have trusted each other. they would have had to have gone for it, and we would have had to go for it. we had the advantage of great industrial superiority. they had a ruined economy. they had the advantage that stalin could force all of the best people to work on it. we did not have that advantage. we cannot get all these people to leave their universities and go to los alamos.

one could speculate that they would have gotten there first, and then what would have happened? the issue of using the bomb is , andmore complicated important reasons pro and con have been given. people debate about for a long time. pro, the most obvious reason pro is that we .ere about to invade japan we anticipated that in the process, we would have killed many millions, maybe tens of millions of innocent japanese civilians. endcould in the war -- and the war then and there. military frank, the

historian, mentioned another reason that i have not heard until i read his book. the japanese army, he said, was monthg 100,000 people a ,n china and manchuria civilians, that is. every day that you waited to use that bomb, 3000 more would be killed. whether that know would have influence the decision makers. what surely would have influenced the decision makers join the was ready to war, had joined it, in fact, a e bomb wasbefore th dropped. if you have let them help desk with the invasion of japan, they would have shared in the

occupation. that leads to a desperately .wful calculus in that sense, the people of agasakima and not where the first victims of the cold war. else insense, everyone japan was a beneficiary of having used the bomb. i have many japanese friends, and i have gingerly felt them out, and i have yet to speak with one who did not say, in some way, that they were somehow relieved. i'm sure there are such ones, but i have yet to speak with one. that was the reason for using it. also, we had cracked the japanese code.

we knew what the emperor, the generals, and the admirals were say to each other. richard b frank, who has read the translated transcripts says -- he is a historian -- that they were not ready to surrender. martinother hand, sherman, who is also a theyrian, has said that were ready to surrender, and the people around the president knew they were ready to surrender, on the condition that they got to keep their emperor, which is the condition on which they finally surrendered anyway. i could easily see that truman and the generals, faced with the choice between using that bomb, or carrying out that dreadful

invasion, might have found it a very easy decision to use the bomb. that is the discussion that one generally hears. that really begs the issue. the question was why invade. the japanese were defeated, why not wantarn them. i think historians are in agreement that no such attempt was made. asked, should we have done it? i'm not quite sure. i think not. by doing it, we caused all that suffering, which you can maybe write off on the suffering, had we not done it. you can say we did nothing new because i march 9, 1945, we had conductined a thousand plane

raid over tokyo. you know, it was really a qualitatively new weapon. a thousand plane raid is something that you can mount once and a war, maybe. , i don't know, all that stuff. this was a raid by one airplane. you can do it once a week, if you can make the bombs once a week. it did something else too. it destroyed our moral leadership in the world. whatever we have been thinking, other people in the world saw that we had used this horrible new weapon on a defenseless, ,nwarned civilian population and incidentally, these civilians were not white, they were not christian. other people had to learn a

lesson from that. every country in the world had to face the fact that we may be willing to bomb them under some circumstances. especially the third world to which we did not have the same attachment that we have to europe. that it will think meeting president made the worst decision that any body in the world has ever made. fai recognize that we had to do that, and i did not have anything to do with the decision, and i wish i had not. >> what do you think of the

argument that if we had not used in the second world war, it would have started the next war, and that would have had a far worse outcome? >> that is what norman ramsey indicated. true.ld have been the notion that we would not, unprovoked by what we thought was a survival problem, use that one which i think is very naive. these decisions are not made by you and me. they are made by military people, who are used to doing tongs that you and i shudder

think of. they are made by presidents who are subject to amazing pressures. let me tell you, it is not only they. in november, 1948, russell was a great pacifist, and at one time a great communist. he urged that using those bonds to attack the soviet union before they got them. if you could suggest such a ramsey ishink norman right, we might have done it. there was one -- you remember, i told you that i went in there to clean out that lab after the accident. funny.just

, ordinary workers .anitorial type workers there were people who worked in the area who would go in to clean up the place. if you asked them to do that, they refuse because they said all the bugs in their were dead. said, i guarantee you, if you put new bugs in, they will die. they were afraid. another person and i went in and cleaned it up. it was not dangerous. there was so little reactivity, it was nothing to consider. we went in and cleaned out the stuff.

we went on and did things. there was no hurry about cleaning up that place. the plutonium had artie been removed. >> you are watching american history tv. 48 hours of programming on american history. follow us on twitter for information on a schedule >> author christopher kolakowski talks about the experiences of citizens during the fall of richmond and the decisions by confederate leaders that led to the surrender at appomattox. he draws comparisons between appomattox in the battle of the tonic during world war ii to show how general grant and lee's actions at appomattox later influenced later military leaders. the emerging civil war blog hosted this event. it is about 50 minutes.