J. Robert Oppenheimer and Making the Atomic Bomb
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00:00 plan on reviewing it once it's out on Blu-ray. But before then, I thought I'd make a biography
00:06 of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He was the father of the atom bomb, but later in life, turned
00:11 against the arms race and the much more destructive hydrogen bomb, which cost him dearly. That
00:17 opposition led to a McCarthyite inquisition that revoked his clearance and made him a
00:24 martyr. That's why one biography labeled Oppie "The American Prometheus," for he was the
00:30 man who brought nuclear fire down from the mountain and was cursed for it. It's a hell
00:36 of a story.
00:53 According to his birth certificate, the J in J. Robert Oppenheimer stands for his father's
00:58 name, Julius. But that is a faux pas in Jewish tradition, so he always went by Robert. A
01:04 naturally inquisitive kid, he collected rocks, read widely, learned several languages, and
01:10 went sailing. He went to the Ethical Culture Preparatory School, quickly skipping grades
01:14 which landed him in Harvard. He graduated in only three years with a bachelor's degree
01:19 in chemistry, just in time to avoid Harvard becoming the first of many American universities
01:25 to impose anti-Semitic quotas. He began graduate school in Cambridge, but throughout 1925-26,
01:33 he had a serious bout of depression, even strangely trying to poison an apple for one
01:38 professor, Patrick Blackett. So he started some unproductive psychotherapy and sought
01:44 new schools to study at. After a trip around Corsica and some revelatory reading, he started
01:49 to come out of his depression. Finally getting his life in order, he moved to the University
01:54 of Göttingen, which was the preeminent school in the emerging theory of quantum physics.
01:59 Oppenheimer gained a reputation for being great at comprehending big ideas and contemplating
02:04 them while saying "Nim Nim Nim", but also for being clumsy with the math to back it
02:09 up. He made many friends with preeminent scientists and quickly earned a PhD for his work there,
02:15 after a brief time at a few European universities where he earned the nickname "Oppie". He
02:20 took a professorship at Caltech. That was only a brief stint, for he got a job at Berkeley
02:26 instead, building up the department as one of the most preeminent in theoretical physics
02:32 in the nation, with many close students and colleagues, some called "the Nim Nim Boys"
02:37 because they constantly copied Oppie's mannerisms. He gave the idea or co-wrote many groundbreaking
02:43 theories, such as predicting the existence of antimatter and black holes. While in California,
02:50 he observed from afar the rise of Nazism and eventually the Spanish Civil War that Franco's
02:55 fascists began. In support of the opposition, Oppie became what communists called a fellow
03:02 traveler. He was active in unionization, helping Jewish refugees such as Albert Einstein immigrate
03:08 to the United States, raising funds for Spanish Republicans, and had many friends who were
03:13 communist party members, including a girlfriend that he'd have a continuing affair with
03:18 even after he got married to Kitty Puning. His brother Frank was a more practically minded
03:24 scientist, a more charismatic character, and a communist party member at the time.
03:30 These sympathies would be used against Robert later, but they were pretty common among New
03:34 Dealer intellectuals at the time. He was a fellow traveler, not a communist.
03:39 When World War II commenced, he was fairly aloof, only somewhat distancing himself from
03:45 communism after the horrors of the Holodomor and Great Purge became more apparent in the
03:51 early 1940s. In the meantime, the theoretical physics community moved on without him. Recognizing
03:57 the danger of Nazi science, physicist Leo Szilard wrote a letter and Albert Einstein
04:03 signed it, warning President Roosevelt that an immensely powerful bomb was feasible based
04:09 on a 1938 German experiment that split the atom. FDR created a Uranium Committee to investigate
04:16 such a weapon, but very little got done that first year.
04:20 British science moved first. They came up with possible ways to make an atomic bomb,
04:25 but kept their findings secret. Perhaps the most important of their secret discoveries
04:29 was the ability to use carbon as a mediator between isotopes, rather than heavy water.
04:35 Without that knowledge, Germany's project never achieved a chain reaction, which is
04:39 necessary for creating plutonium and enriching uranium. Therefore, they probably couldn't
04:46 create a bomb, but the Allies didn't know that and kept forging ahead.
04:50 By mid-1942, the US war machine was taking the Nazi threat of nuclear war seriously.
04:57 Japan had attacked in December, obliterating any notion of isolation and forcing American
05:02 entry into the war. The federal government tasked General Leslie Groves with creating
05:08 a nuclear program. He was already in charge of creating the Pentagon, so what's wrong
05:13 with adding another major domestic construction project? He codenamed it the Manhattan Engineering
05:19 District, but most people nowadays simplify that to the Manhattan Project.
05:24 As one administrator said, "The Manhattan District bore no relation to the industrial
05:29 and social life of our country. It was a separate state, with its own airplanes and its own
05:35 factories and its thousands of secrets. It had a peculiar sovereignty, one that could
05:41 bring about the end, peacefully or violently, of all other sovereignties."
05:46 Reading the theory on how to build a bomb, he secured a site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee
05:52 and another one in Hanford, Washington, to create the massive industrial projects necessary
05:57 for uranium enrichment and plutonium creation. As one author quips, "A rock chipped out
06:03 of the ground by farmers living in near-stone-age conditions was fed into the most advanced
06:09 industrial complex ever constructed."
06:12 Next, Groves had to put together a scientific team. He toured science departments around
06:17 the country. In the process, he okayed the creation of the first reactor ever at the
06:22 University of Chicago, which achieved criticality in December of '42, the first human-made
06:28 chain reaction ever. When Groves met Oppenheimer, he was impressed with Oppie's understanding
06:34 of the task at hand and his ability to talk about history and poetry. So Groves made Oppie
06:40 the leader of centralizing all the research into this bomb. Robert needed to select a
06:45 site for this, and he instantly knew where. For years, he had been going to New Mexico
06:50 to roam the San Cristobal Mountains, buying a ranch he called "Perro Caliente" because
06:56 he liked to exclaim "Hot dog!" In a letter many years prior, he wrote, "My two great
07:01 loves are physics and New Mexico. It's a pity they can't be combined."
07:06 Well, where there's a will, there's a way. Undercover, they met in the Jemez Mountains
07:11 and worked their way northeast to a ranch school called Los Alamos, which is where they
07:16 placed the new lab that would build the bomb. Oppie had no experience in practical science
07:22 nor organizing a large team. His frail and preening disposition didn't seem to entail
07:27 an ability to lead. Yet, by all accounts, he seemed to metamorphose into the role, organizing
07:33 private summits and becoming a great leader. So he started to collect the best and brightest
07:39 from around the country and even a delegation from Britain. Unbeknownst to him, a few would
07:45 willfully send secrets from the Manhattan Project to the Soviets, inevitably helping
07:49 them create their own bomb, but the American program was focused on beating Germany. He
07:55 was approached by a friend about sending secrets to the local Russian embassy in 1943, but
08:01 refused and reported the matter. At the time, Russia didn't fully understand that the object
08:07 of Oppie's project was, as one lecture succinctly put it, "to produce a potential military
08:13 weapon in the form of a bomb in which energy is released by a fast neutron chain reaction
08:18 in one or more of the materials known to show nuclear fission." Several scientific problems
08:25 had to be overcome to build a nuclear bomb. They could only refine so much plutonium and
08:30 uranium. Finding how much of the isotope and how much shielding it took to go critical
08:35 was such a dangerous experiment that two people would end up losing their lives in accidents,
08:40 both after the bomb's completion. They decided on a gun assembly for the uranium, where they'd
08:46 use conventional explosives to launch one chunk of uranium into another with sufficient
08:52 speed to cause a runaway chain reaction. For the plutonium, they went with an implosion
08:57 assembly, where explosives would cave pieces into one another. The tech for making this
09:02 small enough and detonating the device on time took extreme advances, all in secret.
09:08 On top of that, there were ethical issues the scientists had to deal with. Given the
09:13 power of the bomb they were creating, they understood that international diplomacy would
09:18 change forever in the blink of an eye. Many discussions were held over the implications
09:23 of making such weapons. Niels Bohr had this idea of the weapon being so shocking that
09:29 it would force the world to come together and prevent another war like the one they
09:33 were currently fighting. And this became the operant ideology of those on the project thanks
09:38 to its leadership. As one student said, "Bohr was God and Oppie was his prophet." But
09:44 matters were changing rapidly that would challenge their post-war vision. Germany was clearly
09:49 losing the war. The bombs weren't intended for Japan, but now it looked like they were
09:54 the only enemy left. On top of that, President Roosevelt died, leaving Harry S. Truman to
10:00 take over. Before that, he hadn't been adequately briefed on the Manhattan Project. So, at the
10:06 behest of the Los Alamos scientists, he convened an interim committee to decide what to do
10:12 with these weapons. That committee decided against a demonstrative bombing in Tokyo Bay
10:18 that would not intentionally kill anyone. The Battle of Okinawa was ongoing, and showed
10:23 that Japanese forces were often willing to fight to the last man. By late June, Japan
10:28 was on its own, and the US was dropping enough incendiary munitions to cause far more civilian
10:34 casualties than both atomic bombs would. Furthermore, the invasion of Japan could not happen until
10:41 November. So, the interim committee decided on one test bomb to be done in secret just
10:47 in case it didn't work, and using the two completed ones on Japanese cities that had
10:53 not been destroyed by incendiary devices. They also recommended warning the Soviets
10:59 before sending the bombs. When Truman met with Stalin, he only said that "I casually
11:04 mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian
11:10 Premier showed no special interest." They agreed at Potsdam that Japan had to unconditionally
11:16 surrender, despite the fact that they were very near surrendering if only they could
11:20 guarantee that the Emperor could remain at least as a figurehead.
11:32 The interim committee had a reason to rush their decision. With the Soviets about to
11:37 invade Manchuria, they thought that they needed to use these bombs as not only a way to end
11:41 the war, but implement Bohr's vision of the last bombing. Back at Los Alamos, Oppie
11:47 had to rally the scientists who saw no reason to bomb an already defeated enemy. Zillard
11:53 even wrote a petition, signed by many scientists there, that called for "First that you,
11:59 President Truman, exercise your power as Commander-in-Chief to rule that the United States shall not resort
12:05 to the use of atomic bombs in this war unless the terms which will be imposed upon Japan
12:10 have been made public in detail and Japan, knowing these terms, has refused to surrender;
12:17 and second, that in such an event, the question whether or not to use atomic bombs be decided
12:23 by you in light of the considerations presented in this petition, as well as all the other
12:29 moral responsibilities which are involved." Oppie found this to be a betrayal and vigorously
12:34 argued against it. He thought that a sudden and overwhelming use of the weapon would guarantee
12:40 it wouldn't be used again, much like mustard gas after World War I, but this time with
12:46 the scientific community joined as one behind its abolition. However naive that may seem,
12:52 he convinced much of Los Alamos, and they forged ahead. "Having a PhD doesn't mean
12:57 that you're smart in all things," says the historian with a PhD.
13:01 The first test of a non-nuclear detonation didn't go well, but it was because of a wiring
13:07 issue. The night before testing the real deal, Oppie read some lines from the Bhagavad Gita.
13:12 "In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains, on the dark great sea, in
13:17 the midst of javelins and arrows, in sleep and confusion, in the depths of shame, the
13:23 good deeds a man has done before defend him." So the Trinity Gadget blew up on July 16th,
13:31 1945. It detonated in a patch of desert known as the Jornada del Muerto in New Mexico. The
13:37 first nuclear explosion ever, and the equivalent of 25,000 tons of TNT. Richard Feynman even
13:44 took bets on whether they'd ignite the atmosphere, causing a chain fusion reaction via fission
13:51 1, a prophecy of even more powerful bombs to come. In a later interview, Oppie claimed
13:57 to have remembered another line from the Bhagavad Gita. "We knew the world would not be the
14:02 same. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying
14:11 to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed
14:21 form and says, 'Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.'"
14:30 They didn't need to test the gun assembly, which they had nicknamed "Little Boy"
14:35 after its diminutive shape compared to the implosion assembly's "Fat Man." It's
14:39 possible these names were jabs at Oppie and Groves because of their statures. Three weeks
14:44 after Trinity, a B-29 named Enola Gay dropped "Little Boy" over Hiroshima. The atomic
14:50 explosion killed between 80 and 150,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and even a few
14:57 Allied POWs died. Three days later, another B-29 named "Boxcar" dropped "Fat Man"
15:04 over Nagasaki. This one killed between 60 and 80,000 people, almost all of whom were
15:10 civilians. That same day, the Soviets began their invasion of Manchuria. Not one to intervene,
15:16 however, Hirohito broadcast to his people, "The war situation has developed not necessarily
15:21 to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against
15:27 her interest. Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power
15:33 of which to damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should
15:39 we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of
15:44 the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
15:49 As such, the war was over, but the decision of what to do with this technology wasn't
15:55 done."
15:56 Oppie resigned his position at Los Alamos, though UC Berkeley would continue to control
16:00 the lab until 2006, and they were a managing partner until 2018. He went to Caltech to
16:07 teach for a brief stint, but was kinda terrible at it. Instead, he took a position as director
16:13 of the Advanced Studies Institute at Princeton, quickly turning it into another theoretical
16:18 physics haven, much like he had done at Berkeley. It helps that Einstein was already there.
16:23 He'd often bring political outcasts like himself to the institute as a kind of academic
16:29 second chance. While Oppenheimer was transforming the department, he remained extremely politically
16:35 active, seemingly loving the limelight, but his tendency toward histrionics would quickly
16:42 damage his ability to make real change.
16:45 The newly created United Nations was searching for what to do about nuclear technology, and
16:51 Oppie played a role. He helped draft a report with Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal about
16:57 how the world could regulate the tech. They proposed to create an organization that was
17:02 beyond the sovereignty of any nation, with the power to control all uranium mines, reactors,
17:08 and weaponry worldwide. It was a radical idea, but the United Nations had the possibility
17:14 of actually creating such an entity, and would likely prevent a nuclear arms race. While
17:19 begging Truman to adopt this plan, Oppenheimer received serious pushback, so Robert claimed
17:25 something to the effect that he had blood on his own hands, and this was a way to atone.
17:31 Which did not go well. Truman muttered, "Blood on his hands? Dammit, he hasn't half as
17:37 much blood on his hands as I have. You just don't go around bellyaching about it."
17:42 He proclaimed, "I don't want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again."
17:46 Truman always called Oppenheimer a crybaby scientist after that, which guaranteed the
17:51 Acheson-Lilienthal plan wouldn't get adopted. Instead, Bernard Baruch proposed to the UN
17:57 a plan that would not require the United States to give up the new bombs, of which they had
18:02 roughly 50 stockpiled by mid-1946. That practically sabotaged any possibility of the Soviets accepting
18:10 joint regulation and ensured an arms race. Since nuclear armament would remain national
18:16 rather than international, Congress created the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947, and
18:21 Oppenheimer was on it. The Soviets had created their first chain reaction in December of
18:26 '46, and were able to create a replica of Fat Man thanks to all of their espionage during
18:32 the Manhattan Project, detonating it in August 1949. In response, the Truman administration
18:38 sought to make a super bomb first proposed by Enrico Fermi in 1941. This would use fission
18:45 to set off a fusion reaction with hydrogen. The super would be called alternatively a
18:51 hydrogen bomb or a thermonuclear device, and would cause immensely more destruction than
18:57 a regular A-bomb. It was a leap from kilotons to megatons worth of TNT. Oppenheimer opposed
19:04 this, pushing for tactical nuclear weaponry rather than a bomb that could legitimately
19:09 be considered a genocide in one package. He argued that this would only cause the nuclear
19:15 arms race to spiral out of control and provide the world a way to annihilate itself. Truman
19:21 would hear none of it, and forged ahead with the super anyways, completing the first detonation
19:27 in 1951.
19:28 The dance of brinksmanship continued with the most cataclysmic weapons ever made. As
19:33 one historian wrote, "The warheads might just as well have been made of cardboard.
19:38 It was their abstract threat that counted. As it was in H.G. Wells' time, uranium's
19:44 physical powers were far secondary to the power of the narrative that man could craft
19:49 around them. The United States and the USSR would be locked together in this crude but
19:55 effective story for almost forty years. J. Robert Oppenheimer would memorably call the
20:00 standoff "two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at
20:05 the risk of his own life."
20:07 Uppy made friends with Truman's wise men, including one that was going through a similar
20:12 ousting over militarization. George F. Kennan left the State Department in 1950. Oppenheimer
20:18 gave him a spot at the Institute, despite not having completed any of his historical
20:23 works, which I have spoken about in this episode. They bonded over this, and Kennan would help
20:28 him with the trouble derived from trying to stop the super just around the corner. One
20:33 of the enemies he created due to his opposition was Louis Strauss. He'd given Oppie the
20:41 appointment to the Institute, and now made every effort he could to remove the director.
20:46 That animosity continued for his entire life.
20:50 Oppie remained on the Atomic Energy Commission. Despite only serving a couple of days a year,
20:54 he had to keep a security clearance. Because of his previous communist connections, the
21:00 FBI had regularly surveilled him and wiretapped his phones. They had a 7,000 page dossier
21:06 on him, and Strauss got a hold of it. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover received a letter
21:12 from a lawyer who had served on the commission, claiming Oppenheimer was likely a Soviet agent.
21:18 After so much hysteria surrounding Soviet espionage in the Manhattan Project, it was
21:22 easy to raise petty complaints about disloyalty, and Strauss pounced on the opportunity. He
21:28 kicked off a security hearing into Oppie, accusing him of a ridiculous number of unsubstantiated
21:35 rumors and suspending his clearance.
21:46 This was happening at the exact same time as Senator McCarthy was probing into the US
21:52 Army. The Atomic Energy Commission hearings weren't
22:05 a court trial, but they turned into the equivalent of an inquisition. The FBI dossier was kept
22:11 secret from Oppie's defense, while reading parts of it into evidence. They used discrepancies
22:16 between retellings of his communist friend's approach in 1943 as proof of duplicity. To
22:23 everyone there, it was obvious railroading and a foregone conclusion. Despite that, Oppie
22:29 was forced to admit an extramarital affair in front of his wife, and how naive he was
22:34 at the beginning of the Manhattan Project. The AAC denied his clearance and published
22:39 a damning profile, which red-baiting media raked him over the coals with. With the jeering
22:44 of conservatives everywhere, the Oppenheimer family took a much-needed retreat to St. John
22:50 Island. Even so, the FBI continued to hound him, claiming he might defect on a Russian
22:55 submarine and forcing Robert to mail an itinerary to Hoover himself. Kitty had long been an
23:02 alcoholic, and Robert was a bit aloof with their children. The results of the AAC hearings
23:07 exacerbated these problems. Robert alienated his son by leaving him at a boarding school.
23:13 Their daughter, Toni, seemed to have inherited Robert's depression, but nonetheless, Robert
23:18 and Kitty loved the island, buying a house on the beach and partying into the night.
23:23 It would be a place of regular refuge. Reinvigorated, Oppie returned to Princeton and regularly
23:29 took on lecture gigs around the country. He became a bit of a martyr to academic freedom,
23:35 as Strauss repeatedly failed to oust him from the directorship. Oppie's presence at various
23:40 lectures was often protested by conservative academics, but that only made his martyrdom
23:46 seem more important. He still did scientific work, even though he couldn't do any of
23:52 the secretive work that advanced science so rapidly in the post-war period. But for the
23:57 most part, he was focused on decrying red-baiting. With the election of President Kennedy, Oppie
24:04 had a friend in the White House again. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. tried to rehabilitate Robert's
24:10 reputation. He didn't get so far as reinstating Robert's clearance, but got him the Enrico
24:15 Fermi Award, a scientific commendation given out by presidents.
24:20 An assassin killed JFK only a month ahead of the ceremony, so newly inaugurated President
24:26 Johnson did the ceremony instead. Republicans were angry, but couldn't halt the dispensation
24:31 of a $50,000 reward. To retaliate, they reduced the money by half the following year. Two
24:38 years later, Oppie got throat cancer. He was famously a chain smoker. Yet he kept living
24:44 as best he could, resigning from the Institute for Advanced Studies but staying near campus.
24:50 He died after fighting the affliction for two years in 1967. Kitty died in '72, and
24:56 their daughter lived on, but was denied a translator position at the UN because the
25:01 FBI still claimed her father was a commie spy. She took her own life at the St. John
25:07 Island Cottage, deeding the property to the people there, which is still called Oppenheimer
25:12 Beach.
25:13 Oppie's legacy is well described as the American Prometheus. Much like the figure
25:18 of legend, he brought nuclear fire and was punished for that. But perhaps he's more
25:23 akin to the main character of a book subtitled "The Modern Prometheus", as in Mary Shelley's
25:29 Frankenstein. He created something that came to destroy him. Now Oppie himself never really
25:35 regretted being the father of the atomic bomb, unlike some popular depictions, but he did
25:40 regret the missed opportunity of the Atchison-Lilienthal plan and failure to halt the arms race. When
25:46 the Kennedy administration proposed a partial testing ban, he said "It's twenty years
25:52 too late. It should have been done the day after Trinity."
25:55 His legacy is a long and winding road, but perhaps someday his highest hope can finally
26:01 be achieved before we have any more nuclear proliferation and annihilate ourselves.
26:07 "Meow. I knew you'd try to come in. You always do. Oh, thank you. Yes, good boy. Mwah."
26:20 The first test of a non-nuclear desti-destination? Non-nuclear destination. That's most destinations.
26:27 "Meow. Where you going?"
26:32 And weal- and weapon- and weaponry- and weaponry- and weaponry- and weaponry- and weaponry-
26:42 weaponry worldwide. Weaponry world- wow, I cannot say that. Weaponry worldwide. And
26:51 weaponry world- worldwide. As Strauss repeatedly failed to oust him from the dictatorship.
26:58 Dictatorship.
26:59 "Just wanted some attention. Mwah. Okay."
27:06 [music]