As director of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer was instrumental in developing the devastating nuclear weapons that ushered in the atomic age. This is his complicated story. His life is the subject of a movie by Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan.
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00:00 Who was Oppenheimer? The subject of Christopher Nolan's new film Julius Robert Oppenheimer
00:05 is known as the father of the atomic bomb. He was an American theoretical physicist and
00:09 the top scientist in charge of developing the world's first nuclear weapon. He produced
00:13 two bombs, Little Boy and Fat Man. In August 1945, those two bombs were dropped on the
00:19 Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs destroyed those two cities and killed
00:24 at least 110,000 people. He defended the development of the bombs, saying people needed to see
00:29 the capabilities of nuclear weapons. For Oppenheimer, the son of German Jews, originally said he
00:35 would have preferred the bombs to be used on the Nazis. The bombing haunted Oppenheimer
00:40 and he felt he had blood on his hands. He then dedicated the rest of his life to lobbying
00:47 for regulations surrounding nuclear weapons.