As the movie "Oppenheimer" opens across America, Alex Wellerstein - Historian of Nuclear Weapons at Stevens Institute of Technology - gives his perspective on a man he has studied his entire career.
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00:00 I don't know if we can be trusted with such a weapon, but we have no choice.
00:14 Robert Oppenheimer was a key figure in the making of the atomic bomb during World War
00:19 II, and a key figure in shaping early American nuclear policy after the war as well.
00:27 And that latter part of his work I think is less well known to most people.
00:31 Most people know him as the father of the atomic bomb.
00:33 A lot fewer people know that he was deeply involved with many discussions about maybe
00:39 even the abolition of nuclear weapons, but also how you use nuclear weapons in a modern
00:46 Cold War.
00:47 I have been asked whether in the years to come it will be possible to kill 40 million
00:53 American people in the 20 largest American towns by the use of atomic bombs in a single
01:01 night.
01:02 I'm afraid that the answer to that question is yes.
01:05 The most interesting thing about Oppenheimer is that by any measure he is not who you would
01:10 have picked to be the scientific director of the Manhattan Project.
01:14 And people around were surprised that he was picked.
01:18 He had no administrative experience.
01:19 He had never led any group of people larger than a seminar room.
01:22 His reputation was as a scientist's scientist.
01:26 He is a head in the clouds, lots of equations.
01:30 He was a terrible teacher.
01:32 He would chain smoke while writing equations over other equations he had already written.
01:36 This is a sort of famous tactic of his.
01:39 The first thing that Oppenheimer does is he gets together some of the top theorists at
01:45 a conference in Berkeley and they sit around and they sort of plot out what is the problem
01:49 to be solved in designing a nuclear weapon, in sort of making this thing happen.
01:56 And that's what it starts off as being.
01:57 But the role expands dramatically because it turns out to be much harder to make nuclear
02:03 weapons than they thought.
02:05 They went into the Manhattan Project thinking it would be difficult but sort of modestly
02:09 achievable and ended up being by some measures maybe five times harder than they expected.
02:14 In the control shack was Dr. J.R. Oppenheimer, who, assisted by Dr. I.
02:18 Rabi and others, had directed the making of the bomb itself.
02:22 The automatic controls got it now.
02:25 Rob, this time the stakes are really high.
02:28 It's going to work all right, Robert, and I'm sure we'll never be sorry for it.
02:33 But in 40 seconds we'll know.
02:39 He was afraid that if the first bombs were not sufficiently spectacular that you would
02:45 end up in a world with nuclear arms races and then the next war would be fatal for civilization.
02:52 So for him it was important that the first bombing be really awful so that the world
02:56 gets its act together and realizes we can't continue down this path, the same path that
03:00 led to World War I and World War II.
03:02 World War III is not going to be tenable.
03:04 So that was his goal from all of this.
03:07 And so for him the worst things are in Japan, in some sense the better.
03:11 If there is another world war this civilization may go under.
03:19 We need to ask ourselves whether we're doing all we can to avert that.
03:25 Easy to try and make Oppenheimer into a parable.
03:29 And of course all parables are a parable of our time.
03:31 And so it'll be interesting to see what the parable of Oppenheimer is for us now as opposed
03:35 to what it was in the 50s or 60s when also fictional media were being made about him
03:40 or even the 80s.
03:43 But he himself hated being cast as a parable.
03:47 He was very bitterly resistant to any of these things in his time.
03:51 He saw all of these things as being just sort of tawdry and not the right issue to be focusing
03:57 on.
03:58 Science has profoundly altered the conditions of man's life both materially and in ways
04:05 of the spirit as well.
04:07 It has extended the range of questions in which man has a choice.
04:12 It has extended man's freedom to make significant decisions.
04:19 No one can predict what vast new continents of knowledge the future of science will discover.
04:26 But we know that as long as men are free to ask what they will, free to say what they
04:31 think, free to think what they must, science will never regress and freedom itself will
04:38 never be wholly lost.
04:39 [Music]