EDWARD TELLER: At the end of
the war, most people wanted to stop.
I did not.
Among the people who knew
a great deal about
the hydrogen bomb,
I was the only advocate of it.
RHODES: Edward Teller
was a Hungarian Jew
who escaped from Hungary
and came to the United States.
During World War II,
Teller worked at Los Alamos,
but he became obsessed with
the idea of the hydrogen bomb,
even before they
had the atomic bomb.
HERKEN: Teller did very
much consider the atomic bomb
to be Oppenheimer's creation,
and he wanted something
that was bigger and better.
CONANT: And
Oppenheimer said to Teller,
"Go back to doing
physics, but don't build this.
There's no need for it."
RHODES: Oppenheimer
was in charge of a committee
that had been put together
in Washington to decide:
What should we do?
Should we build a hydrogen bomb?
That is a question
in everybody's mind,
Dr. Oppenheimer.
Are we creating something
we may not be able to control?
The decision to try to make
or not to make the hydrogen bomb
touch the very
basis of our morality.
And the committee
decision was basically,
no, we shouldn't build
the hydrogen bomb.
If we are guided by fear alone,
we'll fail in this
time of crisis.
The answer to fear
sometimes lies in courage.
WELLERSTEIN: Oppenheimer's
opposition of the H-bomb
was taken very hard by
people who were in favor for it.
RHODES: The Air Force
wanted more and more bombs
and bigger and bigger bombs.
The bigger the bomb,
in terms of its yield,
the more damage
one plane could do.
HERKEN: The Strategic Air
Command was focused upon
blowing up the Soviet Union.
Oppenheimer said a smarter
move would be to put resources
into intercepting
Soviet bombers.
RHODES: He was going
just the opposite direction
from what the Air Force wanted.
They wanted him out.
They wanted to get rid of him.
BIRD: By 1953, Oppenheimer
has made sufficient enemies
in the Washington bureaucracy.
And then along
comes Lewis Strauss...
(applause)
the new chairman of the
Atomic Energy Commission.
STRAUSS: I have just returned
from the Pacific Proving Ground,
where I have witnessed a
test of thermonuclear weapons.
BIRD: And Strauss
knows Oppenheimer
and has grown to
intensely dislike him.
RHODES: Oppenheimer had
been snappish with him once,
and it had deeply offended him.
So Strauss begins to plot
a means to defrock Oppenheimer.
SHERWIN: And how does he do it?
Lewis Strauss focuses on
Oppenheimer's association
with left-wing friends
during the 1930s in Berkeley.
MAN (over TV): "Communism."
Who are the apostles of a system
that attempts to destroy
the American way of life?
During the Second World War,
the Soviet Union was our ally.
And that sense of
being a communist
or associating with
communists was not something
that was considered that bad.
It wasn't until the Cold War
that all of a sudden,
in retrospect,
anyone with any kind of
legacy of a communist past
is now a security threat.
If there were no communists
in our government,
why did we delay, for 18 months,
delay our research
on the hydrogen bomb?
RHODES: It was
from attitudes like that
that finally led to the
government deciding
they had to pull Oppenheimer's
security clearance.
CHARLES OPPENHEIMER:
He would have to give up
his security clearance in
30 days or ask for a hearing.
He felt he couldn't give
up his security clearance.
He couldn't agree with them
that he wasn't fit to
serve his government.
ELSE: He should have
told them to get lost.
He should have said,
"I am the atomic bomb.
"I won World War II.
Fuck off."
For whatever reason, he
didn't tell them to get lost.
He decided to fight it.
BIRD: And before he
goes down to Washington,
he meets with Einstein
to tell him he's gonna
be absent for a few weeks,
and Einstein's reaction
is quite startling.
Albert says, "But, Robert,
you are Mr. Atomic."
"You don't need
them. They need you.
Just walk away. Why
should you go through this?"
And Oppenheimer shakes his
head and apparently says to Albert,
"Well, you don't understand."
And he walks away,
and Einstein turns to
his secretary and says,
"There goes a nar."
The Yiddish for a fool.
(fanfare plays)
TV ANNOUNCER: World
attention was focused this week
on the Atomic Energy
Commission building in Washington,
where a three-man board
began special hearings
on the security file of
Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,
the nuclear scientist who
developed the first A-bomb.
The security hearing starts,
and it quickly becomes clear
that this is not just
a security hearing.
This is a trial.
TV ANNOUNCER:
There's a new charge
that the scientist opposed
the development of the H-bomb.
WELLERSTEIN: The deck is
stacked against him, and it's ugly.
They're wiretapping
his conversations
with his lawyer illegally and
giving it to the prosecution
so that they know exactly
what's gonna happen.
They are able to look
at classified FBI files.
He is not because he
doesn't have a clearance,
and he can't look at his
own FBI file as a result.
RHODES: Oppenheimer's
involvement with Jean Tatlock,
the question of whether his
brother had been a communist
and still was,
those were the things
they pulled out of the files.
CONANT: One of the most
damning pieces of evidence
that was brought out was
the fact that, during the war,
there had been a conversation
at his home in Berkeley
with Haakon Chevalier,
his old friend, who
had mentioned to him
that there was a way
perhaps that he could
leak information about the
atomic project he was working on
to Soviet officials.
Now, Oppenheimer had
dismissed it at the time,
but he had not
reported the incident.
He knew he was already on
thin ice with security people,
that he was suspected
because of his communist ties.
So he was trying to keep
himself out of hot water.
The problem was that, in
subsequent conversations
with Los Alamos security people,
he had told very evasive, vague
accounts of this
conversation, one after another.
And when they
confronted Oppenheimer
with these evasive
versions, they asked him,
"Why did you do this?
Why wouldn't you
have been forthright?"
He said, "I was an idiot."
And in a sense, he
sealed his own fate then.
RHODES: He fell apart.
He tried to testify,
but he really fell apart.
BIRD: He's having almost
another nervous breakdown,
like what he went
through as a young man.
He's oddly stoic, like
he was in the icehouse
when he was a young
boy being tormented
by his fellow summer campers.
He's resigned and not
really defending himself.
One person who sort of put
the nails in his coffin, of course,
was Edward Teller.
HERKEN: Teller testified
against Oppenheimer.
He said that he thought
he would feel better
if the security of the country
were in other hands
than Oppenheimer's.
And one of the scientists who
was close to Oppenheimer said
it was a matter of not only
stabbing Oppenheimer in the back
but twisting the blade.
RHODES: As he was leaving,
he went up to shake
Oppenheimer's hand
and said, "I'm sorry."
And Oppenheimer looked
him in the eye and said,
"Edward, after
what you just said,
I don't know what that means."
NOLAN: He was obviously
a very, very brilliant man,
but I think he may
have underestimated
the power of the
establishment, the machine,
and the inability
of one individual
to stand against that.
BIRD: The result
was to be expected.
(fanfare plays)
TV ANNOUNCER: Dr. J.
Robert Oppenheimer,
the famous scientist
whose suspension this week
by the Atomic Energy
Commission surprised the nation.
They voted to strip Oppenheimer
of his security clearance.
This was front-page news in the
newspapers across the country.
That he had
recommended communists
who are working the
A-bomb, H-bomb plans.
His wife, uh,
admittedly was, uh,
an official of the
Communist Party,
uh, brother a very
active communist.
BIRD: He became
a political pariah.
KAKU: And that sent a chill
through the
scientific community.
If they could take down the
most famous atomic scientist
on the planet Earth,
then we're all vulnerable.
BIRD: It sent a really
nefarious message
to all working scientists
to beware of weighing
in on political issues.
And this is a terrible thing
because we need their expertise.
And yet the Oppenheimer trial
made that difficult.
RHODES: After
the security trial,
Oppenheimer was
never the same guy again.
He was kind of a
hollow man after that.
CHARLES OPPENHEIMER:
What we say inside the family is
it hurt his feelings.
He didn't like it, but
he didn't talk about it.
He never made one
statement about it publicly.
He never asked for an apology,
and he retreated back
into where he came from.
BIRD: He still kept
his job at Princeton,
but he wasn't doing
any more physics.
These were kind of sad years.
MURROW: And Professor
Einstein is still here, too, isn't he?
Oh, yeah. Indeed he
is. Uh, indeed he is. Uh...
Does he ever call you
up on the telephone?
Hmm, sometimes.
I think he... he calls me,
uh, when he reads
in the newspapers
something about me
that he doesn't like,
and he calls me up and-and says,
"That's all right.
That's just right."
SHERWIN: He had
lost his fighting spirit.
He would have nothing
to do with commenting
on any of the issues of the
day related to nuclear weapons.
MAN: Dr. Oppenheimer, could
you tell us what your thoughts are
about what our atomic
policy should be?
No, I-I can't do that.
I'm not... not close
enough to the facts,
and I'm not close enough
to the thoughts of those
who are worrying about it.
RHODES: Hans
Bethe told me once that,
"Oppenheimer was smarter
than any of the rest of us."
He didn't win a Nobel Prize.
How could this man,
who evidently outshone
some of the greatest
physicists of the 20th century,
not have been more successful
in his line of work... physics...
Than he was?
CHARLES OPPENHEIMER:
You can't talk about Oppenheimer
when you're not talking
about his science.
That was the part of his life.
When he talks
about what he loves,
it was that human thing of
passing knowledge around.
This is negative particles,
neutral, doubly charged,
positive and positive...
CHARLES OPPENHEIMER:
His work on black holes
should have earned
him a Nobel Prize.
SHERWIN: In 1939,
Oppenheimer wrote the first paper
identifying the idea of
collapsing stars, a black hole.
So, black holes
was his original idea.
I mean, that's quite amazing.
And if a real black hole
had been identified
before he died...
he probably would have won
a Nobel Prize for that work.
BIRD: In 1966,
he was diagnosed
with esophageal cancer.
All that smoking over the
years had gotten to him.
(clock ticking)
And he died in early '67.
Oppenheimer's life story,
it's the story of
the 20th century.
It's the story of
our nuclear age
that we're still living with,
and that's a story
that is unfinished.
Will always be unfinished.
(explosion rumbling)
ELSE: We have his bomb.
His bomb is with us.
And we can debate his
membership in the Communist Party
or we can debate the ethics
of bombing civilians at
Hiroshima until we drop,
but the fact is that we
have nuclear weapons.
That's the legacy.
And controlling those weapons,
it's a never-ending struggle.
(explosion rumbling)
It was so horrible
with a baby bomb.
Now they have so much
more lethal nuclear weapon.
OPPENHEIMER:
There is much talk about
getting rid of atomic weapons.
I have a deep
sympathy with that.
TAMURA: Please, let's
try to find common ground.
I'm sure if Oppie was alive
today, he would agree with me.
MAN: two, one.
OPPENHEIMER: But
we mustn't fool ourselves.
The world is not
going to be the same
no matter what we
do with atomic bombs,
because the knowledge of how
to make them cannot be exorcized.
- (insects chirring)
- (wind whistling softly)
JUDY WOODRUFF: Physicist
J. Robert Oppenheimer
is perhaps best known as
the father of the atomic bomb.
As time has passed,
there are some new
assessments of his role in history.
In late 2022, the
Department of Energy
decided to vacate the decision
to have the security hearings.
The national tragedy
is that this hearing,
this McCarthy-era witch hunt,
materialized in the first place.
That type of thing is
not supposed to happen
in a country like this.
This is such an important
and long overdue step.
But at the same
time, it's kind of sad,
because this is something
that J. Robert Oppenheimer
will not get to
experience personally.
OPPENHEIMER: Science
has profoundly altered
the conditions of man's life,
both materially and in
ways of the spirit as well.
NYE: I think we're still
talking about Oppenheimer
because he was so influential.
We have this respect
and fear of science.
And Oppenheimer represented
both sides of that, for sure.
NOLAN: Unquestionably,
he changed the world.
And he changed
the world forever.
There's no going back.
But we know that as long as
men are free to ask what they will,
free to say what they think,
free to think what they must,
science will never regress,
and freedom itself will
never be wholly lost.
(slides clicking)
(explosion rumbling)
(explosion booming)
(lighter clicks)
(explosion rumbling)
(music fades)