Historically High - The Manhattan Project and J. Robert Oppenheimer

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

The Manhattan Project was a government program developed by the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom during WW2 to research and build the first Weapon of Mass Destruction, The Atomic Bomb. To try and understand how man was able to harness the power of the atom, we're discussing how something so powerful could even be discovered and how that discovery was almost immediately weaponized. J. Robert Oppenheimer was one of if not THE key figured in successfully building the devices that would be used to turn two Japanese cites to ash and an Empire to it's knees. He was a brilliant student of science, the arts, and religion. A man almost immediately conflicted with his greatest invention who felt the blood of thousands on his hands. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Keeping those paws silky soft. There's so many splits in my fingers. Just look at that. No, I don't want to look. I'm good. I'm apologizing in advance too, because without realizing it, this is probably the most stoned I've been for a podcast

since we've been doing this. I just took my micro dose, and I'm about to start drinking and smoking. Well, go ahead. Start catching up. Do you have anything you want to discuss? Because, like, I feel like I'm locked in on this, but I can probably come back to it

if you have something worthy of discussion. I usually snag pictures like if I'm on Twitter and shit and I'm going through stuff and something comes up on my food. I'll usually snag pictures of like stuff that would be interesting to talk about. What did I have? Random picture of my alarm clock.

I still can't get over fucking but it just keeps coming back. What's his name? Harvey Weinstein's pipe, man. He just got found guilty yesterday, I think. His pipe? Yeah, all I've thought about is his pecker for like the last day and a half.

If his face is any indication, you know what? I wonder if there's a correlation between face and dick. Well, I told you about his dick, right? Yeah, isn't it all like weird and fucked up like his face? His balls are in each one of his thighs. Oh, yeah, that's right. Wait, did we discuss if that was a natural thing? Oh no, it was a surgery

That he had to get Okay, I actually did highlight something So FDR once actually walked in on A naked Winston Churchill And when Roosevelt apologized Churchill said I can't do it in his voice But he said the Prime Minister of Great Britain

Has nothing to hide from the President of the United States As he was stepping out of the bath That's the guy I think of having that's right That's got to be what Midwar Yeah. Probably, yeah. Yeah. You're at war and then you have to see Winston Churchill's just pasty, pastey.

Pasty. Even in his overcoats, he does not appear to be a... He probably had a cigar in his mouth, too. He probably did. So I want to do an exercise because I find this very funny. I want you to see when I read you these names off, if I read you the names of these. characters, I'm going to save the star for last, but if I read you the names of these characters, can you tell me what ethnicity this movie was? Okay, you're going to read me the name of the character, and I have to guess their ethnicity.

Okay. No, no, no, I don't, I'm sorry, like I told you, I'm kind of stoned. What are you asking me? I want you to see if you can guess what this movie would be by the names of the actors. Okay. Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorhead, Thomas Gonzalez, John Hoyt, William Conrad, Peter McEnos, where's the guy I need? It sounds like an old Western or something. Yeah. I recognize those names.

You would think, right? And the main star of this is obviously John Wayne. Yeah, I would think he, or was it the weird Genghis Khan movie he made? The Conqueror. Was it a good Genghis Khan movie he did? Genghis Khan. There is one Asian man. Listen here. The name is Genghis Khan. There's a dude named Thomas Gonzalez who played Wang Khan. It's like, in this movie was made, obviously it was made in 1956, but there's only one Asian dude in the entire cast. This is actually kind of like online. This is kind of like a, like a hidden kind of joke thing that he played Genghis Khan, yet made no effort or anything to be anyone but a John. on-win character.

I don't think he could have. Like, I don't, he always played the same voice. I'm the leader of the Mongols, Pilgrim. And I would say old westerns,

I think Clint Eastwood, obviously Clint Eastwood's like spaghetti westerns that he did, he pretty much always played spaghetti westerns are. Do you know why they're called spaghetti westerns?

Because you used to sit down every Friday night and eat a spaghetti dinner and watch a western? No. There was this, um, like,

subsets probably not the right word, but there was this era when all these Western movies were made, they were all paid to go over and make these movies in Italy, and they were paid a shit ton of money. That's what a spaghetti Western is? And because they were, yep, like, fistful of dollars, like all of these really well-known, like, Clint Eastwood movies. Two Mules for Sister Sarah. I don't know if it's like, but he plays the same character throughout, like, the course of a lot of these movies, I think. Pretty much everyone was. But a ton of these were actual, like, Italian finance movies.

So they called them spaghetti western The Italians financed them too? Yeah That's why they went over there Because they would pay these stars A ton of money To come over and film their movies So it wasn't

I guess probably back then They weren't looking to jetset For taking them and going And like why would you film the Wild West in Italy It's right You could fucking drive outside L.A and fucking find something suitable for that No yeah they would hire them

Hire them away Okay last one Did you know Nintendo Did you know Nintendo ran a chain of sex hotels In the 50s Which thinking about a noun Nintendo being a Japanese company, I'm believing, I believe. Of course.

They would have Nintendo's, Nintendo themed sex hotels in Japan. I guess when I read that, I was like, bullshit. I never saw any Nintendo-themed sex hotels show up in the United States. Japan? All my research. Japan's a wild country, man. They do some pretty crazy stuff. They have vending machines for, God,

damn pretty much anything. I watched a I think it was like a 45 minute video not a brag of a did someone just go around and buy different things out of Japanese vending machines? No it was a like a ferry from I want to say it was like Osaka to Okinawa or something like that it was like two days the entire meal system for the whole entire ferry was just out of vending machines you would order the but or you'd order

what you wanted and it was everything from like ramen to like they had lasagna and all this kind of stuff then you would take them over to these microwaves excuse me you'd stick them in the microwave you would press the corresponding button that you would scan it and tell how long or how long yeah and it would just do it exactly for you but they had everything from like milkshakes like sodas everything coming out of these vending machines you can buy women's underwear like used women's underwear and vending machines you of course cigarettes i think you can still do that in america in casinos i'm trying to to think if I, last time I was in Vegas, if I noticed, the air filtration systems in there

are so good. I think you can smoke in there. Oh, they haven't, no, no, no, they have now slots in certain sections, smoking, and it's a smaller section now. Really? And we were at the Mirage, which is not like a newer casino. So I'm guessing in the other ones, like the newer places, like Bellagio and Wayne and all that stuff, they probably don't allow smoking. That's sad to see a basion of the old times falling like that. I don't even, I, I, I, I, spies the smell of cigarettes. I... Fuck, man.

I remember when we did the Vegas episode seeing the images of like the fucking table games in the pools and shit. All the time. And there's casinos all over. I'm sure that's probably just a strip thing. There's casinos you can go to that I'm sure are all smoking.

Well, jumping back to I guess, fold in Japan into this today's topic. This one, I feel like I'm going to go like in a lot of different directions because there's a lot of moral questions. throughout this entire thing.

Yeah, I'm along for the journey today. I did some research, but I want to sit back and just... I'm just going to pick your brain. I'm just going to pick the fuck out of your brain. While educating you as well, along with the 15 to 16 people listening. I wouldn't want it any other way. All right, so what we're talking about today is going to be the Manhattan Project. This was on our list to do eventually, but with...

kind of the release of the new Nolan movie and everything. It seems like a time people are going to be doing research on it. And so why not do that research with us? So J. Robert Oppenheimer himself was a large and pivotal piece of the Manhattan Project. But to boil it down to just him is it's doing a disservice to the whole project as a whole and everyone that contributed to it and what it took to actually make this happen. just reading through this stuff, man, it's, I don't know how many people even know about the Manhattan Project. They know, of course, about the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Do you think there's a large subset of people that know that those two things are connected? I think if you were to ask people what, have you ever, do you know what the Manhattan Project is? I think you would get more than half of people being like, I don't know what that is. Yeah, yeah, I would say that's true. It took place long ago, but I don't, can you think of any, I guess, single, I don't want to call it an invention, but it is kind of. It's the ability to create, you know, this type of destruction. Has there ever been anything that is shaped without being actively used on a regular basis? Have it only been used twice? Against people. We just basically developed it as a threat. Yeah, but do you think there's been anything that's had much? more of an impact on the world than that. Because this is a rare circumstance.

I don't know if it's rare, actually. This goes along with the other things we've discussed. The first people to use these discoveries, it's usually military applications. And then only then does it find its way into other sectors. So this, you know, the splitting of the atom, the discovery of, you know, the discovery of, you know, the power of uranium, plutonium, all that kind of stuff. All of that was then applied to making nuclear power plants, nuclear reactors for submarines. and for carriers and stuff like that. That was all after the fact.

It was primarily researched into because it had potential of releasing energy and being used as a weapon. I'd say the treadmill. The treadmill, and go with me on this, the treadmill may be the one thing that more people have purchased and used for a month and then sold it at a garage sale

or on Craigslist, I'm just waiting for you to tie this back in. Well, we were talking about using the atomic bomb. No, no, what I'm saying is, has anything been invented that is impacted? You're saying that you think that treadmills have impacted the world? I think they have, and then they were just kind of put off to the side, because this whole thing, we've, we've only dropped two atomic bombs on someone with that, like, Sands testing. Yes. We've only dropped two atomic bombs total since 19-40.

Only two have ever been used against a populace at all, against humans. I want to say it may be in the process, but, or I think it happened right after this. Didn't the United Nations outlaw the use of atomic weaponry? It's, it's fucking, it's murky. Well, it's the United Nations. It's like, what are they going to do? Like, as soon as they were used, even people that participated in the Manhattan process, project, high-ranking people, came out and was like, don't fucking use this anymore.

They had instant regret about it. Okay, let's get back to it. Let's go, let's go back to the start. So the Manhattan Project, it was, its goal was to produce the first nuclear weapons. That was its sole goal. It was a joint project between the United Kingdom, Canada, and it was led by the United States. I'm pretty sure it was probably led by the United States, simply because England was in an active war zone with Germany. and to be able to go ahead and have the secrecy and everything like that,

I think it made sense to let the United States who our territory was not involved in the war whatsoever to go ahead and kind of research that. And we had more resources, just at our disposal. Yeah, the Canadians were pretty much focused on maple syrup still probably. They were using that during the war, man. I love. Do you know they fashioned their tanks to actually run on that? Maple syrup?

That sweet northern gold. That's their alternate energy source of maple syrup. Yep. But so the project itself was started in 1939 and it grew to actually include 130,000 people and cost in 39 and during the course of the project, $2 billion. So in equivalence today, $23 billion on just this project. It was the second, and this is kind of weird to even say it was the second costliest single project during World War II. the first actually being the B-29, that super fortress, which, in a roundabout way, ends up dropping the bombs. I think what kind of shocked me about this whole thing is now when we look at stuff, the government never does things quickly. Like, it's everything's a grind, everything's a draw, and I think that that plays into the money aspect. Not if it's benefiting the government.

Yeah, but like even to build like a warship or something like that, it's going to take years. It took a long time to build like... Yeah, but that's just because the time it takes. That's not due to, like, hold up in labor. You can only do so much on a ship at one time. Yeah, I just... And have so many people specialize doing that and, you know, make it quality. Well, it just keeps coming up in this whole thing.

Like, this started August 1939, somewhere around there. Yeah, it was 39. And December 1938, Auto-Fersh confirmed nuclear fission by splitting a uranium, or splitting a chunk of uranium into two isotopes, uranium 238 and 235? I don't know if it was uranium that was done at that point. I think it was nuclear fission, was discovered, like you said.

It was Audeau-Hon, and then his buddy was Fritz Straussman. I want to make sure people are getting their due. In 38, and its theoretical explanation made weaponizing it as a bomb theoretically possible. There's a lot of theoreticals throughout this whole type thing, and then they make them real. They're all going off theoretical.

radicals at this point. Just the fact that it took less than a year for them to be like, okay, we got this, we know what's going on. And then within less than a year, FDR is like, yo, bomb time. Well, what ended up happening was in August 39, there was this letter

called the Einstein. This name always throws me off. It's S-Z-I-L-A-R-D. So it's Sillard, Z-R-D. So it was called the Einstein-Zillard letter. And it basically told the United States of possible development of an extremely powerful bomb by Germany. Because they had been working on two at that time. Germany was aware because of the discovery being made by a German scientist

that this had applications as a weapon. Well, all the German scientists that escaped Germany prior to being locked up, all the Jewish scientists and everything had to have had knowledge of this coming over to America. That's how they got a lot of information. A lot of them getting over to, like, England and stuff and, like, Great Britain. So basically this letter also told them to, buy up stock piles of uranium ore, and then basically to accelerate Enrico Fermi, his name pops up a lot,

his research on nuclear chain reactions. I'm going to keep stopping and kind of focusing on certain things just because they kind of really fascinate me. I completely underestimated when we were able to go ahead and start viewing like atoms and working with atoms and knowing the difference between different protons and electrons and different compositions and how they had more nuclei or less electrons and all that kind of stuff. How at this point when like the automobile was still kind of a relatively new thing, were there people that were able to figure this shit out? I assume microscopes?

Is that how they were able to see this stuff? I don't know. that's what that's what so fucking crazy is we're already at the point when even before world war two where nuclear fission is discovered was it just was by discovered did they mean that they just came up with the concept of it and they were like well everything's made of atoms atoms are all made up of this you would have had to have been able to see the atoms in those things though you would have been able to have to see what happened during the reaction because you would have to know because fission so essentially we're going to discuss during the technical jargon that we attempt to understand about this. Fusion,

vision. Vision is the breaking apart of something. Fusion is when it bonds together. Connecting the other. Both can create the power, the energy of the explosion. And one thing I just want to point this out, shocked that Einstein's still alive at this point.

I thought Einstein was like an 1800s guy. He, I think Einstein was just one of those guys that even from like the age of 35 on, he just had that style. That was his like look. And so he just, like, you thought, it was like Mark Twain. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's true. Mark Twain. It looks like he's like 75 years old. Uh, when was Mark Twain big? It was back? Yeah, I can't. But anytime you ever, like, saw pictures, like, or photos of him, big, bushy mustache, everything, it covered his features. It was always a black and white photo.

And he always looked old as fuck. I think the same thing with Einstein. I think maybe he just developed that look a little earlier in his career. And so that's why he looked like he lasted for fucking ever. Yeah, I just, I thought that he was, like, I thought he was dead before this. I didn't realize how long Einstein lived, like, close to us. Yeah.

Well, and so basically, after getting this letter in February of 1940, the Navy Awards, and this seems really low, but awards $6,000 to Columbia University. And I don't, I didn't

write down and really memorize the names of a lot of these scientists and everything, because quite frankly, there's so fucking many of them. Yeah, dude. That, to under to really grasp who's doing what and everything. I'll know what field they work in for the most part when we discuss certain people. But other than Oppenheimer, and the reason that I think he's known for this is because he was the guy that was,

you know, on the XYZ portion of it. He got those last, he got them to the finish line. Like when you're thinking of a relay race, that last guy crossing that finish line breaking through that tape. That's the guy that you remember. remember. I think part of it too is Oppenheimer, excuse me, was a professor at Cal Berkeley. He was also very outspoken after this whole thing too.

Well, yeah, but his work for Cal Berkeley, when he comes over to the Manhattan Project, he brought so many graduate students that worked underneath him and started to figure it all out. So he wasn't only just the guy. He was the guy that knew the guys that brought the other guys in. Yeah. So he was supervising a lot of the guys that made. this happen. He played a pivotal role not only in his himself and what he did, but then all the other

resources he brought with him. Yeah. And here's something crazy. Out of that two billion dollars that was allocated for this over the course of the whole, the whole Manhattan project, 90% of that, oh, actually, sorry, more than 90% of that funding was actually used to build these factories to produce what they call the fissile materials. Fissel materials, basically that's what we're going to be referring to like anything that can break. It's when it's a material that when its atoms are broken apart or fused, creates the basically the nuclear blast. So a lot of it's either uranium or plutonium.

And there's different variations of uranium. Some don't do this, some do. The dummy version of this, the best way that I can explain it is the way that I figured that it made sense to me. When you break apart uranium, these separate isotopes break apart, there's certain makeups in each one of these. isotopes that is bound to have fission happen, like will produce energy when neutrons are shut at it.

And then there's other kind of dormant ones that'll just absorb it and absorb it and not put off any pressure or power as it releases. It's like only a small tiny, and I'll actually get to that here in a second. So it's sort of like it's not only knowing what the mineral is, but then it's actually knowing what that mineral is made of and being like, oh, we can only use. like a fraction of this. So now we have to separate, we have to separate this one mineral

from itself into its sub-minerals. Well, it's, excuse me, a little bit like making edibles, because if you try to use raw flour to make an edible, it's not going to be nearly as strong. So you have to pre-cook it beforehand to turn THCA into THCB,

and THCB can be digested into your system and get you high. So you can just eat a nug of weed, and it's not going to do anything. I don't know if a more apt analogy has been used in a more appropriate setting to a more appropriate topic. I don't know science. Pot science makes sense to me. That's just, it makes sense to me.

That's a great explanation of what they're trying to do here. So there are, throughout the course of the Manhattan Project, okay, so like I was saying, 90% of the funding was used to build factories to produce this material. Less than 10% was actually on development and production. of these materials. So it took so many resources to actually develop tiny fragments of this usable material. It's insane how much stuff they went through to try to just get these tiny little amounts of these. And it kind of goes to show you also when you're thinking about like even current events, when they're talking about like companies trying to develop uranium, usable uranium.

It makes you think how technologically advanced they would have to be to do that. Like, we did that shit back in, like, the 40s. So these other countries you think would have a much better shot at it nowadays. Yeah, I think it, I think they probably have a decent amount of it. It's just the yield that you get out of it because this is a problem that we ran into. Yes, you have to have enough of it. And most of the places where it's found are controlled by guess who. So kind of, you know, getting back to the, oh, so, sorry.

30 sites across the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. They were all working together to either develop materials, do research, all this kind of stuff. It seems like there were two that really sort of stuck out, though, because there's Los Alamos where this whole thing was developed. And then there was one just outside of Nashville in Tennessee, I believe. Yeah, that was Oak something, Oak Hills or... Could have been Oak Hills. Yeah, it was something like... Oak was in the name. So the one in Tennessee had a big part to play.

and then again because Oppenheimer he was at Los Alamos. That was his place. So because he was there at the very end of it when they actually also tested it, I think that's where... And I believe it's called the Manhattan project because it was headquartered Manhattan?

Yeah, their first offices were actually in Manhattan. So it truly has zero to do with Manhattan besides this is where the idea started. Yeah, and they're not... Again, we've established it, not really clever about about names in a lot of situations. But If you also heard the Manhattan Project during the war, you'd just be like, so what are they doing?

Is it in Manhattan? It might throw someone off the... Yeah, to be clear, there was no nuclear testing done in Manhattan. Correct. I'm not going to lie, though. Some of the stuff that they're building and about to do to develop these materials, they're doing it in like fucking basements of like colleges and shit. Well, that's where a lot of this came from, because like you said, they gave a grant to Columbia to start some of the research. They also gave a grant to Caltech, which Oppenheimer spent some time at Anne Berkeley.

Well, the first artificial nuclear reactor itself was called the Chicago Pile One. It was at the University of Chicago. I don't know if it was physically at the campus, but it was part of their like, this goes to show you also, like, how universities at this time were basically just giant think tanks. Great young minds. Yeah, for development. willing to push progress forward. And then there was also kind of an operation going on.

that was with a Manhattan Project during the whole time called Operation Alsace, and basically Manhattan Project personnel actually served in Europe, and they gathered up like nuclear, if like, you know, let's say the Allies overtook a German lab or something like that, and there were materials that, of course, they're not going to understand. If they were used for like German nuclear research, this project would be sent in to go and gather these nuclear materials documents, and they also were meant to go into round up German scientists.

So it was almost like a pre-operation paperclip, but focused on German nuclear scientists and shit. To get into other things that I don't understand that we're about to talk about, uranium just lives forever. Yeah, I guess the decay rate on it, because once they get the isotope out of, or not the isotope, but once they get the specific type of uranium extracted, I don't believe that does last for. forever. So here's the thing, because I'm going to keep dancing around this. Let me say this part, and then it'll kind of maybe answer a question. So the uranium that, natural uranium, is 99.3% what they call uranium 238. Uranium 238 is, it can't be used. It's completely, it doesn't have that, that atom makeup to make it explosive. It absorbs instead of it. I think

That's what it was, yes. So that means only 0.7% of natural uranium is U-235, which is uranium 235. And only 235 is that fissible. I'm just going to say explosive, because that's what it, explosive material. Yeah, it's just an eruption of power. It's just explosion doesn't do justice when it releases that much energy, I guess. So to help understand how long this can be around, uranium 235's half-life, which means half of its existence before it,

703.8 million years. Yeah. So this stuff, all the spank uranium. Is that 238, you said? Yeah, 235. Oh, okay. So this stuff, if we don't blow it up, that's how long uranium lasts.

So all this spank uranium that we've used over time to process, all of it has to be stored somewhere for seven million years. So wrap your meat helmet around this. That's how much energy. that has, that mineral has, that it takes 700 years to expel all... Huh? 700 million. Sorry, to expend all of the energy.

Half the energy. Or half the energy. Even then, that's how much untapped energy that they're tapping into. For something to last that long. And I mean, it's not doing anything, of course. It's not like running, you know, it's not using its power in an active way. but to still be able to hold, bind those atoms together that have that much energy potential.

Well, to be a danger to human beings. I can see it, like talking about this. I can see why there's people that get obsessed with this. Like, how the fuck does that work? Where do we store it after we've tested on it? How do we access it?

If we can access it, can we power sit like? Well, that's where nuclear power plants came from, but all of their waste has to go somewhere and it's not just spent shit. They just put it in oil drums or whatever they put it in. Oh, at the start, yes.

They dig a hole. and then they shove it in a cave. Yeah. So it's just hanging out. Until the local start growing additional toes and maybe a tail. Then they're like, ooh, do you think we did that? You get fucking hills have ice type situations. So kind of get, hold on, trying to find my spot.

I lost it. Okay. So getting back to the Navy awarding the $6,000 to Columbia University. So most of that was spent purchasing graphite. And I don't know what the chemical properties of graphite. of graphite that make it usable in this situation. I just know that it was very necessary. And they would build

the way one of them that was described, it was a nuclear reactor that they built and the guy was standing next to it. Just the way that they're standing next to it and everything like that, I'm like, that's a fucking nuclear reactor, dude. And you guys are being very casual. It seems like they're being casual about this.

It was a box, a large box. Think like, I think they said 20 feet by something of graphite. And then surrounded by a box of five foot thick concrete to shield from the radiation. And we're going to get into plutonium, and I know that that sounds kind of boring,

but here in a second, and you're going to find out why they needed these reactors to actually turn uranium into plutonium. Flutonium is uranium's slower, younger cousin. Yes. All right, where was I at here? Okay, so the team actually, that they gave the $6,000, they created the first fission reaction in the United States.

So first fission reaction would be basically, think of it like you know when people talk about those particle colliders and they're basically throwing atoms and particles and they're trying to smash them into each other to release the stored up energy on a small scale that's kind of what they're trying to do here

and what fission basically does is they're trying to find a way to shoot an atom into essentially another atom and have parts of those not even the full atom they're trying to shoot the is it the protons Yep. Or it's a neutron. Okay, they're trying to shoot the neutrons into the bundle of protrons and neutrons, the ones that are together.

It's just the nucleus of the cell. Correct. Which are made up of like usually equal parts of each positive and then the neutral. Well, if you can shoot an electron into that, right, or a pro, sorry, man, I'm going to keep up as. If you can shoot a neutron into that. And it, like, think of it, like if you're playing pool, you have the tight rack, you shoot the cue ball in there. It breaks apart. you release that energy within that, the tighter it is,

the bigger the brakes are going to be. If you have loose, if they're loose and everything, you're not going to get things going as far. That's kind of the principle of the whole thing about the fission. So they create the first fission reaction, and then Enrico Fermi that we mentioned, that name was kind of like the Noriega name. Like, I've heard the name Enrico Fermi brought up.

I knew he was a scientist, but didn't know what he did. No idea. Never heard of him. I think I've only heard of him because there was, there's some type of equation that's like supposed to be. be named after him that it was maybe a jeopardy answer or some shit. Well, in Einstein's E equals MC squared plays a huge role in this too. Crazy.

Yeah. Yeah, just everyone knows that, but no one knows that it's what mass times like acceleration and it helps with the critical mass and force, yeah, to actually activate the uranium. So for me at Chicago, he actually achieved the world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction. So think of it in the sense of what we just described trying to shoot this marble or this pool cue into the tight rack. Well, what you want to do at that time is imagine now you had a huge pool table and there were racks all over the pool table. And you were trying to shoot when you hit the ball initially to break your rack, you were trying to shoot these balls out and hit all these other racks to cause the same reaction happening. That would be the chain reaction.

Chain reactions are going to, of course, all that energy. It's not just one expanding it. If you can get enough of a chain reaction, that's where you get the power of the bomb, the splitting of the atoms. Well, and that's why 235 was such a big deal, was because it reacted the strongest out of any of the other separated isotopes that they had. And I think that's sort of where we'll get to plutonium. but the yield was so little. Like you said, it was what, 99% 239? Sorry, 99.3%, 238.

0.7% 235. 235 being the explosive one. So for every 100% you're getting 0.7% 235 usable material for this reaction, for this, what will essentially become a bomb. you're getting 0.7% yield out of every single time that you do this. So, excuse me, to have enough to be able to support a chain reaction, they're starting to use up the material more and more.

Wait till we get what the efficiency percentage was of these things going off. It's going to blow your fucking mind. Like a bomb? Huh? Like a bomb? Like a fucking bomb. So research is being done constantly throughout all these different sites, throughout the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In 41 at UC Berkeley,

scientists actually discovered Element 94, which is plutonium, and it's through their research with uranium, that they find this. And then in October 41, FDR approves the atomic program and puts the Army in charge. So up until this point, it's all been research of can we do this? Like, can we even develop the material necessary to do this? So there's not, that's the Manhattan in project's job is to develop essentially the materials necessary to create the atom bomb. So the army gets put in charge instead of the Navy because apparently the Army up to this point had more experience with these large like like wide spanning projects. The Navy. What's the Navy going to do in New Mexico?

Yeah. Well, I mean, there were other places. Yeah, but yeah. Well, and you know the Army probably being the longer standing and having the larger force. Oh, yeah. They probably had a little bit more say in it, I would imagine. Probably had more scientists in the Army than in the Navy. Yeah, Dwight over there being like, give it to us.

Yeah, he was. Boots on the ground. And then around May 42, Oppenheimer is actually approached to take over research into fast neutron calculation, which is a fancy way of saying, calculating the critical mass in detonation. So basically his job was to find out what it would take as part of a bomb to, release this energy that they've provided the container for

the uranium. Like find a way to detonate this and make the biggest boom possible. So you said that was May 42. 42. From 38 is when we confirmed nuclear fission to 1942 is when

we're trying to create it in mass. So in four years we've come that far to make a bomb. Not to like try to power a city at first or to see what we can do at it to make a ball. But we're a war man. We're just and here's the thing these

a lot of these guys fall back on when they've provided information or testimonies or you know, whatever is that throughout this whole time. This is that moral quandary that we talk about sometimes where if your life's ambition, your

life's goal is within reach and someone's like we're going to give you all the money and funding you need to do this. And you know I think we did this during the Von Braun one. It was this question. You're willing to put aside or sacrifice your right or wrong, and you're willing to skew that a little bit more because you're getting to create your passion

and chase your passion to find out if your lifelong work and theory can be applied in a practical way. Also, like Operation Paperclip, I think it was like our eighth episode or something like that, we run into looking the other way, as we did with the Nazi scientists to get us to the moon. We just went ahead and looked the other way as communism is a fight that America has waged a full-on war at this point against. Oppenheimer was a part of the American Communist Party. Let's, yeah, let's go, since this is kind of the first introduction of Oppenheimer coming into this project, which even says something, too, about how.

make of an impact he had to have had. He came in in 42 and then runs with it. So kind of going back on, on, uh, Jay Robert, what was the Jay? I don't know. Julian, Julius. Actually, the thing might have been Julian. Oh, that would have been a good guess. Oh, I'm not even going to check. We're going to go with that. Yeah, Julia's. So he was born in April 22nd, 1904. Um, he was born in New York City and he attended U.C. Berkeley and he went to California Institute of Technology for his doctorate in theoretical physics. Yeah, the man's smarter than all ever think to be. Here's the thing I found actually kind of the most interesting about him is how many different like disciplines that weren't related to science that he was so interested in. He was like

this weird I don't know I'm looking forward I'm looking forward to the movie because it'll be interesting to see how they display him as a person because it's going to be you know it's of course about the Manhattan Project

but it's going to be about him but he was someone who really kind of like he was such a master of this you know this feel that he was in but he also was very it's not religious I don't think but he had like a a really big interest in like Indian

what would you call it like like Hinduism. Like Hinduism, yeah. It was, I think, kind of his religion of choice, which is kind of an interesting choice for an American. I think he was first generation, American, to make that choice. I think his dad is Italian.

They may have come from Italy. Don't quote me on that. But Hinduism seems like an odd religious choice. It's a great religious choice. I'm not shitting on Hinduism, but it's an odd religious choice for a first-generation American from potentially Italy to come to. Is Oppenheimer? Now you have me looking. Now I've got to find out. Oppenheimer doesn't seem like an Italian name. Sorry about that. His parents were, oh, his dad, mom was a painter. His dad, Julius Oppenheimer are a wealthy textile. I love when they say textiles, because it can just be so fucking broad. It sounds like such an old time. He may have made t-shirts. He may have made flags.

Yes. He was actually born in Prussia, Germany. Okay, so he was... He was German. Yeah. Interesting. Oh, and his dad came to the United States as a teenager. I wonder if he had an axe to grind with the H-Man.

Maybe that helps spur him into it a little bit. Not going to lie to you. That's something that, of course, would have to be on your mind. Like, I'm a German descent. We're possibly going to be using this against Germany. I hate what he's done to our country. Yeah, maybe something like that. but I mean even from a young age

he was he was basically what you would consider like a genius he's your he's a classic dogy houseer except instead of in the medical field he's studying theoretical physics willing to bet he probably didn't have a lick of social skills but he was extremely smart yeah so he basically attended you know all the best schools because his family was wealthy he was a member of this weird like ethical culture society or something like that

he was really interested in English and French literature loved mineralogy mineralology which of course I'm sure was useful when he was trying to determine these fucking explosives these minerals he completed like third and fourth grade

in one year skipped half of eighth grade during his final year he actually started getting interested in chemistry entered Harvard one year after he graduated at 18 he actually got like, what did the fuck, he suffered an attack of colitis? What's colitis?

No, uh, tuberculosis. Oh, it's a colitis. Is, is colitis tuberculosis? Uh, that's what, I know he got tuberculosis because that's why he ended up going to Arizona at first because of the, uh, Doc Holliday thing, right? Yeah. That's why Doc Holliday went to tombstone. But he was just, like, what do you say, Wundekin?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, uh, a prodigy, almost. He, this is how smart he was. Savant, maybe. Yes, this is how smart he was. So when you went to Harvard, even though you had like a major, and Oppenheimer wanted a major in chemistry, Harvard had this required science student thing

that they had to study history, literature, philosophy, or mathematics. So they had to basically take like basic core classes. So what he did was he compensated by taking six courses each term and then was admitted to the undergraduate Honor Society. And then in his first year, basically admitted to the graduate study or standing in physics on the basis of an independent study, which basically means that he was like, independent study, fuck you, I can dump all my

basic classes. That's how fucking good he is. In the first year, they were like, sorry, we were wrong. We shouldn't have made you take these bullshit classes. Carry on, please. And then he got attracted to experimental physics by a course on thermodynamics that was taught by this guy named Percy Bridgman. Did Bridgman come in, at some point, I think he may have come into play during a Manhattan Project. There's, like I said, there's so many fucking guys, but, oh, he did graduate Harvard, summa cum laude in

three years. Then move to Europe. Summa cum laude is number one or number two? Summa cum laude is Magnum cum laude is first. I think Magnum's first, so he was second. Um, let's see. Summa is

top one to two, three percent, and then Magnum. Magna is I think Suma is the best. Oh, okay. Yeah. And then Magnus second, and then cum laude is third. Hey, learn something new all the time, right?

Yeah. So then he's like, you know what? I'm still a young man. I'm like 21. I'm graduated already. I'm going to head to Europe. But instead of having fun in Europe, he goes there and he was accepted to this place called Christ's College in Cambridge.

No, that's his fun. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, that's his vacation. He's like, I'm going to go learn elsewhere. I'm going to go on vacation to go to school. And basically he had some connections because he was so good at Harvard. He ended up studying at Cambridge for a while. And then I think he ended up, I'm trying to think when he came back.

Oh, 26, he left Cambridge for the University of Gartengen under Max Bourne. Now, Gatenjin is a German school. And again, this is 26, though. So we're not at war. Between wars. Yeah. So this is actually when he made friends. with all of these guys.

Werner Heisenberg, where call up to Breaking Bad, it's where Heisenberg, or what's his fucking name in that? Walter White gets He gets Heisenberg from. Wolfgang Pauly, and that's where he meets Enrico Fermi. And he was known for being too enthusiastic in discussion,

sometimes taking to the point of taking over seminar sessions. Zero social skills. I think he was just this person that when he was in his element, he could just, that's when he didn't have to, feel awkward. He knew what he was talking about. And so he got his doctorate of philosophy degree in 27 at age 23. I don't know if doctorate of philosophy, do you think that actually is like philosophy or a science applied thing too? No, it's philosophy. Okay. Just seems kind of weird for him to go

to that. I guess he already had the science discipline that he wanted. He probably had a focus within, but it was just basically philosophy. Do you think that's what led to just his his confliction his confliction with it and after he did it like his initial feeling when he saw the test

was like dread yeah he he recites a I think it's like a Hindu from the baghagha shit I pronounced it correctly before bagheda it was the when the Hindu god Ghanish

takes like its true form I'll get the quote when we actually get to the point of the Trinity test and everything because it's when you say it, like when you read it, the way that the words are structured makes it seem even kind of more despairing than it would be. Oh, absolutely. The destroyer, yeah.

Yeah. So he ends up coming back to the United States, goes back to the California Institute of Technology, and that's where he's kind of hanging out and everything up until I'm sure he did some other stuff. He was teaching at Berkeley when he got the call. Oh, and a couple schools were even actually fighting over him. Like one school wanted him half the year and the other school wanted him half the year. And so he was doing kind of like a switch thing. He was John Nash.

He was a beautiful mind. Kind of like you were saying, he did develop this loyal following of like younger geniuses that were all interested in the same field he was in. And that's who he got to brought, you know, bring on to Los Alamos for this project, the tail end of this project. He is an amazing man. I just, I keep thinking about the movie, too, and how they're going to portray him as far as, like, socially and all that. Because, like, he just said, John Nash, Russell Crow, and Beautiful Mind, he was portrayed, and I don't know if it was, like, beforehand, because obviously he was a schizophrenic. Wow, that was tough. I saw it in my brain, and I couldn't get it out.

But his character was such that he was socially awkward and just having to be. a real hard time in social settings. I don't necessarily think that was so much the schizophrenia. I think that when you just become so smart, it's like watching Bill Gates do an interview. Bill Gates is so fucking smart that he has such tough social skills.

But Oppenheimer's amassed this following of kids that want to learn from him. It's like a, I look at it like an arm wrestler. Like you have this one thing that you're so strong at. So it almost is like it's disproportionately strong to everything. else. And because that's the thing that you enjoy

and that you're good at, you never work out the other muscles. They're all useless. You have to go talk to somebody and you're just like, I can talk to your numbers. Yeah. Do you talk numbers? It would be, that's kind of the only way, it's like speaking a different language almost. You have to

make sure that this person is fluent so you can talk amongst your peers in the way that you want to. Well, and the thing too, and this kind of is a testament to how brilliant Oppenheimer was, is that he had, again, he was part of the American Communist Party. And I think his view on communism, again, this is a word that when people hear, because it is synonymous essentially with, you know, Russia and China and everything like that, it's, yes, it's, you know,

communism is kind of like saying, it's almost saying like a type of religion, but then there's offshoot to that religion. You get to pick and choose. And so their version of communism isn't technically what communism would happen. Like, I don't know. Communism is the reason that we have labor part or, we have communism in this country, or like it's almost like, is it more socialism?

It's more socialism, but all of our, trades, what's the fucking word? Unions. All of our unions came from communism. Yeah. Like that's,

they straight up. Yeah, they're workers unions. Yeah. So a workers union is something that is celebrated in this country, but also forgotten that Communism was the root of unions being formed to protect workers. And I think that's what his positive outlook on it was.

And I actually believe I did read that that's why he was actually a member of that party. Well, I think he ended up leaving, but he was still donating like $1,000 a year to their fund. His brother married a communist lady and also became a communist. He was involved with the communist woman. And I think something happened. his wife, the one that he ends up, or the one that he ended up marrying, Catherine, I think her last name was puning, she was a former communist as well. Yeah. So he's synonymous with this party at this point to the point of when they bring him on to the Manhattan Project, they have to fudge his security

briefing to try to get him clearance. So it was kind of that. And you got to imagine at this time, like this is, you know, FDR, that kind of thing. The chiefs of staff, of course, they're all going to be more conservative. That's just the way that it was at this time. So Oppenheimer did have some kind of left-leaning ideologies, but basically the people that were in charge that knew Oppenheimer, that were the ones in charge of picking out these people for these roles, were basically like, no, I understand how this comes across.

But this guy is so, this guy is, we can't do this without this guy. That's how crucially he is. And so they finally relent in, they were like, fine. So he was put in charge of Los Alamos. Um, when he gets put in charge, this now has become kind of like we discussed. It's become a weapons project. It was always a weapons project, but it was almost from the first part, it was almost a materials manufacturing project. And now it's become, now we know we can make the materials.

Let's find out how we can make them into a weapon. First, they had to have enough of the materials, though, for plutonium and uranium to actually use for the weapons. So being that uranium was the, the, you know, key, there were four known deposits in the world at this time. It was one in Colorado, Northern Canada, a place in Czechoslovakia, and a place in the Belgian Congo. Three of them, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, were under Allied control. When you say Belgian Congo, you mean the Congo being run by Belgium? Yeah, there was...

So Africa? Yeah. Have you ever... Do you ever watch Tarzan? The newer Tarzan? it's not a good movie. The closest I got was Georgia the jungle. Anyway, actually back in the early 1900s

and obviously up until this point it was a lot of colonialism of course in Africa everything but the Congo was actually Belgium actually had a huge stake because of like mining operations which explains you know the where they found uranium and stuff so through this

through some like negotiating and everything and it sounds kind of weird because you would think Belgian Congo Belgium was part of Germany at that point had been like why would they would they help us, but apparently like 30 money talks. All the time. Yes.

So basically the owner of this mining company, I don't know if he was technically Belgium or just had the mining contract. 30% of his company was owned by British holdings. So they kind of stepped in to take the negotiation. And we were able to get 1100, oh, sorry, 1,100 tons of, and again, this isn't the refined uranium. This is uranium ore. Basically, think of it this way.

This is crude oil that we're getting. And it has to be refined. So we got 1,100 tons from the Congo, 100 tons from Canada. Remember, there's 2,000 pounds and a ton. They got some from Colorado eventually. And then I want to say, yeah, they couldn't get any. Oh, and then Canada, the place in Canada, the government of Canada owned some of it. And they just kept buying up all the stock as they could.

So then they owned it and they could use all the minerals from there. So essentially they're buying coca leaves and they're sending the coca leaves to America to turn it into cocaine. Yes, sir. So there's different... Again, drug science. So there's different ways of the extraction for uranium. And the ways that they try this, this is, I'm going to get kind of boring for a second, but just the research it took to do this needs to be said. So basically they would take the unrefined uranium and they tried different extraction methods or separation methods. Once they were able to get it just down to the more pure uranium, they had to separate that 0.7% out. the explosive aspect of it.

So they tried centerfuges, the things that you see in like a hospital that spins the blood. Spin around, yeah. These things were fucking huge. Oh, it would have to be. It's like the gravitron at the fair. Yeah, or like Roundup.

Kind of. Yeah. So, but the problem they have with this is in order to get these, you know, fast enough to separate this, they couldn't build them to like withstand the materials that they could steal and all that kind of stuff. They couldn't build them to withstand. stand the force. They were able to get very little out of this process.

They tried electromagnets, basically bouncing the atoms against different magnetic fields, and they had to try to tune it to bounce off certain atoms. Like crazy fucking brilliant stuff. They tried using different gases. They call it gaseous gaseous separation, and then also

like thermal separation. So they, different labs all over. And think of this way. If you guys just Google, look up Manhattan Project and go to like images. it'll show you all these different places built throughout the United States. These factories are fucking huge, all with the same goal of just doing this. So between these different methods, by July of 45, they had 110 pounds of usable uranium.

It was enriched to 89%, which basically 100% would be purely enriched uranium. And it had to, like, think of like... 235. Yes. Well, that's what they had. It was... They broke it down from... They had 110 pounds of uranium.

uranium 235 and it was 87% enriched. So basically think of it like, I guess the best way, think of it like 89 octane if you had 100 was the top. Yeah, or just in a vape pan. Yeah, there you go. Again, I love where your head's at. The fact that when you were explaining all that stuff, it just made me think because heat and pressure is how you make rosin when you squeeze the pure THC out of a nug,

separating it by gases they used to separate to make the vape pens that we all know and love they used to use butane and they would force butane through the marijuana which would extract the oil

it's all like the same shit we've just used it in a much better way one just you know makes you feel really good the other kills completely melts your body and turns you to dust yeah you don't even find the dust

that they price yeah so 110 pounds of this it's delivered to Oppenheimer Los Alamos. All 110 pounds were used in Little Boy. So Little Boy, jumping forward a little bit, is the name of the first bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. And once we get through a little bit further after the Trinity test, I'll explain the different types. Weirdly enough, two different types of bombs were developed and dropped on, one dropped on Hiroshima, the other dropped on Nagasaki. nuclear reactors were being built for the production of plutonium at this point as well. So what they would do is,

you know how I was describing that reactor graphite wrapped in concrete? They would take these uranium slugs, basically think of like a cylinder and everything, like a core sample or something it looked like, and they would force these uranium slugs into the nuclear reactor

and through some process. Yeah, like a dummy cannon round, basically. Yeah, yeah. And then through, I'm not even going to discuss, the process because quite frankly it's too smart for my brain. But it would, through that process, it would create small amounts of plutonium.

So, by February 5th of 45, 80 grams of plutonium was delivered to Los Alamos. 80 grams is 0.17 pounds. Well, I think that was the deal was they realized how tough it was to get uranium 235, so then they looked to plutonium to see if it would be a better yield and what they got was a shittier yield.

Yeah. Los Alamo at this time too. Just kind of getting back to the speed of how all this came about. Los Alamos in 1943 had around 300 people. And that was scientists and all that. This became a secret city almost because by 1945, it had over 6,000 people living there. So in two years, they built barracks.

They built living spaces. and this place, the Oak, I think Oak Ridge maybe, in Tennessee. Tennessee, they were both, like they had one PO box for everybody that lived there to deliver the mail to because they weren't assigned addresses because they wanted to keep these cities so secret for the American public. Yeah, they were saying if you were a child and they had instances of children being born because this was happening over such a long period of time in Los Alamos because it was so secretive on your birth certificate was just a PO box. Really? Yeah. I know they said that anybody in Los Alamos over the age of 12 had to wear an ID badge,

because they were, which sounds like security was top security. That's why the guy that quit and why Oppenheimer was hired, that guy actually quit because he didn't think security was tight enough. He was right. Oh, no, and they actually found out after this that there was, can I say penetration? Tons. The project was just penetrated. by Soviet nuclear spies.

So, I'm not saying Los Alamos itself was. It was. It was, but I'm not saying all of it was at Los Alamos. No. At different levels, you got to understand, when you have 130,000 people as part of this project, you might have some infiltrators at different levels of this thing. This is wildly high, though. Yeah.

The amounts of spies that got in here, apparently security for this whole project was very tight, but when you were smart, it was very loose. Mm-hmm. And I don't know. There's a sort of conspiracy that Oppenheimer asked for people that he knew that were Soviet spies. I don't believe it. No, they had to have been, of course, he's not going to be able to bring. You just said, like, how many were there?

6,000? Yeah. For the end. Those are going to be people bringing in to do other, like, laborist stuff. Well, in Los Alamos is where these bombs were built. It was where the Trinity test, which is coming up, was conducted. So there were two different. I'm going to get boring on you here for a second.

but it's cool how they built these things. So the two types of bombs they decided to go with, one was called a gun type. The other was implosion type. So easiest way to explain it, the gun type, it's pretty self-explanatory. The bomb would be a little bit longer, like a cylinder. At one end, near the tail,

you would basically have a... First, you would mold the uranium into a ball. Okay? Now imagine you were to take an ice cream scoop and you were to scoop out, except in the, sorry, instead of a round, it would be like a cone that you're removing out. It's a hollow point bullet. Kind of, but it's pointed.

Hollow point cannon, I guess, yeah. So what you do is at the very end of that bomb that nose, you position that ball of uranium with the empty portion pointing toward the back of it, perfectly lined up. At the very back of it, you have an explosive device. It was probably T&T that was being used back then. I think it was. And on the end of that, T&T would be the point that you just remove from the uranium. Like a bullet, like you said. That explosive device would force that uranium to shoot down the, basically, the barrel of the gun.

And it would impact into the uranium. It's basically a uranium penis going into uranium vagina. I'm thinking of the action right now. That's what it was. So it would go in with such force. that basically the force it would go in would smash all of the atoms, throwing all of the neutrons. Neutrons around, colliding with the nucleuses, breaking them apart and causing the chain reaction.

So these chain reactions are so powerful that with the little boy, the one that was dropped first, it exploded with 1.5% efficiency. only 1.5% of the material that was fissioned, only 1.5% sorry, only 1.5 of the material was able to be fissioned before what was containing the bomb separated everything. So basically, the casing itself could only hold together so long as 1.5% of this material basically detonated and you still got the destruction over her.

Hiroshima. Well, and I think they said that it exploded somewhere around 1,400 feet away from the ground. Yeah, they found that if they did an airburst, which I was thinking about it from just a scientific standpoint, not a humanity standpoint, when you, like, have you ever seen someone like dive out of the way of a grenade? Yeah. Okay. The best thing they say you can do is either is get, correct, is get flat on the ground. Because when it explodes, all of the force is going to be trying to go in an angle slightly upward. You're going to get stuff coming to the side, but it's less likely. More stuff is going to be going up. Well, if you detonated above the ground, that explosion is all traveling down.

And as the force hits the ground, it travels outward. It travels outward. And then that's where you get the mushroom cloud is the reverberation of the energy being fired into the ground, and then coming back up and then mushrooming out. Yes. And that's why you see the shockwaves, like, slightly going up as it's going up into the atmosphere. So 1.5 percent, think of punching someone, and trying to punch with 1.5%.

Like, that's what I'm trying to describe. If you have a hundred, punch something 100%, that's what it was capable of. Now, punch one point, and then that's, that's the damage it caused. But the damage it caused was just catastrophic. Well, and if they made, supposing that this was how it worked logically,

if they made that bomb three times thicker, would it have been three times the amount of, uranium going off before it separated, so would that make it three times the amount of damage? I don't know with a calculation, but I mean, I'm sure there's something to that. Because at this point, we all have, not we all have, but America has nuclear bombs. There's many countries, I think, that have nuclear production. We had to have been able to encapsulate that better to get better than 1.5% of the spent uranium. Oh, they did so many tests after.

Remember when you see footage of all the tests that happened, like, out in the ocean on the tropical islands. That was all them continuing to do testing to find out if they could make them bigger. Those blasts were much larger that you've seen those footage when they do the underwater dimensions are much more powerful than the stuff they used.

They're basically just using the new stuff that they had the material to make. And with Fat Man, so the shape of Little Boy almost looks like you would think of almost like a traditional bomb, kind of more cylinder longer. Fat man basically just looked like they took the tip of little boy and just smushed it back and it all just expanded like you almost inflated it just a chode yes and the reason the fat man was designed like that is it was an implosion

type this is the other type they developed to los alamos so think of it an implosion type this way you would take that circle of um uranium you wouldn't take anything out of it you would then take that and you would encase that in basically a container with explosives gunpowder or yeah t and t whatever they were using at that time. And basically what you would do is by causing that explosion, you would be forcing everything inward to fission and create that energy

and then contain it. And then it would release outward once it built up enough. It was their other form of detonation. Well, so the little boy was what they consider a kiloton is basically how many thousand tons of dynamite it would be. So little boy.

Yeah. So little boy was 20 kilotons So it was the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT Or is it pounds 20,000 tons Seems like it would make more sense Because 20,000 pounds is just 10 tons Let's see

Equal equivalent to 21,000 tons of TNT So 20,000 tons of TNT The fat man was 23 kilotons Now check this out I don't know I think they found the implosion type work better during this, 17% efficiency. I'm going to get back to the information on the blasts here in a second because I feel like

if we start talking about that, we're just going to bypass Trinity. And I feel like that's a really important thing to touch on because that's essentially when they didn't know what was going to happen. The easiest way I would say to tell the differences between the two bombs, little boy was shooting a pistol at a... A dick into a vagina. Yeah. shoot an epistle into like a

gallon of gas. Yeah. Whereas a fat man was literally like a fireworks surrounding all of the Yeah, you ever see those YouTube videos of those fucking rednecks blown up trinite? Yeah, basically Tenerite. Tenerite in a big fucking refrigerator, yeah. That's basically what it was. So

through the joint work of all the scientists, Los Alamos, it actually resulted in the world's first nuclear explosion. It actually took place, this place called Alamagordo, New Mexico, on July 16th, 1945. And Oppenheimer was the one that gave it the nickname or code name Trinity and said that it was from like John Don's Holy Sonnets or something like that. So again, he's mixing in philosophy in that kind of stuff with his research. Trinity, Father, Son, Holy Ghost.

It has a religious meaning to it. And I want to say that the area that they tested it in had something, it was like Trinity Ranch or something like that. they may attestalone. I don't know if he ended up naming his ranch that. No, his ranch was named the hot dog ranch. It was named Caliente or Perro Caliente. That's right.

That's right. So, yeah, he had a pretty good lay of New Mexico. And I think when they were choosing Los Alamos, there were a couple different spots that they showed him. And he just said, no, people are going to feel too claustrophobic in between these mountain ranges. He actually found Los Alamos Plateau. Or it was a... That's right. Not a plateau.

It was something so... Oh, Salsa. Like Mesa or Salt Flat or something. Yeah. So he knew of this place before, and there was actually a school named Los Alamos there, and that's where they adapted. They took over the school and never, that's right. Okay. So just a little information on the test.

So basically what they did is, if you've ever seen any type of like footage of nuclear bombs going on for anything, sometimes you'll see like the guys kind of in the bunkers through the glass with the goggles on and everything like that, all the armor guys. that was basically what happened here. So I don't know the distance between the blast and when people were watching and everything, but... It happened at 4 a.m., so it was dark. Yeah, so they had, basically, they didn't want to do just detonating on the ground

because that's what I think they figured that it would be more damaging. They wanted to try to recreate something. So they took it up in like a hundred foot tower, and I think they dropped it a little bit, and then when it got a few feet down, it exploded. So they, you know, they're in a hundred foot tower, interviews and stuff like that have come out with like the scientists that

watch it and everything they're like what did you think was going to happen and like we didn't really know honestly they're like we had general ideas of what would occur about the energy output that it could have and all that kind of stuff but we didn't really kind of know what we'd be looking at there were some fears apparently that somehow the chain reaction and the heat and temperature would set the atmosphere on fire yeah no no no there was a small percentage belief that this test would result in the desolation of mankind. Yeah, it would set the atmosphere and destroy the ozone and we'd be bombarded with just radiation and kill everyone. So we made a smart choice with a small percentage.

We gambled. That's more than a gamble. Even 0.1% of ruining the humanity. Yeah, that's a big gamble. Yeah. So after the explosion, which everyone's probably familiar with, they said basically Oppenheimer was kind of reflecting on it and he said if the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky

that would be like the splendor of the mighty one so that's what the explosion made him feel they said there when it went off there was just a bright blinding light of course they were all wearing eye protection they knew that that would probably be an aspect of it um but yeah they at that point he kind of went back and also uh noted something else from yeah the bag of agita and it translated into to I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. And you can read that two ways.

If you were reading that, and I think if like a war, you know, a general had said that in the heat of battle, that would be like, I'm unbeatable. Like it would be in a positive way, like a rageful way. And the way he said it was basically that he kind of realized what he had unleashed. He unleashed destruction on a scale that couldn't have been comprehended. No. He literally was able, by saying the destroyer of worlds, I mean, that's literally him just understanding that he has helped create something that will just wipe out entire sections of the world. It's like, it's not even, it's not even that he's doing it. And he's like, oh, this is going to have like, this could have applications for the military to use.

it was created for that sole purpose. That was the sole purpose at that point. That's a heavy crown to wear. I don't know. I give this dude a lot of credit for being able to live with his abilities that he created this. One of the guys that was kind of in charge of it

actually ended up hanging himself. Allegedly. Outside a 16-story window of a hotel, he hung himself, and then the sash he was using broke and he fell to his death. Seems kind of odd that you would hang yourself outside the window. Not to mention on the window sill. There were scratch marks.

Scratch marks are like signs of a struggle. Which they were like, well, he was probably just kicking around when he was strangling himself before the sash broke or whatever it was. I don't think so. All right. Before we actually go into the applications and use of these weapons and kind of what the end result is on that. I got to make a P.

Okay. All right. All right. Well, we take a break from class and take care of some business. You can also take care of some business. If you don't follow us on Instagram or Twitter already, our Instagram handle is historically high pod. That's historically high POD.

And our Twitter is historically high. That's historically H.I. All right. And back to our show. All right. Okay. So getting to the actual result of all of this. prior to actually utilizing

a little boy and fat man there was a letter sent to I guess the Japanese high command whatever you consider and it was called the Pottsum Declaration and basically it was asking for their

I believe it was an unconditional surrender and basically kind of the and gist of the letter was that like if you don't surrender now we're going to and it didn't describe what they're going to use it says we're going to you know at this point also Germany is no longer a threat Japan is still just holding out that was sort of kind of another interesting thing that

I found in this whole research that I did was they were almost disappointed that Germany had surrendered because they wanted to use it after they had developed it so much that since Germany had surrendered, they had to use it somewhere. And it was almost like the brainchild was to finish off Japan so they didn't, so we didn't have to commit more troops.

Like, yeah, we can test these where people are going to be paying attention. But if we don't use these things, people aren't really going to know what they can do. Yeah, it was like they were looking for a reason. That sounds horrible as I say it out loud. But that's got to, it had to have been part of the rationale. That's part of where I fall on the horrible of this. This is it's, I don't know. I've come to kind of, when you and I talked about it,

this was sort of a necessary evil. But it also feels like this was something that maybe we pushed a little too hard. Yeah, I mean, that Potsdam Declaration that was sent over, I think, on the 26th of July of 45. And basically, kind of what I was getting at, the alternative to them not surrendering, rendering was basically prompt and utter destruction. And they just ignored it. So. I believe too, wasn't there a letter sent to,

because we're out of FDR at this point, we're into Eisenhower? No, not Eisenhower. Hoover, wasn't it? God damn. Who is it? Who is the next president up? That's what I'm trying to figure out.

Who took it? Was it his V. It was his VP, right? Truman. That, that's right. Yeah. So we've crossed into a, a second presidency where there's

checks and balances to say, hey, do we want to do this? Do we not want to do this? Truman was for it obviously. And I don't know if it was between little boy and fat man or if it was pre little boy, but there was a letter sent to Truman from the scientists, urging him not to use the atomic bomb because of the massive destruction. But in the way to Truman, they

classified it or something like that to sweep it under the rug. So Truman, and never ended up seeing the actual letter that was sent from the scientists. Hmm. I mean, that would make sense. It just seems so crazy that the people that developed it weren't allowed a voice in the government to say, Hey, this is a pretty serious deal. As soon as those fucking generals saw that explosion, they were like, good job, guys.

We're going to need a couple more. Don't worry about what we're doing with them. This is where I equivalent it to another movie. This is Jurassic World and Velociraptors. Oh, yeah, when they try to weaponize them. Yeah, and Chris Pratt and his buddy also... Yeah, except the velociraptors. It's like the velociraptors were bred with the intention of being weapons,

and then you're all of a sudden now surprised when they're going to be used as weapons. Yeah, I just, I think that pretty much falls into what this is, though, because they knew once Trinity was dropped that this was going to be used for sure for a bomb. Well, back in 43, the United States, the United Kingdom, signed the Quebec Agreement, and it basically stipulated that if nuclear weapons were a viable option that they couldn't be used against another country without mutual consent.

So I think did we actually we asked them about it? And again, here's the thing too that I think kind of gets lost is really the only two people that were, I think Russia might have been fighting Japan a little bit on their eastern front, but really the two major forces

that had gone against Japan and suffered the losses were the British and the Americans. Moreso the American. Yeah, the British, you know, the British had all their people on, like, in Australia and everything like that. They also lost people like in the, I want to say like the Indian Ocean or something like that to Japanese forces. It would make sense because the Indian Ocean, I think,

is the route that you would go from England to Australia. So they had to have that as a defensible area. Yeah, that's true. So basically, again, after the posthum declaration was ignored, um, um, they decided to kind of put the plan into action. So the little boy bomb, except for the uranium minute, that was ready at the beginning of May 45.

And there were two uranium, 235 components, that hollow sit and, uh, the projectile and then the, the penis in the vagina. I'm just going to keep referencing that. I don't know why I tried to fancy. And basically it was completed on the 15th June and ready to go. So the projectile and eight bomb pre-assemblies, basically partially built bombs without, like, the powder charges and everything. Those were sent to a place in California,

and then those were loaded aboard the USS Indianapolis, which the Indianapolis has a crazy fucking story in itself. Yeah, very much so. So Indianapolis, it's a battleship, it's set sail and arrives on Tinian on the 26th of July. Spoiler alert, four days later after the Indian. Indianapolis is on its way back. It's torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. It sunk.

Really? You didn't know that? Uh-uh. Dude, the USS Indianapolis, we're doing a discussion on this. The USS, eh, USS Indianapolis is one of the craziest fucking stories. After it got torpedoed and it went down, like, almost like 70% of the guys were killed by sharks. It was fucking nuts. Do you remember Jaws?

Yeah. Remember the scene in Jaws where Quint and all of them were dead? down in his boat and they're drinking and talking about stories. And he's like, you were on the Indianapolis. He's like, uh, he's like 700 men went in the water. And he's talking about how the sharks came at night and stuff. Huh. So that, that was actually set.

Can you mention it they would have got torpedoed, you know, on the way there? How things could have been changed. Yeah. So. So, so that was loaded. That was put together and that was loaded on to, I want to say that was loaded onto, onto the Anola Gay.

Yeah, I was just trying to do a little research. I can't figure out why they named it Anola Gay. It was named after a woman. Was it? Yeah, her name was Anola. That's why, that's who's painted on the nose, man. Really? Really?

Yeah, they did that with women all the time, like Betty's and all that kind of stuff. You paint them for girls back home or U.S.O girls that stopped by. That was a big thing. So, Hiroshima was actually, do you say Hiroshima or Hiroshima? Hiroshima. So Hiroshima was the primary target of actually the first one on the 6th of August. And then the alternates were a place called Kukura and then Nagasaki. What's up?

I just saw an old picture of what an oligate looked like. Oh, it was actually named after a dude's mom. Yeah, she's a scary look. Yeah, he was the pilot. So he took off from Tinian. And nobody, again, nobody fucking knows about this. This is the most top secret of the most top fucking secret. That's why the USS Indianapolis took so long for people to get rescued,

because it was on a fucking secret mission. Yeah, there was no heads up to anybody. So it ends up taken off from Tinian, and it's a six-hour flight time to Japan. And it was accompanied by two other B-29s. These are the ones that were the more expensive project than the Manhattan Project during the war. And basically the two other ones,

they carried like instrumentation, film crews. basically people the annulgate it's one job drop the fucking bomb get out the other ones their job was to do

like readings research on the blast that kind of stuff and what they could gather and basically when they arrived over the target

they had clear visibility and this guy named Parsons he was in command of the mission arms the bomb in flight the reason they didn't arm it beforehand

is because they ran into problems on takeoff and crashed they could have had a detonation. Yes, that would have been bad. Because he'd witness four B-29's crash and burn it takeoff. He's like, I'm arming this shit until we're almost at the target.

So another guy, this guy named Morris Jepson, he removes the safety devices 30 minutes before reaching the target area. And then on kind of the night of the 5th and 6th of August, their early warning radar detected the approach of the aircraft. and I don't know if they actually routed anything to stop them. I would imagine that if they picked them up on radar, hmm. They would only have a very small window to be able to do that, though. Because once that bomb has dropped, like we said, it's not just the force hitting the earth,

it's the power and the waves. don't know how in the hell the annulah gay was able to get clear of the drop to be able to not feel the reverberations even that high in the air no it could no the pilot said that it um when it detonated it felt like someone was shooting at the plane because it was jerking oh that's right yeah yeah so they even felt it up there so any sort of defense had they not gotten there on time before the drop they just would have been wiped out i don't think these guys were probably present at the trinity test. So just kind of curious. These pilots.

Yeah, that's what I was just trying to look up. I can't find the name of the ones. Maybe. Maybe not. But I'm just thinking myself, they've never probably seen what one of these things can do and how high it goes. So I mean, they're just going off instructions that they're provided

like, hey, um, little thing. Once you drop that, you're going to want to climb like a motherfucker and just bank the fuck out of this thing. Just get away as, as quickly as possible. Or as soon as you slow way down, and as soon as this thing is out your Bombay doors, just fucking punch it.

And get, I think that would make more sense is to try to get forward. Oh, yeah. And not, yeah. So. Because you're not going to be able to climb nearly fast enough to be able to get out of the force that's blowing straight up. No. But, I mean, they drop this thing.

It explodes. The total radius of destruction was a mile. in a full circle with fires resulting and spreading in a 4.4 square mile area and in this area there were 80,000 people

that were just instantly killed yeah that's a I'm trying to remember what the area was that it completely vaporized all of the buildings but yeah

if you Google Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped it's leveled. I mean, there's no other word for it. It basically, I mean, you can see the squares of the foundations for the buildings. But.

It just vaporized people. The thought of something that's strong enough to just vaporize an entire human being, which I know there's things on a smaller scale, but to just instantly kill 70,000 people. Like, that's a tough, or 80,000 people. It's just a tough thing to try to comprehend. Yeah.

It was around 30% of the population. They were killed by the blast and the result in a firestorm. And another 70,000 were injured. And that's, I'm sure they probably factored in long-term effects because on the second one, which, like I told you, I didn't know, was on a separate day. They started finding that people were developing the sicknesses from the actual radiation that the bomb blast set off. Yeah, it was, they, so you could. After the bomb had gone off, they said that people could come into the area and not develop this, but it was the resultant directly of the radiation from the initial blast itself.

Yeah, when they were able to actually go in and, you know, take a look. Japanese officials actually said that 69% of the buildings were destroyed. Just like, here, look at this. Here's the fucking picture. Look at that. Yeah, it looks like a fucking farmer's still. There's nothingness. Yeah.

Looks like the goddamn desk bowl. but I mean I'm not going to go into detail like just even looking at yeah looking at the images and stuff like that of like the the people that were burned and everything it's putting it all aside from a human standpoint and everything it's it's tough to look at and wildly impressive though oh yeah that's what that's what's really conflicting about it

and here's the other thing too and I think me and you kind of touched based on this when we were texting is there was a lot of different reasons why this was done, but there were a lot of reasons that were never released. And I think the line, and it makes a lot of sense, and it makes sense why this was the thing that was provided as the reason. When they were going over estimates of possible casualties for what an invasion of Japan,

because that's the only way that Japan was going to surrender. We had seen how they had fought over just like the little islands that they had overtaken that weren't even you know their territory and then we saw what started happening when we started getting onto their actual Japanese home islands like Iwojima and stuff like that and saw that they were willing

to just go down to the last man, woman, and child, especially if you invaded their home, you know, the home island there were a tent I'm trying to think of what the operation was called they already started planning for it early, early stages of the of the Pacific campaign they knew that that

was the end result so they had planned for it but because they were also able to reroute all these forces from Europe, they weren't going to be like, hey, guys, go home. They're like, hey, guess what? I know you just got done fighting this war, but there's another one going on way over here, and we're just going to ship your happy asses over there, unless you had enough points, which was a good thing.

If you had enough points and you'd been through enough either campaigns or battles or drops and stuff, you got to return stateside. But they said upwards for the ally casualties in order to invent. and essentially take away the military power of Japan would be close to a million allied casualties. Now, that's not even to say how many Japanese, not only soldiers, but civilians, would also be casualties in that as well.

I don't know what those estimated figures would be. They would have to be more than half. We would have to win. Well, yeah. And I mean, you're trying to take over someone in their home, land. They're going to fight till like, I don't know, that's kind of where the moral quandary of this whole thing ends up coming in for me is with the justification that you could save a million lives just on the allied side and then let's even just equal it out and say a million lives on the Japanese side between soldiers and civilians, things like that. Or, and I don't know how you would even estimate what the projected cat, you would just have to say, well, this is the population of the city. This is what we think it's going to do. So we figure roughly this many people are going to get killed. Is it the concept of you killed a hundred and, it ends up being like a hundred or 110,000 between the two cities to save two million?

About 140,000. Is it, is it that simple? Yeah, 120,000. Is the argument that simple? this is where my human side of the brain kicks in is you can't quantify the amount of damage that's done to the survivors of this whole ordeal because I mean you have 60,000 injured in the second which I'm sure we'll talk about because that was very interesting 70,000 injured in the first

you don't know what's coming out of that. And we didn't study this. Like we just said, when they dropped the Trinity, they thought that it, there was a small chance that it was going to end humanity. Not to mention anybody that would be in the blast radius that would survive. Like, are you going to birth a three-toe child?

What's the outcome? Like, what's the... Well, and the other thing, too, you're also rolling the dice. If you thought that there was a small percentage that it would set the atmosphere on fire, and you're like, okay, that one didn't do it. Yeah. As you continue to use it, you're still rolling that fucking dives.

Every single time. It's like the 99, what is it? Condoms are 98, 98, 99. It's probably less than that, actually, if you think about it. Don't say that. Okay, anyway. Well, what I'm saying is that means that, like, if you go back in your head and you see that, you're like, I've had sex more than a hundred times, which means there's one that, like,

at some point could have possibly gotten through. Yeah, I just, I feel like we didn't do enough research as to what the, long-term effects of this could be. We didn't, they, I guess they figured they didn't have time. There's a reason why we don't hang out in Chernobyl. And Chernobyl was a nuclear leak, and this was a nuclear explosion.

And just the whole thought process of what this could turn into seems like it was very rushed out of the way to be able to drop these bombs. Well, after the Hiroshima bombing, so Truman issues a statement basically announcing the new weapon, he's like, we may be grateful to Providence.

Basically saying that, like, thank God, the German atomic bomb project had failed in the United States and its allies. He's like, we spent $2 billion on the greatest scientific gamble in history and won. And then basically told Japan is like, if you don't, if they do not now accept our terms, because after this they were like, you sure you don't want to surrender? He's like, they may expect a reign of ruin from the air, the likes of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen. and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware.

And basically this was widely broadcast speech and was picked up by Japanese news agencies. Here's the other thing too. And I think this is kind of an important part of what maybe happened with the second bombing. We talked about this on Midway and I think we talked about this on the Pearl Harbor touched on it.

So when things would go right for Japan and the war, they would notify the public about it. When things would go poorly, it would be mum's the word. Or they would spin it. It was kind of like Korea TV. How everything is just rosy and they've won the World Cup, you know, the last fucking 27 years

and they win all the Olympic medals and all that good stuff. They have their own fake news. I think it's everywhere, honestly. I don't think that we report on a lot of the failures of strategic things that are military. No, I don't think we do. But this is something that like, okay, now imagine this just happened on one of the cities in your country. But again, the public is not super aware of this.

Again, state TV are the only people that could probably be covering this. And they're not going to be releasing it to the public. So that could also kind of stand a reason why a lot of these people are probably like, even if they heard this broadcast, they're like, wait, what the fuck does happen? Like, what did they? I didn't hear anything for what they did. I'm just glad that they gave them an ample amount of time between the first bombing and the second bombing to really think about this.

Is it three days? Yeah, yeah, all of three days. 72 hours, I think, is what three days is. We gave them 72 hours to think this whole thing over. Okay, I get that. I'll just, you know what, I'll play devil's advocate just because I think it'll be a good discussion. I don't know how, you know what,

we probably had to have known that the Japanese public was not really aware what was going on. So in that scenario, we're not doing this against them, although we are doing this against them. We're basically, the military knows.

The Japanese command structure knows we just did this. This is us saying like, hey, we're fucking serious. Like, and do you think part of it also was like, they can't have more than one of these, right? like they probably didn't understand how it occurred. Do you think they understand that this was like harnessing the power of the atom or did they just think like

they've somehow figured out how to make dynamite like super powerful or some shit? I would imagine since they were a part of the axis with Germany and Italy that there was some intelligence shared as to what a nuclear weapon was because like we said the Germans did were in development or in some form of theory or thought of this to where I feel like that would have been shared. So they had to have had some idea. But once they saw the destruction, there's no way to be able to go from a theory to seeing it practiced,

in practice, and happen to really understand that that I think is what was going on. Yeah. And so the city in Nagasaki had been one of the largest seaports in southern Japan. And of course, being in South Japan, that would be an area in which we would probably be in. invading. So I mean, if you're going to weaken it up and if it's got a military presence and everything, you'd do that. It was of great wartime importance, basically, because all of its industrial activity. That's also why some of these targets were picked, is they had military

strongholds or like industrial capabilities. There were cities that Truman said were not even negotiable. Kyoto, Tokyo, I think, what, Tokyo actually might have been on the list and then got moved, but I know Kyoto, because that was where the... Jesus Christ. That was what? That was on the list? Tokyo? I don't think Tokyo was what it was back then as what it is now. Kyoto was where like the Imperial Palace and all that kind of stuff was. But do you know what? I assume Tokyo had a much larger population at that point.

Correct. I think I don't know if it was on the list. I don't know. I thought I read Tokyo, but maybe I read it on the list of no-goes. I know Nagasaki was on the list because basically it had been bombed on a small scale like five times prior to that. And they were trying to hit like the docks and ships and everything. What was the significance of Kokora?

So Kokora was basically the preferred target over Nagasaki. And I think it also had like a military presence and everything. So it was a part of their military system. Yeah. And that's, and you know, that's the big thing too is I think that they were picking these targets strategically because they're like, you know, part of you has got to be thinking like, let's make this. You know, we got to try to make it if we're going to use these. we got to try to do as much damage to their war industry as possible as well. Well, because if they don't surrender, which that I don't think was ever a plan,

because after they dropped Fat Boy, after they dropped the second one, there were plans for like seven other atomic bombs to be dropped in the next two months. After that first one, and they wouldn't surrender, I mean, part of you's got to be thinking these people are, you've seen some pretty fucking crazy things out of these people so far. Yeah, oh yeah. These people are willing to just fly their planes. into fucking ships.

True. So at that point, you're like, after the first one, that's got to be a shock to the system being like, they still won't fucking give up. All right, get the fucking kitchen sink ready. We're going to fucking throw it at these guys. So they end up, what was the date that Boxcar took off? August 9th was...

Okay. So August 9th, plane called Boxcar, flown by this guy named Sweeney and his crew, take off from Tinian. and Kokura was the primary target. Nagasaki was the second. So basically the plan was almost identical as the Hiroshima mission.

2B29's flying an hour ahead as weather scouts and then two additional ones for instruments, photography, things like that. Oh, that could also be part of it. When you had that squadron flying and they're all the exact same plane, it's like three card Monty. You don't know which one's carrying an atomic bomb.

Yeah, that's also true. And they also sent, I don't know how, I mean, I could see why you send the planes over to scout for weather, but then aren't you just kind of waking him up and be like, oh shit, there's planes flying over us? And then an hour later, your plane planes over. Anyway, though, so basically what they did, though,

is Sweeney took off with the weapon already armed, but he still had like a snow electrical safety plug, so he's like, fucking, I'm feeling saucy. They ended up, I think one of the planes ended up having to turn back, not theirs. And hold on, let's see. Oh, he made a fuel transfer, something like that, and then he could still fly basically.

They got to Kukura and there was too much cloud cover. Lucky. That's as simple as it is, man. So the same wind gods that were projecting them against the Mongolians back for the samurai episode. They were looking out for the people of Kukura. So they reroute to Nagasaki and end up dropping Fat Man over Nagasaki. Nagasaki was a little bit different as far as like the layout of the land and it actually kind of help contain some of the blast and the casualties and everything because of the hills that were

close it was kind of built within the mountains they blocked a lot of the heat and the shock wave and everything so I think it was how many people ended up dying in Nagasaki? 40,000 40,000 60,000 of them were injured which odd they it seems like the first, well, and I guess like you said, with the mountains maybe taking up some of the blast radius, and it could have been that Nagasaki was built around the mountain, so it was much more spread out, but the fact that there were less people that died and more people injured,

or I guess right about the same as the first one, that's a crazy thought to know that even having a mountain range, whatever, to absorb the shock in there, that there were still that many people that were injured just from the yeah, I don't know. I'm having a hard time trying to grasp. I really think it's almost like

whatever we can fathom, it's much worse. Because we've never been able, aside from watching something on a screen, we've never witnessed anything with that kind of like power or force. If you've never seen like a volcano eruptor, you've never been, like, think of it this way, the most we've been as far as like,

and I would consider this like it's not an active nature but it's so powerful it's almost feels like that right yeah this is like a a controlled earthquake yeah except for all the shock waves are coming yeah volcano blowing up at the same time

yeah like you said after that they expected to have another fat man atomic bomb ready by August 19th three more in September and a further three in October so they were already just fucking lining these things up. And basically until the 9th of August, which that one was going to be ready on the 19th of August, Japan's war cancel still insisted on its four conditions for surrender until the 9th of August.

And then I think finally, like during a meeting, this guy named Suzuki went to like the palace to report on the outcome of like the meeting and basically informed him that this guy, other guy informed him that the emperor had agreed to hold the imperial conference and basically gave a strong indication that the emperor would consent to surrender on the condition that it's called Kokutai which i believe it would be still the recognition of the um japanese system of government like it would allow him to like stay in power it's like an alford plea yeah pretty much like you're going to go ahead and admit that or not admit that you're guilty but admit that there's enough evidence to find you guilty but you still want to maintain that you're not guilty. Yeah, pretty much.

And he and the emperor never got charged with war crimes. Despite being the, despite being the, here's the other thing too is I wonder how much of that he actually, because again, I think, you know, the Japanese. military command probably was calling most of the shots and everything. The emperor wasn't that old, I don't think. Well, and as we sussed out in just a scratch of the service and other Japanese topics that we've done, the emperor

sort of in those times was more of a figurehead. Like a ceremonial almost role. Yeah. Almost, he was almost like their deity. That's what he pretty much was. He was their deity at that point more than their like governmental leader. So on August 12th, he finally, the emperor finally informs the imperial family

is his decision to surrender and like they're another like seven days away from this other bomb being ready and obviously we've already displayed that we're willing to use them two times but basically

they end up surrendering before we're going to use that one and then I think a few weeks later we end up selling the USS Missouri into Tokyo Bay and signing the unconditional's friend of the Japanese on the deck. Just an absolute wild turn of events to happen so quickly.

And that's, like I said... 39 to 45. Yeah, like I said at the beginning, this was a rate of speed that I don't think the government's ever really pushed something. And yes, it was wartime, so it was something that needed to happen in order to... It was a means to an end. But it's just a crazy, fast means to an end at that point. Well, I think it shook up a lot of these scientists that worked on it.

Oh, without a doubt, I know Oppenheimer had a meeting with Eisenhower, I think, at one point. Was it Truman that he said, get that son of a bitch out of here? Yeah. Yeah, because he walked in there and he told them that he felt like he had blood on his hands, and Truman obviously didn't like that. And so after the meeting, he told, like, Oppenheimer's like, CEO, commanding officer, he's like, I don't ever want to see that son of a bitch again. And then when did he end up giving him the Medal of Merit?

That same year. That same year? Yeah. But it all kind of gets tricky because Oppenheimer, he was let in under scrupulous means being a communist. This whole time, our old dickhead friend, Jay Edgar Hoover, that we talked about before, he's collecting a dossier of all the questionable communist ties that Oppenheimer had. he turned it over to, I think it was the not the district

The court of un-American affairs Some shit like that Something that existed back then Yeah it was like a I don't know it was a governmental Group It was a communist watch group probably or something like that Yeah it was like a Congress board or whatever

But he turns over all this evidence to them They bring him into court They bring his brother in they bring his sister-in law in All the communist. Yes, start to tie into these communist beliefs that he had. And Hoover used this to completely suspend his security clearance. He out, his usefulness at that point didn't outweigh what they felt like the headaches that he was causing for him. Because he was very staunch about coming out and saying, hey, we need to make sure that, like, we never get in a situation to use these weapons again.

And he wanted to go ahead and actually make rules against. use of nuclear weapons ever again. Not to mention, we went ahead and pogo sticks off of the atomic bomb into the hydrogen ball. Which they asked him to build, and he's like, no. Yeah, he was very against the, I think it was called the super is what it was, but it was a hydrogen-based bomb that was... That's what you see in those underwater explosions.

That's why those are so fucking powerful. Well, and it's... Well, at the same time, like, do you think he's just looking at this guy going, why? Did you see what the atomic bomb did? Yeah, what scenario do you imagine happening where you need fucking, you can already make a ton of these? I've already showed you. It's not like you're going to forget how to fucking make them.

We had seven more in the works at that point. Like you have seven. Like, isn't that enough? No, I'm not going to help you build something fucking more powerful so you can kill more people the next time someone steps out of line. Like, I can, that's a completely understandable moral decision. well yeah and that was part of the thing that he said was like this is we did an atomic bomb that killed tens of thousands of people a hydrogen bomb's gonna kill millions of people it's it will be the destroyer we didn't even drop them on the places that had the most people that we could have imagine what would happen if you drop one of these on fucking new york or someone someone else succession we had three bombers that all dropped at the same time and then left yeah a mile apart from each other so just yeah not to mention all all that frequency and action that's bouncing around between multiples. Like,

it's incredible that we had such a hunger for the ultimate Trump card that we wanted to just build something even bigger. And then, we wanted to outdo the Soviet Union because we were concerned that they were also developing the same thing. And then what do you do when you both have Trump cards? Well, I'm going to get more Trump cards than you do. Yeah, you just, it's a nuclear buildup that we see play out today. Proliferation is not what it is.

Yeah. It's the loss of escalation is what it is. Well, eventually on the 21st in 53 of December, Oppenheimer security clearance is suspended after old Jay Edgar decides he works for the Soviet Union. Despite the fact that he is like one of the most crucial components in developing it for us first. Yeah, he was working for the Soviet Union. Everyone was fucking working for the Soviet Union, according to Hoover. Well, like they said, there were hundreds of Soviet spies that they ended up rooting out.

They just brought all this information back over to the Soviet Union in order to start their nuclear program. Yeah, which didn't take long. No. And so they caught up rather quickly. And we did branch out from there into starting to use nuclear energy for power plants and things like that to develop it in a more less militaristic way. It still circled back to fucking using it to power aircraft carriers and shit like that. Yeah, it was basically a way that they could not need to use, not be relying on oil or fuel because if that ever ran short, we would need a way to power these things. And it just, it's also wild how it branched off finally. It was like we've talked about so many times we talked about in this episode, it was developed for the military, then it was developed for the public in order to help them.

But the main mean of all this kind of stuff is always the military starts out with that technology. and they used it for some just... Some diabolical shit. Yeah, just crazy. But again, I don't know. Like, was it... I can't make that decision. I wasn't around back then.

I can't say it wasn't necessary. I can just simply go off the fact that I do believe there would have been a lot of casualties had we tried to take that island. It's probably a much easier realization to come to when you're not on the receiving end. of it. Well, and I'm, this is an opinion on my account coming from somebody who would never serve in the military just because I'm kind of a pussy. So I can't be making these decisions of all

this loss of life for soldiers. It's, it's sad when one of them dies. The thought of losing a million of them is kind of hard to calculate on like an emotional scale. Well, even like, and dial in this too with it, just to kind of take this into account. You're not just like, you've already been a war for like four years at this point. You're fucking, like the public is, if

this was strictly based on public opinion, they're like, hey, this many people are going to die, but we got a couple bombs. We can drop it. Public opinion would be like, fucking drop it. We're tired of fucking fighting. We're tired of like burying our kids. Yeah, fucking drop it. We saw the loss of life in Pearl Harbor.

But I mean, even like, I don't, it was this you know of course pearl harbour being the single greatest loss of life up to that point for like an attack it was just kind of like yeah there was it that definitely was a factor is the revenge factor of doing this we were probably a little pissed off that we didn't have a chance to like you said use it against germany and we were like well we're using it we just went revenge times 50 yeah and then kind of kind of a bummer for old Oppenheimer. He was a chain smoker throughout his entire life and finally caught up to him. He got throat cancer in like 65 and not sure how cancer surgery, how effective that was, but he underwent some

unsuccessful treatments on it. Fell into a coma in February 67 and basically died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, February at 62. Thus comes the end of the tale of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It's sort of a, maybe an interesting thing that I sort of put together was prior to nuclear fission being discovered and all that, they didn't have a radiology treatment for cancer. So I wonder if going through all of the nuclear things that Oppenheimer did in the advancement in nuclear technology, I wonder if radiation that came from some of his research was also used to try to slow down his throat cancer. If at that point it had been used in that manner. Well, yeah, we're talking a decade plus.

Yeah, I'm just wondering how far does something that is initially used as a military application, how long does it take to filter down to be used essentially or even be researched as a health application? Like the initial reason it was designed was the exact opposite. It was to kill people. And now you're trying to have to be like, hmm, how can we use this to help people live?

Because all you've seen off radiation at this point is people like with horrible disfigurements and burns and all that kind of stuff. So maybe it wasn't used by then. It would be weirdly poetic if it was that that tried to save his life and everything. But it would be more tragic if that. that technology came around a couple years after he died. Yeah, yeah, that would, I didn't think about if it came around afterwards, but just to think that there could have been like he was sitting in getting radiation treatment, thinking like this is around because of the technology that I create.

Like, motherfucker. Just kind of looking at what he's doing. This is me. All right, man, you got anything else on that? No. Excited to see the movie. Hell yeah. All right, guys.

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