Pirate Wires - Thank God For The Atom Bomb | PIRATE WIRES EP#7

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

EPISODE FOUR: In this episode, Mike is joined by Kmele Foster and Trae Stephens. We break down the movie Oppenheimer, the aftermath of dropping nuclear weapons, and the discourse surrounding the film. Featuring Mike Solana , Kmele Foster, Trae Stephens Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Kmele Twitter: https://twitter.com/kmele Trae Twitter: https://twitter.com/traestephens TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro - Welcome Kmele & Trae 1:48 - SPOILER ALERT If You Don't Know The Ending To WWII 2:25 - Christopher Nolan's Past Movies We Liked 3:23 - Review Of Oppenheimer 13:30 - Creating A Doomsday Device To End All Wars 20:13 - Controversy Around The Name Oppenheimer - Accountability For Actions - We're Missing This Today 29:20 - Famous Physicist Who Worked On Manhattan Project 32:45 - McCarthyism 35:32 - Was The Movie Too Pessimistic? 38:00 - No Nuclear Bombs Have Been Dropped After WWII 39:18 - "Thank God For The Atom Bomb" - Why We Needed To Drop The Nuke 55:23 - Preventing Other Countries From Getting Atom Bombs 56:52 - What's More Dangerous? Dropping The Nuke or Not? 59:50 - Depravity For The American Project 1:03:58 - No One Wants War 1:05:00 - Thanks For Joining For This Special Episode! Pirate Wires Podcast Every Friday!

Oppenheimer, welcome back to the pod. Today we are discussing the latest Christopher Nolan film. Got two of my good friends here to join the conversation with me. Camille Foster, back to the show. Camille now, as of this week, is a colleague of mine as well. Camille is the head of content at Founders Fund. He's also a co-host of The Fifth Column, which is like the only podcast that I listen to other than blogs and report it sometimes. Really, it is just like The Fifth Column. And a former, oh, I guess he's still a co-founder of Freethink and former head over there. I've also got Trey Stevens. For the first time ever on the pod, Trey is a partner of Founders

Fund and a co-founder of Onderal, which is a defense technology company in, well, not really in Silicon Valley, but in tech. Anyway, the perfect group for this conversation. We're all big Nolan fans. Let's just get into it. Today's episode, we're going to start with just a general review of Oppenheimer. We're going to get into it. We're going to talk about Nolan.

We're going to talk about this film in the context of his other films. We'll talk about what we thought about the film. We're going to talk about this film in the context of his other films. We'll talk about what we thought about the film. We're going to get into Trey's theory on the, I guess, controversy of the title from the sort of government's perspective. Camille's got some thoughts on just, I think, the overall, I don't want to play it up too heavy, but the pessimistic maybe nature of the film uh and then i want to talk about the reception and i think we're going to spend a little bit of time on this the reception of this movie and and one sort of like one species of reception in particular which is the like america is evil reception and uh i'm going to combat it with an essay that i read a long time ago that really made a huge impact on me which is called thank god for the atom bomb by paul fus. So let's just get into it. I mean, Oppenheim... Oh, Camille also mentioned that I should do a little spoiler alert. And if you are not aware of what happened

at the end of World War II, I would just go ahead and pause this podcast until you go watch the movie and find out. This is where I talk about everything in the movie. So if you haven't seen it, definitely pause, go watch it, come back and hang out with us. So I mean, right off the bat, like I love Christopher Nolan. Batman movies, they're superhero movies. So they don't often, I think, get the credit they deserve. I, they're superhero movies, so they don't often get the credit they deserve. I think they're brilliant.

And for me, Interstellar is the best movie that has ever been made. People find that to be a controversial opinion. I think they're stupid. I have some problems, though. I think that what is the most recent Taiwan? What is going on here?

I thought Memento, even as a kid, the very first one that I was like, the what is going on here and i thought memento even as a kid the very first one that i was like this is that's him right memento that's where he began his journey like i was like even as like a teenager i'm like what is this post-modern bullshit it's not for me um and then i think my little sister i say little we're in our late 30s um she says of inception it's like it's like a it's the kind of movie that people think is smart when you're not that smart like that's and you guys maybe are going to push back on this but that's my overall like this i feel like this movie sits like top third but like the bottom of that top maybe i would say i don't know what is your overall sense

of just the movie i would say that you, I think I think he basically has two historical epics. Right. He has Dunkirk and. Right. Yeah. And this one. Excellent. I forgot about Dunkirk. Excellent. Top third. And I think I think like Dunkirk was interesting in a way that Oppenheimer wasn't because the whole movie was predicated off the basis of this sound trick where they had this like tick that progressively built over the course of the film until the very end when the ticking stopped when the soldiers came back across the channel from from mainland Europe and I think that made it really powerful in a way that I was

completely unprepared for like physically emotionally watching that film was was just really, really jarring. This one, you know, told a historical story really well, but I felt like it lacked that extra something that really unlocked the like brilliance of his filmmaking. And it also lacked the complexity of stories that I think he's told in the past that I've really loved. Like The Prestige, actually, is one of my top movies of all time. I think if you were to break it down into top thirds, I would put this bottom of top third, top of second third um it definitely didn't for me hit the notes of interstellar inception the prestige it was it was a tier below and i think just with bio is it by the way i mean eternal conflict here is it biopic or bi biopic right it's biopic i i mean biopic i'm gonna go with biopic biopic sounds like some thought of biopic. I'm going to go with biopic.

Biopic sounds like some sort of weird surgical procedure that I definitely don't want. I feel like they're usually bad, and they're usually bad in a similar way, which is they don't know how to plot it out. And when you're doing a biopic, you have to pick a part of the person's life and tell a story. And they didn't really choose here, right? You have two movies in one movie. And so here come the spoilers, right? I mean, they're not really spoilers. It's like, this is history. But in terms of the movie, it's like, you've got on the one hand, the story of the atom bomb. It's being created. It's being built. It's Oppenheimer building his team. It's Los Alamos. And that story by itself, for me, I want to see that story. The second story is the story of him being persecuted by communists, or by being persecuted

for being a communist by the US government following all of this in the 1950s during the McCarthy era. And that is an interesting story, I guess, but it feels like an interesting piece of the story to me. It's not the meat. It's not why we're there. it's not why we're there it's not why we're seeing oppenheimer and i guess i have a conspiracy theory actually about this and i wonder what you guys think about it um like i mean right off the ground floor i wanted to see

more of the just the bomb shit and i didn't and this whole this whole trial that's happening really this like secret not really a trial it's uh i don't know a sort of secret persecution of him they're they're trying to not give him clearance and get him out of government um as i'm hearing about his history with communism watching this film that is clearly designed to make him look like a victim of this uh sort of ground like this, that the first sort of lens through which you look at it, my sense was like, are you actually just kind of giving me a wink here? Like my takeaway watching this is,

holy shit, that dude was definitely a communist. And like, maybe the reason the Soviets got the bomb is like sort of, that is like, I'm like, oh man, I was not an Oppenheimer truther before this, but I certainly am now. And that was not like, that doesn't seem to be their point, but that is my takeaway. Is that like, where are you guys on that? I felt, I mean, you know, where I, where I come down

on Interstellar, Solana, and I don't, I'm, I'll draw it back to the Oppenheimer story, but I think maybe the place where you and I break a little bit on our obsession with Interstellar is that it was a perfect movie until the freaking Tesseract. And then it just became almost incomprehensible. And I think that that's basically what happened in this movie. Like they did the Trinity test and then all of a sudden it took this hard turn into this political commentary about a Senate confirmation hearing. And it was like the equivalent of the Tesseract and, and the interstellar is like, you should have worse. It was worse than a pivot, right? Because it's like, it's cut throughout the movie. So you, you don't, you don't get to just sit there and be like,

for me, the natural tension of an atom bomb story is obviously like, holy shit. So the Germans are going to have an atom bomb and what could what does that world look like which by the way is a great question that we should all always be asking like that we were very close to that reality and that is a horrifying whoever got that bomb first would have shaped the next century and uh you're welcome to the rest of the world that it was america but we can table that and get back to it later um that the tension is like that's the warning shot oh my god potential apocalyptic scenario and then the conclusion is like hiroshima and nagasaki which we didn't even see which is crazy i guess because they want to focus on oppenheimer so then i would have i would have then been like

okay i see i see that they want to focus on him so that it would have been the test but the the actual test like they it felt anticlimactic to me somewhat um yeah and then it was like you were rocketing back and forth between this it's like this time hop thing and that that didn't work for me well i want to take a step back just a little bit here because a lot of what i loved about the film is stuff that was act it reactivated some things from a film class i took in undergrad years and years and years ago it's actually a little daunting to think about the number of years that have passed since then but it was the first time i'd watched a lot of really important classic films like uh dr strange dove um we watched when Harry met Sally which I hadn't watched I'd watched before but I watched under the tutelage of this filmmaker and to think about the narrative choices that are

being made the source material that's being pulled from um as as everyone knows at this point I mean the Christopher Nolan's particular interest and devotion to using practical effects in this film in particular, which I imagine, Mike, might be a lot of the reason why he opts not to go show you the wreckage of Japan. Having to try to create that in an authentic way is really challenging, in addition to wanting to perhaps stay with this narrative. And before watching the film, I also went and read American Prometheus, which I know was the principal thing that inspired his decision to make this film. And I remember being a little befuddled by the choice because that book doesn't move in an energetic way. It is this very detail and a litany of facts, and this and this happened and this happened um and it's told in an almost lawyerly fashion um and the fact that nolan goes from that source material

to this really remarkable film which actually i think has a third act or maybe it's just a preamble where he's at university and he is obviously haunted by the very odd revelations about the way that the world really works, about the implications of quantum mechanics and relativity. And it's keeping him up at night. He closes his eyes and he sees, and you get to see this happening on the screen, atoms colliding with one another fields interacting with one another and at bottom that is what's real whatever we see that's what's really going on really i don't mean to dismiss the the sort of importance of the experience we're having right now at this level um but it's it's really interesting to go from the discovery of this field and the

enthusiasm and excitement and even the the kind of this field and the enthusiasm and excitement and even the the kind of fear at least the discomfort that's associated with that to him actually mastering some of this new insight and he and the rest of the scientific community and the species broadly like actually leveraging that insight like this this thinking matter becoming aware of these facts of the universe and cracking the atom open and being able to extract something incredible from it unleashing this power which is both the potential to create essentially limitless energy um and also to level cities and kill one another in some of the most heinous ways imaginable and possibly.

And the fact that this is a part of the story is one of the things that I've found kind of most invigorating, possibly destroying the world. We've seen so many movies, all of us have, where the world, the universe, the cosmos is at stake if we lose. And this is one of those instances where literally, very, very real, very real possibility here in their minds, you push this button, everything goes black for everyone all at once. I had to remind myself sitting in that film, this is real. All of this happened. These choices are real. Not all of it. There are some liberties taken, but that is a very real part of the story. There was uncertainty about what all of this might mean, and the implications were enormous on so many levels beyond the Nazis winning, which is already terrifying to imagine. There's the possibility of ultimate existential calamity but that is amazing yeah there was an interesting uh moment in the film i forget which physicist it was

who kind of lamented the fact that 200 years of of of really just mind-blowing research into physics was going to amount to it would conclude in in like just creating a doomsday device and or a device just an instrument of war and in this regard i found the film a little bit schizophrenic in that like there was an earlier retort or maybe it was later where oppenheimer is pressed by someone about what he was building like do you think you're gonna get the nobel prize for this and he reminds the person like well nobel created dynamite and it's like these people all seemed to be aware that they were building a bomb and eventually i want to not get there just yet but i do want to like challenge the notion that people were as upset going into this about the weapons piece as we have kind of

we remember it now i think that people kind of it's like yeah we're building a weapon and we're fine with that and it needs to happen i think is what a lot of people thought um and i think that that's a fine position to take actually in the middle of a horrifying war um but yeah it is i guess i understand uh i guess i understand where where the one scientist is coming from understand where you're coming from now and it is interesting and then also isn't that the history of isn't that the history of scientific and technological progress isn't it always that isn't that what darpa is isn't that we're like every piece of technology that we have like this is kind of the sad this revelation or this kind of realization to me was a little bit i don't want to say black pilling but it's hard for me to grapple with because it does seem like most of the things I love most in the world in

terms of most of the things we celebrate the most, um, they were developed for this purpose. And, uh, and then someone found some way to make something good out of it. Maybe I'm wrong. What is your tray? It's at least, it's at least doubled edged, right? It's like fire. Like you can use this to cook your meals and warm your house or you could burn down an entire city i think both things are entirely possible and ultimately culpability for the decisions with respect to what you do with this thing um it comes down to the individual which can you even make the decision that's an interesting insight over a long enough time, it will be used in both ways. And so as we accelerate in a world of technological progress, like with every great leap, you have this utopian vision,

but there is a corresponding, it's right there, negative use case that is horrifying. And this is maybe where the sort of Luddite takes are coming from. It's like, they're not entirely wrong. With greater reward comes greater risk. And I don't know, we're spinning around. I kind of walked out of that movie too also thinking like there's still a risk of nuclear war. Like, holy shit. I mean, it's a slender thread. And like this could start really at any second.

And maybe now more than ever because we're all complacent in this regard. We're like, oh, well, the age of nuclear war is over. So people get sloppy. They stop thinking about it. and then it could just begin. Yeah, I do think that the fear was there. I don't think that the movie overplayed that at all. I mean, the kind of way that Oppenheimer, or sorry, the way that Christopher Nolan drew this out was talking about the letter that Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard sent to the president kind of warning him of the risk. And that's a real historical event that really happened.

I think a lot of these physicists were very concerned about the potential for an unstoppable chain reaction. And there's a lot of tension in this conversation. Like actually my great grandfather worked on the Manhattan project at Oak Ridge national lab, um, and, uh, had like a massive existential crisis after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, um, with like a realization of a top secret program that he was working on, but he didn't know what he was doing, uh, and how that, how that impacted the world and kind of changed things moving forward. This is kind of like a seminal moment in my family's history, actually.

So I think the fear was definitely there. But the realization that this was going to forever change global politic is both correct and probably true on the deterrent side of things, but also really difficult to grapple with emotionally and ethically. And so I don't feel like that was overplayed at all, actually. Well, I know we're going to come around to some of these themes in a deeper way in a little bit. So I'll draw back to talking about the narrative itself and the presentation of things in the film. One detail that I think we haven't talked about yet is the fact that there is this theme that they keep returning to. We're discovering this thing, this knowledge that is just out there about the universe, and it's going to open all sorts of

doors to the extent we're opening a door to a weapon this is a weapon that will end all wars because it is too hideous to imagine people actually using these and having these huge conflicts so that's what we're doing and and the same thing had happened with nobel and in tnt it's like this is so so awful an instrument that no one will actually want to use this. We'll have to come together and have this conversation. Yeah, yeah. There were similar kinds of conversations about that.

Yeah. But that's one aspect of the narrative that I think is worth paying special attention to. I also want to mention, because if you know me, you know, All Roads Lead Back to Cormac McCarthy is two most recent books, which is really just kind of one book in two different ways. Stellum Eris and The Passenger have a similar sort of backstory in that the parents of the protagonist in that book, or the father anyways, worked on the Manhattan Project and was haunted by it. And this theme is kind of woven into the story. So if you haven't read these two books, you really, really should. And then visit the rest of the corner.

I only read, I read one of his books. I read On the Road, or no, The Road. The Road. Road, yeah. And it was so bleak and awful. And every, I mean, I could talk for weeks about how much I hate this book. And one image that is burned in my head

forever that i cannot get out and it's because of that man and i i actually like i find him to be almost like terroristic in nature to be honest no i'm not a hard time moving back in that book is beautiful the love between this man and the boy who well so this is how i know they don't have to read his other books because we disagree so fundamentally on the road that i know that the other books must also be trash the road the road might be my least favorite of his books and i still think it's a very good book which you need to do go read suchery and i'm i'm confident you'll love this book and then read um blood meridian which eventually you will come to love as much as i do because i know you have good taste that's it well we don't have more uh you last night at the screening you

gave a little you gave some opening remarks before we started and you talked you've tweeted about this as well um you talked about the sort of controversy surrounding the name oppenheimer and i'm assuming because it's not the controversy that i'm seeing online it's not the controversy i'm seeing from sort of like i guess left of center type people uh you're saying it's the controversy you're reading from the government the government is finds us maybe a little bit controversial or maybe this concept is controversial within government um and that is that it's named oppenheimer can you just um like after the man uh can you just take us down that rabbit hole tell me tell me what you're talking

about there. Yeah, I wouldn't say that there's any open controversy in this particular setting, but I think there's something very subconsciously countercultural that's happening here that kind of flies in the face of the way that the government thinks about things, which is that we used to believe that individuals, individual people could change the course of human history. And Oppenheimer is one example of this with Manhattan Project. There's also people like Kelly Johnson who started Skunk Works and built the U2, the F-117A, the Stealth Fighter, the SR-71. You know, we went from like the Wright Flyer to the SR-71 in less time than has passed since the SR-71. And that all happened under the control of Kelly Johnson.

You have Benny Shriver with ICBMs, Grace Hopper with machine independent coding languages, like Vent Surf and Robert Kahn with the internet at DARPA. Like there were people that were accountable for pulling us forward um you know the the f-35 program the joint strike strike fighter started in 1994 so we're at year 29 and it still really doesn't work it's like kind of a manufacturing disaster um you know it's been grounded intermittently over the last few years because it had trouble flying in the rain it had trouble with its life support systems and the question is like who's responsible for the f-35 right i think the answer is nobody nobody's responsible for the f-35 it's a program office and and you know the the way that the government

has has kind of grown in its bureaucracy is basically to say that there's no individual that's responsible for anything. We're going to create layers and layers of bureaucracy and paperwork, all with the purpose of obfuscating responsibility and for kicking the can as far as you can down the road so that you never own accountability for the actions. And I think that aside from just the name, which is obviously all I knew aside from the trailer going into watching the movie, I think Nolan really hit on this. He understood that Oppenheimer, rightfully or wrongfully, thought that he had deep accountability for his actions, both in the positive and the negative. And I think this is like, it's almost unthinkable in the modern day government that someone would take account for their failures. I mean, we've gone from Oppenheimer to mistakes were made. Right. And that's like the biggest gulf imaginable in accountability.

It's they also in the movie, it wasn't just Oppenheimer. I'm going to go back to that. There was a scene with with the president at the time and it was like there was a question of who is to blame and they were both sort of assuming blame it wasn't just oppenheimer like both were like i made this i am responsible for this and it was like that's just interesting to have two people trying to claim responsibility for a truly heavy burden that I think even despite his kind of brashness, let's say, I think neither Truman nor Oppenheimer really wanted, right? No one wants to sit with that, but they both would do it. It was a different generation.

My wife and I were talking about this on the ride home after we watched Barbie last night. on the ride home um after we watched barbie last night um where yeah it was it was a double feature yeah there's there's this question about like what actually was going on with truman in that moment and this this is a historical event this wasn't like a made-up interaction uh that from chris vernolin um there's a question of like was truman trying to carry himself with an ego about this like you're a nobody i'm the one that did this um or was he trying to absolve oppenheimer in some way because he didn't pull the trigger um and he was saying like look you're a scientist your role was important but i had to make the call to pull the trigger and that's that's a burden that i carry not a burden that you carry and it's not i'm not especially clear like which one of those that actually was maybe truman was just like an egotistical mess um but as you said like it was a different time like people are

fighting over being held accountable for a truly terrible moment in human history um whereas today like nobody yeah no if you i can't even imagine having that conversation with a recent American president. They would be finding some way to blame it on the other party, some way to blame it on the dysfunction in the bureaucracy. No one would just stand up and say, I got to own this. This happens. This application of responsibility. And I think it's such an interesting insight to just sit with for a little bit. It has implications for the way that we go about trying to innovate and build new things and has implications for leadership. And I can't help but see the connection between the way that you described the landscape with

respect to defense tech and also think about Congress and their abdication of responsibility when it actually comes to conflict. You guys are supposed to vote on this and do the authorizations, and they've done so much to kind of push that responsibility off onto the White House or to someone else. And even once the conflict starts, it just kind of meanders in so many ways. And no one is actually responsible. No one wants to speak in a very assertive way about this. It's a dangerous circumstance to find yourself. The kind of wrestling with responsibility is important. It is invaluable. It's part of what helps us to make good

and prudent decisions and to push the envelope in important respects. I think it's a really vital point for us to take into consideration. Beyond the world of conflict, even you see this in California, right? Who is responsible for the high-speed rail fiasco? Can you give me a name? I would love to know who is the one and there's nobody. And so that's why this problem persists. That's why we spent billions of dollars and we haven't even laid down track or I don't even know how many billions we're up to at this point. It's like, it feels like it's never going to happen. And it's like, it's at every level. It's like the national level we were just talking about. Now it's the state level with the

high-speed rail. If you go down to the local level, the problem of homelessness in the city of Sanford, like we're getting to small problems now. We're talking about like a seven mile by seven mile area and the problem of, let's say, seven, eight, 9,000 homeless people living on the streets. Who's responsible for that problem? How is there? It's like, there's no, there's just nobody. It's like 80 nonprofits.

It's like a bunch of people on the board of soups. It's like, it's not the mayor. That's crazy. You can't do anything that way. Like someone has to lead and, uh, and no one, yeah and no one wants it. It's like everybody wants the glory and nobody wants to actually do anything. Do they even want the glory? I want to live in a world where people want the glory and they're willing to just own the disaster. That's the world that I want. And I don't think we have either of those things people are not very glorious like no one is like out there living my my like glorious

aesthetic dreams right now it's it's like it's just flat yeah it's it's actually funny how like there's a there's this thread where you know it's almost like a pejorative to even talk about someone owning or being responsible for anything where people will say like elon musk's twitter elon must start a spacex yes like you know the fact that he is personally associated with these brands somehow devalues the brands because it's like there's like a person that's too big for that and the reality is like no that's too big for that. And the reality is like, no, that's literally how everything gets done. Someone has to own a responsibility to move the ball forward or the ball doesn't move forward. It's in the context of that kind of aggressive cynicism, the cancellation, the pile on where we

get to, it's you, you did it. That's the only time where I see people scrambling for the opportunity to be seen and making some sort of bold statement. It's when they're condemning someone else's actions for having run afoul of what we say is the right and virtuous thing to do. And I do think that there's something, again, that's inherently dangerous about that. It kind of leads to a sort of sclerosis. And it certainly shouldn't be the case that the most celebrated and venerated people in our lives, in our culture, and in our politics are the ones who wag their fingers the sharpest in the direction of someone who is supposed to be ostensibly bad. That probably isn't the place we want to be. Yeah. And I mean, there are lots of ways and going back to your entry

point to this podcast, Solana, like, you know, there are certainly ways in which Oppenheimer's background and his relationships and connections are maybe somewhat troubling, but I think he also realized that he was the father of the atomic bomb. But then you look at all of those physicists that were working on the Manhattan project that ended up becoming independently world-changing physicists. People like Enrico Fermi, people like Niles Bohr, who showed up on occasion to help out, people like Lawrence, who is what Lawrence Livermore National Labs is named after, that built the first accelerator. There are all of these people that are independently very, very historically significant people. But Oppenheimer understood that he was bearing the responsibility because he was the director of the project.

And that's the sort of accountability that we continued upon. Obviously, Oppenheimer knew that he couldn't do it without his team. He obviously knew that he didn't know enough about all of these different aspects to do it together. But he knew enough to understand that putting a person in charge of a thing and holding them to account for that thing is the only way the thing was going to get done. The only other person who I've heard mention the fact that, well, I mean, yeah, it's kind of appropriate that there was some skepticism of the guy. We were in a conflict with these people and they had attained the secrets. And that particular base where they were doing this development was lousy with spies, we would later discover. And in some respect, if he's culpable for other elements of this,

he's culpable for that too. It's appropriate for there to be a level of scrutiny. Moynihan, my co-conspirator on the fifth column, is the only other person who I've heard make this point. I should also mention, I haven't told anyone else this, that Moynihan, I think I caught him weeping during the film sitting next to me while Oppenheimer is giving this speech after the bomb has been dropped. while Oppenheimer is given this speech after the bomb has been dropped. And he is obviously wrestling with the horrors that were visited upon Japan as a result of this. And I saw Moynihan wipe a tear away, which again, I don't know if that was joy because there were so many lives snatched away or because it was so hideous, terrible to imagine. It could be either. Really good.

Well, I will say this this it is possible that both of these things are true it's possible that like you know he mccarthyism was out of control and you know going out and canceling a bunch of people who had obviously dedicated their lives to their country um was a really not super great thing to do but But also, there are things that you could have been very concerned about with Oppenheimer. I've gone through this process personally, not having my clearance pulled, but I've gone through security clearance stuff. And the reality is they do look really deeply into your background, into your professional and personal associations. And if you had a bunch of relationships that tied you back to one of our strategic adversaries,

like, yeah, of course, that's going to raise questions. That is very deeply concerning. So, like, I think both of those things can be true for sure. That's the, I think it's such an interesting point of mccarthyism where uh we we remember it's i say we remember it's we don't the story that we are told about mccarthyism is that it was a witch hunt and in fact that's what the crucible is based off of and that's the whole it's like there there was no communist uh spy in the country and we it was not a problem it was a huge problem actually there were spies

the soviet union did want to fucking destroy us and like if you were selling seek or giving secrets to the soviet union that's treason and it's a huge problem and it puts a lot of lives at risk and it is very serious and i i do think it was somewhat of a failing of the movie unless my conspiracy is correct and nolan wanted us to walk away thinking about this story that i think is pretty much forgotten not many people are talking about like was oppenheimer a communist who knows um and now i think a lot of people are at least gonna think about it um but certainly like the the literal reading of the script in my opinion is like a it seems to imply that there's a huge problem a huge witch haunted it wasn't right and i think those

questions are actually important and it's a nuanced conversation and you don't want to be witch burning people randomly but like there are stakes there are still stakes here the authors of the source material definitely try to clear oppenheimer of any sort of connection to communism you know there was a he was sort of affiliated but he's never a member definitely never a member that is not clear there's a little more ambiguity there, which I don't think takes anything away from me. Do you have to be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party to be responsible for this? That's just such a weird benchmark for this kind of stuff. I guess back then, maybe a lot of people were running around getting memberships to the communist party it was sort of in vogue i think in like maybe the 20s and

30s and like all the cool hipster people of the day were doing it um but it's still like you definitely he clearly had sympathies uh in the sort of realm of communism the only things that really uh i think absolved him of this were the conversations that were obviously made up by the filmmakers, private conversations between him and his communist lover, like actual communist lover. Like historically, we know she was a communist. And it's like, I don't know, like that does matter to me. And it does matter to me that the Soviet Union got the bomb. Obviously, the world would have been much better if we weren't in a nuclear arms race and no one else ever had nuclear weapons

other than we had a few of them. That would have been ideal. You know what Oppenheimer review I really want to see? Dean Preston. How does he grapple with this? He's obviously going to take the side of the communists, but apparently the communists is the one that built the A-bomb. So that's a tough position for Dean Preston to be in, isn't it?

Camille, do you have any thoughts? You mentioned that you felt the movie was pretty pessimistic. Maybe some thoughts on that, and then I want to get into the fossil essay. Yeah, I mean, the big conclusion of the film, and it's part of the reason why at our screening that we we attended um moynihan and i it was very quiet like no one was moving at the end of the film you might have expected a pause or something like that but people they were they were intensely looking at the screen just kind of shaken is because oppenheimer and einstein ultimately have this conversation.

We discover the content of the conversation at the very end. And it's Oppenheimer saying, I was worried that if I pushed that button to set off this bomb, we might destroy the world. And I think we did. And he has this vision of nuclear missiles being launched all over the world and fire just kind of burning through the atmosphere. And it's this premonition that eventually we will have a fat armed nuclear conflict and destroy ourselves because any innovation that we attain that has destructive

potential, we are going to use it and we're going to use it in the worst possible ways. And it seems to me that that is a very pessimistic perspective to reach or a conclusion to arrive at. I don't think it's necessarily true, obviously. And I think there's quite a lot of reason for optimism, for believing that we've attained a much higher moral horizon and that we can, as a species, become sufficiently responsible that we can live in a world where there are these profound possible dangers, but also these incredible vistas where we can create the world that we want to live in that is filled with opulence and prosperity. That's the challenge before us. And the pessimistic, overly, unnecessarily

us and the kind of pessimistic, overly, unnecessarily kind of fatalistic perspective that ultimately it comes to not is just at odds with, I think, the arc of human history. Life is amazing. I could think of no other time in the past where I would have preferred to live than right now. And there was a very real sense in which all of that helped create this and creating more of this will require us to do something. But there's no reason to imagine that it's necessarily bad. But at the same time, it's been only what, seven decades or something like it's a blip in human history. The amount of time we've gone without having a nuclear war like the bombs

the innovation of those bombs did make it possible for the first time in human history for a war to reduce us to ashes and that is i well in a way right we've never been so close to total cataclysm i mean we're talking like within 24 hours, the whole world could be over. That's a thing that hangs over our head. In terms of the timescale, but as you both know, and I don't know if we're getting ahead of ourselves here, we'd been bombing Japan for a long time. And the firebombing of cities is a kind of innovation of this particular conflict, but it was happening

everywhere. And hundreds of thousands of people were being annihilated in those bombings. And by the time you get around to dropping the nukes, you're talking about tens of thousands of people dying, but you're hoping this ends this horrendous conflict that had already snatched away so many lives and could have snatched away so many more. Could we level the city in a moment? No. Could we level it over the course of a couple of months, weeks even? Actually, yeah, kind of. I think this is a pretty good segue into the Paul Fussell essay. And it's not, I not to it is hundreds of thousands but it's still that's

there's still a question here that i think we need to parse um when i was in college i had this professor he was that he was quietly the troublemaker professor nobody really knew it he was like he was in the rhetoric he had a rhetoric class i was in a class of like 15 with him and um i was his favorite and so he's my favorite uh and he was just like it of like 15 with him and, um, I was his favorite. And so he's my favorite. Uh, and it was just like, it was like a, it was writing, it was writing arguments and making arguments. And I really just, I loved it. And he wanted to be introducing, I think, intentionally provocative concepts.

And the first one that really opened my mind was he went up on the, uh, the whiteboard and it was like, he wrote a bunch of things down. It was, uh, whiteboard and it was like he wrote a bunch of things down it was uh hiroshima nagasaki it was um uh it was japanese internment it was the baton death march it was comfort women and um there were a couple more uh and he just asked you know which ones do you know about and the ones that we knew about were the atrocities that we had committed. We didn't know anything about Japan whatsoever. And that alone, that's the first interesting piece of this, is people are not really aware at all of how the Japanese fought in the Pacific. We are very aware of the Nazis. That's the villain of World War II.

We have no sense whatsoever. The average person has no sense whatsoever of what the Japanese were up to. And it was brutal and vicious and just, I mean, in many cases, just as bad as the Nazis. Then he went on to make us all read this essay called Thank God for the Atom Bomb by Paul Fussell, which sparked a lot of controversy in the class because we're taught it's slavery and the atom bomb are these unambiguous evils. In American history, they prove that we're evil and it's like slavery, absolutely true, unambiguous evil. The atom bomb is complicated and it's complicated just in terms of numbers. So I want to just highlight, I think everyone should go read this essay by Paul Fussell. Thank God for the atom bomb. Excellent, provocative, strange. We don't encounter arguments like this often anymore, but some of the highlights. So he's writing this decades and decades ago, and immediately there was a tension among the American public. There's on the one hand, the notion that the Japanese were just going to surrender. The war was already over. We didn't have to drop the bomb at all. And on the other hand, the reality

of that's just, and this just, it seems like history to me. It seems pretty clear that the only thing that was going to stop that war was a land invasion. So the US military was already preparing for the land invasion. It was already underway. And all the soldiers who were going to be on the first several waves, they knew that they were going to die. So you have an estimation from the government quietly that there were going to be around as many as 1 million US casualties, just American casualties, not including the allies from the UK and whatnot. The soldiers preparing knew they were going to die, the first one through five waves, especially the Marines. And that's not counting, there were something like 2 million Japanese

soldiers, all of whom were going to fight until their death. This is kamikaze culture. of whom were going to fight until their death. This is kamikaze culture. On top of that, the culture of Japan was, it was after they are dead, the elderly and the children will fight in the streets. We're never going to give up. We're looking at really a situation where casualties would have been somewhere between, I think 3 million is kind of like the absolute ground floor. And it could be, it's anyone's guess as to how many millions more on top of that. So just in terms of numbers, it's like this thing, the atom bombs saved lives, just straight up. We're talking a couple hundred thousand deaths to potentially 10 million plus deaths right there. We're not even talking now about how the future shape of Japan, because America was in Japan and not the Soviets. And we're not even talking about just the long-term

consequences of this and whatnot. Just ground floor, it seems pretty important to me. There's a separate notion that if you didn't drop the second bomb, you maybe didn't have to drop the second bomb. I think here may be a more interesting and compelling argument, but it's also not really clear that that's the case. In between the 9th and the 15th of August, when the bombs were dropped, Nagasaki and then Hiroshima, you had a whole series of things go on. I mean, there was, it's like the war was just ongoing. You had the sinking of a submarine.

You had the sinking of a destroyer. You had another destroyer lost. ongoing. You had the sinking of a submarine, you had the sinking of a destroyer, you had another destroyer lost. You had, I think, eight or 12 American flyers captured and beheaded by the government. They were just carrying on. And then I guess the last point is for as long as they would carry on, we're talking about 7,000 deaths a week. So for as long as the war went on, this would happen. And the estimation was it would take about a year to carry on the invasion without actually just ending it definitively right then. And I think it's hard for us to face that because none of us have fought in a war. And we want to believe that things are simple and you can just do the unambiguously good thing.

But I think it's true that nuking a city is horrifying and also that war is horrifying and ending a war is important. And it's a complicated thing to grapple with, but I think it's an important thing to grapple with. What do you guys think? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that Christopher Nolan did and I honeymooned in Kyoto, kind of like making it sound like it was sort of ad hoc and silly how they were picking these targets. And that's not historical. There was like, there's no, there's no historicity to this idea that like it was spared because of his, he honeymooned there. But it like was very clearly used to signal idea that like it was spared because of his he honeymooned there um but it like was very clearly used to signal something that uh was was probably not happening in that room at the time

uh the second is where uh oppenheimer is meeting with with truman and truman says you know in hiroshima and he says and nagasaki and he came back said said, oh, yes, and Nagasaki. And he intentionally mispronounced it as well. And that also has no historical source material. And it was just twice that very, very small moments, that's like 10 seconds maybe of the total movie, were made to rewire our brains to think that people in government in senior positions weren't taking this seriously. Which I think they were taking this seriously, which I think they were taking it. I think exactly what you just teed up from the Fussell essay is what they were thinking. I don't want to write any more letters to the parents of dead children. I don't

want to do that anymore. The worst one was actually, I mean, in my opinion, I agree those two moments stood out to me, but there was another one where they actually introduced, and I forget who Oppenheimer was talking to, but the guy said like, you know, hey, a lot of people are going to die if we do a land invasion. And that is just, that's such an understanding, like you have to actually make the case. For people to understand, to get inside of the heads of people at that time, you have to make the case because it wasn't just like some people are going to die and who cares they're soldiers. First of all, soldiers, who who are soldiers we're talking about boys teenage boys who go to war as they always have they didn't make this decision they're sent there to die and second of all it's

like not just a few of them we're talking about millions of people are going to die if we don't end this war and and that's frustrating to me that we are that we kind of still can't grapple with this honestly online right now the discourse is um this is like a white guy movie or a lot of people are maybe ignoring maybe i'm just too into the discourse i've gotten this criticism before and i think that's fair i don't know i think you're spending too much time on twitter man i don't know i think you're spending too much time on twitter man and and i i'm gonna just well i'll sit with that but um i'm seeing a lot of like like this is an unambiguous horror this is the greatest terrorist attack of all time famously this idiot from tech uh the guy who i don't even want to get into it but

let's just say an idiot on twitter said this um another one that's more interesting is uh there's a filmmaker right now who's going viral for saying she's been trying to make this film about a woman who suffered like the fallout of the testing from uh the the first oppenheimer test forever and like a bunch of people like a bunch of kids died because of it he got leukemia and all of this and she wants to tell that story and how dare you tell oppenheimer story and it's like how are we not aware of the scale of difference here it's like really frustrating to me that we can't have this conversation because it's really important it is not it is not an easy conversation and like if you are an adult

and you are entering the discourse I just I need you to be capable of of having a complex situation about a complex a topic so complex as this it is it is the question of war and like maybe we're just and it's a good thing sort of you know we're we're soft we haven't had a really horrifying war of this kind in a long time and what a blessing that is and thank god for the atom bomb like i think that's actually the reason that we haven't had that war which is a whole other conversation and cut on the atom bomb i think think Camille, you've sort of been teetering around that for a while, but, um, and maybe we should just get into that now, but like that, it, it, it frustrates me. Like the story is bigger than this.

And, and then, and that places the frustration or maybe not the frustration that, that places the, uh, the moral self-interrogation of Oppenheimer into a different context for me. It's like, he didn't just allow Truman to drop a bomb on some Japanese people who were basically innocent. He saved millions. And yes, the world changed, but there's a question of whether it changed for the better or the worse. And my question is not really answered, in my opinion. I think we don't know the answer. I think to this point after after the war in particular you can look at like the trajectory of weapons development also fundamentally changed we started beginning of human civilization we had like one to one conflict it was like your fists or rocks or knives at best and then we like figured out how to

make that slightly more destructive with things like trebuchets and catapults. And then with the advent of gunpowder, you had cannons and firearms, and we figured out bombs. And it went from one to one to one to some to one to many to, with the atom bomb, it was really one to infinity. We now have the ability to destroy all of humanity. And I think there's this assumption that we're just going to keep going. And I think there's this assumption that we just, we were just going to keep going. And like, eventually like we're going to have like star killer weapons, but the reality is it's actually going backwards.

All of the tech development that's happened since, since the forties, except in the specific strategic nuclear category has been precision guided weapons. How do we avoid casualties? How do we use new technologies to be better at targeting? Using things like computer vision to make sure that we're getting

at the target that we want. Most recently, taking out Zawahiri in Pakistan, we actually did that with a non-explosive missile. It was just a rotating knife, basically, that only hit him him it only hit him

it has no other damage at all and we can do that from play like planes that are not piloted by people from from thousands of miles away i mean it's like incredible how much back down that curve we've come back to the one-to-one kind of conflict. And this is responsible for saving millions of lives. I mean, it's like remarkable how big of a difference that's made. A little pushback. So it's responsible for that in the same way that the world was like sort of locked in a peaceful state when America was the only country that had the atom bombs. But once this technology becomes ubiquitous and everybody has it aren't we sort of i mean what does that look like what in your opinion as in like proliferation is that what you're asking about i'm talking about the

proliferation of these precision these precision instruments of death like once every country has them and then every gang lord has them like i mean what is that that seems like a world of of uh that seems like a world of more violence generally not less uh i don't i don't know about that because it's still an act of war like you you're you're still like invading enemy territory when you're doing that and you wouldn't want to like draw more attention. I think that the point is that we don't have to like stand in lines opposed to each other and, you know, fire our muskets. Now we can just say like, we're just going to go right to the source and we want this to stop as quickly as possible. Um, and I think, I think that is, is changing the face of warfare. Now, obviously there's like the next level of this that probably gets into a scary level of arms race would be rods from god where you have like a refrigerator in orbit in space uh that has tungsten rods and you can just basically direct the tungsten rods

to take out any point on earth in like six minutes six minutes or less and that's not explosive it's just like uh you know a very high velocity projectile at that point um and i think if we got to that point we would be having this conversation about like well what does that do because then you like you can just like strike without any consequence wherever you want to do is get serious about policing space like we need to not allow this to happen there should be no proliferation of this shit in space and i i can't help but look back at why are why did we ever allow other countries to get the atom bomb that seems just like it seems like the most important thing you could have possibly done at that moment in time is do whatever it takes to prevent anybody

else from getting it and like that becomes like your chief focus is just is just the singular focus of of the entire military u.s military apparatus should have been preventing that from happening and um i mean what is that did you guys know any background there like why i mean it's just it's just science you can't just you can't stop the spread of science you see the tests happening you you can see that like you we all know i mean like people are going to know how to do this like all you have to do is just like figure out this science fine i think we're escaping i think you're running away from the uncomfortable aspect question because it is not just science it requires it requires

enrichment it inquires uh it requires resources we know when the tests are happening because we can register the, I forget what the actual, are they measuring isotopes or something? They're always like readouts and things. Like every time North Korea does something. We know that when there's a launch. Yeah, totally. You know, that's fair. It's always been like that.

That's fair. We knew like there were a lot of things we could do. I could not just go and spin up a nuclear weapon in my backyard. And a lot of countries were in that position as well. I mean, that's what Top Gun Maverick is about. It's about taking out an enrichment facility, right? Yes. Right. American, it's like American greatness. That is like, I want to see more of that. I mean, I'm wondering though, Solana, how practically that could have been achieved

given what actually unfolded. I mean, our greatest geopolitical adversary, the Soviet Union, is working on a bomb. They're developing a bomb, invade them after World War II to try to stop them and take away their capacity to develop a weapon of mass destruction. I don't know that that actually is a better place than what ended up happening, a Cold War in which there was a bunch of buildup on both sides and you got all of these weapons aimed at one another. And you're saying, if you do anything, I'm going to blow you to shit. If you do anything, I'm going to blow you to shit. Is it bad? That's bad. But I think the bloody conflict that would have been necessary to try and achieve that outcome would have been bad. necessary to try and achieve that outcome would have been bad there was no bloody that doesn't mean you might have to invade to stop them so you're saying bomb them to stop them i'm saying no one even made the threat no one even made the threat no one was like like one more test and we're going to nuke the facilities and let's go beyond the threat if they don't stop and you make

the threat or is the prescription there we'll just start bombing and then bomb any other country that starts building one because they say the only way to stop the u.s from becoming this this murderous nuclear monster is to build our own nuclear weapons and i don't know that that's not what you see yeah but i so i mean we have a world in which that there are endless like how many countries at this point have nuclear bombs i'm trey do you know the number of this it's like the official number or the unofficial number right i think it's nine officially so i don't like that is an inherently unstable dangerous scary place to be uh especially when you talk about something like russia collapsing and who knows where the fuck their bombs have gone that is really frightening and i don't think i

think it's like right now it's a kind of theoretical question what is more dangerous like the united states having done whatever it took to prevent proliferation from happening or um like some potential cataclysm in in the future based because we didn't and and i just don't think it's going to be theoretical forever it seems really unlikely to me that atom bombs will never again be used on civilians in the in the course of or anyone in the course of human history like even the next century like i think it's like i think the risk of nuclear war is a lot a lot lot way higher than than we think we've just normalized the idea that it's like, I think the risk of nuclear war is just a lot, a lot, lot way higher than, than we think. We've just normalized the idea that it's over because the Berlin wall fell, but just that world isn't, doesn't work that way.

It's like geography is already thawing again. Conflict is on the horizon. It's, it's, we're in an unstable place is my basic feeling. And, um, and I think it's like the stakes are higher than we realize. And I think it imagine that the best outcome is always going to happen, but I do think it's always a possibility and we've worked towards that end. So while I acknowledge that is, as you describe it, it's terrifying, it's frightening. I also think that the fact that that hasn't happened yet is a pretty good sign and that there are lots of good

reasons to think that we can avoid those worst possible outcomes going forward. But it's going to require something of us. And thinking about what that is that it might require is important. And also the fact that there may be some more devastating tech that's on the horizon. I don't know what that might look like. Yeah's not talk about ai today i don't i don't want to get into that but that's not even what i was getting i wasn't alluding to that it is if what you're saying is if the general rule is true and in the bombs being locked in this weird threat of nuclear war is enough to keep us from real world war again, as it has over the last seven, eight decades or whatever, it's seven decades. Then the bomb not only saved millions of lives at the end of the war,

but it's saved potentially hundreds of millions of lives since. There was no reason there shouldn't have been another world war following that. And who knows how many wars have not happened because of this dynamic um if that holds forever a very prosperous piece then then the weapons themselves will be the thing that prevented the conflict and that is that is an unambiguous good at that point um and it's not an unambiguous good that's that's a good that's like another it's like a lot more in the good column um last thoughts you guys before we wrap this up. I'm just thinking about what you said when you described the professor that you really loved and that anecdote about the class not being familiar with the horrible atrocities that have been perpetrated by other countries and imagining that there is this kind of unique depravity with respect to the American project. And I'm remembering something Gavin Newsom tweeted when he was celebrating the fact that

California had this reparations committee that was going to be studying this project. And he said, our past is one of slavery, racism, and injustice. Our systems were built to oppress people of color. And I remember encountering that and immediately thinking about what a preposterously stupid thing to say. It is so typical of the current epoch in which we celebrate cynics. And so many people imagine that being like just this really trite boring cynic is somehow uh the same as being really thoughtful and and erudite like this doesn't make any sense it's completely incoherent the united states isn't the apogee of human awfulness slavery is older than writing it's been practiced on every continent even at the time that the u.s had slavery there were even

more slaves in other parts of the world. That's the truth. It was awful. It was terrible. But the American project has always been defined by these amazing ideals and this optimistic vision about our possibilities and this notion of freedom being something that was accessible to far more people than it had previously been granted to. And has this been this project of us essentially becoming more perfect, to use a very odd phrase? It has, bizarrely. We've expanded the horizon of the people who can participate in this project. And I think to the extent I'm concerned about anything in a really palpable way, one of my persistent fears is that not too few people appreciate just what a remarkable innovation

America was, is a philosophical idea. This is not any sort of hollow, cheap, patriotic speech. I mean, just genuinely, when you look at the broad sweep of history, there's something really special about a place that is rooted in this idea of basic equality and basic human freedom, however imperfectly it was articulated and implemented at the start. And the rather prosaic, America is terrible, I'm so ashamed. We're so awful. It's ahistorical, but it's also dangerous. It's genuinely dangerous. And I think it's totally reasonable and fair to try and persuade more and more people that there are some things special and worth preserving, worth working on and developing. We don't need to tear down the structure in order to make progress. We can actually just continue to improve and expand our sensibility with respect to how to make more people more free. I think the question itself is an indication that we are good. The fact that we are constantly fighting over this question and like mining our past and, and analyzing our faults. It,

the clear implication is that everybody in the country on every side wants to be morally righteous and good and to do the good thing. And we actually, we actually sort of, we almost, I think we have universal agreement on what, what it means to be good. It is like maximization of freedom and treating people with respect. And where we break down is it is on the question of whether or not we are doing that and we have worked towards that. And that's where the fierce disagreements happen. But when you just look at what it is that we're fighting about exactly, I think the indication is clear that we are one of the only... I don't know many... I won't say we're the only one, but I will say America is an exceedingly moral nation just based on the questions that we're asking from both sides.

Yeah. And I spent a lot of my time working in the national security community, obviously. And I think this idea that there are four-star generals and politically appointed officials sitting around boardroom tables, glibly making decisions about life and death for people, both Americans that are serving abroad, as well as in international conflict. It's just the most absurd idea ever. Nobody wants to write a letter to a parent letting them know that their kid died. Nobody wants to do that. And we don't enter a conflict all willy-nilly, right? Like we are actually very, very thoughtful about how we go about making sure that we're extending protection to our allies and our partners, that we're supporting people that don't have the ability to support themselves. And this is like a core of the American democratic institution that we've established.

And to mock that or make it sound like there's a lack of thoughtfulness is just kind of ridiculous. It's just not happening. Awesome. Well, thank you guys both for joining today. Stoked for the next Nolanolan movie in i guess 20 years from now who knows um adult children by the time it comes out uh and that's that guys have a