The Rest Is History - 343: Oppenheimer: The Father of the Atom Bomb

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This was J. Robert Oppenheimer’s reaction to the first atomic bomb test in July 1945, marking the beginning of the nuclear age. Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist of Jewish-German descent, was in charge of the American nuclear project, leading the Los Alamos laboratory and tasked with developing “the bomb” in 1943, following his involvement in the Manhattan Project. Join Tom and Dominic as they delve into the life of the man behind “the weapon to end all wars”. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. I can't spell it right. So you just give a fake name, your cafe name, Julia. But the more you use it, the more it feels like you're in witness protection. Wait a minute. What kind of espresso drinks does Julia like anyway? Is it too late to change your latte order? But with an espresso machine by KitchenAid, you wouldn't be thinking any of this because you could have just made your espresso at home.

Shop now at KitchenAid.ca. All of a sudden, the night turned into day, and it was tremendously bright. The chill turned into warmth. The fireball gradually turned from white to yellow to red as it grew in size and climbed into the sky. After about five seconds the darkness returned but with the sky and the air filled with a purple glow just as though we were surrounded by an aurora borealis. We stood there in awe as the blast wave picked up chunks of dirt from the desert soil and soon passed us by. That was Joe Hirschfeld, who was a chemist who'd been assigned to measure the radioactive fallout from the test on the first atom bomb dropped on the 16th of July, 1945.

Dominic, we are thinking about the birth of the atom bomb, the Manhattan Project, all that malarkey. All that malarkey, very good. Well, it's such a somber and kind of overwhelming subject, isn't it? That one wants to perhaps introduce, slightly puncture the gravity of it, because otherwise it's so depressing. And we're doing this obviously because there's a new film out about the life of it, because otherwise it's so depressing. And we're doing this, obviously, because there's a new film out about the life of the man often described as the godfather of the atom bomb, Oppenheimer. And I know so little about Oppenheimer,

I didn't even know what his first name is. I just suddenly realized. His name is J. Robert Oppenheimer, Tom. So what's the J, though? Julius. So his father was called Julius. We'll come on to his parents in a little bit. And by the way, for those people listening, that's the first test. j though julius so his father was called julius we'll come on to his parents a little bit and by the way for those people listening um that that that's the first test that's the trinity test in

new mexico and uh so the bomb wasn't dropped it was sort of installed and then they do the detonation that is that in the hut yes they're exactly they're all miles away that they have in the in the fourth indiana jones film today i think they do. You've been watching a lot of Indiana Jones, Tom, haven't you? Because you're gearing up for a mighty series. Yeah, that's coming next week. So we mustn't get distracted by that. I vaguely remember. Anyway, listen, we don't

want to be talking about Indiana Jones when we're talking about Julius. Well, Robert. He was called Robert Oppenheimer. And Oppenheimer is... So the film, the Christopher Nolan film, is by a book, which won the Pulitzer Prize, called American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. American Prometheus, that will appeal to you, Tom, because Prometheus is the fellow who steals fire and brings it from Zeus as a gift to mankind, doesn't he? But then is punished for it. So what happens to Prometheus? He gets chained to a rock in the Caucasus mountains and either an eagle or vulture, depending on the myth, comes and rips out his guts and then they grow back. And then next day,

the eagle or straight vulture comes back and does the same. And so it goes on until finally Heracles comes and shoots the eagle-straight vulture. Right. But that idea of somebody who has stolen something that is at once exciting, invigorating, liberating, but also utterly terrifying, which is fire, and taking something that should properly belong to the gods and giving it to human beings, and then is punished for it, and then becomes a kind of martyr. That's the core of Oppenheimer's story. I mean, the ancient myth that Oppenheimer himself famously invokes is from the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic, and specifically the Bhagavad Gita. Yes. So it's traditionally said that he sees the atom bomb, and he quotes the Bhagavad Gita,

now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. But didn't he actually, he actually quoted a couple of lines, 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 in those two quotes, both of which I've seen attributed to him, on the one hand, there's the sense of death and on the other, there's the sense of radiance and light. Yeah. And that ambivalence, by the way, is at the center of his relationship with the atom bomb and with the nuclear age and the Cold War and all those kinds of things, as we'll go on to discuss. And actually, the stories that are told about him, the reason we didn't start with that

story is I don't think he did say that, because he claims later that he said it, but people at the time don't recall him saying it. But I mean, he studied Sanskrit. I mean, we are talking about one of the cleverest men who seems ever to have lived. I mean, this is a guy who turns up to the Netherlands, not speaking Dutch and gives a lecture in Dutch. He did indeed. I mean, it's an unbelievably clever guy. So maybe he muttered it in Sanskrit. I think the truth of it is he says he said it to himself or he thought it. I wonder whether there's a little bit of the es esprit de scalier there you know that's possibly um it would have been great if i had said this so i'll say that i did um but no so

the oppenheimer story is not just the story of as you say one of the titanic intellects of the 20th century and somebody who as you also said was the is the godfather or indeed the father of the atomic age but it's also a kind of thriller actually, Tom, because Oppenheimer becomes in the 1950s, the supreme martyr, the sacrificial victim in the McCarthyite anti-communist Red Scare's hysteria of the 1950s. That's what makes his story such an exciting one. Because the context for that is, of course, that it's the United States that gets the atom bomb. Yeah. But the United States is facing a rival superpower that is also after the atom bomb.

And so the knowledge, this Promethean knowledge, is something very, very prized. Well, right from the start of the Manhattan Project, there was a sense of a race. So initially, that race is against Nazi Germany. But then, as time goes on that race starts to become a race for the soviet union to stay ahead of the soviet union that becomes you know that sort of sense of urgency that sense of tremendous excitement is there throughout oppenheimer's story so let's kick off by tom by talking about oppenheimer himself the man because he is an extraordinary man he's born in April 1904, and he is the child

of German Jewish immigrants. Actually, a lot of the people in this story will be of German Jewish immigrant stock, actually. So they're ethnically and they're culturally Jewish, but they're not observant. They don't go to the synagogue or anything like that. His father, Julius, was born in Frankfurt. He's a real autodidact. He spends all his spare time going to art galleries in New York City and reading history books and things. And he worked as a partner in a clothing firm, which sounds very unglamorous, but he's enormously rich. Because he has three Van Goghs and a Picasso. He does, and a Rembrandt, and a Renoir, and a Cezanne. That's not bad, is it?

This is very good going. And they live on the Upper West Side, I think, in New York City. His wife is Ella Friedman. She's a painter. She's also from a sort of German Jewish immigrant stock. And they're very well off. They have a summer house on Long Island where their little boy, Robert, goes sailing. So in other words, they're not a sort of your Lower East Side kind of struggling Jewish immigrant family, quite the reverse.

And not surprisingly, given that he's surrounded by very cerebral parents who spend all the time going to art galleries, Robert, their son, is a very clever little boy. And his passions, so Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin tell us, were poetry, an unusual interest for somebody who's sort of 8, 9, 10 years old, reading and writing poetry. Building things with blocks, which is a sign of the scientific mentality, I suppose, the sort of patterns and construction and all this sort of stuff. And minerals, Tom. So he loves collecting minerals. Do you like minerals? I prefer fossils. Well, I know you're big on fossils. I don't know whether fossils and minerals are part of the same world.

I think, yeah. Kind of geological treasures, yeah. Who was Wilfred Owen, the war poet? He was a massive mineralologist, if that's the word. Was he? Well, I did not know that. So he must have enjoyed his trench. And also poetry.

So he and Oppenheimer would have gone on famously, Tom. Yeah, but Wilfred Owen, he wasn't great on theoretical physics, was he? Not so good, no. And also, of course, was dead by the time that Oppenheimer entered his prime. That would inhibit the flow of conversation. It would. So all through his career, there was a sense of political idealism because his parents were into this thing called the Ethical Culture Society, which is fascinating actually. So that

was founded in 1876 and it was founded out of kind of reformed Judaism in New York City by a guy called Felix Adler. And he said, this is the Judaism of the future. We won't have any prayers. We won't have any religious rituals. It's kind of Jewish Quakerism. Jewish Quakerism. Jewish Quakerism. It's very social gospel. It's very about being kind and all that sort of stuff. And you can see why it would appeal because at a point when there's quite a lot of anti-Semitism for basically rich Jewish businessmen in New York who have a social conscience, this is

a way, it's a sort of assimilationist creed. So they can join in life, they can have clubs, they can do stuff, but their Jewishness is kind of downplayed. They are all Jewish, but they're not talking about the Torah and stuff. And there's this kind of liberal activist element to it. So Oppenheimer goes to this school and he is by far the kind of top student. He's the brain box, top of his class and everything. But even at this point, and this will recur throughout his career, he's a very awkward kind of lonely person. So there's a story that when he's 14, his parents sent him to summer camp. You know, obviously, most of our American listeners will be very familiar with the idea of summer camps for non-Americans.

You know, this is a huge ritual for American kids. It's probably not really matched. It doesn't have any counterpart in other countries. So he goes to summer camp. And it's all sports and games and kind of Boy Scout-ish kind of activities in which he doesn't really join in at all. He just walks around collecting rocks. And he's also, like most normal 14-year-olds, he's completely obsessed with George Eliot, Tom. Yes, of course.

What young lad going off to summer camp doesn't want to curl up with Mill on the floor? He's really into Middlemarch. So people are saying, you know... Oh, even longer novel. How do you think the Yankees are going to get on this season? He says, well, you know, I'm just thinking about Dorothea or whatever it is.

Anyway, he writes home to his parents. He says, well, it's not actually going that badly because one good thing about going is my campmates have taught me all about the facts of life. And his parents are outraged. They write to the camp sort of top brass who give the boys a massive rollicking. The boys then,

do you know what they do to Oppenheimer? It's not good, Tom. They strip him. They paint his buttocks and genitals with green paint, and they lock him overnight in an ice house. But I'm afraid, Dominic, that if you are the kind of child who goes around reading Middlemarch, that's what you've got to expect. Tom, that is harsh.

I speak from personal experience. That is... What? Has that ever happened to you? I'm not going to say. Crikey. Well, that is very harsh. I didn't expect such ruthlessness on the rest of his history, to be honest. Anyway. You've just got to man up.

Well, so Oppenheimer, and this will also disappoint you, Tom. He graduated in 1921, and he had a place at Harvard, not surprisingly. But then he went off with his family on a little trip to holiday to Germany before going to Harvard, and he fell ill. He fell ill while prospecting for minerals. Do you know, I love him. His parents said, oh, you've fallen ill. You'll have to defer at Harvard for a year while you stay at home and have improving broths and we look after you. But actually, one thing that does happen, which is related to the nuclear issue, go on, I'm intrigued to know where this is leading. As part of his convalescence,

they arranged for one of his teachers, a man called Herbert Smith, from this sort of improving ethical reform, whatever it is, Ethical Culture Society School, to take him to New Mexico, riding. He falls in love with riding. And one day he's riding near Santa Fe and he sees this valley. And in the valley or the top of the valley, there is a boys school, a boarding school. And is this school by any chance called Los Alamos? It is. It is, Tom. It is called Los Alamos.

What an extraordinary moment. Yeah. So he sees this and he thinks, brilliant place for a nuclear test. And then he comes back. I'll be back. Yeah. I'll be back. Yeah, I'll be back, exactly. He does go to Harvard. His biographers describe him as a studious, socially inept and immature young man,

which is very nice. He's very austere. So he's a complete boffin. Here for dinner every night, he has chocolate, beer and artichokes. And do you know what he has for lunch? He has something he calls black and tan, which is toast covered with peanut butter and chocolate syrup. So he's not a man for a healthy diet, it's fair to say. But he's very thin, isn't he? Incredibly thin. Incredibly thin.

He's a chain smoker. He's a chain smoker. He's very melancholy. He's very moody. And Tom, one of the great highlights of doing the rest of this issue is we get to read wonderful works of poetry. And I thought you'd enjoy it if I read some of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Father of the great highlights of doing the rest of this issue is we get to read wonderful works of poetry. And I thought you'd enjoy it if I read some of J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the nuclear bombs, poems, his erotic poems. Would you like to hear that? Yes, yes, yes, please. Okay. This is informed by the fact of life that he's been tortured in summer camp. Precisely.

He's never had any dealings, as far as I can tell at this point. I don't think he's even spoken to a girl or a woman. So he says, I'm going to find this quite hard to read because they're ludicrous. Tonight she wears a seal skin cape, glistening black diamonds where the water sways her thighs.

A noxious glint conspire to surprise, a pulse condoning eagerness with rape. That's unexpected, isn't it? You didn't expect that final word. I did not expect that. This was inspired by Spinoza, an erotic poem inspired by Spinoza, the great Dutch.

Who will be featuring very soon in our episode on Amsterdam. No, I know that there have been others who have read Spinoza, even I. Others who have crossed their white arms across the umber pages. Others too pure to glance even a second beyond the sacred sphincter of their erudition yeah that is that is unexpected well yeah how old was he when he was writing this about 21 or something

yeah maybe not even um no he's probably a little bit younger i'm being harsh he's probably about 18 okay but i think that's fair enough yeah they are you didn't expect that no i didn't expect that yeah maybe not even no he's probably a little bit younger i'm being harsh he's probably about 18 okay i think that's fair enough yeah they are you didn't expect that no i didn't expect that probably science more his thing then well yes it is he does very well he's actually studying chemistry but he falls in love with physics and after this he goes off to england to study at the cavendish lab in cambridge which is the great place for quantum physics but he's very clumsy isn't he he's well he's clumsy and very unpopular and so ernest rutherford refuses to have him correct on his team because he keeps knocking over test tubes exactly so quantum physics for

those people who don't know it's the laws that govern basically atoms molecules electrons there's going to be a lot of science in this time and i have really ginned up on it so um he's very miserable in um in cambridge he doesn't really like england he behaves in a series of ludicrous ways so that the erotic stuff is there's clearly a lot going on there there's a story that he was once in a third class railway carriage and there were two people opposite him a man and a woman who were kissing and they were obviously boyfriend and girlfriend or husband and wife the man went out to probably buy some cigarettes or something and at that point oppenheimer threw himself on the woman and kissed her.

She pushed him off. And then he fell to the ground sobbing in a sort of terrible heap. And the fact that he then went around telling people this story suggests that he wasn't, you know. So he's a faintly rapey nerd. Correct. He tried to kill his tutor, a man called Patrick Blackett, by poisoning an apple and leaving it in the laboratory for him to eat. Wow.

That's very Snow White. It's very Snow White. And then the other thing. Presumably, was Snow White coming out at that time? Maybe he was inspired by it. I don't think so, Tom. I think Snow White is a little bit later, about 10 years later. He had a friend called Francis Ferguson, who was a Rhodes Scholar.

And Francis Ferguson said to him one day, great news. I've got engaged to my girlfriend. And oppenheimer sort of smiled weakly and then when francis ferguson turned his back i'm a left on him with the strap from a trunk and tried to strangle him tried to garrot him and then when ferguson fought him off a bit like on the train oppenheimer then fell to the floor and floods of tears he sounds sounds quite creepy. Yeah, he is quite creepy. So he then went to Germany to Göttingen, which is the great center of theoretical physics. So as you said, Cambridge, you need to be good with test tubes. This is experimental.

In Göttingen, it's all kind of more mathematical. But there, he was so unpopular, interrupting in the class the whole time, that the other students boycotted the course unless he was removed. And was he i think he probably he was or they found a way around it but didn't he became friends with um verner heisenberg well he's not really friends with heisenberg no but there is it's true that this is the point at which verner heisenberg dominic tell people who've done so verner heisenberg is oppenheimer's kind of rival to some degree. He is one of the absolute meteoric figures of the golden age of breakthroughs in quantum physics, the high point of which is between 1925 and 1927. And all these theoretical physics boffins are studying the movement of electrons around the nucleus of an atom.

Tom, something I know you're very familiar with. And of course, Heisenberg, Tom, you all know this. Yeah, his uncertainty principle. The uncertainty principle. So more precisely, the more exactly you know the position of a particle, Tom, the less, of course, you can predict its momentum. You know that, don't you? Yes, I did know that. Good. And it's an incredibly exciting field. It's very much a young man's field. So Einstein is kind of yesterday's man, really. And all these young, thrusting young fellows are studying electrons and talking about waves and all this kind of business.

And Oppenheimer, he published 16 papers in three years. So he's a great kind of, you know, people know that he's an absolute star of this stuff. Before coming on to do this, I did some research in the Bodleian, where I read that his achievements in physics include the Born-Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wave functions, Dominic. Wave functions is one of his things, and field emissions, Tom. Did you read it? But did Wikipedia tell you about his work on field emissions? No, it didn't. But I was just wondering, what exactly is... So tell the listeners what the approximation for molecular wave functions is all about.

I'll be very happy to do so. But we'll be doing that, Tom, for members of the Restless History Club. You can sign up at restlesshistorypod.com. Restless particle physics. I don't want to waste it on the ordinary listeners. Okay. No, that's fair enough. So he gets a job, anyway, in the long run at the University of California at Berkeley. And is he... So Heisenberg is very much Germany's top boffin.

Yeah. Is Oppenheimer already being groomed to be America's top boffin? I don't think he's being groomed as the top boffin because there are lots of top boffins in America. But he's a top boffin. He is a top boffin, exactly. In the American Prometheus book, the Byrd and Sherwin book, they call him the Pied Piper of theoretical physics. So if you are clever and you are 18, you might well want to go and study with Oppenheimer.

You'd go to what's called, so it's the Berkeley Radiation Lab, but it's actually nicknamed the Rad Lab. And as we will see, that has another dimension, the Rad Lab. But just on Oppenheimer, before we get back to the Rad element of the Rad Lab, he's still quite an awkward, lonely, cerebral man.

The key question, Dominic. Yeah. Has he actually managed to speak to a woman at this point? I don't think so, really. He will do soon. And a very important moment at that. I heard like, do you like electrons yeah is that how he speaks i imagine that's exactly how he speaks as you said he taught himself he does things like

teaching himself dutch he spends all his time reading sanskrit yeah reading um sort of sacred texts hindu texts and things and then in the holidays he goes off and he rides in new mexico with his brother frank they will ride a thousand miles in a summer you know across the kind of the plateaus and the valleys so he's not just a nerd no he's not but he's also not a man who would spend his summer lounging on a sofa with a gin and tonic yeah okay so he wouldn't he wouldn't go to mallorca he would not he's a very driven man now i said it was the rad lab and when he gets to berkeley so we're at the sort of late 20s into the early and mid 1930s, it's a real hotbed of radical politics. So the Rad Lab is kind of double edged. And he goes to parties with other academics where they all talk about kind of Roosevelt's New Deal, about trade unions, about the rights of migrant farm workers,

all this sort of stuff that is absolutely in the air on the West Coast in the 30s. I also read in the Bodleian that he claimed only to have heard about the Wall Street crash six months after it happened. But that's very plausible. Yeah. But that seems to contradict the sense of him as someone who's very interested in radical politics. Well, first of all, the Wall Street crash happens at the beginning of his time. So do you think he becomes increasingly interested in politics?

He does absolutely. At first, I think he's idealistic, but unworldly. And then he becomes worldlier. I think there are a couple of people. One is a very important person in his story, who is a professor of French called Joaquin Chevalier. And Chevalier has these kind of parties and salons such as his house where people get together and they talk about left-wing ideas. This is kind of standard stuff in the academic world in the 1930s. But as we will see, this will have absolutely tumultuous consequences for Oppenheimer's career and his reputation. And the other person, he meets a medical student called Jean Tatlock. She's played in the film by Florence Pugh.

Tom, that gives you some sense of her. Oh, I love Florence Pugh. Yeah, well, there you go. Whose dad runs a restaurant in Oxford. He's always moaning about chairs. He's not allowed to put chairs outside his restaurant. And also very furious about traffic calming measures in Oxford, which apparently have depressed demand for his business.

That is not a line I expected us to be taking in this episode. Right, she is the daughter, Florence Pugh, a.k.a. Jean Tatlock. She is the daughter of a notable Chaucer scholar, Tom, which would appeal to you. She'd studied English lit at Vassar, the great college for sort of rich, posh girls. And she had been a very keen member since her teens, late teens, of the Communist Party, Tom.

Right. So she went to two Communist Party meetings religiously every week. And she wrote to a friend, I am a complete red. And she and Oppenheimer basically strike up this great romance. So he now definitely has spoken to a girl. Is this his first real experience of relating to women in a way that doesn't involve?

Strangling people or crying. Basically. Basically, a relationship with a woman that is, I mean, it must be overwhelming for him because he's obviously got very, very intense sexual feelings. Yeah. But at the same time, it hasn't had any way of expressing them. Yeah, I think that's right and he meets someone who presumably is you know intellectually empowering and full of new

ideas so do you think is that a she must be a huge influence on him she is massive influence she's the great love of his life i would say they don't end up marrying she's a little bit she's troubled she suffers very badly from Indeed, she ends up taking her own life much later on after they're no longer an item. But she is a great, great influence on him. But again, I mean, he seems depressive. Yes. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, when he was at, I think in England, people sort of said, you know, you need to seek treatment.

You are a very troubled, a very troubled man. But in the same year that he met her, he started reading Das Kapital. His father gives him a copy of Sidney and Beatrice Webb's book, Soviet Communism, A New Civilization, which is always the sort of book that people bash the British left with when they say they were soft on communism in the 1930s. I mean, it seems quite odd behavior for a New York plutocrat. Yeah, but he's an idealistic plutocrat, Tom.

And it's not only a plutocrat, he's a sort of trouser magnate or whatever. People selling you shirts. I mean, can you be a plutocrat if you're... No, I suppose not. But he's doing well. He's doing very well. He's got a Rembrandt. That's true.

That's true. Okay, fair enough. Semi-plutocrat. So Oppenheimer and Jean, they spend all their time going to these weekly kind of political parties where people sit around and they talk about Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, the plight of farm workers in Roosevelt's America. They have fundraisers for the Republicans in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. And a lot of these things are genuine causes, but they're also communist

front organizations. Now, a lot of the people at these meetings are paid up card-carrying members of the communist party, including Oppenheimer's brother, Frank. Oppenheimer himself seems never to have joined, probably because he's just not very clubbable. He's not a joiner. Because the communists in this period in, say, California, are they kind of left-wing masons? There's a sense of that. It's a club. It's something where you… I think it's a very complicated picture because the American Communist Party

was one of the most Stalinist parties in the world, the CPUSA. But at the same time, as you say, communism is attractive to a whole part of the kind of radical academic intellectual elite but also communist appeals to people in the in the union so the 1930s is a great age of union arrest in america and california california has always been this kind of seedbed for radical ideas so you there's all kinds of motives that would draw people into the party and you know we did a podcast series about ronald reagan we? And we were talking about him in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s

and the appeal of this kind of radical stuff in Hollywood. I mean, this is actually pretty similar. So people will be drawn into communism because their mates are all in it. As you say, some of them are Stalinists. Some of them are idealists. Some of them, it's a clubbable thing to do and all the people you know are doing it

and it's a good cause and all this sort of stuff. And he is clearly, it's a clubbable thing to do, and all the people you know are doing it, and it's a good cause, and all this sort of stuff. And he is clearly, he's giving cash. He's not paying membership dues, but he's giving cash donations to communist organizations. And the FBI, even at this point, are aware of all this. So in March 1941, this is before the United States has entered the Second World War, one of their guys is making a note of all the license plates of the people who've been to what this guy Hawkins Chevalier's part is. And Oppenheimer's is one of them. And they open a file on Oppenheimer that month. It's not because of the bomb or because of physics or something. It's because he's just part of that world and they have files on all of these people and because they have a sense war is coming so that is a theme

that we will pursue in the second half yes and of course there'll be more physics so um very exciting we'll be back in a few minutes with with dominic explaining the laws of the universe goodbye chiara it means smart in italian too bad your barista can't spell it right so you just give The laws of the universe. Goodbye. Is it too late to change your latte order? But with an espresso machine by KitchenAid, you wouldn't be thinking any of this, because you could have just made your espresso at home. Shop now at KitchenAid.ca I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman, and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip,

and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We're talking Oppenheimer and Dominic. You are, I mean, an astonishing development to all who know your much vaunted hatred of science. You are now all over the development of the atom bomb.

Well, Tom, I never said I wasn't good at science. I said I had no interest in it, which is different. So if I can effortlessly get my way through quantum physics, despite not being interested in it, I should be very proud of myself. And that is an unusual thing, Tom, because as you know, I do suffer from colossally low self-esteem. So 1939, Europe is at war. The big development for Oppenheimer is he splits up with Jean Tatlock, Florence Pugh, and he marries a woman called Kitty Harrison. Now, she's from a rich Pittsburgh family,

but interestingly, she's on a second husband already. Her first husband, believe it or not, was a communist party organizer in the steel town of Youngstown, Ohio. So it's all stacking up. And it even run for mayor, Tom, on the communist ticket. How did he do? Didn't do well. He won about two votes. And he was then killed as a volunteer in the Republican army in Spain. Well, credit to him putting, you know, I mean.

Yeah. He put his money where his mouth was. But yeah. Yeah. So she then, Kitty then married again. She married a British doctor. Then she had an affair with Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer and the doctor kind of got their heads together.

It was all very sort of gentlemanly. And she left the doctor and with Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer and the doctor kind of got their heads together. It was all very sort of gentlemanly. And she left the doctor and married Oppenheimer. She gets a terrible press in all the books about Oppenheimer. People say she's, I mean, the Kai Bird and Martin Sherman book is full of people saying Kitty was a genuinely wicked woman. Oh, goodness. Why? Well, she drank a lot. She was very abrasive. I think there is always an element, though, in these sort of biographies of, in inverted

commas, great men, that sometimes the women or the wives, if they're spirited people, independent people, they come off very badly. Basically, all the hero of the books' friends say, oh, Kitty was a terrible person. She was always moaning when we went out on the, you know. On the lash. On the lash, exactly. Was Oppenheimer going out on the lash? he doesn't seem the kind of person for that no but he was they had a very they clearly had quite a volatile relationship and she was a volatile person was

she a spitfire that's what that's what um in screwball comedies yeah i think would she be played by katherine hepburn that's what you're saying yeah she might be played by katherine hepburn i suppose um yeah i think her enemies would regard that as very generous generous I think, would she be played by Catherine Hepburn? Is that what you're saying? Yeah. She might be played by Catherine Hepburn, I suppose. Yeah, I think her enemies would regard that as very generous casting. I think she's Emily Blunt in the Christopher Nolan film. So, you know, draw your own conclusions, Tom. Emily Blunt was Mary Poppins, wasn't she? Yeah, I don't have any strong, I don't think I've ever seen Emily Blunt in anything,

so I have no strong views on Emily Blunt one way or the other. I mean, I have to say Mary Poppins sounds exactly what Oppenheimer needs yeah I guess so well he didn't you know stopping him strangle people poisoning people with apples all that so let's let's get so let us cut to the chase now Tom so in January 1939 news broke on the west coast that two German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had demonstrated that you could split the nucleus of uranium which is one of the heaviest elements in the periodic table, if you bombarded it with neutrons, with subatomic particles. The resulting fission will see a gigantic release of energy. And right away, people around the world see that this could produce a bomb the like of which humanity had

never seen. A bomb that may come to threaten the very survival of humanity itself. Very good, Tom. That's your Channel 5 documentary voiceover sorted. Just so everyone understands what's at stake. So that autumn, President Roosevelt set up what he called the Uranium Committee to research this. He said, we have to be on top of it. So he got his top boffins onto the case. Actually, took a year before the rad lab at berkeley began working on this and oppenheimer himself became involved i mean of course they are well known for being very left wing so you can understand why the government so to be fair it's roosevelt well right it's not as

left as they are but certainly by october 1941 so this is a few months before the united states enters the um second world war they have a few months before the United States enters the Second World War, they have a secret meeting at the General Electric headquarters in New York, upstate New York. Is Reagan there? No, Reagan is not. I knew. Oh, hello. What happens if I press this?

Oh, shit. I knew as soon as I said General Electric that you would think of Ronald Reagan. For those people who don't know, in our Reagan series, we talked about Reagan's work in the 1950s as a kind of front man for General Electric. So he might have been there. It would have been a bit later. He would have been there if it was 20 years later. At this point, he was dressing up as a soldier, wasn't he? Well, he was a soldier, wasn't he?

He was, and appearing with monkeys. They talk about how basically they will need loads of this particular isotope of uranium, which is called U-235, which is the only isotope, Tom, that can sustain a chain reaction. And they will need this for a nuclear bomb. And Oppenheimer is all over this stuff. And even at this point, they have a real sense that they are in a race against time with Nazi scientists. So I know you've been watching a lot of Indiana Jones films. And obviously, Nazi scientists and people about ilk play a large part in these things so there's an element of a sort of thriller about this now yeah they know

that the nazis it's the equivalent of the race of the ark of the covenant exactly exactly and dominic where is britain in this britain is off doing its own thing britain has a project called tube alloys um which will end up being kind of folded into the manhattan project but at this stage the american project is its own thing but it's are they ahead of britain and germany uh no they have a sense i was going to come to this but they have quite a strong sense of being behind their sense is that partly because of it was the hans strassman who made the great theoretical breakthrough and partly you know the germans have verner heisenberg who's the most famous young physicist on the planet and of course they think well the germ have probably been, because they've been in

the war for two years already, they have probably been throwing tons of resources at this. And don't the Germans sort of have heavy water at Telemark or something? I know nothing of heavy water, Tom. That's where my scientific knowledge runs out. I don't even know if it's relevant. Okay. There's something to do with Norway. Okay.

And there's heavy water there or something. I don't know. My brother would know about Okay. There's something to do with Norway. Okay. And there's heavy water there or something. I don't know. My brother would know about that. Let's draw a veil over that. Let's get back to Oppenheimer. So May 1942, he has made the director of the fast neutron research for a new secret committee, which is called S1. And he's absolutely passionate about doing this.

So he believes, as most of these scientists do, there are lots of Jewish scientists among them. And at this point, there is no sense whatsoever that this will be directed. Even though they're fighting Japan, this will be used against Japan. All their sense is this will be used against the Germans. In fact, Oppenheimer tells one of his colleagues,

Edward Teller, a man who will feature more heavily in this story, in the summer of 1942, explicitly says to him, only a nuclear bomb can dislodge Hitler from his conquered territories in Europe. And, I mean, is the intention that they will use it or that they will say, we will use it unless you unconditionally surrender? Or what's the military planning on that? I think at that point, they have no clear plan. Because they don't know how devastating it will be. No, because they don't know when, what the situation will be when they finally got there.

They don't know how long it will take. Of course, it's going to take them another three years. They don't have a sort of a finely worked out strategy for how to use this. Now, Oppenheimer is aware, even at this stage, that there is a big problem, and that is the communist problem. So he says to his friends that summer in 1942, I'm cutting all my contacts with people who were in the communist party. I know that the government will not want me unless I do this,

that I have this passed, basically. And in fact, in August 1942, the War Department said they were very unhappy about using Oppenheimer. They didn't really want to give him security clearance. They said, listen, he's been hobnobbing with these people who have security risks for years. It's not like a one-off. And who are Stalinists. And who are Stalinists. But he gets an absolutely crucial ally who is one of the big figures in the story of the Manhattan Project, who is a guy called colonel leslie r groves so colonel groves had graduated fourth in his class at west point he's in his late 40s he is an immensely dedicated ruthless organizer that's what he is he's an organizer one of his aides one of his closest aides said to, said of him, he was the biggest son of a bitch I ever worked

for. I hated his guts. But he then said he got things done. And that was, he was the person you brought in to get stuff done, to run projects and things. So Groves in the autumn of 1942, he takes over what was then called the Manhattan Engineer District, ends up being called the Department of Substitute Materials, but we know as the Manhattan Project. And why is it Manhattan? Because there was some office in Manhattan. Because I always wondered that, because Manhattan's a long way from Los Alamos.

It's a long way. But as you see, Los Alamos is not even on their radar at this point. Oh, okay. Because I always thought that they were working in Los Alamos. They do end up working in Los Alamos, but that's because of Oppenheimer. So they haven't even got there yet. So Groves and Oppenheimer have lunch and Oppenheimer, and they're so different, but what they have in common is this sort of single-minded obsessiveness about the security clearance issue. You are my man that I want to run a single laboratory, which will gather all these great brains and that we will dedicate it to this weapon. And I want one person to run it.

And that person is you. And why have they fixed on Oppenheimer? Because he's the best scientist or because they sense that he has the personal qualities? When you say they, it's really only he. It's only Groves. Lots of other people say. Was he spotted? Well, when you say they, it's really only he. It's only Groves. Lots of other people say- What's he spotted? Well, that's the fascinating thing, because lots of Groves' superiors and colleagues say,

why Oppenheimer? He's risky. And Groves just says, I see something in him. This, I think, is the obsessiveness, actually. Okay, so it's the obsessiveness rather than his evident pedigree as a scientist. The pedigree as a scientist is part of it. But what he's actually getting him to do is to run the thing, to manage it, to manage hundreds of other scientists, which is not something Oppenheimer has ever done.

And I wouldn't say that his track record necessarily suggests he'd be very good at it, with his whole strangling people and poisoned apples and things. I agree with you. But he has cleaned up his act since then. There's been very few strangling related incidents. So Oppenheimer is going to be the man. But, and this is, everyone should stop what you're doing and listen to this bit of the podcast.

Oppenheimer has a terrible conversation about this point a few weeks later, the autumn of 1942, or perhaps the early weeks of 1943. He has his old friend, Hawkins Chevalier, the autumn of 1942, or perhaps the early weeks of 1943, he has his old friend, Hawkins Chevalier, the French literature guy, round for dinner back in California. And at that dinner party, Chevalier says to him, I have a friend called George, who asked me to pass on a message to you. It seems very unfair that we are now talking to the British and sharing secrets with them. But our gallant allies in the East, who are doing so much of allied unity and actually winning the war against the Nazis and for you to pass on a few, you know, what you know. And Oppenheimer does one very good thing and one very foolish thing.

The very good thing is he says, no, I'm not interested. You know, this is not for me. There's no doubt about that. He didn't pass on secrets to the Soviets. But the thing that's very foolish is he doesn't report the conversation. He doesn't tell anybody about it. Is it, but is it just them? In the room. But the thing that's very foolish is he doesn't report the conversation. He doesn't tell anybody about it. But is it just them? In the room. Just the two of them? Yeah, I think their wives are around and they're in the kitchen or something

and it's just a quiet word. So very deniable. Very deniable. But, well, as we will see, even for his own self-protection, he absolutely should have mentioned it in his failure to do so. Though you might say laudable because he's protecting a friend,

this will really come back to bite him. But of course he doesn't know this at the time. At the time he is planning for what becomes Los Alamos. So in November 1942, he goes with a small group, including Groves, to New Mexico. They go to a place called Jemez Springs near Santa Fe, a canyon. And they say, Oppenheimer says, it's too small. We won't be able to build a little town down here. Why don't we go up to the end of the canyon and keep going? I used to ride around

here. There's a boys' school. They go up there and they go to the boys' school and Groves says, brilliant, this is the place. I mean, that's literally what he says. He says brilliant this is the place i mean that's literally what he says he says this is the place and two days later the u.s army buys the boys school that oppenheimer visited all those years ago and they just transform it they bring in loads of machines they bring in generators and cyclotrons and lab things and what's the cyclotron it's an important lab thing and um they uh at first they open in March and they have only 100 people. But by the time they're really running in mid-1945, they have 6,000 people and Oppenheimer is basically running the show. It's amazing. I mean, considering how unsuited to running 6,000 people,

everything that you've said about him seems to mark him. But he's good at it, Tom. I mean, as we know, they did it. I know. He's very good at it because of this sort of demented single-mindedness, I suppose. He drives them really hard. They believe that the Germans, at this point, they believe the Germans are two years ahead of them. But is he and the other boffins, are they actually in the army or are they just linked

to the army? Well, most of the people in Los alamos are not in the army so there are 4 000 people who are not in the army in 2000 who are um oppenheimer himself he has the specially commissioned uniform which he wears all the time to show you know to i suppose to show that he's an authority figure that he's not just a scientist um he was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel even though he failed the medical so he was medically completely you know partly because he's just been eating artichokes and not just a scientist. He was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel even though he failed the medical. So he was medically completely, partly because he'd just

been eating artichokes and chocolate for 30 years. And he can't move in a chemistry lab without knocking over a burner. I mean,

he'd be good in the cavalry, Tom, with all his riding. Yeah, that's true. And he'd be good as a sort of,

as an assassin with his strangling, his gretting. And his apples. Right. But not as a conventional um as a conventional infantryman or something now so he's running them you know they're doing all this stuff to kind of prepare for the bomb but all through this there are doubts about him so for one thing

he started seeing jean tatlock again okay she's still a communist. Florence Butte, she's still a communist. Now, whether they're having an affair or whether they're just seeing each other's friends, who knows? We don't know, but he's certainly seeing her. Secondly, the FBI and army intelligence, both are very concerned about him. So all through this period, they are tapping his phone, they read his letters, they wiretap his office. Even his chauffeur, his driver, is an agent for army counterintelligence. They are so worried. And they actually say to him, whenever you leave Los Alamos, if you drive into Albuquerque or Santa Fe or somewhere, we will be tailing you. We will be watching you. So from this point onwards, he's actually always under

scrutiny. I didn't realize this. I thought that the communist issue, as it were, came out of nowhere in the 1950s. I mean, it's less toxic for him at this point because, as you said, the Soviets are still American allies. That's right. That's right. So he can sort of, it's not so toxic. That said, in the late summer of 1943, he has his second great disastrous conversation. And this is, he hears that they are worried about communist influence at Berkeley, the radiation laboratory.

And it's at this point that he reports, so very late, months late, that he decides he will report the conversation with Chevalier about possibly being an agent for the Soviets. And he's interviewed by a man with a slightly peculiar name of Boris Pash, who's an ex kind of white Russian or something, who works for army intelligence. And he gives a very, very poor performance. He's very vague about the conversation. And he's also inaccurate. He says, I don't think it's just me they approached. He was approaching three other scientists as well, which is a kind of detail that he's made up that's not true. And it's not clear whether he's made that up so that it's not just him and that he doesn't look so bad, or he's made it up because he wants it to look bigger than it is. He himself said, I don't know why I said that. It just wasn't really true. But the fact is he's

given this very rambling, shambolic performance. And whenever the FBI, when they later interrogate him, he's always a bit vague and evasive. And I think because he feels guilty, you know, because as we all would, he feels under pressure and a bit shifty and anxious. So he's a very bad. And that, unfortunately, does not put it to bed. It means that among the FBI and among the U.S. Army intelligence, there are people who think he's hiding something. You know, there's something fishy about Oppenheimer, something not quite right. And actually, even at this point, Groves is still having to kind of stick up for him and say, no, he's my man. We'll get him to do it. One other thing before we move on to the very end of the story, this part of the story anyway. At the end of 1943, a chap called Niels Bohr arrives at Los Alamos, a great Danish physicist.

Now, he had gone on this amazing journey. He had been smuggled out of Denmark into Sweden. And then in Sweden, he was kind of bundled into the kind of bomb bit of an unmarked British bomber and then flown to England. They had an oxygen mask for him to wear because he could he would probably pass out possibly die on the flight if he didn't have oxygen but he misheard the instructions and didn't put it on so he did pass out but he didn't die which is just as well uh he joins the british nuclear project which was called tube alloys and the british agree that they will send boar as they end up sending lots of their scientists to los alamos to collaborate on the Manhattan project. And it's when Bohr gets to Los Alamos that he says, I know for a fact, because I had

a conversation with him, that Werner Heisenberg in Germany is working on a Nazi bomb. So the pressure is really on. But Bohr also does something else. He says to Oppenheimer, once we've done this, we should share this with the world. It shouldn't just be an American or British thing. We should share it with everybody because in this new age, we have to be completely open and there can't be any secrecy. We have to build a new, more idealistic, more international world. Sharing the benefits of atomic energy is a massive part of this. Now, Bohr went around saying this in the final years of the war. He said it to Churchill, and Churchill said afterwards to his men, you know, that bloke should be locked up. Like, this is a very bad idea. But Oppenheimer, because of his kind of ethical culture stuff and his kind of social gospel, Judaism, and all this business.

He's into that. He loves it. He thinks this is great. This is a great step towards a world government and all this great fun. So this again is going to be a sort of little ticking time bomb in Oppenheimer's career. So let's fast forward since we're reaching the end of this episode. We're into 1945. Roosevelt died in the middle of April.

Hitler killed himself on the 30th of April. It's clear at this point the bomb is not going to be used against Nazi Germany. They're not going to need to. The Nazis have lost the race, so the Nazis never did build a nuclear bomb. And as when Germany crashed out of the war in May 1945, obviously the next target is Japan. And at this point, to put the decision that will be made in the next episode into context, at this point, the American bombing raids on Japan have reached such a peak that in the most famous one on the 9th of March 1945, the firebombing of Tokyo, they destroyed 16 square miles of the Japanese capital and killed 100,000 people. But also, Dominic, just to put that into context, they are also fighting an incredibly brutal war in the Pacific. And the projections of military strategists is that millions of people on both sides will die if there is a land invasion of Japan. That's right. That's absolutely right. I mean, there are ferocious arguments about the decision to, I mean, among historians, I mean, about the decision to drop the first atom bomb on Hiroshima

and then the second on Nagasaki. And maybe we'll come to this a little bit in the second episode. I think there was never any doubt the Truman administration were going to do it. And Oppenheimer, at this point, he seems to have had a few private doubts, but by and large, he's happy to go along with it. I mean, the context is that Germany's been defeated, and certainly the British are exhausted, and America is desperate not to lose millions of people. And so presumably this is weighing on what's happening at Los Alamos. They're thinking this could be a cutting of the Gordian Knot. It's not just that.

He thinks it's the weapon to end all wars. Oppenheimer does. Yes. But presumably the US military and Truman don't think that. No, the US military and Truman are thinking purely, I think they've got two things on their minds. One is winning the war against Japan, and the other is the Soviet Union's Darnham.

And this is a massive historiographical this is one of the hottest most hotly contested debates in all american historiographies so we don't really have time of course the key thing though tom is they have to make sure it works so that summer they choose the place the place is called i mean you could hardly you couldn't make this up. It's called the Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of Death. The place is the sort of... That's literally its name. Yeah. That's the Spanish name. Nominative determinism. Nominative determinism, indeed. It's about 120 miles southeast of Albuquerque,

New Mexico. It's Oppenheimer who says we'll call it Trinity. I don't know why he, no one knows why he chose that title. He just said... Apparently from a John Dunn poem. Yeah. There were some people who say because he loved the poet John Donne. Which he'd been introduced to by Florence Pugh. Is that right?

Apparently, yeah. I mean, thank God he didn't name himself to George Eliot. Yeah. Reawakening memories of that disastrous spell at summer camp. And so that quote that you read at the beginning of the episode, that's what happens at 5.30 a.m. on the morning of the 16th of July, 1945. And this is an extraordinary moment in world history. It is the beginning of the atomic age. It's the moment at which, if you're going to use that Promethean device, it's the moment at which humankind gets

its hands on fire. Well, I mean, it's more than just human history. I mean, the whole history of the planet. Yeah. And so as you said afterwards, many years later, Oppenheimer said that he thought about that line from the Bhagavad Gita, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. But actually, at the time, he said something quite different. So the New York Times, there's a guy from the New York Times who has been chosen. He's basically embedded. He's been chosen by Groves to report the event. And Oppenheimer says to him that the blast was terrifying, but not entirely under-pressing. And then he pauses and he says, lots of boys who are not yet grown up will owe their lives to this, which is a counterintuitive note on which to which to end

on that we will take a break and finish today's episode and we will be back with the second half of this story so the way the atom bomb is used in japan oppenheimer's views on that all the kind of historiographical complexities around it and then the story of Oppenheimer's downfall. And ultimately, he gets kind of rehabilitated, doesn't he? So we will see you for part two very soon, unless, of course, you are a member of the Restless History Club, in which case we can see you immediately, because you can go and listen to it right now. So we will either see you, well, you know, in a few minutes or in a few days.

Either way, bye-bye bye-bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad-free listening and access to our chat community please sign up up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest of the entertainment.com that's