Oppenheimer: What led to the physicist's downfall?

First J. Robert Oppenheimer created the weapon, then he fought for years to warn of its dangers. During the second world war, the so-called “father of the atomic bomb”, led a team of scientists in the US in a race against Nazi Germany to create the first nuclear weapon. Then it was used to kill thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

In Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s new 3-hour blockbuster, the film focuses on the years that followed and how the physicist’s campaigning ultimately led to his downfall.

In this episode of CultureLab, Christie Taylor speaks to Kai Bird, a journalist and historian who co-authored the book that was the main source material for Nolan’s film – American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Christie Taylor: There’s a new film out that is perhaps one of the most science-adjacent cultural moments we could’ve wished for here at New Scientist, a three-hour Hollywood film about the physicist J Robert Oppenheimer and the race to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany. You’ve probably heard of it by now, it’s called Oppenheimer.

J Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the scientists at New Mexico’s top secret Los Alamos Laboratory for two-and-a-half years, leading up to the first successful test of a nuclear weapon in 1945. That test was called the Trinity Test and it was the proof of concept that then President Harry S Truman needed to authorise bombings of the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima later that summer.

The casualties in Japan, both immediately and in the aftermath, remain difficult to tally, but are estimated at over 100,000 or even closer to 200,000. Meanwhile, New Mexicans living downwind of the Trinity Test site reported higher rates of cancers in the years following.

After the war, Oppenheimer famously spoke against the widespread use of nuclear weapons. He then lost his security clearances and reputation in the fever of McCarthyism in the 1950s, when the country and US government turned in paranoia against anyone even slightly suspected of Communism. It’s this aftermath, the tragedy of Oppenheimer ‘s later years that the film focuses on in detail.

At a screening event in New York last weekend, Director Christopher Nolan spoke of his hopes that the US government might take more seriously the threat of nuclear weapons and the need for international co-operation.

Christopher Nolan: Our relationship with the fear of nuclear weapons ebbs and flows with the geopolitical situation, and it shouldn’t, because the threat is constant, and very often, when you look back at history, some of the closest moments to nuclear disaster have actually been in times of relative calm, geopolitically. So, even though the situation in Ukraine, kind of, puts it more in the forefront of people’s minds, the truth is nuclear weapons are an extraordinarily dangerous thing to have lying around the house, and it is not something we should ever forget about, and it’s not something we should take lightly.

Christie Taylor: Shortly before the film’s release, I talked to Kai Bird, a journalist and historian, who co-authored the 2006 book, American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, along with this co-author the late Martin Sherwin. The Pulitzer Prize winning book was the main source material for Nolan’s film.

Kai, lets start with the title of your book. You call this American Prometheus, which refers to this Greek myth of a man who stole fire from the gods, and then, spent the rest of his life punished for it. Chained to a rock having vultures eat out his liver, if I remember right. For people who are not perhaps familiar with the story of J Robert Oppenheimer, how do you, sort of, condense his life into that same kind of story? Why is he the American Prometheus?

Kai Bird: Well, it’s a very apt title, precisely because he, at the end of World War II, was hailed as a national hero in America, his image was put on the covers of Time and Life, he became the most celebrated scientist in America, and then, nine years later, he’s, sort of, publicly humiliated in this kangaroo court at the height of the McCarthy witch-hunts, and his loyalty to the country is questioned and he’s suspected of being a security risk or perhaps even a spy, and indeed, his security clearance, he’s stripped of them, and then, the entire transcript of this very unfair, semi-judicial proceeding is leaked to The New York Times.

He was once a very particular public intellectual, and after that 1954 trial, he’s a public non-entity. He’s disinvited from university platforms, he’s no longer welcome in Washington to give counsel, he’s stripped of his national identity as a scientist and intellectual. So, it’s a very relevant story to our times and it helps to, by the way, explain some of our current idiotic politics in America today.

Christie Taylor: I definitely want to ask you about that a little bit later but, let’s start at the beginning. Christopher Nolan, the director of the movie, he called him the most important man who ever lived, or something along those lines, but when we talk about him being the lead of the science team during this race to build the bomb, was he truly instrumental to that effort, or could someone else have gotten us across the finish line faster than the Germans too? Why was he the guy to get it done?

Kai Bird: Well, he was a most peculiar choice to become scientific director of this secret city in Los Alamos. He was only 38 years old when General Leslie Groats chose him in 1942 and he had never administered more than a handful of graduate students. There was no reason to pick him, expect for the fact that Groves saw in this young man a, sort of, intensity and an ambition and unlike all the other scientist he’s been interviewing, Groves saw that this was a man who could speak in plain English and could convey knowledge. He was a quantum physicist who actually loved the novels of Ernest Hemingway and wrote poetry himself, and he was a man of literature. So, that was, sort of, a key to his success, both as a scientist and as director of Los Alamos.

Christie Taylor: Can you say more about that? When you’re talking about accomplishing a project, I don’t necessarily think of literature as making you successful in that very particular way.

Kai Bird: Well, he typically, could inspire these very eccentric and large egoed scientists to work hard on this project, and his, sort of, style of management was to come into the room and stand at the back of the room and listen and let everyone have their say and talk. Then, at exactly the right moment, he would step in and summarise what everyone had been saying, and yet, do so in a way that pointed the path forward to solving whatever particular problem they were trying to address, scientifically or otherwise, and he could do so in plain English.

You know, off the top of his head, he could quote from poetry and make analogies that made it clear to people what he was trying to convey, and everyone we interviewed, coming back to your first question, everyone who was at Los Alamos all said that if anyone else had been chosen as director, it probably would’ve taken three or four or five years. He motivated people to work hard, but also, to play hard at Los Alamos.

He was famous for hosting parties and mixing gin martinis and he emphasised that people should have fun and also work hard. You know, it was quite clear to any physicist in 1942 that the discoveries that had been made about fission made it possible to have a gadget that would have enormous destructive power, and after that, it was simply an engineering problem. A complicated engineering problem, that took enormous resources to pull together. So, this was going to happen, if not in two-and-a-half years, it was going to happen very soon thereafter.

Christie Taylor: So, he and his team accomplished the bomb in two-and-a-half years, as you said, and then, we have the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To what degree could he have had a say in whether that happened or not? You know, did it matter what he felt or whether he thought it was a good idea? Could he have influenced the outcome?

Kai Bird: Well, he felt a mix of emotions. You know, it was not his decision. That was the President’s decision, it was Harry Truman’s decision, and the War Secretary, Henry Stimson, but Oppenheimer knew what was going to happen, and in the first instance, trying to build this gadget as quickly as possible because he feared that the Germans were going to get it first and fascism would win, but then the fascists in Germany are defeated in the Spring of ’45.

So, then there was actually a discussion that took place in an auditorium in Los Alamos among the scientists, ‘Well, why are we working so hard to build this weapon of mass destruction to be used on the Japanese when we know the Japanese cannot possibly be doing this?’ Oppenheimer steps forward, after listening to all the arguments, and in his typical fashion, and he tells the story about how when Nils Bohr first arrived in Los Alamos, on the last day of 1943, he went up to Oppenheimer and said, ‘Robert, I have one question for you. is it big enough? Is it big enough to end all war? Big enough to shock humanity into realising that we can no longer fight total warfare in this way?’

Oppenheimer convinced himself of this argument and that the gadget had to be demonstrated, its power had to be demonstrated in this war, because otherwise, the next war was going to be fought by two adversaries, both of them would be armed by these nuclear weapons, and that would be Armageddon. So, it’s an interesting argument, and yet, what happened, in fact, was he knew it was going to be used on a whole city.

He instructed the bombardiers to drop it in the centre of the city, Hiroshima, and at the right altitude to have the most maximum power, and he understood that the victims were going to be ‘poor little people,’ civilians, women and children, and that pained him. When he read the accounts of what happened in Hiroshima after the bomb, we know from letters that his wife, Kitty, wrote, he plunged into a deep depression and she feared for his life, and then, he spent the rest of his life trying to warm people about the dangers of these weapons.

He called it a weapon of terror, a weapon for aggressors, and even, he said, a weapon that had been used on a virtually already defeated enemy, and he said that because, after Hiroshima, he came back to Washington, and got briefings about the end of the war and just within weeks of the Japanese surrender, and he realised the Japanese were really on the verge of surrendering.

Christie Taylor: Yes, you raise that point about the motivation being to end all war, right? This hope that by having such a horrible weapon, nations would understand they could no longer actually fight each other without destroying the planet, but it also comes with this is, possibly very small, but they don’t necessarily know that immediately, chance that the chain reaction that you start with nuclear fission just never stops, and you ignite the atmosphere, set it on fire, end the world, right there in the testing phase. Why did Oppenheimer feel that this weapon was worth even that, very small but very frightening risk?

Kai Bird: Well, he took the risk because he knew he didn’t have any other choice, and when I say that, I mean, as a scientist, he understood that human beings are mammals with great curiosity. You can’t stop science. You cannot stop human beings from figuring out the physical world around us.

So, he knew, in 1939, when fission was discovered, this was a possibility, that someone was going to do it, and he feared, as I said, that the German scientists that he had studied with in Germany as a young man, were perfectly capable of doing this, and that they were likely eighteen months ahead in the race to build this weapon. So, he felt compelled to do it, and yes, there was a risk, and at one point, there was so much worry that they might set fire to the atmosphere that he got on a train and came back to consult other scientists on the east coast and came to the consultation, in the end, that the chances of that were infinitesimal.

Christie Taylor: So, you already referred to his activism after World War II, sort of, culminated in these bombings. I guess I’m wondering, is it too simple to say he regretted what he did? You know, was there any part of him that felt like it was worth it? You know, like, do you think that he would go back and do something different, if he had the chance, or was he really about, ‘Well, now we’ve done, sort of, the smallest step, we don’t need to take any bigger steps,’ right? He was advocating against the hydrogen bomb, he had this place for, sort of, tactical weapons. What do you think, like, his ideal end result would have been?

Kai Bird: Well, he never apologised for Hiroshima. He never said, ‘I regret that we did this.’ He, again, said, ‘As a scientist, I think we had to do it. You couldn’t stop it,’ but he was emphatic that, ‘Now that we have discovered how to make this weapon of mass destruction, we need to contain it. Internationalise controls over it,’ and he had a very specific plan to create an international atomic authority that would have sovereign rights to all things atomic, that would have the right to inspect any factory, any laboratory, anywhere in the world, and prohibit the construction of these weapons.

He essentially wanted to ban the weapon, although he wanted to use the technology to produce energy. He thought that atomic energy was a viable technology. So, he spent the next nine years arguing for international control, and he was against the hydrogen bomb, and he said, ‘We need to put all this back into a box and contain it,’ and he failed, because no-one listened to him. Edward Teller wanted to build the H-Bomb and Harry Truman authorised it and America, spent billions of dollars to build thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons, and this was his worst nightmare.

In 1945, he predicted that it was cheap, that there were no secrets, and that any society, however poor, who wanted this technology could get it. So, he was predicting North Korea getting then, and Pakistan, and Israel, and Iran, someday. He was right. So, that’s the other part of the tragedy.

Christie Taylor: You say in a piece you wrote for The New Yorker very recently, part of the real tragedy was also the disgrace, the trial, the, sort of, stripping of society credentials, the McCarthyism, that he was the centre of, you say this, ‘damaged our ability, as a society, to debate honestly about scientific theory.’ That’s a pretty strong ripple effect, and you pull it back to Anthony Fauci during the COVID 19 pandemic. Why do you think that was such a strong moment in what became, a very politicised scientific future?

Kai Bird: Well, it was, what happened to Oppenheimer in 1954 just sent a message to scientists everywhere that if you get off your narrow lane and you attempt to become a public intellectual and talk about policy and social issues and politics and try to give advice about science to the politicians, you can be tarred and feathered and humiliated and destroyed.

So, it’s very odd that, after the creation of this, at the dawn of the nuclear age, when we’re drenched in science and technology, as a society, we don’t have, as heroes, scientist. Instead, Dr Fauci, Anthony Fauci, in the midst of the pandemic, virtually his integrity and honesty and his standing as a loyal citizen is questioned in a, sort of, narrow-minded, know-nothing, kind of, populist demagogic way, and this reveals that, at least a great many Americans, and this is true of other societies across the globe, have some kind of innate distrust of science.

Even though we are using computers everyday, driving cars, somehow, as human beings, we have a distrust of the technology that we actually rely on, and it’s very peculiar, and I think part of the fact that we don’t have a really civil discourse about such issues in science today, for instance, like on AI, it goes back to what was done to Oppenheimer.

Christie Taylor: Your biography with Martin Sherwin won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, and now, there’s this movie coming out, and it seems to be poised to be one of the blockbuster movies of the year. What does that mean to you, someone who wrote all this down in a book almost twenty years ago with a co-author who is, unfortunately, no longer with is? You know, this movie, could it shape the world, or is this just another way to tell the same story?

Kai Bird: Well, I’m very sad that Marty Sherwin’s no longer with us, he spent 25 years working on this book, and I only spent five years, I came aboard in 2000, and it still took us five more years to produce the book, but it was a great collaboration, and yes, the book won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006.

It’s, sort of, astonishing, eighteen years later now, it’s having a second life and is getting a lot of attention, so I’m very fortunate that Nolan, in particular, as a director, picked up the film option on this book, because he is, in some way, peculiarly talented and well-qualified to tackle this big subject. He has an interest in science and science fiction and time and space, so the story attracted him, when someone handed him the book, and he’s written, I think, a brilliant screenplay, and it’s grappling with all of these big issues, at the dawn of the atomic age, but also, McCarthyism and the role of the scientist as a public intellectual, and yet, it’s also a film that is deeply biographical and you’ll come away with a curiosity about this very complex man.

So, Nolan has taken the book, which is, a 700 plus page biography, and he’s transformed it, artistically, into this other medium, in a just brilliant fashion and tells much of the whole story. I’m very grateful that, as a historian and biographer, it’s also just amazingly historically accurate. He’s not making things up.

Christie Taylor: The effort you and Martin Sherwin undertook to, sort of, clear Dr Oppenheimer’s name over the last, again, almost twenty years, it seems like you started fairly close after your Pulitzer Prize, if not earlier, and Energy Secretary, Jennifer Granholm, like, just last Fall, last Winter, December, announced that, I feel like this is a technicality in some ways, but the nullification of the revoke of his security credentials, which is not the same as reissuing his security credentials, but it’s, like, an official act of, sort of, forgiveness that I believe you said goes far beyond just an apology or a declaration, I guess.

Can you say more about, can these kinds of official acts, sort of, bring us back to a better place, with regards to the politicisation of science, or is this just much more about J Robert Oppenheimer himself?

Kai Bird: I think it’s significant for many reasons. Historically, it means that readers will now be able to read the last chapter and realise that, officially speaking, what happened to Oppenheimer in 1954 was wrong and that they violated their own procedures and what they did to him was atrocious. At the same time, I think this is important today because it will, again, send a message to working scientists, scientists who work in the government bureaucracy, that they won’t be punished if they espouse unpopular views or speak out about public policy that is unpopular or dissenting.

It’s important for people, in general, to understand that science is always an argument. The scientific method is all about experimentalism, about examining the facts, again and again, and testing them, and that, of course, we have to be able to change our minds, based on what we see in the facts. So, coming back to Dr Anthony Fauci, Fauci had to, in the pandemic, try to, at times, look at the facts and come to different conclusions about what public policy, health policy should be, and that scientific mind-set should be honoured and valued. I think the Oppenheimer nullification sends a message that people, policy makers in Washington, understand that, will honour that.

Christie Taylor: As someone who lived through the Cold War, and many of the actors have noted this connection themselves, what is it like to look at this man who, as you said, was one of the drivers of a technical achievement with a huge social and political aftermath? Do you resent him, and I’m sure you can actually look at it with more nuance than that, but what is like to hold this admiration for him in one hand and also understand all of the consequences that followed?

Kai Bird: No, I admire Oppenheimer as a man and I sympathise with the dilemma that he faced. Again, you can’t turn away from science, you can’t turn away from trying to explore the physical world, and yet, unfortunately, one of the results of this is the invention of these weapons of mass destruction. You know, we’re still trying to live with, live with the bomb, and facing a war in Europe now, the Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin has warned, somewhat obliquely, about the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield. I think it’s important for us to understand that the father of the atomic bomb, three months after Hiroshima, was trying to warn us that these are weapons of terror, they’re not weapons of defence, they’re weapons for aggressors, and that’s how we should think about them. So, it’s a very important story and I’m, very, again, gratified that Nolan has found a way to tell the story on the big screen.