Day After Trinity

<v Narrator 1>In August of 1945, the city of Hiroshima was destroyed in about nine <v Narrator 1>seconds by a single atomic bomb. <v Narrator 1>The man responsible for building the bomb was a gentle and eloquent physicist <v Narrator 1>named Jay Robert Oppenheimer. <v Narrator 1>This is the story of Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb. <v Haakon Chevalier>Stinson Beach, California, August 7th, 1945. <v Haakon Chevalier>Dear Oppy, you're probably the most famous man in the world today. <v Haakon Chevalier>And yet I am not sure that this letter will reach you. <v Haakon Chevalier>But if it does, I want you to know that we are very proud of you. <v Haakon Chevalier>And if it doesn't, you will know it anyway. <v Haakon Chevalier>[music plays] We have been irritated by your reticence these past few years. <v Haakon Chevalier>But under the itchy surface, we knew that it was all right. <v Haakon Chevalier>That the ?work? was progressing, that the heart was still there, and the warm being we <v Haakon Chevalier>have known and cherished. <v Haakon Chevalier>I can understand now, as I could guess then, the somber note <v Haakon Chevalier>in you during our last meetings.

<v Haakon Chevalier>There is a weight in such a venture which few men in history have had to bear. <v Haakon Chevalier>I know that with your love of men, it is no light thing to have had a part <v Haakon Chevalier>and a great part in a diabolical contrivance for destroying them. <v Haakon Chevalier>But in the possibilities of death are also the possibilities of life. <v Haakon Chevalier>You have made history. <v Haakon Chevalier>We are happy for you. <v Hans Bethe>You may well ask why uh uh people <v Hans Bethe>with a kind heart and human- <v Hans Bethe>humanist feelings. <v Hans Bethe>Why they would uh go and work on weapons of mass destruction. <v Hans Bethe>[music plays]

<v Narrator 1>When J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in 1984, the atomic bomb was <v Narrator 1>not yet even science fiction. <v Narrator 1>He was educated at the Ethical Culture School in New York. <v Narrator 1>And mastered Harvard's curriculum in three years, summa cum laudi. <v Narrator 1>He spoke six languages and seriously considered becoming an architect, a poet or <v Narrator 1>a scientist. <v Narrator 1>But it was his love of physics that led him to England and Germany in the 1920s, <v Narrator 1>where the atom was beginning to yield its secrets to Einstein, Rutherford, and Borne. <v Narrator 1>European scientists would later remember him as the quick and eccentric <v Narrator 1>young American who devoured both theoretical physics and 16th century <v Narrator 1>French poetry. One of his best friends was the young American writer, Frances <v Narrator 1>Ferguson.

<v Frances Ferguson>Well, when I first knew him he knew nothing about politics. <v Frances Ferguson>He never read the newspaper. <v Frances Ferguson>Uh he was extremely ignorant about practical matters and he didn't care about <v Frances Ferguson>them. Uh and uh [stuttering] his whole <v Frances Ferguson>life was in the intellect. [music plays] <v Narrator 1>At the age of 25, he accepted an unusual dual professorship at the University <v Narrator 1>of California at Berkeley and at Cal Tech in Pasadena. <v Narrator 1>He brought with them the radically new understanding of the atom and the principles of <v Narrator 1>quantum mechanics. <v Robert Server>Quantum mechanics was comparatively new ?inaudible?. <v Robert Server>And it was, oh, he was opening a new world ?inaudible? <v Robert Server>he made it tremendous, tremendously exciting <v Robert Server>and fascinating, too. <v Robert Server>And in fact, very few of them didn't take- didn't come back and take it a second <v Robert Server>year [laughing]. <v Narrator 1>One of his graduate students was Robert Server. <v Robert Server>I think there was- remember one Russian lady, Miss ?inaudible?, her <v Robert Server>name was, who had taken it three times and the fourth year [chuckling] she

<v Robert Server>wanted to come back and and Robert to- refused to allow her into the course. <v Robert Server>She went on a hunger strike [laughed] and forced her way in. <v Robert Wilson>Something that might have taken me months to have learned before he <v Robert Wilson>would go over in minutes. <v Narrator 1>Robert Wilson, physicist. <v Robert Wilson>Very fast ?inaudible? in a very elegant manner. <v Robert Server>He was extremely quick and very impatient, had a very sharp tongue. <v Robert Server>Which he used on people. <v Robert Server>He actually terrorized the students when he first began to teach, <v Robert Server>[laughing] we were afraid to come into the same room for fear of a nasty <v Robert Server>remark. <v Narrator 1>[music plays] Robert Oppenheimer and his younger brother, Frank, were born into a wealthy <v Narrator 1>family and raised in New York City. <v Narrator 1>Throughout the 1930s, they spent their summers with friends at a small ranch leased by <v Narrator 1>the Oppenheimer family high in the Pecos wilderness of northern New Mexico. <v Frances Ferguson>When we first went there, uh we slept on the floor.

<v Frances Ferguson>A board floor. <v Frances Ferguson>We didn't have enough covers and we were pretty frozen by morning. <v Frances Ferguson>But [laughs] that didn't bother Robert much. <v Frances Ferguson>He was a fairly hardy fellow, although he didn't look that way. <v Frances Ferguson>He looked terribly frail, but he was pretty tough. <v Frances Ferguson>He eventually explored a large part of those mountains, probably knew more about <v Frances Ferguson>than almost anybody else. <v Frances Ferguson>And he would just get on his horse and put a chocolate bar in his <v Frances Ferguson>pocket and be gone for a day or two, at least. <v Frances Ferguson>Sleeping out, probably would see nobody else during the whole trip. <v Frank Oppenheimer>Everything my brother did would sort of be special. <v Frank Oppenheimer>If he went off in the woods to take a leak, he'd come back with a flower and not <v Frank Oppenheimer>to disguise the fact that he ?made? leak, but just to make it an occasion, I guess. <v Frank Oppenheimer>It was a wonderful time for all of us. <v Frank Oppenheimer>All the different guests, most of them physicists, um um brought some some

<v Frank Oppenheimer>ideas and new ideas with them. <v Frank Oppenheimer>Also, we- the meals were str- sort of strange. <v Frank Oppenheimer>Sort of peanut butter and Vienna sausages and whiskey, and we'd <v Frank Oppenheimer>get sort of drunk when we were high up and we'd all act kind of silly. <v Robert Server>[laughed] I've never been on a horse in my life. <v Robert Server>?inaudible? They gave us maps and they sent us off on this uh three day <v Robert Server>trip over the mountain mountain passes around 12,500 <v Robert Server>feet. You went out an absolute minimum <v Robert Server>of uh of equipment. Ya know, a bottle of whiskey and some graham crackers <v Robert Server>[laughs] and food and oats for the horses. <v Frank Oppenheimer>?inaudible? The rainy season, finally and we noticed it didn't rain quite as much at <v Frank Oppenheimer>night. So we started to ride at night. <v Frank Oppenheimer>And I don't know uh what we gained riding at night because it also rained <v Frank Oppenheimer>at night.

<v Robert Server>Imagine this, you're- you're riding <v Robert Server>on a mountain ridge at midnight in the middle of a thunderstorm, <v Robert Server>lightning hitting all around you. <v Robert Server>You come to a fork in the road, in the trail. <v Robert Server>And Robert said, look this way, it's only seven miles home. <v Robert Server>This way, it's a little longer, but it's much more beautiful [laughs]. <v Narrator 1>[marching]But far from the Pecos wilderness, far from Berkeley was Adolf Hitler. <v Narrator 1>And Robert Oppenheimer was a Jew with friends and relatives in Germany. <v Haakon Chevalier>He did not keep up with current events. <v Haakon Chevalier>He read novels or even philosophy books or serious books. <v Haakon Chevalier>But uh all of a sudden, and I think it was due in large part to Hitler <v Haakon Chevalier>and to the Nazi persecution of the Jew of the Jews that he suddenly uh- <v Haakon Chevalier>I think it must have been fairly suddenly he suddenly realized that things were

<v Haakon Chevalier>getting out of hand and that something had to be done about it by serious people. <v Haakon Chevalier>So he began reading- <v Narrator 1>Haakon Chevalier was a professor of French literature at Berkeley, <v Narrator 1>active in left-wing causes. <v Narrator 1>He and Oppenheimer grew to be close friends. <v Haakon Chevalier>On one of his many trips to the east, on the train, he had taken to the three volumes <v Haakon Chevalier>das Kapital and he had read them all in the original on his way to New York. <v Narrator 1>In German? <v Haakon Chevalier>In German, yes. And uh then shortly after, apparently he <v Haakon Chevalier>bought the complete works of Lenin and read those. <v Hans Bethe>He was a tremendous intellect. <v Hans Bethe>I don't believe I have known another person who was quite <v Hans Bethe>so quick in comprehending. <v Narrator 1>Hans Bethe. Nobel laureate. <v Hans Bethe>In comprehending both scientific and general <v Hans Bethe>knowledge.

<v Frank Oppenheimer>At uh Berkeley he'd read the Bhagavad Gita and learned Sanskrit and was really taken <v Frank Oppenheimer>by the charm and the kind of general wisdom <v Frank Oppenheimer>of the Bhagavad Gita. <v Frank Oppenheimer>Some people seem to think he was uh got very religiously involved <v Frank Oppenheimer>in it. But that ?inaudible? <v Frank Oppenheimer>true at true at all. <v Narrator 1>The late 1930s, while America enjoyed a Great Depression. <v Narrator 1>Fascism seized in Germany, a civil war raged in Spain and Oppenheimer <v Narrator 1>moved further to the left. <v Narrator 1>Kitty Harrison was a communist and had lost her first husband in the Spanish Civil <v Narrator 1>War. In 1940, she and Robert Oppenheimer were married. <v Narrator 1>Shortly before then, Robert's brother Frank and his wife, Jackie, had joined the <v Narrator 1>Communist Party in California. <v Narrator 1>Robert, not a joiner, stayed aloof from formal association, but his left wing <v Narrator 1>activities did attract official attention. <v Narrator 1>As war clouds gathered in Europe, the FBI added Oppenheimer's name to a list

<v Narrator 1>of people to be imprisoned in the event of national emergency. <v Hans Bethe>Back in 1938, uh Hahn and Strassmann <v Hans Bethe>in Germany discovered fission and many people realized <v Hans Bethe>very quickly that it might <v Hans Bethe>be possible to make atomic bombs. <v Hans Bethe>To use fission uh as an explosive. <v Hans Bethe>To use uranium as an explosive. <v Man 1>I first heard about- but I think Niels Bohr told me. <v Man 1>I think it was in Princeton and when I came back to Columbia and I told Enrico <v Man 1>Fermi about it, by uh the end of the day, he had calculated the, <v Man 1>uh, the depth of a crater, the size of a crater which one pound <v Man 1>would uh would give exploding. <v Robert Server>The first I heard about fission was uh a letter from Oppenheimer.

<v Robert Server>And the news had just gotten to Berkeley and he he wr- wrote to me, I gave <v Robert Server>a seminar on it that same day, and <v Robert Server>uh at uh ?inaudible?. I mean once it was one of these ideas. <v Robert Server>You know, uh once somebody told he said, how can I be <v Robert Server>so stupid not to have seen that before? <v Robert Server>[coughs] And I think even in the first letter, he mentioned the possibility of making a <v Robert Server>bomb. <v Freeman Dyson>So I suppose that [Narrator 1: Freeman Dyson, physicist] he was at that time <v Freeman Dyson>profoundly impressed with the precariousness of the allied situation. <v Freeman Dyson>That, after all, most of his friends were Europeans, many of them in countries which had <v Freeman Dyson>been occupied by the Germans. <v Freeman Dyson>The Germans looked as though they were the wave of the future at that time. <v Frank Oppenheimer>He said there's the danger that this <v Frank Oppenheimer>may mean the end of Western civilization.

<v Frank Oppenheimer>My brother viewed it as not just something persecuting <v Frank Oppenheimer>uh our own uh relatives, but as a kind of thing that could be a wave <v Frank Oppenheimer>that would walk over the United States as well. <v Hans Bethe>He wanted to help. <v Hans Bethe>He thought probably the best way to do this, where he had most <v Hans Bethe>competence would be in uh <v Hans Bethe>the atomic bomb work. <v Hans Bethe>And therefore, it was natural that for him, almost <v Hans Bethe>necessary for him that this is where he would put his effort. <v Hans Bethe>He built the atomic bomb or he didn't build it, <v Hans Bethe>but he led the effort to build the atomic bomb <v Hans Bethe>because he thought this was necessary to save <v Hans Bethe>Western civilization.

<v Narrator 1>It was feared that Nazi scientists were already building an atomic bomb in 1939 <v Narrator 1>when Albert Einstein informed President Roosevelt that such a thing was even possible. <v Narrator 1>The program Roosevelt initiated was small and had little momentum until December 7th, <v Narrator 1>1941. [explosion] The <v Narrator 1>day after Pearl Harbor, America declared war on Japan and Germany. <v Man 1>We had on the one side, this crazy nation and this demon in <v Man 1>Germany [Narrator 1: ?inaudible?] and uh these <v Man 1>funny people who didn't know what the Western world was about to tackle the United <v Man 1>States. <v Man 1>I mean, there was no question in my mind that uh something had to be done. <v Man 1>And furthermore, we weren't winning at all.

<v Robert Wilson>I was caught up in the war effort and ended with a patriotic <v Robert Wilson>fever that is hard to imagine nowadays. <v Robert Wilson>It's been so long since uh anything of that kind has motivated uh <v Robert Wilson>Amer- seems to have motivated Americans. <v Robert Wilson>And one would have done anything it was necessary to get on with the war. <v Narrator 1>The bomb project had a sudden urgency. <v Narrator 1>The U.S. Army was given charge and code named at the Manhattan district, with General <v Narrator 1>Leslie Groves in command and secret laboratories scattered across the country. <v Narrator 1>Groves put Oppenheimer in charge of a group at Berkeley to explore the basic scientific <v Narrator 1>requirements of an atomic bomb. <v Narrator 1>Oppenheimer, who had taken to wearing a rakish pork pie hat, took pleasure in his new <v Narrator 1>official title: Coordinator of Rapid Rupture. <v Freeman Dyson>That was the time when the the big change in his life occurred. <v Freeman Dyson>And it must have been during that time that the

<v Freeman Dyson>dream somehow got hold of him of- really <v Freeman Dyson>producing a nuclear weapon, which other people had been talking about, but he was the <v Freeman Dyson>fellow who really did it. <v Hans Bethe>It is a very different <v Hans Bethe>uh attitude if you want to find out the deep secrets <v Hans Bethe>of nature, which is what ?you? <v Hans Bethe>had wanted to do before. <v Hans Bethe>And on the other hand, if you want to to produce something, to <v Hans Bethe>produce a mechanism that works. <v Hans Bethe>It was a different problem, different attitude. <v Hans Bethe>And he completely changed to fit the new role. <v Hans Bethe>[music plays] <v Narrator 1>The Los Alamos Boys School high on a mesa 50 miles north of Santa <v Narrator 1>Fe, New Mexico, not far from the Oppenheimer Ranch.

<v Narrator 1>In the summer of 1942, students began to notice low flying military <v Narrator 1>aircraft overhead. One student was Sterling Colgate. <v Sterling Colgate>It was in the fall of 42 when uh this place was invaded <v Sterling Colgate>by uh an armada of uh <v Sterling Colgate>bulldozers and construction crew. <v Sterling Colgate>Uh suddenly, we uh knew that the war had arrived here and these two <v Sterling Colgate>uh characters showed up. Uh Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones, <v Sterling Colgate>uh one wearing a pork pie hat and the other uh a suit and a normal hat. <v Sterling Colgate>And these two guys went around as if uh, well, one, they owned the place, <v Sterling Colgate>which evidently they did. But more than that, as if their pseudonyms was <v Sterling Colgate>a normal sort of thing to do. <v Sterling Colgate>My God. I mean, there their pictures were in our in our physics book, and we all had <v Sterling Colgate>physics. One is the lead theoretical physicist of his age <v Sterling Colgate>and the other uh uh head of a major laboratory who'd done a cyclotron <v Sterling Colgate>and things like that. So we immediately knew that one, uh uh they

<v Sterling Colgate>felt that it was so important to be Oppenheimer and Laurence that they had to <v Sterling Colgate>have a pseudonym, uh two that they were putting megabucks, uh <v Sterling Colgate>multi megabucks into what seemed to us the worst place in the world to have a laboratory. <v Narrator 1>Granting Oppenheimer's request for a single isolated lab where the bomb could be designed <v Narrator 1>and built, General Groves appropriated the remote school and officially named Oppenheimer <v Narrator 1>scientific director. Oppenheimer's first job was to convince scientists <v Narrator 1>and their families to join him for the duration of the war in a place he was not allowed <v Narrator 1>to identify to work on a project he was not always allowed to describe. <v Stan Ulam>Oh I was a young assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin [Narrator 1: Stan <v Stan Ulam>Ulam, mathematician and his wife, Françoise]. <v Stan Ulam>The war was on. <v Stan Ulam>I noticed that some other younger colleagues especially was disappearing <v Stan Ulam>from town. <v Stan Ulam>They couldn't tell where they were going.

<v Stan Ulam>Very secret. <v Stan Ulam>But when I learned ?that I am? <v Stan Ulam>supposed to go somewhere to New Mexico. <v Stan Ulam>uh Françoise wanted to know about the state of New Mexico. <v Stan Ulam>So I went to the library and borrowed one of these <v Stan Ulam>?WPA? books on various states and there was one volume in New Mexico. <v Stan Ulam>Then looking at this, I noticed that the back of the book, there was a list of <v Stan Ulam>previous borrowers, to my amazement, <v Stan Ulam>several names of people who ?just? disappeared a week or two before were <v Stan Ulam>put down [laughing] as borrowers. <v Narrator 1>[speaking] Robert Porten was a private in the army. <v Robert Porten>And I don't know how many people um viewing this program ever <v Robert Porten>had the pleasure of getting off a train at Lamy, New Mexico but uh <v Robert Porten>we've looked at it as if it were out of Siberia. <v Robert Porten>It was very strange. It was nothing but a lot of sand and sagebrush.

<v Robert Porten>And but there was a G.I. vehicle and uh and we got in still wondering where we <v Robert Porten>were and why we were there. <v Narrator 1>[music plays] Scientific and military personnel arrived from all over America, many <v Narrator 1>traveling under assumed names. <v Narrator 1>A station master in Princeton, New Jersey was baffled at the sudden demand for one <v Narrator 1>way tickets to the tiny station outside Santa Fe. <v Woman 1>It was a little bit awe inspiring to being in the middle of nowhere <v Woman 1>like this and not knowing what we were getting into. <v Woman 1>Uh not the slightest idea. <v Narrator 1>Next stop for newly arrived personnel was an inconspicuous building in Santa Fe. <v Narrator 1>Dorothy McKibbon was in charge of the tiny office. <v Dorothy McKibbon>Santa Fe was full of young FBI agents, middle <v Dorothy McKibbon>age agents and to some of us, they were quite discernable <v Dorothy McKibbon>because they were so well-dressed.

<v Narrator 1>What did they do? <v Dorothy McKibbon>They uh wore gray slacks and tweed jackets and shirt with <v Dorothy McKibbon>necktie. And they leaned against the walls of buildings and they hung around La Fonda <v Dorothy McKibbon>in the Capitol pharmacy and all restaurants. <v Robert Porten>We drove through Santa Fe and then a place called Espanola and then <v Robert Porten>hit some dips in the road and then started to climb. <v Robert Porten>And I had never been in mountainous country. It was very interesting. <v Man 2>I just finished reading the mount- Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann and of course <v Man 2>uh, to go to this mysterious mountain on the top of which there would be <v Man 2>a secret laboratory, uh which we would go into the doors would slam. <v Man 2>And the two years later, where we would come out bearing an atomic bomb. <v Stan Ulam>Very impressive, strange scenery, mountains, rocks, <v Stan Ulam>the desert. <v Stan Ulam>We crossed the Rio Grande. And arrived in a place full of little

<v Stan Ulam>well, how to call it? Almost huts. <v Narrator 1>Oppenheimer had brought scientists and their families fresh from distinguished campuses <v Narrator 1>all over the country. Ivied halls, soaring ?inaudible?, vaulted chapels. <v Narrator 1>Los Alamos was a boomtown, hastily constructed wooden buildings, dirt <v Narrator 1>streets, coal stoves and only five bathtubs. <v Robert Crohn>There were no sidewalks, the streets were all dirt. <v Robert Crohn>The water situation was always bad. <v Narrator 1>One young physicist was Robert Crohn. <v Robert Crohn>Was not at all unusual to open your faucet and <v Robert Crohn>have worms come out. <v Woman 1>Everybody was wearing Western clothes, jeans, boots, parkas. <v Woman 1>There was a feeling of mountain resort. <v Woman 1>In addition to army camp. <v Woman 1>The mixture was unbelievable. <v Woman 1>Then there was the awful mud. <v Narrator 1>The physicist Edward Teller had brought a piano and played Beethoven late into the

<v Narrator 1>night.Ffrom his cramped quarters in a four family dwelling, he could disturb more <v Narrator 1>Nobel laureates at once than he could have anywhere else in the world. <v Narrator 1>Oppenheimer had gathered the elite in physics, mathematics and chemistry to build <v Narrator 1>the atomic bomb. <v Hans Bethe>I don't believe there was ever before an assembly <v Hans Bethe>of so many first rate people for one task. <v Narrator 1>They, in turn recruited their best students, promising kids working side by side <v Narrator 1>with Nobel laureates. <v Woman 1>There was no class distinction between the small fry and the <v Woman 1>big shots. <v Freeman Dyson>When I first came to the United States, I got to know a lot of the young people who had <v Freeman Dyson>been at Los Alamos, most of them were very young. <v Freeman Dyson>They'd just gone right into it without even finishing their scientific training. <v Freeman Dyson>And for them, it was just the most marvelous time of their lives. <v Freeman Dyson>[music plays] <v Man 3>People worked hard. Scientists worked around the clock and people made up for the lack

<v Man 3>of big city life. And it was a lot of partying. <v Woman 1>We were very young and it was just like a camp out. <v Robert Crohn>Liquor was short in the area. So in order to spice up the parties, <v Robert Crohn>we used lab alcohol. <v Robert Crohn>Lab alcohol is 200 proof, basically. <v Robert Crohn>This is just exactly what you're looking for, for punch. <v Dorothy McKibbon>If you were in a large hall and you saw several groups of people, the largest groups <v Dorothy McKibbon>would be hovering around Oppenheimer. <v Dorothy McKibbon>He was great at a party and women simply loved him and still do. <v Woman 3>I found it e- extremely dashing in the sort of uh <v Woman 3>elegant way. <v Man 4>It was for these young people, not only a great experience, it was also fun, <v Man 4>it was it was a lot.

<v Robert Wilson>Yes, it was a good time. It was a good time in America. <v Robert Wilson>It was a good time to be American. It was uh a time when the whole country was pulling <v Robert Wilson>together uh and a uh and a cause, <v Robert Wilson>which even now, I think was just. <v Robert Wilson>That is the idea that the Nazis would uh uh Nazi Germany would win that <v Robert Wilson>war could've uh led to me it seemed to me a thousand years of dark <v Robert Wilson>ages and everything that we meant by civilization could have come to an end. <v Robert Wilson>That's what it seemed to me was what the fight was about. <v Robert Wilson>It was something pretty close to that. And most Americans felt that most Americans were <v Robert Wilson>in it just as uh as uh hard as they could be. <v Narrator 1>Their average age was 29 and their job was to construct a mechanism which would trigger <v Narrator 1>in a millionth of a second, a violent chain reaction. <v Narrator 1>They had two dance bands, a soda fountain, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, a radio <v Narrator 1>station with no call letters, a cyclotron and 7000 fire extinguishers.

<v Freeman Dyson>Somehow, Oppenheimer put this thing together. <v Freeman Dyson>He was the conductor of the orchestra or whatever it was. <v Freeman Dyson>Somehow he created this fantastic esprit. <v Freeman Dyson>No matter who you talk to, they all lived it. <v Freeman Dyson>And and they all, I think, almost without exception, felt it most strongly that <v Freeman Dyson>without him this wouldn't have happened. It couldn't have happened. <v Narrator 1>Oppenheimer had envisioned a small community of 30 scientists and their families. <v Narrator 1>But by 1944, he was in charge of a walled city of 6000. <v Narrator 1>The cost escalated to 56 million dollars. <v Narrator 1>Seven divisions: theoretical physics, experimental physics, ordinance, <v Narrator 1>explosives, bomb physics, chemistry and metallurgy. <v Hans Bethe>He knew and understood everything that went on in the laboratory <v Hans Bethe>whether it was chemistry or theoretical physics or machine shop. <v Hans Bethe>He could keep it all in his head and coordinated.

<v Hans Bethe>It was clear. I saw it ?inaudible? <v Hans Bethe>that he was intellectually superior to us. <v Freeman Dyson>The most striking contradiction is the fact that this man who was so <v Freeman Dyson>unworldly, so unpolitical in his youth, such a great scholar, <v Freeman Dyson>so fond of metaphysical poetry, should suddenly emerge as the great administrator <v Freeman Dyson>who put Los Alamos together and produced the atomic bomb. <v Robert Wilson>I saw him change from that almost irresponsible intellectual, <v Robert Wilson>bohemian- <v Woman 4>And radical. <v Robert Wilson>Radical person that he was that uh and that I had known at uh <v Robert Wilson>Berkeley uh to someone who was just completely <v Robert Wilson>dedicated to getting on with the war. <v Man 5>Well, I think it was a real stroke of genius. <v Man 5>And part of General Groves was not generally considered to be a genius, <v Man 5>uh to have appointed him, which was the most improbable appointment. <v Man 5>I was astonished.

<v Narrator 1>The professor and the general made an unlikely team. <v Narrator 1>When Groves took charge of the Manhattan Project in 1942, there was barely enough <v Narrator 1>plutonium in the world to cover the head of a pin and very little uranium 235. <v Narrator 1>These were the only elements that could fuel the Los Alamos bomb. <v Narrator 1>To produce U 235, Groves built a secret 44 acre building in Oak <v Narrator 1>Ridge, Tennessee. In Hanford, Washington giant reactors labored to produce <v Narrator 1>a few pounds of plutonium. <v Narrator 1>It was the most expensive scientific project in the history of the world. <v Narrator 1>General Groves distrusted liberals. <v Narrator 1>And yet, in spite of Oppenheimer's well-documented leftist background, Groves overruled <v Narrator 1>the astonished security officers who tried to block Oppenheimer's clearance. <v Frank Oppenheimer>He had arguments with Gen- General Groves, but I think they were mostly about sort of <v Frank Oppenheimer>trivial things like that, the fact that people were having too many babies and uh he <v Frank Oppenheimer>couldn't do anything about that. And when things came up um

<v Frank Oppenheimer>that were really important, I think General Groves usually supported him. <v Robert Server>He had the support Robert himself, against the intelligence <v Robert Server>people who, of course well, in fact, I'm not only- wouldn't have cleared Robert. <v Robert Server>They obviously wouldn't have cleared three quarters of the people on the uh [stuttering] <v Robert Server>place so- <v Narrator 1>Why not? <v Robert Server>Hmm? I mean, they were all moderately liberal, [laughs] <v Robert Server>moderately left-wing people. <v Narrator 1>[music plays] It was a new and strange world. <v Narrator 1>Barbed wire. Body guards, censored letters, secrets <v Narrator 1>from their wives and children. <v Robert Porten>Well, I'd written try to be so newsy when I was in Fort Leonard Wood and when I came <v Robert Porten>here I would write and say, I'm out here in the West and the scenery is beautiful <v Robert Porten>and the weather is just gorgeous.

<v Robert Porten>And my mother would write back and say, well, where are you really? <v Robert Porten>And what are you doing? And I would write back and say, I'm out here in the West and the <v Robert Porten>weather is gorgeous and the scenery is beautiful. <v Robert Porten>[laughing] And she never understood that until the war was over. <v Robert Porten>And I could explain it to her. <v Dorothy McKibbon>And you heard throughout the town that they were joking and saying it's a submarine <v Dorothy McKibbon>base to make windshield wipers for submarines. <v Dorothy McKibbon>Or it was a Navy installation or or something like that. <v Dorothy McKibbon>And they saw it as a great joke. <v Robert Server>G2 wanted a rumor spread in Santa Fe with er all kinds of speculation <v Robert Server>about what was going on at Los Alamos. <v Robert Server>They went in to get out a rumor that we were busy making electric rockets. <v Robert Server>And we we tried it. We went down <v Robert Server>and we tried to find the bar which is usually crowded. <v Robert Server>And of course, that night it was practic- ya know [chuckling] half deserted. <v Robert Server>And we talked as loudly as we could about electric rockets, but nobody seemed <v Robert Server>to pay any attention.

<v Robert Server>So then we went out to a workman's bar [laughs], much rougher <v Robert Server>and ?inaudible? than some some uh <v Robert Server>Spanish American came along and asked ?inaudible? <v Robert Server>she was trying to tell him about Los Alamos and he was trying to tell her that he what he <v Robert Server>wanted was a ranch to raise horses [laughs]. <v Robert Server>He couldn't have been less interested. <v Robert Server>And finally, I grabbed the guy at the g- bar and I took him by <v Robert Server>lapels and shook him and said, you know what we're doing here right now [laughs]? <v Robert Server>And he was so drunk. I'm sure he didn't remember a word of [laughs] the complete flop. <v Robert Server>It's not as easy as it sounds to be a spy. <v Narrator 1>Back in Berkeley, an industrial scientist named George Eltenton had approached <v Narrator 1>Oppenheimer's old friend Haakon Chevalier in 1943 with a request <v Narrator 1>that Chevalier convince Oppenheimer to share secrets with Russian scientists. <v Narrator 1>Chevalier refused. And when Oppenheimer passed through Berkeley on secret business, <v Narrator 1>Chevalier told him about the incident.

<v Haakon Chevalier>And I told Oppenheimer that this uh was not something that <v Haakon Chevalier>uh he could do anything about and that uh if there were to be such exchanges, they <v Haakon Chevalier>would have to be proposed on the highest levels of government and would have to be <v Haakon Chevalier>worked out in that way. And then he agreed that uh this would not <v Haakon Chevalier>be any- there was no possibility of doing anything. <v Haakon Chevalier>And that is all. And uh I forgot about it. <v Haakon Chevalier>And I think that he forgot about it for a long time too. <v Narrator 1>This seemingly insignificant conversation would later have enormous impact on the lives <v Narrator 1>of both men. <v Narrator 1>[explosion] In late 1944, American intelligence learned that the German atomic bomb <v Narrator 1>effort had failed. Nevertheless, shortly afterwards, Los Alamos scientists <v Narrator 1>picked up the pace and began working six day weeks- <v Robert Wilson>Where everything was coming together. <v Robert Wilson>Everything was going at a very rapid rate. <v Robert Wilson>We were building up to the trinity test. <v Robert Wilson>At that time, we were a great deal of production of uh uh

<v Robert Wilson>devices to be used in the atomic bomb were being made. <v Robert Wilson>Everybody was working day and night. <v Robert Wilson>It was very hard in the in the push to make that <v Robert Wilson>uh test to stop and think. <v Dorothy McKibbon>I said, what do you young men do in the evening for pleasure? <v Dorothy McKibbon>And they said, we go back to the lab and stay to midnight [laughs]. <v Robert Wilson>As one would remember, I would walk oh- work almost every <v Robert Wilson>every night ?'til? I'd nearly drop, then go home, sleep a bit, and then come back uh <v Robert Wilson>Saturdays and Sundays, just constantly working. <v Robert Wilson>[airplanes flying] [explosions] <v Narrator 1>Across the Pacific, the war raged on against Japan. <v Narrator 1>But in the spring of '45, there was victory in Europe. <v Narrator 1>The Nazis had never come close to building an atomic bomb.

<v Narrator 1>Germany surrendered. <v Narrator 1>VE Day. <v Narrator 1>Eisenhower returned triumphant. <v Robert Wilson>I would like to have to think now that uh that I <v Robert Wilson>had the time of the German defeat, that uh I would have stopped taking <v Robert Wilson>stock, thought it all over very carefully, and that I would have walked away from <v Robert Wilson>uh Los Alamos at that time. And I in terms of all of my <v Robert Wilson>everything that I believe in before and during and <v Robert Wilson>after the war, I cannot understand why I did not take that and make <v Robert Wilson>that act. On the other hand, it simply was not in the air. <v Robert Wilson>I do not know of a single instance of anyone who had uh made that suggestion <v Robert Wilson>or who did leave the time. <v Robert Wilson>There might have been someone that I didn't know. <v Robert Wilson>But uh at the time, it just was not uh something that uh was part <v Robert Wilson>of our lives where our life was directed to do one thing.

<v Robert Wilson>It's as though we had been programmed to do that and we as automatons were doing it. <v Frank Oppenheimer>Amazing how the technology tools trap one. <v Frank Oppenheimer>And uh they're so powerful that when I <v Frank Oppenheimer>wa- I was impressed because most of the sort of fervor for developing the bomb came <v Frank Oppenheimer>in a kind of antifascist fervor against Germany. <v Frank Oppenheimer>But when VE Day came along, nobody slowed up one little bit. <v Frank Oppenheimer>No one said, I want the main thing. It doesn't matter now. <v Frank Oppenheimer>We all kept working. And it wasn't because we understood the significance against Japan. <v Frank Oppenheimer>It was because the the machinery had caught us in its trap and we were anxious <v Frank Oppenheimer>to get this thing to go. <v Robert Wilson>I organized a uh a a small meeting at our <v Robert Wilson>building. I think the title was The Impact of the Gadget <v Robert Wilson>on Civilization. <v Robert Wilson>Oppy oh tried to persuade me not to have it. <v Robert Wilson>I don't know quite why, but he certainly did try to dissuade me.

<v Robert Wilson>On the other hand, I went ahead and did hold the meeting. <v Robert Wilson>Perhaps between 30 and 50 people came. <v Robert Wilson>Oppy came too, which I had a uh certain uh, always added a tone <v Robert Wilson>to any meeting. <v Robert Wilson>Uh we did discuss whether we should go on or not. <v Robert Wilson>And in the context of what was happening in the world, of course, it was <v Robert Wilson>called in the context, perhaps what we were we were doing was morally <v Robert Wilson>wrong, particularly Oppy pointed out that uh but <v Robert Wilson>it would be well that the world knew about the possibility of an atomic <v Robert Wilson>bomb. Rather than it be something that would be kept secret while the <v Robert Wilson>uh uh United Nations was being formed. On that basis, on a logical <v Robert Wilson>basis, we all decided that that was right and that we ought to go back <v Robert Wilson>in the laboratory and work as hard as we could to demonstrate a nuclear <v Robert Wilson>uh weapon uh before the uh uh and so that the United Nations

<v Robert Wilson>would be set up in the awareness of this horrible thing to come. <v Freeman Dyson>Faustian bargain is when you sell your soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and <v Freeman Dyson>power. And that, of course, in a way, is what Oppenheimer did. <v Freeman Dyson>There's no doubt he made this alliance with <v Freeman Dyson>the United States Army in the person of General Groves who <v Freeman Dyson>gave him undreamed of resources. <v Freeman Dyson>Huge armies of people and as much money as he could possibly spend <v Freeman Dyson>in order to do physics on the grand scale, in order to create this marvelous <v Freeman Dyson>weapon. And it was a Faustian bargain, if ever there was one. <v Freeman Dyson>And of course, we are still living with it ever since. <v Freeman Dyson>When once you sell your soul to the devil, then there's no going back on it. <v Holm Bursom>Well, I can't tell you exactly, but right over there between here <v Holm Bursom>and the ?inaudible? in the high part of the ?inaudible? <v Holm Bursom>mountains where that little peak is on the McDonel ranch is where they detonated

<v Holm Bursom>the first atomic bomb. <v Holm Bursom>[clears throat] <v Narrator 1>What was this country like then? <v Holm Bursom>Not like it is now. [music plays] <v Narrator 1>Two hundred miles south of Los Alamos, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, <v Narrator 1>a vast, unbroken stretch of prairie. Here Robert Oppenheimer chose <v Narrator 1>to test the first atomic bomb. <v Narrator 1>He named the place Trinity site. <v Narrator 1>It had been Apache Country. But in late '44, it was populated only by a handful <v Narrator 1>of cattle ranchers and homesteaders. <v Narrator 1>They called it by the Spanish name: Hornado del Muerto. <v Narrator 1>The journey of death. <v Narrator 1>Dave MacDonald. <v Dave MacDonald>Uh I've put out of here in '42. <v Narrator 1>Who put ya out here? <v Dave MacDonald>Uh the Corps of Engineers in federal judge and so <v Dave MacDonald>forth.

<v Dave MacDonald>And they said they had to have it for their gunnery range and so forth you see. <v Dave MacDonald>And later on it wound up being this, you see, when you got the atomic bomb to work and <v Dave MacDonald>?inaudible?. They come in for a place and then they selected ?this? <v Dave MacDonald>right here. That time they were living, that is the people that was <v Dave MacDonald>assembling this bomb and preparing to shoot it was there at my place. <v Dave MacDonald>Somewhere around 5 to 700 people ?listed? <v Dave MacDonald>there and living in my house and around it and so forth, you see with <v Dave MacDonald>other buildings and so forth. <v Narrator 1>It began with 15 men in December. <v Narrator 1>By May, there were several hundred civilians and GIs working in secret. <v Narrator 1>At night, nearby ranchers heard gunfire. <v Narrator 1>GIs hunting antelope with submachine guns. <v Holm Bursom>About 1939, I think it was on the front piece of Time magazine, they <v Holm Bursom>had a picture of an atom buster at the University of California. <v Holm Bursom>And when they shipped the shell in for this experimental detonation

<v Holm Bursom>down here, why I thought I says if I didn't think <v Holm Bursom>I was crazy as something I'd think maybe they're uh fooling around with <v Holm Bursom>uh busting in atoms or doing something with atomic power, but it- and <v Holm Bursom>I was just talking because I certainly didn't know anything about it. <v Holm Bursom>I had no conception of what an atomic bomb was or the violence of it and <v Holm Bursom>the strength of it. <v Frank Oppenheimer>When I arrived there, they um, they were being- in the process of an <v Frank Oppenheimer>end of May of constructing a 100 foot tall tower in this desert. <v Frank Oppenheimer>It was really a very empty, very wasn't sandy, but it was typical <v Frank Oppenheimer>dry sagebrushy desert with one wall off to the east of rock. <v Frank Oppenheimer>And a base camp, which had a couple of extra buildings, but which really <v Frank Oppenheimer>was just uh some old ranch houses. <v Frank Oppenheimer>People were feverishly setting up wires all over the desert. <v Frank Oppenheimer>Building the tower, building little huts in which to put cameras and house

<v Frank Oppenheimer>people at the time of explosion. <v Frank Oppenheimer>The- the Army had just accidentally bombed the place a little bit before I got there, <v Frank Oppenheimer>but nobody was hurt. <v Françoise Ulam>The work had been so frantic that it was a relief to know that it was coming to <v Françoise Ulam>a conclusion. And we knew that they were preparing the big experiment to see <v Françoise Ulam>if the gadget, as it was called, would work. <v Narrator 1>What did you expect? <v Françoise Ulam>I hope I- um what did I expect? <v Françoise Ulam>[Narrator 1: Françoise Ulam] I was had mixed feelings. <v Françoise Ulam>I expected- wanted it to succeed because it would help to <v Françoise Ulam>end the war. I didn't want it to be dangerous. <v Françoise Ulam>Eh was it? Of course it was. <v Françoise Ulam>There was a chance that it would be very danger- could be very dangerous. <v Narrator 1>The 11th of July 1945, an unmarked Pontiac sedan arrives <v Narrator 1>at the MacDonald Ranch carrying the world's entire supply of plutonium, about 10

<v Narrator 1>pounds. The courier demands a receipt. <v Narrator 1>Approximate value one billion dollars. <v Narrator 1>At Oppenheimer's request, General Groves has made a secret arrangement with the governor <v Narrator 1>of New Mexico to evacuate the state in case of catastrophe. <v Robert Crohn>Now prior to the shot back in the lab, there had been some speculation <v Robert Crohn>that it might be possible to explode the atmosphere, in which <v Robert Crohn>case the world disappears. <v Narrator 1>Did you sense uh a lot of anxiety in your brother? <v Frank Oppenheimer>A lot lot of anxiety in everybody, including my brother. <v Frank Oppenheimer>Both whether it would work or not work. <v Frank Oppenheimer>[Narrator 1: Frank Oppenheimer, physicist] I think mostly uh bad, but also <v Frank Oppenheimer>it was you see it was a time in which um I think <v Frank Oppenheimer>it his interest in us- in using the bomb to b- help produce <v Frank Oppenheimer>a better world- peace was was what didn't happen just <v Frank Oppenheimer>after the war. But he really had hope that Truman would tell Stalin

<v Frank Oppenheimer>about it fairly forthrightly. <v Frank Oppenheimer>Of course, that didn't happen and set the stage almost at that instant to the Cold War, <v Frank Oppenheimer>rather than to a a warmer humanity. <v Frank Oppenheimer>And so I think both of those things seem everything that was wearing him back then. <v Robert Wilson>There was this it was building up tremendous, uh almost hysterical <v Robert Wilson>uh anxiety. Many people feeling that we couldn't possibly hold the test <v Robert Wilson>because every time we tested some component that had to do with the test, it would <v Robert Wilson>fail. Everybody was rushing around. <v Robert Wilson>Things did not appear to be ready. <v Robert Wilson>Yet uh there did seem to be a certain uh momentum to <v Robert Wilson>the work that was going on that we wouldn't make a test. <v Robert Wilson>I think it had been put back several times, but uh on July 16th, <v Robert Wilson>there would be a test come hell or high water. <v Narrator 1>[music plays] Memo, 11 July. 1700 hours.

<v Narrator 1>Both charges completely papered. <v Narrator 1>Work another night shift if necessary, to complete this job. <v Narrator 1>Request personnel as necessary. <v Narrator 1>Memo 12 July. 1600 hours. <v Narrator 1>Seal all holds in case. Wrap with scotch. <v Narrator 1>Wrap box charges inner and outer with two spares for each. <v Narrator 1>Memo 13 July. 1300 hours. <v Narrator 1>Assembly starts, remove polar cap and dummy plug. <v Narrator 1>Gadget now belongs to tamper people. <v Narrator 1>G engineers work until 1600 with active material insertion. <v Narrator 1>Dummy plug hole is covered with a clean cloth and explosives people take over. <v Narrator 1>Insert H-E. This is to be done as slowly as the G engineers wish. <v Narrator 1>Remove all chains. Clear the deck. <v Woman 5>Well, I expected that what they were working on, they were going to

<v Woman 5>try. <v Narrator 1>14 July 0800 hours. <v Narrator 1>Rig guidelines lift to tower top. <v Narrator 1>Ready for X unit at 0900. <v Narrator 1>Bring up G engineers footstool. <v Narrator 1>14 July 0900 hours. <v Narrator 1>Wiring of the X unit proceeds under the direction of the explosives people. <v Narrator 1>Tower platform should be tested with concrete weight as per Oppenheimer. <v Narrator 1>Detonators placed to conform with requirements of informer switches. <v Narrator 1>H.E. people stand by to criticize potential rough handling. <v Narrator 1>Note that once detonators are on sphere, no live electrical connection can be brought to <v Narrator 1>the X unit, informer unit or anywhere else on the sphere. <v Narrator 1>All testing must be done before a sphere is lifted to tower. <v Narrator 1>After that, it is too late. <v Narrator 1>14 July, 1700 hours.

<v Narrator 1>Gadget complete. <v Narrator 1>Should we have the chaplain here? <v Narrator 1>[wind blowing] The betting pool cost a dollar. <v Narrator 1>Edward Teller bet on a blast equal to 45,000 tons of TNT. <v Narrator 1>Oppenheimer bet low. 3000 tons. <v Narrator 1>And ?inaudible?, he put his money on 20 kilotons. <v Narrator 1>Young technicians were horrified to overhear Enrico Fermi taking side bets on the <v Narrator 1>possibility of incinerating the state of New Mexico. <v Man 5>The test was set at midnight. <v Man 5>The prediction was there'd be 60 mile visibility and a certain wind <v Man 5>pattern. Well, it ?went? midnight. <v Man 5>It was raining cats and dogs, lightning and thunder, really <v Man 5>scared about this object there in the tower [pause] would be set off <v Man 5>accidentally. <v Man 5>So th- you can imagine the strain on Oppenheimer [inaudible muttering]. <v Robert Wilson>I remember it was one of my uh

<v Robert Wilson>uh memories of that time having to go up to the tower to turn <v Robert Wilson>on a piece of equipment. So I was one of the last not the last person by any means, but <v Robert Wilson>one of the last people to get our equipment that was right next to the bomb <v Robert Wilson>uh have it to have it all turned on and tested before uh before starting <v Robert Wilson>the test. And uh it was quite dramatic because, lightning was striking all around, <v Robert Wilson>it was quite a fierce storm going on. <v Robert Wilson>And particular one had a certain amount of respect uh for that atomic bomb <v Robert Wilson>being right next as sparks seemed to be flying. <v Robert Wilson>Uh did give me a little bit of a sense of apprehension [laughs]. <v Frank Oppenheimer>Um uh he and I were lying down right next to each other, flat in the desert, right <v Frank Oppenheimer>outside the the um control roo- hut- ?inaudible? <v Frank Oppenheimer>at the time the bomb went off. <v Robert Wilson>And we ever had prepared ourselves with glass. <v Robert Wilson>And uh when we we could hear the countdown when it went off. <v Robert Wilson>We all are looking through the glass.

<v Robert Wilson>And then we saw what was just a tremendous <v Robert Wilson>uh uh ?leave?, overpowering <v Robert Wilson>uh vision of this thing happening, seeing the mountains small beside it, seeing <v Robert Wilson>perhaps with some kind of beauty, but awesome was what I would call it as it slowly <v Robert Wilson>developed, went up in the air and uh made those <v Robert Wilson>the whole desert light up as it noon. <v Robert Wilson>And a pure small of a large desert ringed by mountains <v Robert Wilson>appeared to be a small place. And that was just something that uh once that had happened, <v Robert Wilson>uh I was a different person from then on. [explosion] <v Frank Oppenheimer>[sighs] D- at the time it went off, it was, I think, absolutely what I knew sort of what

<v Frank Oppenheimer>would happen. I didn't expect the heat from the flash at five miles away to be <v Frank Oppenheimer>uh nearly that intense. <v Frank Oppenheimer>And then there was a cloud sort of the radioactive cloud went sort of hovered <v Frank Oppenheimer>there. And I ?inaudible? <v Frank Oppenheimer>been working on developing escape routes because of that <v Frank Oppenheimer>thing and gone a little bit uh south of the fall and then fall <v Frank Oppenheimer>out on the camp and I had to get out of there to the south rather than where <v Frank Oppenheimer>the north was road was to the north. <v Frank Oppenheimer>And um so there was this sense of this ominous cloud uh <v Frank Oppenheimer>hanging over us. It was so brilliant purple with all the radioactive blowing, <v Frank Oppenheimer>and it just seemed to hang there forever. Of course it didn't. <v Frank Oppenheimer>It m- it must have been just a very short time for it until it went up, but it was very <v Frank Oppenheimer>terrifying. And the thunder from the blast, <v Frank Oppenheimer>um it bounced on the rocks and then went I don't know where else it bounced, but it never <v Frank Oppenheimer>seemed to stop. And not like an ordinary echo of the thunder. <v Frank Oppenheimer>It just kept echoing back and forth.

<v Frank Oppenheimer>And that, ?inaudible?. It was a very scary time when it <v Frank Oppenheimer>when it went off. <v Frank Oppenheimer>God I wish I could remember when my brother said but um I can't. <v Frank Oppenheimer>But I think we just said it worked. <v Frank Oppenheimer>I think that's what we said. Both of us. It worked and nobody knew it was gonna work. <v Man 5>He was in the uh in the forward bunker. <v Man 5>And then when he came back, there he was, you know, his hat. <v Man 5>You've seen pictures that Robert's hat and so on. <v Man 5>And uh he came to where we were in this in the headquarters, <v Man 5>so to speak. And um- the way <v Man 5>his walk was like high noon. <v Man 5>I think it's the best I could describe it, this kind of struck. <v Man 5>He'd done it. <v Woman 6>It felt like an earthquake. We lived in a good adobe house

<v Woman 6>and it just did [whooshing sound]. And he said, my goodness, that's an earthquake and <v Woman 6>wonder if it hurt the house. <v Woman 6>And he got out of bed and he got up and he says, I want you to come look. <v Woman 6>The sun's rising in the wrong direction. <v Robert Server>Must've been nearly 20 miles away. <v Robert Server>Where this is if somebody had set off a flashbulb right in your face. <v Robert Server>Completely blinded for about 30 seconds. <v Robert Server>Then gradually your vision cleared and you saw this huge [pause] orange <v Robert Server>and purple and green, violently colored ?balls? <v Robert Server>rolling up towards the sky. <v Dave MacDonald>So we knew something had happened over here, and we had a car ?along? <v Dave MacDonald>had a radio in it. <v Dave MacDonald>So we kept that radio on and long ?inaudible? <v Dave MacDonald>and told us that there's a ammunition that went off. <v Elizabeth Ingram>We were headed up to Albuquerque to take her back to school and <v Elizabeth Ingram>we were between ?Paladara? <v Elizabeth Ingram>and ?Limitar? when we saw this great big flash of light and my

<v Elizabeth Ingram>sister, she said what happened and that was she got to see the light. <v Elizabeth Ingram>And it just seemed like it lit up the whole b- prairie all around us. <v Narrator 1>Was anything odd about your sister asking about the light? <v Elizabeth Ingram>Yes, because she was blind. <v Man 5>It didn't take very long. I was ?inaudible? just after the first few minutes <v Man 5>that I realized sort of viscerally what had happened <v Man 5>and uh had gooseflesh, a little <v Man 5>of the consequences. What what would happen to the world? <v Narrator 1>When did you find out what happened? <v Dave MacDonald>Well, it's quite a while you know and ?inaudible? tell them begin to talk about the <v Dave MacDonald>cattle, you know, that the hair was turnin' white on 'em like frost you know, looked like <v Dave MacDonald>they had frost on their backs or so forth. <v Holm Bursom>Way we noticed them was the uh where that <v Holm Bursom>fall out fell on a cow. She's lying on her left side while her right side was get burned <v Holm Bursom>and the particles of dust that were radioactive would fall on her. <v Holm Bursom>And then they've caused a burn like a scald.

<v Holm Bursom>And the hair, instead of coming back red, like on a Hereford cow, would come back <v Holm Bursom>white just like a saddleburn on a black horse <v Holm Bursom>and old man Max Smith that had the white store up there had a black cat, just as black as <v Holm Bursom>the ace of spades. That thing had white spots all over it. <v Holm Bursom>After the atomic blast, he sold it to some tourists <v Holm Bursom>for 5 dollars, I think curiosity. <v Holm Bursom>[smokes] [explosion] <v Narrator 1>Iwo Jima, Lady Gulf, Mindanao, the Marshall Islands. <v Narrator 1>At Okinawa alone, 50,000 American casualties. <v Narrator 1>[explosion] 110,000 Japanese casualties. <v Narrator 1>The beginning of the end for Japan. <v Narrator 1>[bombs dropping] Saturation bombing. Thousands of B29s raining incendiary <v Narrator 1>bombs on all but a few cities.

<v Narrator 1>Harry Truman, who has assumed the presidency after Roosevelt's death in early '45 <v Narrator 1>calls for total surrender. <v Harry Truman>Our demand has been and it remains unconditional <v Harry Truman>surrender [applause]. <v Narrator 1>Japan was in ruins, most of her major cities destroyed. <v Narrator 1>Tokyo reduced to rubble. <v Narrator 1>More than a million civilians dead. <v Narrator 1>The Japanese fought on. <v Robert Wilson>Now, when the question of use came up, then I did have <v Robert Wilson>quite long discussions with Oppy uh about how it might be <v Robert Wilson>used. And he did bring up to me one day that he would serve on a panel <v Robert Wilson>uh to make a recommendation about the use of the bomb. <v Robert Wilson>So then uh uh I suggested to him that it would be a good

<v Robert Wilson>idea if it would be used in a demonstration. <v Robert Wilson>Uh for example, as the uh as the demonstration to Trinity, <v Robert Wilson>where Japanese observers might have been invited to attend. <v Robert Wilson>And I can remember very specifically when Oppenheimer brought up a counter argument <v Robert Wilson>to that, that, well, supposing it didn't go off. <v Robert Wilson>And I turned to him coldly and said, well, we could kill 'em all [laughs]. <v Robert Wilson>And of course, I was not uh I didn't say that for real. <v Robert Wilson>But even so, I was aghast at having even uh to make a point <v Robert Wilson>that I had said such a bloodthirsty thing. <v Freeman Dyson>Why did the bomb get dropped on people at Hiroshima? <v Freeman Dyson>I would say it's almost inevitable that it would have happened <v Freeman Dyson>simply because all the bureaucratic apparatus existed by that time <v Freeman Dyson>to do it. The Air Force was ready and waiting. They had been prepared big airfields <v Freeman Dyson>in the island of Tinian in the Pacific from which you could operate. <v Freeman Dyson>The whole machinery was ready. <v Freeman Dyson>The president would have had to be a man of iron will in order to put a stop to it.

<v Harry Truman>The question was whether we want to save our people <v Harry Truman>and Japanese as well and win the war or whether we want to <v Harry Truman>take a chance on being able to win the war by killing all our <v Harry Truman>young men. <v Dorothy McKibbon>I don't think they would have developed that to show at a garden party. <v Dorothy McKibbon>I think they had to do it. And we felt this was our own defense. <v Dorothy McKibbon>And also, there was a hurricane that would have wiped out a lot of our troops out there. <v Dorothy McKibbon>And the Pearl Japanese hadn't been very nice to us, John. <v Dorothy McKibbon>They kind of demolished our Navy without any warning. <v General Leslie Groves>It would have come out sooner or later in a congressional hearing, if nowhere <v General Leslie Groves>else, just when we could have dropped the bomb if we didn't use it. <v General Leslie Groves>And then uh knowing American politics, you know as well as <v General Leslie Groves>I do that uh there'd been election ?spot? <v General Leslie Groves>on the basis that every mother whose son was killed after

<v General Leslie Groves>such and such a date, uh the blood is on the head of the president. <v Narrator 1>Americans braced themselves for a bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland. <v Stan Ulam>And uh in those days, most people did not realize the qualitative <v Stan Ulam>difference between the atomic bomb and the number of ordinary bombs. <v Stan Ulam>There was really no uh immediate <v Stan Ulam>feeling that the world is changing as it is now, <v Stan Ulam>but rather that it would be a good way to win the war more quickly. <v Freeman Dyson>So I would say it was nobody's fault that the bomb was dropped. <v Freeman Dyson>As usual, the reason it was dropped was just that nobody had the courage or the foresight <v Freeman Dyson>to say no. <v Freeman Dyson>Certainly not Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer gave <v Freeman Dyson>his consent in a certain sense.

<v Freeman Dyson>He was on a committee which advised the secretary of war and that <v Freeman Dyson>committee did not take any kind of a stand against dropping the bomb. <v Jane Wilson>Of course, we never expected, I don't think even the people who were doing the testing <v Jane Wilson>expected, uh the the bomb to be thrown on Japan so fast. <v Narrator 1>Hiroshima, a city the size of Houston, one of the few cities spared <v Narrator 1>the firebombing. <v Narrator 1>Months earlier, orders had been given to leave several Japanese cities untouched to <v Narrator 1>provide virgin targets where the effects of the new bomb could be clearly seen. <v Frank Oppenheimer>The um it- then the announcement <v Frank Oppenheimer>that of Hiroshima. I think I was in the hall right outside my brother's <v Frank Oppenheimer>office and it came over the sort of loudspeaker that went through <v Frank Oppenheimer>was just ?delivered? throughout and that the bomb had been dropped

<v Frank Oppenheimer>and that it had devastated. <v Frank Oppenheimer>That uh. <v Frank Oppenheimer>So the first reaction was, thank God it wasn't a dud. <v Frank Oppenheimer>But before that whole sentence <v Frank Oppenheimer>of the broadcast was finished when ?inaudible? <v Frank Oppenheimer>got this horror of all the people that had been killed. <v Frank Oppenheimer>Uh and I don't know why up to then, I don't think we'd really I'd really thought of all <v Frank Oppenheimer>those flattened people. <v Frank Oppenheimer>Um we had talked often about having a demonstration where they weren't people <v Frank Oppenheimer>maybe on the mainland so that the military would see it that way there weren't <v Frank Oppenheimer>people. And then the thought that uh that they'd <v Frank Oppenheimer>actually dropped in on a place where all those people were in the image of those people, <v Frank Oppenheimer>which came before any pictures of it uh really was pretty awful. <v Frank Oppenheimer>But the first thing was, I'm sure it was, thank God it worked. <v Frank Oppenheimer>[music plays]