GORDON GRAY (dramatized): The hearing will come to order. Dr. J.R.

Oppenheimer, the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. There has developed considerable question
whether your continued employment on Atomic Energy Commission work is consistent with the
interests of the national security. ♪ ♪ In view of your access to highly sensitive classified
information, and in view of allegations which, until disproved, raise questions as to your
veracity, conduct, and even your loyalty, the commission has no other recourse but to suspend
your clearance until the matter has been resolved.

NARRATOR: The hearings were held in a makeshift courtroom in a shabby government office
in Washington, D.C.

GRAY (dramatized): It was reported that your wife, Katherine Puening Oppenheimer, was a
member of the Communist Party. It was reported that your brother Frank Friedman Oppenheimer
was a member of the Communist Party.

NARRATOR: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the most eminent atomic scientist in America, stood
accused, a risk to national security. It was 1954. The cold war with Russia was fueling fears of
Communist infiltration at the highest levels of government.

GRAY (dramatized): It was reported that you stated that you were not a Communist, but had
probably belonged to every Communist front organization on the West Coast and had signed
many petitions in which Communists were interested.

NARRATOR: The news shocked Americans everywhere. If Robert Oppenheimer could not be
trusted with the nation's secrets, who could be? ♪ ♪ Brilliant, proud, charismatic, a poet, as well
as a physicist, Oppenheimer had seemed to enjoy the full trust and confidence of his country's
leaders. He was a national hero, the man who had led the scientific team which devised the
atomic bomb... (explosion roaring) ...the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Oppenheimer
came to prominence through unspeakable violence and suffered all the ambiguities and
contradictions he had helped create.

OPPENHEIMER: We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few
people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the
"Bhagavad Gita." Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to
impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of
worlds." I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

RICHARD RHODES: What he was trying to help the world understand is that these are not
weapons. These are forces of destruction so great that we finally, as a species, are in a position
where we can destroy the entire human world, without question.

NARRATOR: As the nation's top nuclear weapons adviser, Oppenheimer tried to warn his
countrymen of their dangers, but powerful figures within the government feared he was a threat
to America's security. They determined to destroy him.
MARVIN GOLDBERGER: The country asked him to do something, and he did it brilliantly,
and they repaid him for the tremendous job he did by breaking him.

ROGER ROBB (dramatized): Doctor, do you think that social contacts between a person
employed in secret war work and Communists, or Communist adherents, is dangerous? Are we
talking about today? Yes. Certainly not necessarily so. They could conceivably be. Was that your
view in 1943 and during the war years?

NARRATOR: The hearings would go on for nearly a month, the story of Oppenheimer's life
laid bare; his secrets exposed; his brilliance and arrogance, naïveté and insecurities debated,
dissected, and judged. A special three-man board appointed by the Atomic Energy Commission
would rule on the charges. To defend himself, the embattled scientist felt compelled to tell his
own story in his own way.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): The items of so-called derogatory information cannot be fairly

understood except in the context of my life and, and work. (lighter clicks) I was born in New
York in 1904. My father came to this country at the age of 17 from Germany.

NARRATOR: Julius Oppenheimer was a penniless Jewish immigrant who arrived in America
in 1888 unable to speak a word of English, and went to work in his uncle's textile importing
business. By the time he was 30, he was a partner in the company and a wealthy man. When he
fell in love, it was with a sensitive, talented woman of exquisite taste and refinement.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage,
she was an artist and teacher of art.

NARRATOR: Ella Oppenheimer was "very delicate," a friend remembered, with an air of
sadness about her. Robert was precociously brilliant, and both parents were protective of his
uncommon gifts. Frail, frequently sick, he was attended to by servants, driven everywhere. He
rarely played with other children.

PRISCILLA McMILLAN: He wasn't mischievous. He was too brilliant to be just one of the
children. But his parents treasured him, treated him like a little jewel, and he just skipped being a
boy.

NARRATOR: "My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and
bitter things," Oppenheimer said. "It gave me no normal, healthy way to be a bastard." ♪ ♪
Sometime around the age of five, Robert's grandfather gave him a small collection of minerals.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): From then on, I became, in a completely childish way, an

ardent mineral collector. But it began to be also a bit of a scientist's interest, a fascination with
crystals.

NARRATOR: He wrote to the New York Mineralogical Society on a typewriter. They were so
impressed with what he had to say that, of course, thinking he was an adult, they invited him to
give a lecture, and little Robert, at age ten or 11, shows up at the New York Mineralogical
Society, and has to stand on a box in order to see over the lectern to give this lecture. That is not
a normal, average childhood.

NARRATOR: Eight years separated Robert from his brother Frank, too many for
companionship. Robert was a loner. And at New York's Ethical Culture school, he inhabited his
own rarefied world, more comfortable with his teachers than with the other students, who
nicknamed him "Booby" Oppenheimer. To protect himself, he relied on his preternatural
brilliance and grew aloof and arrogant.

McMILLAN: He didn't grow up. He studied a great deal, which shielded him from the world,
and the emotional side of him didn't catch up until much later.

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer graduated high school valedictorian and then conquered Harvard.
He studied chemistry, physics, calculus, English and French literature, Western, Chinese, and
Hindu philosophy. He even found time to write stories and poems.

RHODES: He described it as being like the Huns invading Rome, by which he meant he was
going to swallow up every bit of culture and art and science that he could possibly do.

SHERWIN: Harvard's an environment in which the intellectual life is a rich feast, but the social
life is a desert.

NARRATOR: In all his years at Harvard, he never had a date. He remained immature,
uncertain, easily bewildered in social situations. One friend remembered "bouts of melancholy
and deep, deep depressions." "In the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence," he
said later, "I hardly took an action, hardly did anything that did not arouse in me a very great
sense of revulsion and of wrong. My feeling about myself was always one of extreme
discontent." His doubts about himself came clear in his poems.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): The dawn invests our substance with desire

And the slow light betrays us, and our wistfulness.
We find ourselves again
Each in his separate prison
Ready, hopeless for negotiation
With other men.

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer graduated in just three years, and, in 1925, headed for Cambridge,
England, and an advanced degree at the celebrated Cavendish Laboratory. Academic success had
always come easily. Ambitious, determined to succeed, in England, he would learn what it was
like to struggle and fail.

RHODES: Oppenheimer, like so many theoretical physicists, it turns out that if he walks
through a lab, the instruments all break. And he's trying to do a rather delicate physical
experiment and he's not getting anywhere. And he's sinking deeper and deeper into that special
despair that comes along when prodigies grow up and have, and realize they can't just do it by
being a prodigy anymore.
SHERWIN: His eyes and his hands and his mind are not coordinated. He can't do what all of the
other young people are able to do. And he finds himself one day standing at a blackboard, staring
into space, saying, "The point is... The point is... The point is... There is no point."

RHODES: He fell into despair-- he fell into depression. Here was a point where he was
suddenly doubting his intellect, his ability to do science, so it's not surprising that at that point,
the whole thing would go collapsing down for him. At the same time, he had never really learned
how to approach women-- how to close the sale, if I may call it that-- and he was dealing with
that, as well.

NARRATOR: Wrestling with inner demons that threatened to overwhelm him, he was, he later
said, "at the point of bumping myself off." In 1926, Oppenheimer would save himself. He cut
free from the English experimental laboratory and headed for Göttingen, Germany, to study
theoretical physics with some of the greatest scientific minds of the century.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): I had very great misgivings about myself on all fronts. I hadn't
been good; I hadn't done anybody any good; and here was something I felt just driven to try.

NARRATOR: In Göttingen, Oppenheimer would make his mark in a new science which
explored a world that ran counter to everyday experience: quantum physics.

HERBERT YORK: Quantum physics is the basic physics behind electrons and atoms. It turns
out that classical ideas about Newtonian mechanics and particle motion and so on do not apply to
things of, to things of atomic scale. You needed a new kind of physics. So if you're going to
change on a different scale the, the whole structure of the physics, everything has to be redone, if
you will, and that means there are enormous opportunities available for a young graduate student
with talent to come in and make various aspects of this his own.

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer immersed himself in the mysteries of the subatomic universe,

where nothing was certain and probability the only rule. He found the work exhilarating. "There
was terror," he wrote, "as well as exaltation."

FREEMAN DYSON: Oppenheimer really flourished there. He annoyed everybody, of course,

by talking too much and pretending he knew everything. He always considered very carefully
what he said as though he was speaking for, for the ages. And he expected everybody to be
seduced by his Renaissance man knowledge of everything.

NARRATOR: In Göttingen, Oppenheimer came into his own as a theoretical physicist,

publishing 16 papers in three years. By the time he was ready to return to America, he was
focused and confident, an ambitious young man with an international reputation.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): In the spring of 1929, I returned to the United States. I was
homesick for this country. I had learned in my student days a great deal about the new physics. I
wanted to pursue this myself, to explain it, and to foster its cultivation.
NARRATOR: Oppenheimer was just 25 and already knew more about the quantum universe
than nearly any other American. He settled in California, and began teaching at Cal Tech in
Pasadena and the University of California in Berkeley. But at first, his lectures were
incomprehensible.

ROBERT CHRISTY: It was customary until I got there for students to take his main course in
theoretical physics twice in a row. They would take a second year to fully understand it. Other
students were taking it in pairs. One would listen, the other one would write notes, and they'd
work out the lecture afterward.

SHERWIN: He spoke at a very fast clip, puffing on his cigarette, which he always had; he was
writing with his chalk, and he was moving back and forth between his left hand and his right
hand so quickly that people thought he was going to smoke the chalk, you know, and write with
the cigarette, uh, and they could not, couldn't follow him. But he was able to transform himself
into an excellent lecturer who was charismatic and extremely effective.

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer became a magnetic, dazzling teacher, but his arrogance could
make even his colleagues wince.

GOLDBERGER: He was not likable because he wouldn't let you look at him. He was always
on stage. You never had a feeling that he was speaking from the heart somehow. He never came
across as a real person. There was always a studied remark intended to convey some sort of, I
don't know, superiority or deeper knowledge than you pos, you slob could possibly understand.
He could be devastating, especially to young people. He became very impatient and was always
all over them, and sometimes reduced them practically to tears.

RHODES: His sharp remarks were not inadvertent. They had to do with a kind of arrogance and
contempt. I take it to be a way that he disguised his anxieties, that he disguised his social
insecurities, but it was immensely cruel.

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer called his behavior "beastliness." "It is not easy," he wrote in a
letter to his brother, "at least, it is not easy for me to be quite free of the desire to browbeat
somebody."

NARRATOR: Ever since Oppenheimer had visited New Mexico as a teenager, he had been
haunted by its wild beauty. In 1927, his father took a lease on a rustic cabin high in the
mountains 45 miles northeast of Santa Fe and gave it to both his sons. The Oppenheimers called
it Perro Caliente—Spanish for "hot dog."

RHODES: He found peace there. He found a different self there, one that he liked, a cowboy
self. Friends who went to visit him later would talk about the fact that he would go out riding for
three days at a time up the ridge of the Rocky Mountains with a bar of chocolate and a pint of
whiskey in his hip pocket, and they would be starving and terrified, riding through mountain
storms and lightning, and he would just be having a wonderful time.
NARRATOR: "My two great loves," he once told a friend, "are physics and desert country. It's
a pity they can't be combined."

(birds singing) (people shouting, whistle blowing) (explosions popping)

NARRATOR: In 1934, San Francisco longshoremen battled police, shutting down the
waterfront just across the bay from Oppenheimer's home in Berkeley. America itself seemed on
the verge of revolution, with violence in the streets, strikes, a failing economy, a third of the
nation unemployed. But Oppenheimer remained aloof.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): I had no radio, no telephone. I never read a newspaper or a

current magazine. I learned of the stock market crash in the fall of 1929 only long after the event.
I voted for the first time in a presidential election in 1936. I was deeply interested in my science,
but I had no understanding of the relations of man to his society.

SHERWIN: The Depression didn't affect him personally. He had an income from his father,
who was wealthy. And politics seemed gross to him.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): Beginning late in 1936, my interests began to change. I saw

what the Depression was doing to my students. Often, they could get no jobs. But I had no
framework of political conviction or experience to give me perspective in these matters. In the
spring of 1936, I was introduced by friends to Jean Tatlock. In the autumn, I began to court her.
We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged.

NARRATOR: Jean Tatlock was Oppenheimer's first real love. She was 22, studying to be a
doctor, and passionately involved with the contentious issues of her day: the Civil War in Spain,
organizing workers, racial discrimination. She was also a member of the Communist Party and
introduced Oppenheimer into her political circle.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): I made left-wing friends, and felt sympathy for causes which
hitherto would have seemed so remote from me, like the Loyalist cause in Spain and the
organization of migratory workers. I liked the new sense of companionship, and, at the time, felt
that I was coming to be part of the life of my time and country. I did not then regard Communists
as dangerous, and some of their declared objectives seemed to me desirable.

RHODES: In the 1930s, in the bottom of the Depression, there was a deep and fundamental
concern about the future of this country, of whether its economic and, to some degree, political
system was adequate. We came later in America to demonize people who belonged to the
Communist Party, but it was a very common business in the '30s.

NARRATOR: Workers, teachers, doctors, writers. Americans of every stripe and color were
party members, but although he shared many of their political concerns, there is nothing to prove
that Oppenheimer himself was a Communist. Oppenheimer never joined the party. The FBI
spent 30 years trying to prove that Oppenheimer had been a Communist and was never able to do
so. That's probably good evidence that he never joined the party.
NARRATOR: Oppenheimer was deeply bound to Tatlock, but she was volatile, moody,
sometimes distraught. After three years, she broke off their relationship.

McMILLAN: Their relationship appears to have been quite a stormy one, and Jean Tatlock,
although for many years people who knew her didn't say this, was uncertain whether she wanted
to be with men or women, whether she was lesbian or heterosexual, and I believe that must have
been at the bottom of her crises with Oppenheimer. And how that fed into his own sexual
certainties and uncertainties one can only imagine. He was troubled. That's why he was attracted
to troubled women. He was troubled. He didn't know who he was.

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer would always feel a tender attachment to Jean, but they had gone
their separate ways when Kitty Harrison set her cap for him. Kitty was 29 and also a former
Communist Party member. She was married to a doctor, but that didn't stop her from going after
the well-known scientist.

RHODES: When she saw Oppenheimer, she grabbed him. They were together, of course, for the
rest of their lives, but it was, God knows, a tumultuous relationship with a lot of bickering and a
lot of fighting and a lot of drinking. You know, Kitty and Jean were both dominant women, they
were passionate women, and in some way, he could comfort them. He could save them, or try to.
Here were two women who both presented themselves as people who needed saving, and Robert
jumped in like the, like the white knight that he, I think, wanted to be.

NARRATOR: In 1940, Oppenheimer became Kitty's fourth husband. Less than seven months
later, their first child, Peter, was born. Although they continued to see some of their left-wing
friends, the Oppenheimers were, by now, detaching themselves from Communist Party politics.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): My views were evolving. At that time, I did not fully
understand—as in time I came to understand—how completely the Communist Party in this
country was under the control of Russia. Many of its declared objectives seemed desirable to me,
but I never accepted Communist dogma or theory. In fact, it never made any sense to me.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: What did make sense was science. He would never let politics interfere with
his teaching or his physics.

ROY GLAUBER: Of course, he paid attention to experiment, but he was a theorist. He probed
very deeply. He was interested in the deepest ideas, and he did contribute to some of them.

DYSON: In 1939, he published with his student Hartland Snyder, really, a great piece of work
explaining how stars collapse, how they can actually end up as black holes, which had never
been understood before.

NARRATOR: That same year, a startling dispatch from the abstruse world of nuclear physics
changed the course of history and Oppenheimer's life. Two German chemists reported that the
uranium nucleus could be split. The discovery soon had a name: nuclear fission.
OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): "The U-business is unbelievable. Many points are still
unclear. I think it really not too improbable that a ten-centimeter cube of uranium deuteride
might very well blow itself to hell."

NARRATOR: The discovery of nuclear fission began a race that would end with the atomic
bomb.

RHODES: He saw already at the beginning, as I think any really good physicist did, just by
doing the numbers about the amount of energy released in this reaction, that this was going to
change the world.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: With that discovery came a change in the relationship between science and
the nation state. Every country in the world in 1939 and 1940 that had the capability of even
beginning to work on a bomb began that work, not only England and Germany and the United
States, but also France, Japan, and the Soviet Union.

NARRATOR: But the only threat came from Germany.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): We had information in those days of German activity in the

field of nuclear fission. We were aware of what it might mean if they beat us to the draw in the
development of atomic bombs. I had relatives there, and was later to help in extricating them and
bringing them to this country.

NARRATOR: Nine months after the discovery of nuclear fission, Germany invaded Poland.
World War II had begun. When the United States entered the war two years later, American
scientists feared that Germany was already well ahead in the race to build an atomic bomb. If
America was going to develop a bomb first, they would have to work fast.

NARRATOR: In October 1942, the 20th Century Limited was speeding toward New York City.
Sharing a private Pullman car were Robert Oppenheimer and a 46-year-old career Army officer,
General Leslie Groves. Groves had been placed in command of the Manhattan Project, the
staggering enterprise to marshal the vast technical and industrial resources to develop an atomic
bomb. Now he was looking over the man he hoped might head up the secret laboratory where the
bomb would be designed and built.

RHODES: Groves's way of operating was to be blunt and brutal. He knew, as they said during
the First World War, how to get the Spam to the front lines. He knew how to get the job done.

NARRATOR: The two men talked for hours. When they were done, Groves had made up his
mind. Oppenheimer, he believed, had the ambition, discipline, and brilliance to lead the most
complex scientific effort America had ever undertaken.

GROVES (quoted): "He's a genius. A real genius. He can talk to you about anything you bring
up. Well, not exactly. He doesn't know anything about sports."
CHRISTY: Groves went a way out on a limb in choosing Oppenheimer. No one would have,
would have supposed that this esoteric person with a, an interest in French poetry and Hindu
mysticism would be a practical person to lead a laboratory. He'd never directed anything, really,
to, to speak of. He hadn't even been a department chairman. Most of his friends think that
Oppenheimer could not run a hamburger stand.

NARRATOR: Groves wanted Oppenheimer anyway, but the United States Army refused to
give the scientist a security clearance. The country was at war. Even though Russia was
America's ally, anyone with Communist associations was considered a possible spy. It was the
first time Oppenheimer's loyalty to America would be questioned.

SHERWIN: The security people are appalled. Oppenheimer is the last person they would want
as director, and he's the next-to-last person they'd even want involved in the project at all, as a,
uh, as a janitor. Groves is very conservative—he hates Communists. But Groves does not allow
Oppenheimer's left-wing activities during the 1930s to trump his belief that Oppenheimer will be
just the right person.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): In early 1943, I received a letter appointing me director of the

laboratory. Almost everyone knew this was a great undertaking. It might determine the outcome
of the war. It was an unparalleled opportunity to bring to bear the knowledge and art of science
for the benefit of the country. This job, if it were achieved, would be part of history.

NARRATOR: In times of spiritual trial, Oppenheimer would search the Bhagavad Gita, a
sacred Hindu text, for meaning and comfort. He often turned to the story of the warrior Prince
Arjuna, who, to fulfill his destiny, must fight and kill.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): "In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains, on the
dark, great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows, in sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
the good deeds a man has done before defend him."

NARRATOR: In April 1943, Oppenheimer was 38 years old, about to take on a task for which
few people thought him capable: harnessing the forces of the atom to build a bomb of awesome
destructive power. There was little doubt that a potentially world-shattering undertaking lay
ahead. We began to see the great explosion. We also began to see how rough, difficult,
challenging, and unpredictable this job might turn out to be.

♪♪

CHRISTY: A whole town was being constructed, and Oppenheimer was trying to organize the
science. But in addition, they were constructing roads, laboratory buildings, and homes. We had
no sidewalks anywhere, and in one season of the year, walked around in mud up to our ankles.

RHODES: They were trying to build a first-class physics laboratory out in the middle of a
howling wilderness. It was a hell of a place to try to move a linear accelerator up the narrow
switchback mountain roads to install it at the top.
NARRATOR: The laboratory at Los Alamos was a closely guarded secret. From its beginnings,
security had the highest priority. Army intelligence watched over everything and everybody,
especially the laboratory director with the left-wing past. Oppenheimer's phones were tapped, his
mail opened, his office wired, his comings and goings closely monitored. His driver and
bodyguard was an undercover agent. Oppenheimer, who knew everything that was going on at
Los Alamos, was still waiting for his security clearance.

SHERWIN: Oppenheimer goes about doing the job as best he can do it, but the security people
are like flies on a hot summer day. They're constantly buzzing around him. They're constantly
annoying him. He does his best to shoo them, you know, away, but there's one instance where he
makes a terrible, terrible mistake.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): I had visited Jean Tatlock in the spring of 1943. I almost had
to. She was not much of a Communist, but she was certainly a member of the party. There was
nothing dangerous about that. There was nothing potentially dangerous about that.

NARRATOR: The government knew all about Oppenheimer's visit. Agents from Army
intelligence waited outside Tatlock's apartment, while Oppenheimer spent the night, and reported
the details to the FBI.

ROBB (dramatized): Why did you have to see her?

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): She had indicated a great desire to see me before we left for
Los Alamos. At that time, I couldn't go. For one thing, I wasn't supposed to say where we were
going or anything. I felt that she had to see me. She was undergoing psychiatric treatment. She
was extremely unhappy.

ROBB (dramatized): Did you find out why she had to see you?

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): Because she was still in love with me.

ROBB (dramatized): When did you see her after that?

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): She took me to the airport, and I never saw her again.

RHODES: Jean Tatlock was a wounded, lonely woman who was at wit's end, and she wanted
this man whom she loved to come to her, and he did. From the point of view of the gumshoes
who sat outside Jean Tatlock's apartment all night in their car, writing down who came and who
went and at what hour, and when the lights were on, when the lights were off, there may have
been a security problem. But for him, human need, human compassion, caring for someone you
love trumped the security system.

NARRATOR: The FBI feared that Tatlock might be passing atomic secrets to the Russians.
They tapped her phone, but persistent eavesdropping revealed nothing. Six months after
Oppenheimer's visit, Jean Tatlock killed herself.
NARRATOR: "I am disgusted with everything," she wrote in an unsigned note.
"To those who loved me and helped me, all love and courage. I wanted to live and to give, and I
got paralyzed. I tried like hell to understand and couldn't. I think I would have been a liability all
my life. At least I could take away the burden of a paralyzed soul from a fighting world."

INVESTIGATOR: You have said that you knew she had been a Communist.

OPPENHEIMER: Yes, I knew that in the fall of 1937.

INVESTIGATOR: Was there any reason for you to believe that she wasn't still a Communist in
1943?

OPPENHEIMER: No.

INVESTIGATOR: Pardon?

OPPENHEIMER: There wasn't— I do not know what she was doing in, in 1943.

INVESTIGATOR: You have no reason to believe she wasn't a Communist, do you?

OPPENHEIMER: No.

INVESTIGATOR: You spent the night with her, didn't you?

OPPENHEIMER: Yes.

INVESTIGATOR: Yes. You have told us, this morning, that you thought that at times, social
contacts with Communists on the part of one working on a secret war project was dangerous.

OPPENHEIMER: Could conceivably be.

INVESTIGATOR: You didn't think spending a night with a dedicated Communist...

OPPENHEIMER: I don't believe she was a dedicated Communist.

INVESTIGATOR: You don't?

OPPENHEIMER: No.

NARRATOR: Five weeks after Oppenheimer's visit to Tatlock, General Groves rammed
through his security clearance. But Oppenheimer continued to operate under a shadow of
suspicion, and by the summer of 1943, the pressure began to tell. That August, Oppenheimer
volunteered to talk with Colonel Boris Pash, chief of Army counterintelligence for the West
Coast. He had begun to worry about his conversation with his friend Haakon Chevalier. He
realized that he should have reported it at once, but he still didn't want to get his old friend in
trouble.
OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): General Groves has, more or less, I feel, placed a certain
responsibility in me. I don't mean to take up too much of your time.

PASH (dramatized): That's perfectly all right. Whatever time you choose.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): I have no firsthand knowledge, but a man attached to the

Soviet Consul has indicated indirectly through an intermediary that he was in a position to
transmit information. I think it might not hurt to be on the lookout for it. If you wanted to watch
him, I think it would be the appropriate thing to do. His name is Eltenton.

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer had simply wanted to alert Army intelligence that Eltenton might
be a threat, but Pash did not trust Oppenheimer and his left-wing past. He hid a microphone in
the telephone receiver and recorded their entire conversation. Oppenheimer had no idea that
everything he said was set down, transcribed, and added to his security file, where it would be
unearthed years later with disastrous consequences.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized, recorded): There were approaches to other people, who were
troubled by them, and sometimes they came and discussed them with me. And that's as far as I
can go on that.

PASH (dramatized, recorded): Mm— these people, were they contacted directly by Eltenton?

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): No.

PASH (dramatized): Oh, through a, another party?

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): Yes.

PASH (dramatized): Well, now, could we know through whom that contact was made?

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): I think it would be a mistake.

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer makes up this complicated story so that the security people are
looking all over the place, and they won't finger Robert and they won't finger Chevalier. He
evidently hadn't learned to think the way security people think. Every time he said something
else, he just made it worse. Pash ended up, of course, believing Oppenheimer was a Communist
spy.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): But I think in mentioning Eltenton's name, I essentially said

that he may be acting in a way which is dangerous to the country and which should be watched.
I'm not going to mention anyone else's name in the same breath. I just can't do that.

♪♪

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer quickly put the whole incident behind him. There was too much
work to do. Los Alamos was growing into a bustling town with thousands of people.
NARRATOR: Los Alamos was growing into a bustling town with thousands of people.
He had wildly underestimated the magnitude of the job. But he was thriving. In spite of the
initial doubts of his scientific colleagues, he was proving that he was more than up to the
enormous task.

GOLDBERGER: He showed an ability to motivate and inspire that I think surprised everyone.

GLAUBER: Everyone loved him because he was everywhere. He understood all of these
absurdly difficult and intractable problems, and he often had witty things to say about them.

HAROLD AGNEW: He had a certain charisma, a certain charm, a certain flair. He had a robin's
egg blue convertible Cadillac, you know. And if you're a young kid, and here's the boss, and he's
driving around with his porkpie hat and his tweed jacket and cigarette always, you know, like in
the movies, you know, you're impressed.

GLAUBER: Oppenheimer inspired everyone. He expressed the intellectual essence of what we

were doing, the deepest sense of what it was.

GOLDBERGER: I don't know in retrospect who could have done it better, who could have
pulled that gang— 80% of which were prima donnas of their own— could have pulled that gang
together and, and made them work as a, as a unit.

RHODES: In being the director of this historic laboratory, Oppenheimer found his greatest and
most natural role.
He was cruel to people before the war. He was cruel to people after the war. But he wasn't cruel
to people during the war.
The period at Los Alamos was the only time in his life when he wasn't plagued by existential
doubt, when all the parts came together and worked together.
It was the first chance he'd ever had to serve the country and forget himself.

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer shaped an array of brilliant, eccentric scientists into a team. The
Hungarian refugee Edward Teller was his biggest problem.

GLAUBER: Teller was always an ebullient scientist. Very bright, quite impatient.
When I showed up at Los Alamos, uh, I saw this name chalked next to the door, E. Teller, but
there was no one in the office.
I learned that he was rather unhappy that he had not been chosen as leader of the theory division
and had gone off in a huff.
His passion from the very first was to create what he called "zupa," the superbomb.

NARRATOR: The "super" was a hydrogen bomb, a weapon with nearly unlimited destructive
power. But since a hydrogen bomb would need an atomic bomb to set it off, Oppenheimer gave
Teller's super a low priority.
TELLER (dramatized): Oppenheimer said, "No, no, we got enough on our hands. We're not
going to, we're not going to... We got to make the hy... We got to make the atomic bomb. That's
what we're going to do, that's our job, and that's what we're going to focus on."

NARRATOR: Teller threatened to quit until Oppenheimer relented and let him work
independently to try and design his superbomb, but there would always be bad blood between
them.

GOLDBERGER: Teller was obsessive. He would not accept Oppenheimer's judgment about
the feasibility of this project. He was not a crackpot or anything like that. He was an excellent
physicist. But he got off on something that was simply wrong, and he couldn't let it go.
Teller never forgave Oppenheimer, and, uh... He paid him back. Unfortunately.

NARRATOR: By summer of 1944, the enormous burden of responsibility had begun to take its
toll. Losing weight, afflicted with a rasping cough, Oppenheimer chain-smoked his way through
increasingly demanding months.

Kitty was an additional burden. She refused to take on the role of the director's wife and found
herself at loose ends. After their second child was born in the Los Alamos Hospital — a girl they
named Toni — she became even more distracted. She was drinking hard, on the verge of
emotional collapse while Oppenheimer was preoccupied, desperately pushing the project
forward.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): For me, it was a time so filled with work, with the need for
decision and action and consultation, there was room for little else.

NARRATOR: They had to invent all these new technologies in these very short months from
the summer of '44 to the summer of '45. Oppenheimer nearly broke down. He was really
depressed. He thought he'd blown it. He thought they had found themselves at a dead end.

GLAUBER: It was devilishly difficult grappling with problems which were on the edge of
absurdity. Just imagine trying to find out what's going on within an explosion all of which is over
in less than a thousandth of a second.

NARRATOR: He seriously considered leaving the project, and one of his friends finally took
him aside and said, "Robert, you can't leave. You're the only person who can make this happen.
You have to stay — I don't care what you think." And he did stay.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): The consensus of all our opinions and every directive I had
stressed the extreme urgency of the work. Time and time again, we had in the technical work
almost paralyzing crises. Time and again, the laboratory drew itself together and we faced the
new problems and got on with the work. We worked by night and by day.

(fires, explosion pounds)

NARRATOR: While Oppenheimer and his team raced on, the war against Japan and Germany
was reaching a bloody climax. On May 7, 1945, the Nazis surrendered. The race with Germany
to build the bomb was over.

GLAUBER: We had joined this project fearing that the Germans were working on trying to
produce a bomb, and, if they succeeded in reaching it before we did, they wouldn't be very
sentimental about using it.

SHERWIN: When Germany surrenders, the bomb is several months away from being built. And
the question is, should we continue? Is it the right thing to do? Is it ethical?

NARRATOR: We never heard any suggestion from Oppenheimer that, uh... there was any
course other than continuing. There was a kind of momentum involved in our efforts in this
direction. It was an enormous project. We were all deeply involved in finding out whether the
darn thing would work.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): When you see something that is technically sweet, you go
ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical
success.

NARRATOR: Caught up in the momentum of the project, driven by the desire to finish the job
he had begun, Oppenheimer was determined to see it through.

"This might help to convince everybody," he argued, "that the next war would be fatal. For this
purpose, actual combat use might even be the best thing." He rejected the idea of demonstrating
the bomb first.

YORK: If you have a demonstration, what it is is a fantastic firework with nobody getting hurt.
What's important about nuclear weapons is not that it's fantastic fireworks. What's important
about nuclear weapons is the fact they kill people.

NARRATOR: On May 31, 1945, Oppenheimer joined a meeting of high-ranking government

officials, scientists, and military men. It was agreed that "the most desirable target was a vital
war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers' houses."
Oppenheimer made no objection. What worried him was whether the bomb would work.

The answer would come in New Mexico's Alamogordo desert, the place the Spanish had called
the Jornada del Muerto, "The Journey of Death."

NARRATOR: On July 15, Oppenheimer climbed a 110-foot tower for one last look at the
bomb. It would be tested the next day. He was down to 115 pounds, tense, on edge.

GLAUBER: There was great tension about the test, great uncertainty whether it would work or
produce a, a pathetic fizzle. This had never been done before, and it was a... No one had a clear
picture at all of what to expect.
NARRATOR: The evening before the test, someone recalled, "The frogs had gathered in a little
pond by the camp and copulated and squawked all night long."

Oppenheimer chain-smoked nervously and sat quietly reading the French poet Baudelaire.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): Seductive twilight, the criminal's friend. Silent like a wolf.
The sky is closing down. A dark cloth drawn across an alcove. Where the impatient man changes
into a beast of prey.

NARRATOR: At 5:10, the countdown began at zero minus 20 minutes. As loudspeakers ticked
off the time at five-minute intervals, Oppenheimer wandered in and out of the control bunker,
glancing up at the sky.

At the two-minute mark, he was heard to say to himself, "Lord, these affairs are hard on the
heart." Minus one minute. Minus 55 seconds.

CHRISTY: We were given a piece of welder's glass to hold in front of our eyes, so that we
could look at it without being blinded. It was pitch-dark outside, just before dawn. There was a
lot of tension.

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer lay on his stomach, his face dreamy, withdrawn.

"He grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off," an Army general remembered. "He scarcely
breathed. For the last few seconds, he stared directly ahead."

(no audio) (explosion roars)

CHRISTY: There was a brilliant flash like daylight outside. Suddenly, from pitch-dark to
daylight over a huge area. There was this rapidly expanding glowing sphere with swirling, dark
clouds in it. And finally, as it dimmed, you could see on the outside a faint blue glow. It was
simply fantastic.

NARRATOR: "It worked," was all that Oppenheimer said. "It worked."

GLAUBER: We were just awestruck. There it was — it had happened. The test was evidently a
success. But we had no idea when the next thing would happen. Nobody had said to us that a
bomb had already been shipped out. There was total silence, fear, and tension. Now we're into
something. Now who knows what's going to ensue?

We heard not a single word until the sixth of August.

(explosion roars)

NARRATOR: On August 6, 1945, the United States exploded an atomic bomb over Hiroshima,
a city with a population of 350,000.
Even before the blast, Oppenheimer had been darkly mourning.

OPPENHEIMER (quoted): "Those poor little people," he said. "Those poor little people."

Yet he had given the military precise instructions to ensure that the weapon would be delivered
on target.

(reads): "No radar bombing," he wrote. "It must be dropped visually. Don't let them detonate it
too high or the target won't get as much damage."

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer was of two minds. His success had been exhilarating, but he was in
anguish over the human costs.

RHODES: There's no doubt that there was ambivalence about it. I think Oppenheimer saw the
question in all its complexity. It wasn't so simple as, "Was he guilty about building such a
weapon?" He understood that the bomb was going to change history. He might have hoped that
there was some other way to demonstrate its effectiveness.

They knew what they were making. They knew it was going to kill a lot of people. They didn't
like that aspect of it, but there you were.

(explosion roaring)

NARRATOR: The second atomic bomb, exploded over Nagasaki on August 9, left him morose,
consumed by doubts, fast sinking into depression.

OPPENHEIMER (letter): "This undertaking," he wrote a friend, "has not been without its
misgivings. They are heavy on us today, when the future, which has so many elements of high
promise, is yet only a stone's throw from despair."

OPPENHEIMER (speech): "Some of you will have seen photographs of the Nagasaki strike —
seen the great steel girders of factories twisted and wrecked. Atomic weapons are weapons of
aggression, of surprise, and of terror. If they are ever used again, it may well be by the
thousands, or perhaps by the tens of thousands."

SHERWIN: He was a great supporter of using the bomb, but he understood all along that he was
on the cusp of a new terror. Even at the moment when the scientists believed that there was no
other choice.

They knew that most of the people killed were civilians. They knew that the targets for these
bombs were the centers of cities.

It's a very heavy burden that he carries into the postwar period, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki are
destroyed.
OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): I have been asked whether, in the years to come, it will be
possible to kill 40 million American people in the 20 largest American towns by the use of
atomic bombs in a single night. I am afraid that the answer to that question is yes.

NARRATOR: In 1945, America was the only country in the world with the atomic bomb.
President Harry Truman believed that national security depended on keeping nuclear technology
secret.

Oppenheimer, along with nearly every other nuclear scientist, disagreed.

OPPENHEIMER: I have been asked whether there is hope for the nation's security in keeping
secret some of the knowledge in, which has gone into the making of the bombs. I am afraid there
is no such hope.

RHODES: President Truman really did seem to feel that if you just kept the lid on enough, we'd
always have the secret and no one else would ever get it. There wasn't any secret. The secret was
it worked.

NARRATOR: On October 25, 1945, Oppenheimer met with President Truman to share his
concerns. When the president assured his visitor that the Soviets would never get the bomb,
Oppenheimer became frustrated.

OPPENHEIMER: "Mr. President," he said, "I feel I have blood on my hands."

TRUMAN (quoted): "Blood on his hands," Truman complained later. "Damn it, he hasn't half
as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don't go around bellyaching about it."

RHODES: It's not surprising Truman just about threw him out of his office. It was the
president's decision. It wasn't Oppenheimer's decision.

NARRATOR: Later, Truman told his secretary of state, "I don't want to see that son of a bitch
in this office again."

NARRATOR: In the years after the war, Robert Oppenheimer’s fame grew. His name became a
household word. He was “the father of the A-bomb,” the government’s top adviser on atomic
weapons, privy to all the nation’s atomic secrets.

YORK: He was instantly famous. Nuclear weapons, nuclear energy was such a big and new
thing and such a surprise to nearly everyone that it was very widespread to ask your local
physicists, “What does this all mean and what should we do?” You know, the Rotary clubs did it.
You know, the Kiwanis did it, the PTAs did — I mean, everybody. And for, not only that,
whenever there was a, in the, anything in the papers about it, it was always a “brilliant nuclear
physicist.” There was no other kind. Now, Oppenheimer was right at the top of it, so it was the
president or the Congress or the senators or the U.N., you know, who asked him, and for whom
he gave his advice.
McMILLAN: He was interested in power. He was drawn to it. He wanted to have a say in what
became of those weapons. He wasn’t going to go back down on the farm after he’d seen Paris.

RHODES: He realized that he might turn this fame and power into statesmanship. That he might
become the sort of philosopher-scientist, uh, philosopher-statesman, who could bring the rest of
the message to government about how you go about eliminating nuclear weapons in the world.

Oppenheimer was naïve in that he really thought that if he got inside, he could change things.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): Immediately after the war, I was deeply involved in the effort
to devise effective means for the international control of atomic weapons.

NARRATOR: In 1946, Oppenheimer hammered out the details of a visionary proposal with
some of America’s most distinguished statesmen. The plan was designed to put atomic energy
into the hands of an international agency controlling uranium mines, atomic power plants, and
atomic laboratories.

YORK: It involved giving up nuclear weapons and internationalizing the entire nuclear
enterprise. And Oppenheimer writes, “We know that people will say, ‘This is impossible — you
can’t do this.’ Our answer is, ‘We must.’”

NARRATOR: But Oppenheimer’s hope for an international accord that would lead to the
elimination of nuclear weapons was facing fierce resistance, foundering on the deepening
antagonisms between two former allies: the Soviet Union and the United States.

SHERWIN: Oppenheimer believed that if we could figure out how to create a postwar period in
which the foundation of international affairs was U.S.–Soviet cooperation, the world would be a
very different place.

NARRATOR: But the Soviet army already occupied much of Eastern Europe. Americans feared
that Western Europe might be overrun. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had fears of his own.

RHODES: The Soviet Union was not about to let the United States have a monopoly on these
weapons. They didn’t trust us, with reason. We had, after all, built a weapon in secret, telling our
allies Great Britain, but not telling our allies the Soviet Union, and actually used the thing on a,
on an enemy population. Stalin had every reason to believe that we would use it on him.

NARRATOR: In the face of opposition from both the Soviets and the Americans,
Oppenheimer’s plan to internationalize nuclear energy went nowhere.

RHODES: So, it was a brilliant and radical and evidently premature idea. Because national
sovereignty trumped everything.

(explosion roars)
NARRATOR: On July 1, 1946, the United States tested a 21,000-ton atomic bomb, exploding it
in Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Two months before, Oppenheimer had written President
Truman a letter opposing the tests. Truman paid no attention, calling Oppenheimer “that crybaby
scientist.”

By now, Oppenheimer was disillusioned with America’s efforts to eliminate the threat of nuclear
weapons, but he was even more disillusioned with the Russians.

McMILLAN: He saw how intransigent the Russians were going to be, and he went into another
mode in his thinking about what should be done about the bomb.

He felt that what you had to do, instead of — you had to accomplish the impossible — what you
had to do was accomplish another impossibility, and that is live successfully and peacefully with
nuclear weapons.

NARRATOR: That fall, Oppenheimer was made a key adviser to the newly created Atomic
Energy Commission. As chairman of its General Advisory Committee, he reached what he
described as a “melancholy” conclusion.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): As the prospects of success receded and as the evidence of

Soviet hostility and growing military power accumulated, we were more and more to devote
ourselves to finding ways of adapting our atomic potential to offset the Soviet threat. We
concluded that the principal job of the commission was to provide atomic weapons and good
atomic weapons and many atomic weapons.

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer was now a scientific statesman. He had little time to be a scientist.

After the war, he had given up teaching to become the director of the Institute for Advanced
Study at Princeton, a center for theoretical research, renowned as the home of the most famous
scientist in the world, Albert Einstein.

But Oppenheimer rarely did any research himself anymore. He published only a few scientific
papers, and after 1950, never published one again.

DYSON: And that was a great grief to him. He had had dreams of getting back into science and
doing something great while he was here. His wife, Kitty, begged me if, if I couldn’t actually
work with Robert and actually do some science with him, and I never could. Some... You know,
it was...

He, he never got down to the nitty-gritty. He was older. What, he was 40? He was past the age
when people do their best scientific work.

NARRATOR: The popular press continued to depict him as a scientist on the cutting edge and a
model American, a happily married man with two small children and a German shepherd called
Buddy.
No one knew that he was under close surveillance by the FBI because of his past ties to the
Communist Party.

J. EDGAR HOOVER: Communists have been, still are, and always will be a menace to
freedom, to democratic ideals, to the worship of God, and to America's way of life.

NARRATOR: With America's relationship with Russia deteriorating, the fear of Communism
seemed to be spreading everywhere, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover continued to find
Oppenheimer suspicious, in spite of Oppenheimer's leadership at Los Alamos and his immense
reputation.

SHERWIN: There were periods in which there was a letup, but the FBI started to follow and
surveil Oppenheimer in about 1940, 1941, and never stopped. Never stopped.

NARRATOR: As the Soviets tightened their grip on Eastern Europe, the hunt for Communist
spies was becoming a national obsession.

McMILLAN: Looked at from outside, the United States was the most powerful country in the
world, but in the U.S., there was this awareness that the Russians had walked all over Eastern
Europe and that Communism was being foisted on the peoples of those countries, and that was
terrifying to the American public. And it wasn't long before there were politicians who learned to
exploit that fear.

NARRATOR: The House Un-American Activities Committee had begun investigating what
they called the Communist threat to the American way of life. In June 1949, it subpoenaed
Oppenheimer. The famous scientist tried to charm the congressmen. When they asked, he
confirmed the names of Communist Party members. Some had been his students. Later, he said
that his nerve just gave way.

DYSON: It looked as though he was just trying to save his own skin by incriminating the
students. To me, it, it was horrible.

McMILLAN: He must have sensed that the flames could get to him sometime. And it wasn't
clear to him what he should do.

NARRATOR: That same June, Oppenheimer appeared before Congress again, but this time,
made a formidable enemy. Lewis Strauss was the president of the Institute for Advanced Study.
He had hired Oppenheimer as its director. Strauss was also a member of the Atomic Energy
Commission. A self-made millionaire, ambitious, proud, fiercely anti-Communist, he did not like
to be crossed. "If you disagree with Lewis about anything," a fellow atomic energy
commissioner said, "he assumes you're just a fool at first, but if you go on disagreeing with him,
he concludes you must be a traitor."

Oppenheimer and Strauss clashed over a minor issue at a Congressional hearing, and Strauss
never forgave him.
OPPENHEIMER: My opinion is that if the determination were made that isotopes should not
be shipped abroad, the Congress will be making a profound mistake.

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer was testifying in support of exporting radioisotopes to Europe

while Strauss looked on, seething. Strauss violently disagreed, fearing that the isotopes might fall
into the hands of Russia. In a reckless display of arrogance, Oppenheimer aimed a jibe directly at
Strauss, telling the congressmen that radioisotopes were no more dangerous than a shovel or a
bottle of beer.

SHERWIN: And everybody laughed, and a journalist said he looked over at Lewis Strauss, who
had turned beet-red. He had never seen so much hate and anger on anyone's face as he saw on
Strauss's face at that moment.

McMILLAN: Strauss was very sensitive to criticism. If he didn't like people, he dealt with
them. And he had a long memory. He could deal with them a long time afterward, um, if he
wanted to.

NARRATOR: On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. America was
still the most powerful nation on Earth, but the confidence of many of its citizens was shattered.

RHODES: There was near-hysteria in Washington. People were running around screaming,
"The sky is falling." Now, why would they do that? If you've got all of your eggs in the basket
that it's a secret, and then the secret is lost, then of course you think you've lost everything.

NARRATOR: The day the test made headlines, Oppenheimer received a call from an agitated
Edward Teller. "What should I do now?" Teller wanted to know. "Keep your shirt on,"
Oppenheimer told him.

RHODES: From Teller's point of view, there was a balance of forces between us and the Soviet
Union in Europe. They had four million men on the ground in Eastern Europe, and we had the
bomb. Now, suddenly, they had four million men on the ground in Europe, we had the bomb,
and they had the bomb, so the balance of forces was upset.

GOLDBERGER: He hated the Soviet Union. He grew up in Hungary, and Communism was a
four-letter word, so he thought the only way you could deal with the Soviet Union was have
more bombs than they did. That they would be influenced by force and by nothing else.

NARRATOR: Teller believed he had the answer to the Soviet threat: the super, the hydrogen
bomb, which had remained his pet project ever since Los Alamos. It was up to Oppenheimer and
his General Advisory Committee to recommend to the Atomic Energy Commission whether or
not to try and create the most awesome weapon of mass destruction ever devised.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): A good many people came to me or called me or wrote me

letters about the super program. It was not clear to me what the right thing to do was. Was it
crash development, the most rapid possible development and construction of the super?
NARRATOR: The debate over the H-bomb sparked a controversy fraught with danger for the
unsuspecting scientist.

NARRATOR: Ever since the war had ended, Teller had been trying to convince any high
official who would listen that the super would keep Americans safe.

GOLDBERGER: He thought that if we didn't develop it, the Russians surely would, and we
would be at their mercy.

McMILLAN: He thought that it would be crazy not to develop it and that those who opposed it
might possibly be unpatriotic.

NARRATOR: But Oppenheimer and the General Advisory Committee worried more about the
destructive power of the H-bomb than they did about the Russians. They voted eight to zero
against it. There was a surprising unanimity— to me, very surprising— that the United States
ought not to take the initiative in an all-out program for the development of thermonuclear
weapons.

SHERWIN: The committee concluded that it shouldn't be built, because this was a weapon of
genocide that had absolutely no military necessity, and that our stockpile of atomic bombs was a
sufficient deterrent.

NARRATOR: The debate seemed to be over. Oppenheimer, along with some of the country's
most experienced nuclear scientists, had rendered their opinion, but President Truman, fearing
the Russians would develop an H-bomb first, dismissed it.

(explosion roaring)

On November 1, 1952, the world's first hydrogen bomb explosion vaporized the tiny island of
Elugelab in the Pacific.

AGNEW: It became a great big lagoon. It just went away. And the whole water around it was
milky white. It was scary. The heat from this thing was really very frightening. It started getting
hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter. This is almost 30 miles away.

RHODES: These were no longer weapons that were military devices. They were simply
weapons of mass destruction on the most terrible scale. Well, let's take New York. The blast
would destroy the entire greater New York area. The fallout would take out the rest of the East
Coast. One bomb.

McMILLAN: It meant that a new era of warfare was upon us. We now had in our possession a
weapon of genocide, not just warfare. The modern arms race started with the invention of the
hydrogen bomb, and after which, it was escalation all the way.
OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): If the development by the enemy, as well as by us, of
thermonuclear weapons could have been averted, I think we would be in a somewhat safer world
today than we are. God knows, not entirely safe, because atomic bombs are not jolly, either.

NARRATOR: Once the decision was made, Oppenheimer did nothing to oppose it. Frustrated,
he considered leaving the government altogether, but instead, played the loyal soldier. Later,
Oppenheimer's lack of enthusiasm would be interpreted as outright opposition.

ROBB (dramatized): Did you, subsequent to the president's decision of January 1950, ever
express any opposition to the production of the hydrogen bomb on moral grounds?

OPPENHEIMER: I would think I could very well have said, "This is a dreadful weapon," or
something like that.

ROBB: Why do you think that you could very well have said that?

OPPENHEIMER: Because I have always thought it was a dreadful weapon. Even if, from a
technical point of view, it was a sweet and lovely and beautiful job, I have still thought it was a
dreadful weapon.

ROBB: And have said so?

OPPENHEIMER: I would assume I have said so, yes.

ROBB: You mean, you had a moral revulsion against the production of such a dreadful weapon?

OPPENHEIMER: This is too strong.

ROBB: Beg pardon?

OPPENHEIMER: That is too strong.

ROBB: Which is too strong, the weapon or my expression?

OPPENHEIMER: Your expression. I had grave concern and anxiety.

ROBB: You had moral qualms about it. Is that accurate?

OPPENHEIMER: Let us leave the word "moral" out of it.

ROBB: You had qualms about it.

OPPENHEIMER: How could one not have qualms about it? I know no one who doesn't have
qualms about it.
RHODES: Oppenheimer wasn't opposed to building nuclear weapons. He was just opposed to
building huge nuclear weapons that wouldn't— that were bigger than the targets.

NARRATOR: In 1950, the United States went to war in Korea. Soon, Americans were fighting
both Korean and Chinese Communists, while the Russians seemed to be growing increasingly
belligerent. Oppenheimer knew that America's military planned a devastating response to any
Soviet attack. In 1951, he was shown the Air Force's top-secret strategic war plan.

RHODES: The plan was that we would bomb our way across Eastern Europe with nuclear
weapons. We would then destroy the Soviet Union, and then as a kind of an extra, we'd go on
and destroy China, because, after all, it was a Communist country.

SHERWIN: The American government was planning, in its nuclear weapons response to any
Soviet attack, to kill 200 and something million people within a week or two. I mean,
Oppenheimer just felt that this was madness, sheer madness.

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer spoke out for moderation. He took a stand against building
nuclear-powered aircraft and submarines, and advocated open discussion of the growing arms
race.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized): It is grave danger for us that these decisions are taken on the
basis of facts held secret. If we are guided by fear alone, we'll fail in this time of crisis.

NARRATOR: But powerful Washington insiders believed he was standing in the way of
America's ability to defend itself. They were led by Lewis Strauss. With the election of Dwight
Eisenhower to the presidency, Strauss became the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.
He now had the power to build a case to rid the government of the influential scientist.

RHODES: Strauss would deliberately destroy the name and reputation and government position
of Robert Oppenheimer. And when he destroyed something, he destroyed it thoroughly.

NARRATOR: Strauss began by orchestrating a campaign in America's most popular news

magazines, alleging that Oppenheimer was undermining the nation's atomic weapons program.
The stories depicted Edward Teller as a scientific patriot. Teller readily joined the crusade
against his old boss. He had long wanted to remove Oppenheimer from public life. In 1951, he
told the FBI that "a lot of people believe Oppenheimer opposed the development of the hydrogen
bomb on direct orders from Moscow."

GOLDBERGER: Teller sincerely believed that we were in a dangerous arms race with the
Russians, and that Oppenheimer was standing in the way of protecting the country against this
dreaded foe. I think he may well have sincerely believed that. And I'm sure for Teller, it was also
a very personal jealousy. "Oppenheimer likes his bomb, but he doesn't like my bomb." I know
that sounds absurd, and yet, I have no doubt that it was part of the equation. So, get rid of him,
and then Teller, like cream, would rise to the top of the bottle. They needed to get Oppenheimer
out of the way so that Strauss and Teller could realign the physics community around the dream
of building new and better bombs.
NARRATOR: Late in August 1953, the Russians exploded what the press called a hydrogen
bomb. The news seemed to confirm what Americans feared. Their nuclear secrets were being
stolen.

NARRATOR: Two years before, reports that Soviet agents had penetrated Los Alamos and
passed atomic secrets to the Russians under Oppenheimer's watch had stunned them. Convinced
that America was vulnerable, many began searching for someone to blame.

UNNAMED SPEAKER: One Communist on the faculty of one university is one Communist
too many.

NARRATOR: The reputations and careers of loyal citizens in universities, businesses, and
government were already being ruined.

UNNAMED INTERROGATOR: Are you a member of the Communist conspiracy as of this

moment?

RHODES: People were really convinced that tomorrow, Soviets were going to take over
America, and they were convinced that it would be because of internal subversion. Not because
of external activity, but because we had spies, and they were destroying the American way.

NARRATOR: The former executive director of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic
Energy was convinced that Oppenheimer was one of them. William Borden had harbored doubts
about Oppenheimer for years, and shared his suspicions with Strauss.

SHERWIN: Borden is a natural ally of Lewis Strauss. And Strauss allows Borden to take
Oppenheimer's security file home, and Borden studies it for months and writes this letter to J.
Edgar Hoover.

NARRATOR: Borden outlined a series of charges against Oppenheimer. He concluded with an

accusation that went off like a bombshell.

"More probably than not," Borden wrote, "J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet
Union."

Hoover forwarded the letter to the White House. The president called in Lewis Strauss to help
him decide what to do.

SHERWIN: Strauss convinces Eisenhower that if this letter was sat on by the administration, it
would cost Eisenhower politically, and Eisenhower declares that a wall should be put between
Oppenheimer and secrecy.

NARRATOR: On December 21, 1953, Strauss told Oppenheimer that his security clearance had
been suspended. The country’s most famous authority on atomic weapons, “the father of the A-
bomb,” was stunned. He fell into a “despairing state of mind,” a friend remembered. The
following evening, after meeting with his lawyers and more than one drink, he fainted on the
bathroom floor.

SHERWIN: When he began to think about the consequences of what he was facing, I think he
realized that he was in deep, deep trouble for the first time in his life.

McMILLAN: Oppenheimer realized that he was going to pay. I think he had the tragic sense.
He understood the drama that he had to play out, even though he later called it a farce.

NARRATOR: The hearings were enveloped in an atmosphere of fierce anti-Communism.

GRAY (dramatized): It was reported that in 1940, you were listed as a sponsor of the Friends of
the Chinese People, an organization characterized by the House Committee on Un-American
Activities as a Communist front organization.

NARRATOR: At stake was a man’s dignity and the role that nuclear weapons would play in
America’s military strategy.

GRAY (dramatized): It was reported that you strongly opposed the hydrogen bomb on moral
grounds, and by claiming that it was not feasible and not politically desirable. And even after it
was determined to proceed, you continued to oppose the project.

NARRATOR: Confronted with charges that could ruin his reputation, Oppenheimer himself
insisted on the hearing, despite the warnings of some of his friends.

RHODES: Oppenheimer couldn’t see tucking tail and walking away. What would that say about
the charges against him? On the other hand, it’s too bad he didn’t understand what sort of forces
he was up against.

NARRATOR: With no credible evidence to prove that Oppenheimer had put America’s security
at risk, prosecutor Roger Robb would have to wear the scientist down, force him into
contradictions, confuse and embarrass him.

ROBB: Your brother Frank told you in 1936, or probably 1937, that he and his wife, Jackie, had
joined the Communist Party. Did he ask your advice about it?

OPPENHEIMER: Oh, Lord, no. He had taken the step. I had confidence in his decency and
straightforwardness and in his loyalty to me.

ROBB: Tell us the test that you applied to acquire the confidence that you have spoken of.

OPPENHEIMER: In the case of a brother, one doesn’t make tests. At least I didn’t. Well... I
knew my brother.

ROBB: When did you decide that your brother was no longer a member of the party and no
longer dangerous?
OPPENHEIMER: I never regarded my brother as dangerous.

NARRATOR: Robb was an experienced trial lawyer, but Lewis Strauss wasn’t taking any
chances. The hearings turned into a trial in which Strauss made the rules. Strauss selected the
judges, and from knowing in advance which witnesses would be called.

SHERWIN: They are in a war against Communism and, therefore, the normal rules of justice
have to be set aside in order to protect the body politic.

NARRATOR: Strauss even broke the law to get his man. The FBI bugged Oppenheimer’s
lawyer’s offices, his home, nearly everywhere he went, then passed the information along to the
prosecutor. The defense strategy was known to the prosecution in advance.

RHODES: It was the worst kind of kangaroo court. They had them ten ways to Sunday.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized, recorded): There were approaches to other people, who were
troubled by them, and sometimes they came and discussed them with me. That's as far as I can
go on that.

NARRATOR: Unknown to Oppenheimer or his lawyer, Robb had discovered the secret
recording of Oppenheimer's conversation with Army intelligence officer Colonel Pash. He
carefully studied the transcript and prepared a trap to catch Oppenheimer in a lie.

ROBB: Did Chevalier tell you or indicate to you in any way that he had talked to anyone but
you about this matter?

OPPENHEIMER: No.

ROBB: You are sure about that?

OPPENHEIMER: Yes.

ROBB: Did you learn from anybody else or hear that Chevalier had approached anyone but you
about this matter?

OPPENHEIMER: No.

ROBB: You are sure about that?

OPPENHEIMER: That is right.

ROBB: Doctor, I would like to read from the transcript of your interview with Colonel Pash.
"There were approaches to other people, who were troubled by them, and sometimes came and
discussed them with me. That's as far as I can go on that." Do you recall saying something like
that?
OPPENHEIMER: I don't recall that conversation very well. I can only rely on the transcript.

ROBB: Doctor, for your information, I might say that we have a record of your voice.

OPPENHEIMER: Sure.

ROBB: Do you have any doubt that you said that?

OPPENHEIMER: No.

ROBB: So as to be clear, did you discuss with or disclose to Pash the identity of Chevalier?

OPPENHEIMER: No.

ROBB: Let us refer to him, then, for the time being, as "X."

OPPENHEIMER: All right.

ROBB: Didn't you say that X had approached three people?

OPPENHEIMER: Probably.

ROBB: Why did you do that, Doctor?

OPPENHEIMER: Because I was an idiot.

ROBB: Is that your only explanation, Doctor?

OPPENHEIMER: I was reluctant to mention Chevalier.

ROBB: Yes?

OPPENHEIMER: No doubt somewhat reluctant to mention myself.

ROBB: So you told Pash that there were several people that were contacted.

OPPENHEIMER: Right.

ROBB: And your testimony now is, that was a lie.

OPPENHEIMER: Right.

ROBB: That wasn't true.

OPPENHEIMER: That is right.

ROBB: You did, you are sure, tell Colonel Pash there was more than one person involved.

OPPENHEIMER: This whole thing is a pure fabrication except for the one name Eltenton.

ROBB: Why did you go to such great circumstantial detail about this thing if you knew it was a
cock-and-bull story?

OPPENHEIMER: I fear this whole thing is a piece of idiocy.

RHODES: Oppenheimer was up against a kind of psychological torture. He was broken down
by a very, very skillful prosecutor, made to look stupid. Made to look like a fool.

McMILLAN: The purpose in proving him a liar was to impress the hearing board that he
couldn't be trusted and that they should declare him a security risk. It had to be totally
humiliating and destroy his confidence in himself. He's being told that he's a liar, untrustworthy,
unworthy, and he folded.

OPPENHEIMER: The story I told Pash is not a true story. There were not three or more people
involved. I believe I can do no more than say that the story I told is a false story. It is not easy to
say that. Now, when you ask as to why I did this, other than that I was an idiot, I am going to
have more trouble being understandable. I found myself, I believe, trying to give a tip to the
intelligence people without realizing that when you give a tip, you must tell the whole story. But
I am, in any case, solemnly testifying that there was no conspiracy in what I knew and what I
know of this matter. I wish I could explain to you better why I falsified and fabricated.

McMILLAN: The trial proved to him his worst fears. Oppenheimer had been troubled all his
life about who he was. He later said that he was repulsive to himself. The trial said that he had
defects of character, that he was not a good human being, and unfortunately, he agreed.

NARRATOR: Oppenheimer testified for 27 hours. A parade of witnesses was called on both
sides. He looked wan, demoralized by the time Edward Teller took the stand. Teller drove the
final nail into Oppenheimer’s coffin.

TELLER (dramatized): I thoroughly disagreed with Dr. Oppenheimer in numerous issues, and
his actions, frankly, appeared to me confused and complicated. I feel that I would like to see the
vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better and therefore trust more. I would
feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands. I'm sorry.

OPPENHEIMER: After what you've just said... I don't know what you mean.

NARRATOR: The hearing lasted nearly four weeks. In his closing remarks, Oppenheimer's
lawyer warned, "America must not devour her own children."

GRAY (dramatized): We find that Dr. Oppenheimer's continuing conduct and associations
have reflected a serious disregard for the requirements of the security system. We have found a
susceptibility to influence, which could have serious implications for the security interests of the
country. We find his conduct in the hydrogen bomb program sufficiently disturbing. We have
regretfully concluded that Dr. Oppenheimer has been less than candid in several instances in his
testimony.

NARRATOR: By a vote of two to one, the board concluded that, although Oppenheimer was a
“loyal citizen,” his security clearance should be revoked. Numb and bewildered, Oppenheimer
told a friend, “I have so little sense of self remaining.” In a futile gesture, he appealed to the
Atomic Energy Commission, chaired by Lewis Strauss. The commission upheld the verdict four
to one.

JEREMY BERNSTEIN: I took a train ride with him to New York, and for some reason, he
started talking about "my case, my case." And he said to me that at the time, he thought it was
happening to somebody else.

McMILLAN: He wasn't accused in the course of the hearing of having ever betrayed a secret. It
was about getting Oppenheimer out of the security councils of the U.S. government.

NARRATOR: America’s most influential voice for nuclear moderation had been stilled.

SHERWIN: The Oppenheimer hearing was a political battle between the Strauss view—we
need more and more and more nuclear weapons—and the Oppenheimer view that nuclear
weapons are a part of our defense, but we have to, you know, use them sensibly and we can't rely
on them totally.

That hearing had a profound effect on the nuclear arms race. It essentially opened the floodgates.
It removed the legitimacy of criticism against more and more nuclear weapons.

NARRATOR: In 1954, the year of the Oppenheimer hearings, America had some 300 nuclear
weapons. By the end of the 20th century, the United States would have at the ready more than
70,000. We built so many more than we ever needed, and the Soviets followed suit.

NARRATOR: In 1954, Robert Oppenheimer turned 50. His security clearance had been
revoked. His connection to the government had been severed. He would live for 13 more years,
but he was never the same man.

CHRISTY: He had been a strong, forceful leader before that, and he was a beaten man
afterwards.

RHODES: He gave lectures on science and its interaction with humanity. He continued to direct
the Institute for Advanced Study. He became what Yeats calls a smiling public man.

GOLDBERGER: I saw a lot of him at that time, and I saw the impact that this tragedy had on
him. I can't recall ever seeing him happy, you know? Just relaxed and having fun. I don't have
the feeling that he ever felt good about himself and if he was ever in any sense at peace with
himself.
NARRATOR: In 1963, Oppenheimer received what many saw as an official apology. President
Lyndon Johnson presented him with one of the nation’s highest scientific honors: the Fermi
Award from the Atomic Energy Commission.

OPPENHEIMER: With countless other men and women, we are engaged in this great
enterprise of our time, testing whether men can live without war as the great arbiter of history. I
think it just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken some character and some courage for you to
make this award today.

NARRATOR: Edward Teller was there that day, come to offer his congratulations. When he
extended his hand, once again, Oppenheimer shook it. After the ceremony, Lewis Strauss wrote
an angry letter to Life magazine, complaining that honoring Oppenheimer “dealt a severe blow to
the security system which protects our country.” Robert Oppenheimer died four years later. He
was 62. In those twilight years, he seldom returned to the New Mexico where he had come to
feel at peace. When he was 24, he had written a poem inspired by the wilderness he loved so
well and the allure of death.

OPPENHEIMER (dramatized):
It was evening when we came to the river
With a low moon over the desert
That we had lost in the mountains, forgotten,
What with the cold and the sweating
And the ranges barring the sky.
We waited a long time in silence.
Then, we heard the oars creaking,
and afterwards, I remember the boatman called to us.
We did not look back at the mountains.