Pod Insights Dwarkesh Podcast Richard Rhodes — The making of the atomic bomb About this episode It was a tremendous honor & pleasure to interview Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb
We discuss
- similarities between AI progress & Manhattan Project (developing a powerful, unprecedented, & potentially apocalyptic technology within an uncertain arms-race situation)
- visiting starving former Soviet scientists during fall of Soviet Union
- whether Oppenheimer was a spy, & consulting on the Nolan movie
- living through WW2 as a child
- odds of nuclear war in Ukraine, Taiwan, Pakistan, & North Korea
- how the US pulled of such a massive secret wartime scientific & industrial project
Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/tMdMiYsfHKo. Listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/richard-rhodes-making-of-atomic-bomb-ai-ww2/id1516093381?i=1000614123147, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/30sLG3txRdRsuGFPenOUbW?si=3KCqwdXVTOiS2BAEvHeeHw, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/richard-rhodes. Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp for updates on future episodes.
Timestamps
(0:00:00) - Oppenheimer movie
(0:06:22) - Was the bomb inevitable?
(0:29:10) - Firebombing vs nuclear vs hydrogen bombs
(0:49:44) - Stalin & the Soviet program
(1:08:24) - Deterrence, disarmament, North Korea, Taiwan
(1:33:12) - Oppenheimer as lab director
(1:53:40) - AI progress vs Manhattan Project
(1:59:50) - Living through WW2
(2:16:45) - Secrecy
(2:26:34) - Wisdom & war
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com https://www.dwarkesh.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1
Transcript 24,876 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 By 1945, we were so pissed off at the Japanese. We had destroyed their air force, we had destroyed their navy, we had destroyed their army, and yet they wouldn't surrender.
0:10 Dwarkesh Patel? The people who are working on AI right now, they are huge fans of yours. The way they see the progress in the field is exactly like when they start reading this book.
0:18 Speaker 00 Oppenheimer's worst enemy said to me, Robert Oppenheimer, thus the best lab director I ever knew. And then he chased me out of the house. You can make a pretty high level nuclear explosion just by taking two subcritical pieces of uranium. All this business about secret designs and so forth is hogwash. We're still in a very precarious place. And as long as any country in the world has nuclear weapons, we're going to continue to be. That has been the price of nuclear deterrence.
0:51 Dwarkesh Patel? Okay, today I have the great honor of interviewing Richard Rhodes, who is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and most recently, the author of Energy: A Human History. I'm really excited about this one. Let's jump in actually at a current event, which is the fact that there's a new movie about Oppenheimer coming out, which I understand you've been consulted about. What did you think of the trailer? What are your impressions?
1:22 Speaker 00 They've really done a good job, I think, of things like the Trinity Test Device, which was the sphere covered with cables of various kinds. And, you know, I had watched Peaky Blinders, where the actor who's playing Oppenheimer also appeared. And he looks so much like Oppenheimer to start with. Oppenheimer was about six feet tall. He was rail thin, not simply in terms of weight, but in terms of structure. Someone said he could sit in a children's high chair comfortably. So he, but he never weighed more than about 140 pounds. And that
2:05 Speaker 00 Quality is there in the actor, I think. So who knows? It all depends on how the director decided to tell the story. There are so many aspects of the story, you could never possibly squeeze them into one two-hour movie. I think that we're waiting for the multi-part series that would really tell a lot more of the story, not the whole story. But it looks exciting. We'll see. There have been some terrible depictions of Oppenheimer, some terrible depictions of the Bond program, and maybe they'll get this one right.
2:41 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, yeah, hopefully. You know, it is always great when you get an actor who resembles their role so well. Brian Karason, for example, played LBJ, and they have the same physical characteristics of the BDI's, the big ears. But, okay, so in the case of Oppenheimer, one question I had, since we're talking about him, I understand that there's evidence that's come out that he wasn't a communist spy, or he wasn't directly a communist spy, but is there any possibility that he was leaking information to the Soviets or in some way helping the Soviet program? He was a communist empathizer, right?
3:15 Speaker 00 He had been during the 1930s.
3:17 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
3:17 Speaker 00 But less for the, for the theory, if you will, than for the practical business of helping Jews escape from Nazi Germany. One of the loves of his life, who was busy working on extracting Jews from Europe during the 30s as well, was a member of the Communist Party, and Jean Tatlock. And she, I think, encouraged him to come to meetings. But I don't think there's any possibility whatsoever that he either shared information or was in any way affiliated. In fact, he said he read Marx on a train trip.
3:58 Speaker 00 People traveled by train in those days between Berkeley and Washington one time and thought it was a bunch of hooey, just ridiculous. He was a very smart man and he read the book with an eye to its logic and he didn't think there was much there. So I think you have to see him as, you know, he really didn't know anything about human beings and their struggles. He was born into considerable wealth. There were impressionist paintings all over his family apartments in New York City. His father had made a great deal of money cornering the market, so to speak, on uniform linings for military uniforms during and before the First World War.
4:43 Speaker 00 So there was a lot of wealth. I think his income, if I remember and if I'm right in this, when he was during the war years and before, was somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars a month. And that's a lot of money in the 1930s. So he just lived in his head for most of his early, early years until he got to Berkeley and discovered that prime students of his were living on cat food. I mean, you know, cans of god awful cat food because they couldn't afford anything else. And once he understood that there was great suffering in the world, he jumped in on it, as he always did when he became interested in something.
5:28 Speaker 00 So all of those things come together. I do think his brother, well, there's a question that his brother Frank was a member of the party, as was Frank's wife. And the whole question of Oppenheimer's lying to the security people during the Second World War, which he did, about who approached him and who was maybe trying to get him to sign on to some espionage. I think was primarily an effort to cover up his brother's involvement. Not that his brothers gave away any secrets, I don't think he did. But, but if the army's security had really understood Frank Oppenheimer's involvement,
6:09 Speaker 00 he probably would have been shipped off to the Aleutians or some other, some other distant place for the duration of the war. And Oppenheimer, quite correctly, wanted Frank around. He was someone he trusted.
6:22 Dwarkesh Patel? Let's start talking about the, the making of the bomb. One question I have is, if World War II doesn't happen, is there any possibility that the bomb just never gets developed? Nobody bothers?
6:33 Speaker 00 That's really a good question, and I've wondered over the years. But the more I look at the sequence of events, the more I think it would have been essentially inevitable, though perhaps not so, such an accelerated program. The bomb was pushed so hard during the Second World War because we thought the Germans had already started working on one. Nuclear fission had been discovered in Nazi Germany, in Berlin in 1938, nine months before the beginning of the Second World War in Europe. So, from our perspective, without the kind of elaborate national security programs that
7:15 Speaker 00 we have developed since then, I mean, technological surveillance, none of that was available during the war. The only way you could find out something was to send in a spy, or have a mole, or something human. And we didn't have that, evidently. So, we didn't know where the Germans were, but we knew the bomb had, not the bomb, but the, the, the basic physics reaction that would, could lead to a bomb, had been discovered there a year or more before anybody else in the West got started thinking about it. So, there was that, most of all, to push the urgency. And there would not, of course, have been that, and you're hypothetical.
7:56 Speaker 00 However, as soon as good physicists thought about the reaction that leads to nuclear fission, where a slow neutron, room temperature neutron, very little energy, bumps into the, the nucleus of a uranium-235 atom.
8:20 Speaker 00 Isidoro Robbie, uno de los grandes físicos de esta era, dijo: "Estaría como si la luna golpeara la tierra."
8:29 Speaker 00 "Ese tipo de respuesta masiva." "Así que, muy poca energía adentro y mucha energía fuera." "La reacción fue, los físicos dirían, fuertemente exothermica." "Es decir, se produce mucho más energía que se necesita usar para empezar."
8:47 Speaker 00 "Una vez hicieron los números de eso, y una vez descubrieron cuánto uranium necesitarían en un lugar para hacer una bomba, o para hacer que la fisión se despegue, y una vez estuvieron seguros de que habría una reacción en cadena, es decir, un par de neutrinos saldrían de la reacción de un átomo, y esos dos o tres seguirían y chocarían en otros átomos de uranium, que luego fisjarían a ellos, y se obtendría una exponencial geométrica." "Obtienen uno, dos, cuatro, ocho, dieciséis, treinta y dos, y eso es todo." "Así que, en aproximadamente 80 generaciones, para la mayoría de nuestras bombas de hoy en día, estoy seguro,
9:28 Speaker 00 la fisión inicial lleva a, en 80 generaciones, una explosión de choque." "Y luego tuvieron que descubrir cuánto material necesitarían, y eso es algo que los alemanes nunca realmente descubrieron, afortunadamente para el resto de nosotros. "Estaban todavía trabajando en la idea de que de alguna manera un reactor sería lo que se construiría." "Cuando Niels Bohr, el gran físico danés, escapó de Dinamarca en 1943, cuando los alemanes invadían y llegaron a primera Inglaterra, y luego a Estados Unidos, él llevó con él un tipo de dibujo duro que Bernhard Heisenberg, el líder de..."
10:12 Speaker 00 The leading scientist in the German program had handed him in the course of trying to find out what Bohr knew about what America was doing. And he showed it to the guys at Los Alamos. And Hans Bethe, one of the great Nobel laureate physicists in the group, said, "The Germans are trying to throw a reactor down on us." Well, I mean, you can make a reactor blow up. We saw that at Chernobyl. But it's not a nuclear explosion on the scale that we're talking about with the bomb. So when a couple of these emigre Jewish physicists from Nazi Germany were whiling away their time in England after they escaped, because they were still technically enemy aliens
10:54 Speaker 00 and therefore could not be introduced to top-secret discussions. One of them asked the other, "Well, how much would we need of pure uranium-235, this rare isotope of uranium that chain reacts? How much would we need to make a bomb?" And they did the numbers and they came up with one pound, which was startling to them. Of course, it is more than that. It's about 125 pounds, but that's just a softball. That's not that much material. And then they did the numbers about what it would cost to build a factory to to pull this one rare isotope of uranium out of the natural metal, which has several isotopes mixed together.
11:39 Speaker 00 And they figured it wouldn't cost more than it would cost to build a battleship, which is not that much money for a country at war. Certainly, the British had plenty of battleships at that point in time. So they put all this together and they wrote a report, which they handed through their superior physicist at Manchester University, where they were based, who quickly realized how important this was. And the United States lagged behind because we were not yet at war, but the British were. They were, London was being bombed in the Blitz. So they saw the urgency, first of all, of beating Germany to the punch, second of all, of the possibility of building a bomb. In this report, these two scientists wrote that
12:22 Speaker 00 there would be no physical structure that they could think of, that you could build, that would protect you against a bomb of such ferocious explosive power. So they said in this report from 1940, understand, this is long before even the Manhattan Project got started. They said in this report, "The only way we could think of to protect you against a bomb would be to have a bomb of similar destructive force that could be threatened for use if the other side attacked you." That's deterrence. That's a concept that was developed
13:04 Speaker 00 even before the war began in the United States. You put all those pieces together and you have a situation where you have to build a bomb. Because whoever builds the first bomb theoretically could prevent you from building more or prevent you, another country, from building any and could dominate the world. And the notion in particular of Adolf Hitler dominating the world, the Third Reich, with nuclear weapons was horrifying. So put all that together and I think the answer is every country, this is the case, actually, every country that had the technological infrastructure, even remotely have the possibility
13:49 Speaker 00 of building everything you'd have to build to get the material for a bomb, started work on thinking about it as soon as nuclear fusion was announced to the world. France, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the United States, even Japan. So I think it would have happened, but maybe not so quickly.
14:09 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, I think you talk in the book that for some reason, the Germans thought that the critical mass was something like 10 tons. They had done some miscalculation.
14:18 Speaker 00 A reactor.
14:18 Dwarkesh Patel? Right. You also have some interesting. Stories in the book about how different countries found out the Americans were working on the bomb. For example, the Russians saw that all these physicists and chemists and metallurgists who were the top of their field were no longer publishing. They had just like gone offline and so they figured out, well, something must be going on. I'm not sure if you're aware, by the way, the subject of the making of the atomic bomb in and of itself is incredibly fascinating, but also this book has become a cult classic in AI. Are you not familiar with this?
14:52 Speaker 00 No.
14:53 Dwarkesh Patel? The people who are working on AI right now, they're huge fans of yours. They're the ones who initially recommended the book to me because the way they see the progress in the field is exactly like when they start reading this book, this is like, you start off with these initial scientific hints that with deep learning, for example, here's something that can teach itself any function similar to Slazard noticing the nuclear chain reaction. You progress to somebody figuring out in AI, there's these scaling laws that say that if you make the model this much bigger, it gets this much better at, you know, reasoning, at predicting text and so on.
15:34 Dwarkesh Patel? And then you can extrapolate this curve and you can see, huh, we get two more orders of magnitude and we get to something that looks like human level intelligence. Anyway, so a lot of the people who are working in AI have become huge fans of your book because of this reason. They see a lot of analogies in the next few years from, they must be like page 400 in their minds of where the Manhattan Project was.
15:57 Speaker 00 We, we must later on talk about unintended consequences.
16:02 Dwarkesh Patel? Yes.
16:02 Speaker 00 I find the subject absolutely fascinating. I think my next book might be called unintended consequences.
16:09 Dwarkesh Patel? So you, you mentioned that a big reason why many of the scientists were, wanted to work on the bomb, especially the Jewish emigres, was because they were worried about Hitler getting it first. Now, at some point, as you mentioned, it was becoming obvious, maybe, I don't know what the exact year would be, 1943, 44, that Hitler, the Nazis were not close to the bomb. And I believe that almost none of the scientists quit after they found out that the Nazis weren't close. So why didn't more of them say, oh, I guess we were wrong. The Nazis aren't going to get it. We don't need to be working on it.
16:44 Speaker 00 There was only one, Joseph Redblatt.
16:46 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
16:47 Speaker 00 When he heard that Germany had been defeated in May of 1945, he packed up and left. General Groves, the imperious Army Corps of Engineers general who ran the entire Manhattan project, was really upset. He was afraid he'd spill the beans. So he threatened to have him arrested and put in jail. But Redblatt was quite determined not to stay any longer. He was not interested in building bombs for, to aggrandize the national power of the United States of America, which is perfectly understandable. But why was no one else?
17:26 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
17:27 Speaker 00 By then, let me tell it in terms of Victor Weiskopf. Victor Weiskopf was an Austrian theoretical physicist who, like the others, escaped when the Germans, then the Nazis took over Germany and then Austria, and ended up at Los Alamos. Weiskopf wrote later, "There we were at Los Alamos," he said, "in the midst of the darkest part of our science." We had been, he said, he meant they were working on a weapon of mass destruction. Certainly, that's pretty dark. He said, "Before, it had almost seemed like a spiritual quest."
18:10 Speaker 00 And it's really interesting how different physics was considered before and after the Second World War. Before the war, one of the physicists, an American named Louis Alvarez, told me, when he got his PhD in physics at Berkeley in 1937 or so, and went to cocktail parties, people would say, "What's your degree in?" He would tell them chemistry. I said, "Louis, why?" He said, "Because I didn't have to explain what physics was." That's how little known, if you will, this kind of science was at that time. There were only about 1,000 physicists in the whole world in 1900. And by the mid 30s, there were a lot more, of course.
18:53 Speaker 00 There'd been a lot of nuclear physics and other kinds of physics done by then. But it was still arcane. And they didn't feel as if they were doing anything mean or dirty or warlike at all. They were just pure science. Then nuclear fission came along. It was publicized worldwide. People, I think, who've been born since after the Second World War don't realize it was not a secret at first. The news was published first in a German chemistry journal, Notterwissen Schafften, and then in, and then in the British journal Nature. And then in American journals.
19:34 Speaker 00 And there were headlines in the New York Times, in the Los Angeles Times, in the Chicago Tribune, and all over the world. Here at last was, people had been reading about and thinking about how to get energy out of the atomic nucleus for a long time. It was clear there was a lot there. All you had to do was get a piece of radium and see that it glowed in the dark. You didn't plug it into a wall. It just sat there, a chunk of this material, and if you held it in your hand, it would burn you. So where did that energy come from? Well, the physicists realized it all came from the nucleus of the atom, which is a very small part of the whole thing.
20:19 Speaker 00 One one hundred thousandth the diameter of the whole atom is the nucleus. Someone in England described it as about the size of a fly in a cathedral. Most of the energy that's involved, all of the energy that's involved in chemical reactions, comes from the electron cloud that's around the nucleus. But the nucleus was the center of powerful forces. This was clear. But the question was, how do you get them out? The only way that... The nucleus had been studied up to 1938 was by bombarding it with protons, which have the same electric charge as the nucleus, positive charge, which means they're repelled by it.
21:04 Speaker 00 So you had to accelerate them to high speeds with various versions of the big machines that we've all become aware of since then. The cyclotron most obviously built in the 30s, but there were others as well. And even then, at best, you could chip a little piece off. You could change an atom one step up or one step down the periodic table. This was the classic transmutation of medieval alchemy, to be sure. But it wasn't much. You didn't get much out. So everyone came to think of the nucleus of the atom as like a little rock that you really had to hammer it hard to get anything to happen with it
21:46 Speaker 00 because it was so small and dense. That's why nuclear fission with this slow neutron drifting in and then going, sort of floating into it, and then the whole thing just goes bang, was so startling to everybody. So startling that when it happened, most of the physicists who would later work on the bomb, and others as well, realized that they had missed a reaction that was something they could have staged on a lab bench with the equipment on the shelf. Didn't have to invent anything new, didn't have, just, and Louis Alvarez, again, this physicist at Berkeley, told me, he said, "I was getting my haircut.
22:30 Speaker 00 When I read the news in the newspaper, I pulled off the robe in half with my haircut, ran to my lab, pulled some equipment off the shelf, set it up, and there it was." So he said, "I discovered nuclear fission, but it was two days too late." And that happened all over. People were just Sure. hitting themselves on the head and saying, "Well, Niels Bohr said what fools we've all been." So, this is a good example, by the way, in science. If your model is wrong, the one you're working with in your head, well, it doesn't lead you down the right path. There was only one physicist who really was thinking the right way about the uranium atom, and that was Niels Bohr. He realized somewhere in the 30s
23:15 Speaker 00 that the nucleus of the uranium atom, the last natural element in the periodic table. Why is it the last one? What is different about the others that would come later? Well, he visualized it as a liquid drop. I always like to say visualize as a water-filled balloon. It's wobbly, it's not very stable. The proton in the nucleus are held together by something called the strong force, but they still have the repellent, a positive electric charge that's trying to push them apart. When you get enough of them into a nucleus, it's almost a standoff between the strong force and all the electrical charge.
24:00 Speaker 00 So, it is like a wobbly balloon of water. And then, you see why a neutron just falling into the nucleus would set it to wobbling around, and in one of its configurations, it might take a dumbbell shape. And then you'd have basically two charged atoms just barely connected, trying to push each other apart. And often enough, they went the whole way. When they did that, these two new elements, half the weight of uranium, way down the periodic table, would reconfigure themselves into two separate nuclei.
24:43 Speaker 00 And in doing so, they would release some energy. And that was the energy that came out of the reaction, and it was a lot of energy. So...
24:53 Speaker 00 Bohr thought about the model in the right way. The chemists who actually discovered nuclear fusion didn't know what they were gonna get. They were just bombarding a solution of uranium nitrate with neutrons, thinking, well, maybe we can make a new element. Maybe a first manmade element will come out of our work. So when they found these, as they analyzed the solution they had after they bombarded it, they found these elements like, I never can remember the names of the elements, but they're halfway down the periodic table. They shouldn't have been there. And they were totally baffled. What is this doing here? Did we contaminate our solution? No. They had been working with a physicist named Lisa Meitner, who was a theoretical physicist,
25:37 Speaker 00 an Austrian Jew. She had gotten out of Nazi Germany not long before. But they were still in correspondence with her, so they wrote her a letter. I held that letter in my hand when I visited Berlin and I was in tears. You know, you don't hold history of the scale in your hands very often. And it said in German, it said basically, we've found this strange reaction in our solution. What are these elements doing there that don't belong there? And she went for a walk in a little village in western Sweden with her nephew Otto Frisch, who was also a nuclear physicist. And they thought about it for a while and they remembered Bohr's model, this wobbly water-filled balloon.
26:21 Speaker 00 And they suddenly saw what could happen. And that's then where the news came from. The physics news as opposed to the chemistry news from the guys in Germany that was published in all the western journals and all the newspapers. And, you know, everybody had been talking about what you could do for years before if you had that kind of energy. A glass of this material would drive the Queen Mary back and forth from New York to London 20 times and so forth. Your automobile could run for months. No. But you see, people were kind of getting, thinking about what would be possible if you had that much available energy.
27:04 Speaker 00 And of course, people had thought about reactors. Oh, and again, when the news reached Berkeley, while Louis Alvarez was running over to to run the experiment, Robert Oppenheimer, who was a professor there, one of his students told me, his response was, within a week, he said Robert had a drawing on the blackboard, he said a rather bad drawing of both a reactor and a bomb. So again, because the energy was so great, the physics was pretty obvious. Whether it would actually happen depended on some other things like, could you make it change react? But fundamentally, the idea was all there at the very beginning.
27:49 Speaker 00 And everybody jumped on it.
27:53 Dwarkesh Patel? How do you think about the spectrum of damage caused by the different weapons that had become available and very available at the time? So first of all, it is actually the best history of World War II I've ever read.
28:07 Speaker 00 Uh huh.
28:07 Dwarkesh Patel? Which is, I mean, it's about the atomic bomb, but it's interspersed with the events that are happening in World War II, which, you know, motivate the creation of the bomb or the, you know, the release of it, like why it had to be dropped on Japan, given the Japanese response. Anyways, but the first third is about the scientific roots of the physics. And it's so, it is also, it's also the best book I've read about the history of science in the early 20th century and the organization of it. I mean, there's some really interesting stuff in there about, for example, there was a passage where you talk about how there was a real, real master apprentice model in early science, where if you wanted to like, learn to do this kind of experimentation,
28:52 Dwarkesh Patel? you will go to Amsterdam where the master of it is residing. It's much more individual focused.
28:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, the whole European model of graduate study, which is basically the wandering scholar.
29:03 Dwarkesh Patel? Right.
29:04 Speaker 00 You could go wherever you wanted to and sign up with whoever was willing to have you sign up.
29:09 Dwarkesh Patel? But so the question I wanted to ask regarding the history you made of, you know, World War II in general is, There's one way you can think about the atom bomb is that it is completely different from any sort of weaponry that has been developed before it. Another way you can think of it is there's this like spectrum where on one end you have the thermonuclear bomb, in the middle you have the atom bomb, and on this end you have, you know, the firebombing of cities like Hamburg and Dresden and Tokyo. Do you think of these as completely different categories, or does it seem like a sort of escalating gradient to you?
29:46 Speaker 00 I think until you get to the hydrogen bomb, it's really an escalating gradient. The hydrogen bomb, which can be made arbitrarily large. The biggest one ever tested was 56 million tons of TNT equivalent, 56 megatons. The Soviets tested that. That had a fireball more than five miles in diameter, just a fireball. So that's really an order of magnitude change. But the other one's now, and in fact, I think one of the real problems, this has not been much discussed, and it should be. When American officials went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war, well, one of
30:29 Speaker 00 them said later, "I got on a plane in Tokyo. We flew down the long green archipelago of the Japanese home island. When I left Tokyo, it was all gray, broken roof tiles from the firebombing and the other bombings, and then all this greenery. And then when we flew over Hiroshima, it was just gray, broken roof tiles again." So the scale of the bombing with one bomb, in the case, let's say, of Hiroshima, was not that different from the scale of the firebombings that had preceded it with tens of thousands of bombs.
31:13 Speaker 00 The difference was it was just one plane. In fact, the people in Hiroshima didn't even bother to go into their bomb shelters because one plane had always just been a weather plane, coming over to check the weather before the bombers took off. So they didn't see any reason to hide or protect themselves, which was one of the reasons so many people were killed. The guys at Los Alamos had planned on the Japanese being in their bomb shelters. They did everything they could think of to make the bomb as As much like ordinary bombing as they could. For example, it was exploded high enough above ground, eighteen hundred yards, I believe roughly,
31:57 Speaker 00 that the fireball that would form from this really very small nuclear weapon, tactical scale by modern standards, fifteen kilotons, fifteen thousand tons of TNT equivalent, that the fireball wouldn't touch the ground and stir up dirt and irradiate it and cause massive radioactive fallout. It never did that. They weren't sure there would be any fallout. They didn't think that, they thought the plutonium in the bomb over Nagasaki now would just kind of turn into a gas and blow away. That's not exactly what happened, but people don't seem to realize, and it's never been emphasized enough, these first bombs, like all nuclear weapons, were firebombs.
32:40 Speaker 00 Their job was to start mass fires, just exactly like all the six-pound incendiaries that had been destroying every major city in Japan by then. Every major city above fifty thousand population had already been burned out. The only reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were around to be atomic bombed is because they'd been set aside from the target list, because General Groves wanted to know what the damage effects would be. The only way that he could study that, obviously, the bomb that was tested in the desert didn't tell you anything, killed a lot of rabbits, knocked down a lot of cactus, melted some sand.
33:22 Speaker 00 But, but you couldn't see the effect on buildings and on people. So, the bomb was deliberately intended to be as much not like poison gas, for example, as, because we didn't want the reputation for being people like the war in Europe during the First World War, where people were killing each other with horrible gases. We just wanted people to think this was another bombing. So in that sense, it was. Of course, there was radioactivity, and of course, some people were killed by it. But they calculated that the people who would be killed by the irradiation, the prompt neutron radiation from the original fireball, would be close enough to the epicenter of the explosion that they would be killed by the blast
34:06 Speaker 00 or the, the flash of light, which was ten thousand degrees, the world's worst sunburn. You know, you've seen stories of people walking around with their skin hanging off their arms. I've had sunburns almost that bad, but not over my whole body, obviously. You know, where the skin actually peels, blisters and peels off. That was a sunburn from a 10,000 degree artificial sun.
34:29 Dwarkesh Patel? So tha- that's not the heat, that's just the light?
34:31 Speaker 00 That's the light, yeah. Well, light and heat, 10,000 degrees.
34:35 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
34:35 Speaker 00 Radiant light, radiant heat. The, but the blast itself only extended out a certain distance. It was fire. And all the nuclear weapons that have ever been designed are basically firebombs. That's important because the military in the United States after the war, probably everywhere, not being able to figure out how to calculate the effects of this weapon in a reliable way that, that matched their previous experience, would calculate only the blast effects of a nuclear weapon when they figured their targets. That's why we had what came to be called overkill, really. I mean, we wanted redundancy, of course, a stockpile.
35:20 Speaker 00 But I mean, 60 nuclear weapons on Moscow was way beyond what would be necessary to destroy even that big a city because they were only calculating the blast. But in fact, if you exploded a 300 kiloton nuclear warhead over the Pentagon at 3,000 feet, it would blast all the way out to the Capitol, which isn't all that far. But if you counted the fire, it would start a mass fire and it would reach all the way out to the Beltway and burn everything between the epicenter of the weapon and the Beltway.
36:00 Speaker 00 All organic matter would be totally burned out, leaving, leaving nothing but, but, but mineral matter, basically.
36:07 Dwarkesh Patel? I, I want to emphasize two things you said because they really hit me in reading the book and I'm, I'm not sure if the audience has fully integrated them. The first is, in the book, the, the military planners in Groves, they talk about Needing to use the bomb sooner rather than later because they were running out of cities in Japan where there are enough buildings left that it would be worth bombing in the first place.
36:31 Speaker 00 Right.
36:31 Dwarkesh Patel? It which is insane, like an entire city is already, I'm sorry, an entire country is almost already destroyed from firebombing alone. And the second thing about the category difference between thermonuclear and atomic bombs, I forget his name, but the nuclear planner who wrote the Doomsday Machine, one of his in one of his passages, he talks about, you know, people don't understand that the atom bomb, in the case of a hydrogen bomb, the atom bomb, which we, the pictures we see of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, that is simply the detonator of a modern nuclear bomb, you know, which is an insane thing to think about. So, you know, for example, 10 and 15 kilotons is the Hiroshima Nagasaki and the SARS bomber,
37:13 Dwarkesh Patel? which was 50 megatons, so, you know, more than 1,000 times as much, and that wasn't even as big as they can make it, right? They kept the uranium to tamper off because they didn't want to like destroy all of Siberia. But so you could get like over 100, more than like 10,000 times as powerful.
37:30 Speaker 00 When, you know, Teller, Edward Teller, one of the dark forces in this story, Teller was the co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb. And later on, when he was consulting with our military, just for his own sake, he sat down and calculated, how big could you make a hydrogen bomb? He came up with a thousand megatons. And then he looked at the effects, thousand megatons would be a fireball 10 miles in diameter. And the atmosphere is only 10 miles deep. So he figured that it would just be a waste of energy because it would all blow out into space.
38:12 Speaker 00 Some of it would go laterally, of course, but most of it would just go out into space. So he figured that a bomb more than 100 megatons would just be totally a waste of time. Of course, 100 megaton bomb is also a total waste because there's no target on earth big enough to justify that from a military point of view. Robert Oppenheimer, when he had his security clearance. Questioned and then, of course, lifted when he was being punished for having resisted the development of the hydrogen bomb, was asked by the interrogator at this security hearing, "Well, Dr. Oppenheimer, if you'd had a hydrogen bomb for Hiroshima, wouldn't you have used it?" And Oppenheimer said, "No."
38:56 Speaker 00 The interrogator said, "Why is that?" He said, "Because the target was too small." So, I hope that scene is in the film. I'm sure it will be. So, after the war, when our bomb planners and some of our scientists went into Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just about as soon as the surrender was signed, what they were interested in was the scale of destruction, of course, and the cities, those two cities, didn't look that different from the other cities that had been firebombed with small incendiaries and ordinary high explosives.
39:40 Speaker 00 They went home to Washington, the policymakers, with the thought that, "Ah, these bombs are not so destructive after all." They had been touted as city busters, basically, and they weren't. They didn't completely burn out cities. They were not certainly more destructive than the firebombing campaign, when everything of more than 50,000 population had already been destroyed. That, in turn, influenced the judgment about what we needed to do vis-à-vis the Soviet Union when the Soviets got the bomb in 1949. There was a general sense that, one, you could fight a war with nuclear weapons, deterrence
40:22 Speaker 00 or not, but, two, you would need quite a few of them to do it right. And the Air Force, once it realized that it could aggrandize its own share of the federal budget by cornering the market, if you will, on delivering nuclear weapons, very quickly decided that they would only look at the blast effect and not the fire effect. It's like tying one hand behind your back. Most of it was a fire effect. So that's where they came up with numbers like we need 60 of these to take out Moscow. And the more bombs, this is what the Air Force figured out by the late 1940s, the
41:07 Speaker 00 more bombs, the more targets, the more bombs, the more bombs, the more planes, the more planes, the biggest share of the budget. So by the mid 1950s, the Air Force commanded 47% of the federal defense budget. And the other branches of services, which had not gone nuclear particularly by then, woke up and said, we'd better find some use for these weapons in our branches of service. So the Army discovered that it needed nuclear weapons, tactical weapons for field use, fired out of cannons.
41:48 Speaker 00 There was even one that was fired out of a shoulder-mounted rifle. There was a satchel charge that you two men could carry, weighed about 150 pounds, that would be used to dig a ditch so that Soviet tanks couldn't cross into Germany. All sorts of wonderful. And of course, the Navy by then had been working hard with General Rickover on building a nuclear submarine that could carry ballistic missiles underwater in total security. No way anybody could trace those submarines once they were quiet enough. And a nuclear reactor is very quiet. It just sits there with neutrons running around, making heat.
42:28 Speaker 00 So the other services jumped in and this famous triad, you know, we must have these three different kinds of nuclear weapons baloney.
42:39 Dwarkesh Patel? Interesting.
42:40 Speaker 00 We would be perfectly safe if we only had our nuclear submarines.
42:45 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
42:46 Speaker 00 And only one or two of those. One nuclear submarine can take out all of Europe or all of the Soviet Union.
42:51 Dwarkesh Patel? Because it has multiple nukes on it?
42:52 Speaker 00 Because they have. Sixteen intercontinental ballistic missiles with merbed warheads, at least three per missile.
43:00 Dwarkesh Patel? Wow. I had a former guest, Richard Hanania, has a book about foreign policy where he points out that our model of thinking about why countries do the things they do, especially in foreign affairs, is wrong because we think of them as these rational actors, individual rational actors, when in fact it's these like competing factions within the government. And in fact, you see this especially in the case of Japan in World War II, where, I forgot the name of the book, there was a great book of Japan leading up to World War II, where they talk about how, I mean, it was basically the, you know, I forget which branch of the Japanese military, they needed, you know, more oil to continue their campaign in Manchuria.
43:41 Dwarkesh Patel? And so they forced these other branches to escalate. But yeah, that's so interesting. That's why we have so many nukes is that the different branches are competing for funding.
43:49 Speaker 00 Well, you know, the Air Force dreamed ever since the First World War, ever since, what's his name, Duy, an Italian theorist of air power. He had been in the trenches in the First World War, this, when somebody called the trenches of the Second, First World War, the long grave already dug, because millions of men were killed. And the trenches never moved, a foot this way, a foot that way, all this horror. And Duy came up with the idea that if you could fly over the battlefield to the homeland of the enemy and destroy his capacity to make war, then the people of that country, he theorized, would rise up
44:33 Speaker 00 in rebellion and throw out their, their leaders and sue for peace. And this became the dream of all the air forces of the world, but particularly ours. Until around 1943, it was called the US Army Air Force. And the dream of every guy in the Air Force, every officer was to get out from under the Army, not just be something that uses, delivers ground support or air support to the Army as it advances, but a power that could actually win wars. And the missing piece had always been the scale of the weaponry they carried. So when the bomb came along. You can see why Curtis LeMay, who really ran the Strategic Air Command during the
45:17 Speaker 00 prime years of that force, was pushing for bigger and bigger bombs. Because if a plane got shot down, but the one behind it had a hydrogen bomb, then it would be just almost as effective as the two planes together. So they wanted big bombs, and they went after Oppenheimer because he thought that was a terrible way to go, that there was really no military use for these huge weapons. Furthermore, that the United States had more cities than Russia did, than the Soviet Union did, and we were making ourselves a better target, basically, by introducing a weapon that could destroy a whole state. I used to live in Connecticut, and I once calculated, I saw a map that showed the air
46:00 Speaker 00 pollution that blew up from New York City to Boston, and I thought, well, now if that was fallout, we'd be dead up here in green, lovely Connecticut. And it would have been, I mean, that was the scale that it was going to be with these big new weapons. So on the one hand, you had some of the important leaders in the government, thinking that these weapons were not the war-winning weapons that the Air Force wanted them and realized they could be. And on the other hand, you had the Air Force garnering the market on nuclear solutions to battles, if you will, all because some guy in a tranche in World War I was sufficiently
46:43 Speaker 00 horrified and sufficiently theoretical about what was possible with air power. I mean, remember, they were still flying biplanes. When H.G. Wells wrote his novel, The World Set Free, in 1913, predicting an atomic war that would lead to world government, he had Air Forces delivering atomic bombs, but he forgot to update his planes. They were, the guys in the backseat, the bombardiers, were sitting in a biplane, open cockpit, and when the pilots had dropped the bomb, they would reach down and pick up their, H.G.
47:24 Speaker 00 Wells's idea of an atomic bomb and throw it over the side, which is kind of what was happening in Washington after the war. And it led us to to a really, I think, terribly misleading and unfortunate perspective on how many weapons we needed, which in turn fomented the arms race with the Soviets. And and just chased off in the Soviet Union. They had a practical perspective on factories. Every factory was supposed to produce 120% of its target every year. That was considered good Soviet realism, and they did that with their nuclear war weapons.
48:06 Speaker 00 So by by the height of the Cold War, they had 75,000 nuclear weapons, which would have been, and nobody had heard yet of nuclear winter. So if if both sides had sent off this string of mass traps that we had in our arsenals, it would have been the end of the human world without question.
48:25 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah. You know, that actually raises the interesting question. If the military planners thought that the the conventional nuclear weapon was like the firebombing, would it have been the case that if there wasn't a thermonuclear weapon, that there actually would have been a nuclear war by now? Because people wouldn't have been thinking of it as this hard red line.
48:46 Speaker 00 I don't think so, because, I mean, we're talking about one bomb versus 400 and one plane versus 400 planes and thousands of bombs. That scale was clear. I think deterrence was the more important business. Everyone seemed to understand, even the spies that the Soviets had connected up to were wholesaling information back to the Soviet Union. There's this comic moment when Chairman is sitting with Joseph Stalin at Potsdam, and he tells Stalin, "We have a powerful new weapon." And that's as much as he's ready to say about it. And Stalin looks at him and says, "Good, I hope you put it to good use with the Japanese."
49:30 Speaker 00 Stalin is exactly what he's talking about. He's seen the design of the fat man-type Nagasaki plutonium bomb. He's held it in his hands, because they had spies all over the place.
49:43 Dwarkesh Patel? Well, how how much longer would it have taken the Soviets to develop the bomb if they didn't have any spies?
49:49 Speaker 00 Probably not any longer.
49:50 Dwarkesh Patel? Really?
49:51 Speaker 00 When the when the Soviet Union collapsed in the winter of 92. I ran over there as quickly as I could get over there. Because the scientists in this limbo between forming a new kind of government and some of the countries pulling out and becoming independent and so forth. All of a sudden, their nuclear scientists, the ones who'd worked on their bombs, were free to talk. And I found that out through Elena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov's widow, who was connected to people I knew. And she said, yeah, come on over. And her secretary, who was a geologist, about thirty-five years old,
50:33 Speaker 00 Sakura, became my guide around the country. And we went to various apartments where retired guys from the bomb program were living on, as far as I could tell, a sack of potatoes and some salt. They really, you know, they had government pensions and the money was worthless all of a sudden.
50:52 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
50:53 Speaker 00 I was buying photographs from them, partly because I needed the photographs and partly because I thought, I mean, twenty bucks was two months' income at that point. So it was easy for me and it helped them. And in turn, they told me about, by nineteen forty-seven, they had first-class physicists, Soviet Union, they do in record today. So by nineteen forty-seven, they had a design for a bomb that they said was half the weight and twice the yield of the Fat Man bomb. Fat Man bomb was the plutonium implosion, right, and so forth. And it weighed about, I don't know, nine thousand pounds. So they had a much smaller and much more deliverable, therefore, bomb
51:37 Speaker 00 with a yield of about forty-four kilotons.
51:41 Dwarkesh Patel? Why was Soviet physics so, so good? I mean, you know, you would think that this is like a poor society with communists.
51:49 Speaker 00 The Russian mind, I don't know. You know, they learned all their technology from the French in the nineteenth century, which is why there are so many French words in Russian. So they got good teachers, the French are superb technicians. They aren't so good at building things, but they're very good at designing things. There's something about Russia, I don't know if it's the language or the education. They do have good education, they did. But, but, I mean, I remember asking them when they were working, I said, on the hydrogen bomb. You didn't have any computers yet. We only had really early primitive computers to do the complicated calculations of the hydrodynamics of that explosion. I said, what did you do?
52:33 Speaker 00 They said, oh, we just use nuclear. We just use theoretical physicists, which is why we did Los Alamos. We had guys come in who really knew their math and they would sit there and work it out by hand. And women with old Marchand calculators running numbers. So they basically, they were just good scientists and they had this new design and they, Khatatov, who ran the program, took it to Lavrentiy Beria, this monster of the, who ran the NKVD, who was put in charge of the program, and said, look, we can build a better bomb. Do you really want to waste the time to make that much more uranium and plutonium? And Beria said, comrade, I want the American bomb.
53:18 Speaker 00 Give me the American bomb or you and all your families will be camp dust. He said, so, and I talked to one of the leading scientists in the group and he said, so we valued our lives, we valued our families, we gave them a copy of the plutonium implosion bomb, which it was.
53:36 Dwarkesh Patel? It strikes me now that you explain this, that when the Soviet Union fell, if I was like North Korea or Iran or something, why did not, why didn't they, or did they, you know, let's send a few people to the fallen Soviet Union, get, recruit a few of these scientists to start their own program, buy off their stockpiles or something?
53:58 Speaker 00 There was some effort by countries in the Middle East to get hold of the enriched uranium, which they wouldn't sell them. They were, these were responsible scientists. I mean, they told me, look, we worked on the bomb, of course you had it. We didn't want there to be a monopoly on the part of any country in the world. So patriotically, even though Stalin was in charge of our country, he was a monster, we still felt, even Sakura felt that way.
54:30 Speaker 00 He felt very much that it was his responsibility to work on these things. They all did. So there was a great rush at the end of the Second World War to get hold of German scientists. And about, I think, an equal number were grabbed by the Soviets. All of the leading German scientists like Heisenberg and Han and others went west as fast as they could. They didn't want to be captured by the Soviets. But but there were some who were, and they helped them work. You know, people have the idea that Los Alamos was where the bomb happened. And it's true that at Los Alamos, we had the team that designed, developed,
55:13 Speaker 00 and built the first actual weapons. But the truth is, the important material for weapons is the uranium or plutonium. One of the scientists in the Manhattan Project told me years later. He said, you know, you can make a pretty high-level nuclear explosion just by taking two subcritical pieces of uranium, putting one on the floor and dropping the other by hand from a height of about six feet. If that's true, then all this business about secret designs and so forth is hogwash. What you really need for a weapon is the critical mass of plutonium or uranium-235,
55:57 Speaker 00 or highly enriched uranium, 90% uranium-235. If you've got that, there are lots of different ways to make the bomb. We had two totally different ways that we used. You know, the gun on the one hand for uranium, and then because plutonium was so reactive that if you fired up the barrel of a cannon at 3,000 feet per second, it would still melt down before the two pieces made it up. So for that reason, they had to invent an entirely new technology, which was an amazing piece of work. From the Soviet point of view, and I think this is something people don't know either, but it puts the Russian experience into a better context.
56:38 Speaker 00 All the way back in the 30s, since the beginning of the Soviet Union after the First World War, they had been sending over espionage agents connected up to Americans who were willing to to work for them to collect together
56:57 Speaker 00 Industrial technology, they didn't have it when they began their country. It was very much an agricultural country. And in that regard, you know, people still talk about all those damn spies stealing our secrets. We did the same thing with the British back in colonial days. We didn't know how to make a canal that wouldn't drain out through the soil. The British had a certain kind of clay that they would line their canals with. And there were canals all over England in the 18th century. That was impervious to the flow of water.
57:35 Speaker 00 And we bought a British engineer, brought him over at great expense to teach us how to make the lining for the canals that opened up the Middle West and then the West. So they were doing the same thing. And one of those spies was a guy named Harry Gold, who was working all the time for them. He gave them some of the basic technology of Kodak filmmaking, for example, and so forth. Harry Gold was the connection between David Greenglass, and one of the American spies at Los Alamos, and the Soviet Union. So it was not different. So the model was never give us something that someone dreamed up that hasn't been tested
58:20 Speaker 00 and you know works. So it would actually be blueprints for factories, not just a patent. And therefore, when Beria, after the war, said, "Give us the bomb", he meant, "Give me the American bomb because we know that works. I don't trust you guys. Who knows what you'll do? You're probably too stupid anyway." He was that kind of man.
58:42 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
58:43 Speaker 00 So for all of those reasons, they built the second bomb they tested. Was twice the yield and half the weight of the first bomb. In other words, it was their their new design. And so was ours, because the technology was something that we knew during the war, but it was too. It was too too theoretical still to use. You just had to put the core and have a little air gap between the core and the explosives. So that the blast wave would have a chance to accelerate through through an open gap. And therefore Alvarez told me, he said, it's he couldn't tell me what it was. So he said, well, look, you can get a lot more destructive force with a hammer.
59:28 Speaker 00 If you hit something with it, rather than if you put the head on the hammer and push. And it took me several years before I figured out what he meant. I finally understood he was talking about what's called levitation.
59:41 Dwarkesh Patel? On the topic of the fact that the major difficulty in developing a bomb is the either the refinement of uranium into U two, three, five, or its transmutation into plutonium. I was actually talking to a physicist in preparation for this conversation. And, you know, he explained the same thing, that if you get two subcritical masses of uranium together, you wouldn't have the full bomb, because you would it would start to tear itself apart without the tamper, but you would still have like more than a one megawatt megaton.
1:00:11 Speaker 00 Well, it would be a few kilotons. Alvarez's model would be a few kilotons, but that's a lot.
1:00:18 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, but, you know, he claimed, sorry, I'm in kiloton. He claimed that one of the reasons why we talk so much about Los Alamos is that at the time, the government didn't want other countries to know that if you refine uranium, you've got it. And so they were like, oh, we did all this fancy physics work in Los Alamos that you're not going to get to. So don't even worry about it. I don't know what you make of that theory. That basically it was like a sort of a psy op to convince people that the Los Alamos.
1:00:48 Speaker 00 You know, again, I think all the physics had been checked out by a lot of different countries by then. It was pretty clear to everybody what you needed to do to get to a bomb. That it was a fast fission reactor, not a slow fission reactor, like a reactor. They'd worked that out. So I don't think that's really the problem. But to this day, no one ever talks about the fact that the real problem isn't the design of the weapon.
1:01:15 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
1:01:16 Speaker 00 You could make one with wooden boxes if you wanted to. The design, the problem is getting the material. And that's good because it's damned hard to make that stuff. And it's something you can protect.
1:01:30 Dwarkesh Patel? We also have gotten very lucky. I mean, if lucky is the word you want to use. I think you mentioned this in the book at some point. But the laws of physics could have been such that, you know, unrefined uranium ore was enough to build a nuclear weapon, right?
1:01:45 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:01:46 Dwarkesh Patel? In some sense, we got lucky that it takes a nation state level actor to really refine and produce the raw substance.
1:01:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, I was thinking about that this morning on the way over. And, you know, all the uranium in the world would already have destroyed itself.
1:02:03 Dwarkesh Patel? Oh.
1:02:04 Speaker 00 Most people have never heard of the living reactors that developed on their own in a bed of uranium ore in Africa about 2 billion years ago.
1:02:16 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
1:02:17 Speaker 00 Right? When there was more U235 in a mass of uranium ore than there is today. Because it decays like all radioactive elements. And the French discovered it when they were mining the ore and found this bed that had a totally different set of nuclear characteristics. They were like, what happened? But there were natural reactors in Gabon once upon a time. And they started up because some water moderator for the, to make the neutron slow down, washed its way down through a bed of much more highly enriched uranium ore than we still have today. Maybe 5%, 10% instead of 3.5% or 1.5%, whatever it now is.
1:03:02 Speaker 00 And they ran for about 100,000 years and then shut themselves down. Because they had accumulated enough fission products that it had been, the U235 had been used up. Interestingly,
1:03:20 Speaker 00 It never migrated, this material never migrated out of the bed of ore. People today who are anti-nuclear say, well, what are we going to do about the waste? Where are we going to put all that waste?
1:03:33 Speaker 00 It's silly.
1:03:35 Dwarkesh Patel? Shove it in a hole.
1:03:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, basically, that's exactly what we're planning to do. Holes that are deep enough and in beds of material that will hold them long enough for everything to decay back to the original ore. It's not a big problem, except politically, because nobody wants it in their backyard.
1:03:52 Dwarkesh Patel? On the topic of the Soviets, one question I had in reading the book was, listen, we negotiate with Stalin at Yalta and we surrender a large part of Eastern Europe to him under his sphere of influence. And we know, I mean, obviously, we saw, you know, 50 years of immiseration there as a result. And then at the time only we had the bomb. Would it have been possible, given the fact that, you know, we had the bomb, that we could have just like knocked out the Soviet Union or at least prevented so much of the world from succumbing to communism in the aftermath of World War II? If you just kept it going, is that a possibility?
1:04:30 Speaker 00 When we say we had the bomb, we had a few partly assembled handmade bombs. It took almost as long to assemble one as the battery life of the batteries that would drive the original charge that would set off the explosion.
1:04:47 Speaker 00 It was kind of a big bluff. You know, when they closed Berlin in 1948 and we had to supply Berlin by air with coal and food for a whole winter, we moved some B-29s to England. The B-29 being the bomber that had carried the bombs. They were not outfitted for nuclear weapons. They didn't have the same kind of bomb-based structure. The weapons that were dropped in Japan had a single hook that held the entire bomb. So when the bay opened and the hook was released, the thing dropped. And that's very different from dropping a whole rows of,
1:05:30 Speaker 00 you've seen the photographs and the film footage of small bombs. So. It was a big bluff on our part. We, we took some time after the war inevitably to pull everything together. There was a brand new technology. There was a brand new weapon. Who was going to be in charge of it? There was a battle between the military wanted control. Truman wasn't about to give the military control. He'd been an artillery officer in the First World War. He used to say, no damn artillery officer captain is going to start World War III when I'm president. So, I, I grew up in the same town he lived in. So, I know his accent. In Missouri? Independence, Missouri. Yeah. Used to see him at, at his front steps, taking
1:06:15 Speaker 00 pictures with tourists after he, while he was still president, actually. So, used to step out on the porch and to let the tourists take photographs. About a half a block from my Methodist church where I went to church. So, it was interesting. Interestingly, his, his wife was considered much more socially acceptable than he was. She was from old family, Independence, Missouri people, and he was some farmer from way out in Granville, Missouri, south of Kansas City. So, values. Anyway, at the end of the war, there was a great rush from the Soviet side of what was already a zone, right? There was a Soviet
1:06:56 Speaker 00 zone, a French zone, British zone, and American zone. Germany was divided up into those zones to grab what's left of the uranium ore that the Germans had stockpiled. And there was evidence that there were several, a number of barrels of the stuff in a warehouse somewhere in the middle of all of this. And there's a very funny story about the Russians ran in and grabbed off one site full of uranium ore, this yellow-black stuff in, in, in what were basically wine barrels. And, and we, at the same night, just before the, the wall came down, as it were, between the zones, were running in from the other side, grabbing
1:07:38 Speaker 00 some other ore, and then taking it back to our side. But there was also a good deal of, of, of requisitioning of German scientists. And the ones who had gotten away early came west, but there were others who didn't, and ended up helping the Soviets. And they were told, look, you help us build the bomb. You help us, actually, you help us build the reactors and the uranium separation systems that we need. And we'll let you go home and back to your family, which they did. Early 50s by then, the Russian, the German scientists who had had helped the Russians went home. And I think, I think our people stayed here and brought their families over.
1:08:23 Speaker 00 I don't know.
1:08:24 Dwarkesh Patel? Was there, was there an opportunity after the end of World War II for the US, before the Soviets developed the bomb, for the US to do something where either it somehow enforced a monopoly on having the bomb? Or if that wasn't possible, make some sort of credible gesture that, you know, we're eliminating this technology, you guys don't work on this, we're all just gonna step back from this?
1:08:49 Speaker 00 We tried both. Before the war and General Groves, who had the mistaken impression that there was a limited amount of high-grade uranium ore in the world, put together a company that tried to corner the market on all the available supply. For some reason, he didn't realize that a country the size of the Soviet Union is going to have some uranium ore somewhere. And of course, it did in Kazakhstan. Rich uranium ore, enough for all the bombs they wanted to build. But he didn't know that, and I frankly don't know why he didn't know that.
1:09:29 Speaker 00 But I guess uranium's use before the Second World War was basically as a glazing agent for pottery, all that famous yellow pottery and orange pottery that people owned in the 1930s. Those colors came from uranium and they're sufficiently radioactive even to this day that if you wave a Geiger counter over them, you get some clicks. In fact, there have been places where they've gone in and with masks and suits on and grabbed the, grabbed the Mexican pottery and taken it out in a lead-lined case. People have been so worried about it. But, but that was the only use really for uranium and to make a particular kind of glass. So.
1:10:14 Speaker 00 Once it became clear that there was another use for uranium, a much more important one, gross tied to corner of the world market and he thought he had. So that was one effort to limit what the Soviet Union could do. Another was to negotiate some kind of agreement between the parties. That was something that that really never got off the ground because Truman Secretary of State was an old southern politician. He didn't trust the Soviets. He went to the first meeting, where was it? Geneva, I think, in the, in forty-five, after the war was over and kind of strutted around and said, "Well, I got the bomb in my pocket. So let's sit down and talk here."
1:11:00 Speaker 00 And the Soviets basically said, "Screw you. We don't care. We're not worried about your bomb. Go home." So that didn't work. Then there was the effort to get the United Nations to start to, to develop some program of international control. And the program was proposed originally by a committee put together by our State Department that was, that included Robert Oppenheimer. Rightly so, because the other members of the committee were industrialists, engineers, government officials, people with various kinds of expertise around the very complicated problems of technology and the science and, of course,
1:11:43 Speaker 00 the politics, the diplomacy. Oppenheimer taught them in a couple of weeks, taught them the basics of the nuclear physics involved and taught them what he knew about bomb design, which was, which was everything, actually, since he'd run Los Alamos during the war. And they came up with a plan and people have scoffed ever since. It's what came to be called the Atchison-Lillianthall Plan, named after the State Department people. But it's the only plan, I think, anyone has ever devised that makes real sense as to how you could have international control without a world government.
1:12:24 Speaker 00 Basically, every country would be open to inspection by any agency that was set up.
1:12:33 Speaker 00 And the inspections would not be at the convenience of the country. But whenever the inspectors felt they needed to inspect. So what Oppenheimer called an open world. And if you had that, and then if each country then developed its own nuclear industries, nuclear power, medical uses, whatever. Then if one country tried clandestinely to begin to build bombs, you would know about it at the time of the next inspection. And then you could try diplomacy. If that didn't work, you could try conventional war.
1:13:15 Speaker 00 If that wasn't sufficient, then you could start building your bombs too. And at the end of this sequence, which would be long enough, assuming that there were no bombs existent in the world, and the ore was stored in a warehouse somewhere, six months, maybe, maybe a year. It would be time for everyone to scale up to deterrence with weapons rather than deterrence without weapons, with only the knowledge. That, to me, is the answer to the whole thing. And it might have worked. But there were two big problems. One, no country is going to allow a monopoly on a nuclear weapon,
1:14:00 Speaker 00 at least no major power. So the Russians were not willing to sign on from the beginning. They just couldn't. How could they? We would not have. Two, Chairman assigned a kind of a loudmouthed, wise old Wall Street guy to present this program to the United Nations. And he sat down with Oppenheimer after he and his people had studied and said, "Where's your army? Somebody starts working on a bomb over there. You got to go in and take that out, don't you?" What would, what, he said, what, what, what happened if one, what would happen if one country started building a bomb? Nijmegen said, well, that would be an act of war.
1:14:44 Speaker 00 Meaning then the other countries could begin to escalate as they needed to, to protect themselves against one power trying to overwhelm the rest. Well, Baruch, Bernard Baruch was the name of the man. He didn't get it. So when he presented his revised version of the Achtung-Lieenthal Plan, which was called the Baruch Plan to the United Nations, he included his army. And he insisted that the United States would not give up its nuclear monopoly until everyone else had signed on. So of course, who's going to sign on to that deal?
1:15:23 Dwarkesh Patel? I feel like he has kind of point in the sense that, listen, World War II took five years or more. You know, if like, if we find that the Soviets are starting to develop a bomb, it's not like within the six months or a year or whatever it would take them to start refining the ore. And to the point we found out that they've been refining ore, to when we start a war and engage in it and doing all this diplomacy, by that point, they might already have the bomb. And so, you know, we're behind because we dismantled our weapons. We are, we're only starting to develop our weapons once we've exhausted these other avenues.
1:15:59 Speaker 00 Not to develop, presumably we would have developed. And everybody would have developed anyway. But rather to not have, I mean, I think of this, another way to think of this is, is as delayed delivery times. Takes about 30 minutes to get an ICBM from, from central Missouri to, to Moscow. That's the, that's the time window for doing anything other than starting a nuclear war. So take the warhead off those missiles and move it down the road 10 miles. So then it takes three hours. You've got to put the warhead back on the missiles.
1:16:41 Speaker 00 If the other side is willing to do this too, then you both can watch and see. We require openness, a word bore introduced to, to this whole thing.
1:16:51 Speaker 00 In order to make this happen, you can't have secrets. You have to absolutely have, and of course, as time passed on, we developed elaborate surveillance from space,
1:17:01 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
1:17:02 Speaker 00 Surveillance from planes and so forth. It would not have worked in 1946, for sure. There wasn't the surveillance. But that system, by the way, is in place today. The International Atomic Energy Agency has detecting systems in air, in space, underwater. They can detect 50 pounds of dynamite exploded in England from Australia with the systems that we have in place. So we have a system in place exactly. It's technical rather than human resources, but it's there. So it's theoretically possible today to get started on such a program.
1:17:45 Speaker 00 Except, of course, now, unlike 1950, the world is awash in nuclear weapons. Despite the reductions that have occurred since the end of the Cold War, there's still 30, 40,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Way too many.
1:18:01 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, that's really interesting. What percentage of warheads do you think are accounted for by this organization? Like, if there's 30,000 warheads, what percentage are?
1:18:09 Speaker 00 All.
1:18:10 Dwarkesh Patel? Really? Okay.
1:18:12 Speaker 00 They're allowed to. They're allowed to inspect anywhere without having to ask the government for permission.
1:18:17 Dwarkesh Patel? But presumably not like North Korea or something, right?
1:18:21 Speaker 00 North Korea is an exception. But we keep pretty good track of North Korea, needless to say.
1:18:26 Dwarkesh Patel? Are you surprised with how successful nonproliferation has been? The number of countries in nuclear weapons has not gone up for decades. Given the fact, as you were talking about earlier, it's simply a matter of refining or transmuting uranium. Is it surprising that there are more countries that have it?
1:18:44 Speaker 00 That's really an interesting part. Again, a part of the story that most people, I think, have never really heard. In the 50s, before the development and signing of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which was, I think, 1968, and it took effect in 1970.
1:19:07 Speaker 00 A lot of countries that you would never have imagined were working on nuclear weapons. Sweden, Norway, Japan, South Korea. A lot of countries, they had the technology. They just didn't have the materials. And it was kind of dicey about what you should do. But I interviewed some of the Swedish scientists who worked on their bomb. And they said, but look, we weren't talking about, we were just talking about making some tactical nukes that would slow down a Russian tank advance on our country long enough for us to mount a defense. I said, so why did you give it up?
1:19:50 Speaker 00 And they said, well, when the Soviets developed hydrogen bombs, it would only take two to destroy Sweden. So we didn't see much point. And we signed then the nonproliferation treaty, they said. And our knowledge, they said, these scientists of how to build nuclear weapons, helped us deal with countries like South Africa, which did build a few bombs in the late 1980s. Six World War II type gun bombs fueled with enriched uranium because South Africa is washed in uranium ore and makes a lot of uranium for various purposes. So, so efforts were starting up.
1:20:32 Speaker 00 And that's where John Kennedy got the numbers, then in a famous speech he delivered, where he said, I lose sleep at night over the real prospect of there being 10 countries with nuclear weapons by 1970 and 30 by 1980. And of course, that would have been a nightmare world because the risk of somebody using them would have gone up accordingly. But we offered, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, we and the Soviet Union basically said, we gotta, gotta slow this thing down for us and for others as well. And the treaty that was then put together and negotiated
1:21:17 Speaker 00 offered a good deal. It said, if you don't build nuclear weapons, we will give you the knowledge to build nuclear energy technology that will allow you to forge ahead very successfully with that. And these countries had not, you know, there was a belief in the early years of nuclear weapons, that as soon as the technology was learned by a country, they would immediately proceed to build the bomb. And, you know, no one really thought it through. It seemed sort of self-evident, but it wasn't self-evident. There are dangers to building a nuclear weapon and having an arsenal. If you're a little country and you have a nuclear arsenal, you
1:21:58 Speaker 00 have the potential to destroy a large country, or at least disable a large country, because you have these terribly destructive weapons. That makes you a target. That means that large country is going to look at you and worry about you, which they never would have before. That kind of logic dawned on everybody at that point, and they were getting a good deal. And the other part of the deal was the part that the nuclear powers never kept to this day, which was an agreement that, that we would work seriously and vigorously toward nuclear disarmament. We didn't do that. We just told them we would, and then
1:22:42 Speaker 00 kind of snuck around on the sides. So much so that by this treaty, because no one was quite trusting of the whole deal. Treaties are usually signed and they exist in perpetuity. They don't have any end date. They go on until somebody breaks the rules. But this treaty was given a 25-year review period, which would have been 1995, at which point if the countries had chosen to abrogate the treaty, it would have been set aside and everybody could have gone back to making nuclear weapons. Now, it almost came to that for the very reason that the main nuclear powers had not fulfilled their agreement to start reducing
1:23:27 Speaker 00 arsenals. You know, we didn't start reducing our nuclear arsenal till the end of the Cold War, till the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's when we began cutting back, as did the former Soviet Union. A diplomat who's a friend of mine, Tom Graham, was assigned the task by our State Department of going around to the countries that were going to be voting on this renewal or not of the treaty, and convincing their leaderships around the world that it wasn't in their best interest to abrogate the treaty at that point. Tom spent two years on the road. The only place he thought he should go is not the UN, where there's a second level diplomat he could have talked to, but back to the home countries.
1:24:11 Speaker 00 And he convinced enough countries around the world. I mean, he's another hero who's never been properly celebrated. He convinced enough countries around the world that that they did agree to extend the treaty in perpetuity. With the proviso that the goddamn nine nuclear powers get busy eliminating their nukes. And of course, George H. W. Bush, bless him, I didn't like his politics otherwise, but he stepped forward and split the nuclear arsenal in half right away. We dropped our numbers way, way lower than we had been. He pulled them out of South Korea, which was a great bugaboo for both the Soviets and the North Koreans and China,
1:24:54 Speaker 00 and did a lot of good work toward moving toward a real reduction in nuclear arsenals. And the Russians agreed at that time. It was before Putin took power. So there was a change for the better, but there are still too many around, unfortunately. So that's why there are only nine nuclear powers to this day.
1:25:15 Dwarkesh Patel? How worried are you about a proxy war between great powers turning nuclear? For example, you know, people have been worried about the Ukraine conflict for this reason. In the future, if we're facing an invasion of Taiwan by China, that's another thing to worry about. I had a friend who understands these things really well. And he was, we were arguing, because I thought, listen, if there's like a war, if there's a risk of nuclear war, let them take Taiwan. You know, we'll build semiconductor factories in Arkansas. Who cares, right? And he explains, no, you don't understand. Because if if we don't protect Taiwan, then Japan and South Korea decide to go nuclear because they're like, America won't protect us.
1:25:58 Dwarkesh Patel? And if they go nuclear, then the risk of nuclear actually goes up, not down.
1:26:02 Speaker 00 Or to, or they just decide to align with China.
1:26:05 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
1:26:05 Speaker 00 Because we didn't protect them with our nuclear umbrella the way we promised we would.
1:26:09 Dwarkesh Patel? Right. Oh, I guess we haven't promised Taiwan that, but it's implied, I guess.
1:26:13 Speaker 00 I think it's implied.
1:26:14 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
1:26:15 Speaker 00 If we said we're going to help defend them, that's what that means.
1:26:18 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah. But anyway, so the question was, how worried are you about proxy wars turning in nuclear?
1:26:26 Speaker 00 I think the best evidence, and there's been a lot of argument about whether nuclear deterrence actually works or not. The best evidence is that the United States fought a number of wars on the periphery, beginning with Korea and then Vietnam and so forth, and some other smaller things in between. Where we were willing to accept defeat, we accepted defeat in Vietnam for sure, rather than use our nuclear arsenal. Always because behind those peripheral countries, if you will, was a major nuclear power, China, Soviet Union, whatever. And we didn't want to risk a nuclear war.
1:27:09 Speaker 00 So at that level, deterrence really seemed to work for a long time. But there's been a change lately, and it's kind of terrifying, I find it at least. And the first manifestation was when India and Pakistan, which both went nuclear full scale in the late 1990s. India had tested one bomb in 1974, which they claimed was a peaceful explosion, whatever that is. But they hadn't proceeded anywhere from there. And Pakistan had not tested, well, they tested their first bomb in China when they got it from Aqib Khan, the same guy who was trying to proliferate to Iran a little later, and
1:27:54 Speaker 00 Iraq. But they didn't build a lot of warheads either. And then their conflict, or the personalities involved in the governments got sideways with each other, and both sides tested a quick flurry of four or five bombs each around 1997 or 98, I think. So there they were, now they were full-fledged nuclear powers on the scale of two regional countries. But then in 1999, there was a border conflict between the two countries, and Pakistan came up with a whole new argument about nuclear deterrence.
1:28:34 Speaker 00 Not only could you prevent a nuclear escalation, but if you kept your deterrent in place, you could have a conventional war.
1:28:47 Speaker 00 With the other side not willing to escalate to nuclear because you still had your nuclear arsenal. And that, which came very close to a nuclear exchange, we jumped in with both feet, believe me, and were all over both countries about, don't do this, don't go this far. And they backed off. But Putin, or someone in the Russian complex, picked up on that new approach. And it's the one Putin is using now. He's basically saying, I'm having a conventional war here. And don't you dare introduce nuclear weapons, or I will. In fact, if you defeat me, I may introduce nuclear weapons. Screw you.
1:29:31 Speaker 00 I'm going to use my nukes as a backup. That's new, and it's terrifying because it's a totally different kind of deterrence.
1:29:40 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
1:29:40 Speaker 00 That risks going too far, too fast, to be able to know what's going on.
1:29:46 Dwarkesh Patel? And in some sense, he is calling our bluff in that, or at least I hope he is, because I hope the government, I mean, obviously, you shouldn't say this, but hopefully, the government would not respond to a tactical nuke used in Ukraine by getting the US annihilated.
1:30:03 Speaker 00 I don't think we would respond with a full-scale nuclear attack.
1:30:07 Dwarkesh Patel? Right.
1:30:08 Speaker 00 But I do think we would respond with some level of possibly nuclear exchange with Russia.
1:30:17 Dwarkesh Patel? Wow.
1:30:18 Speaker 00 And I think, or maybe just with that part of Russia. I don't know. We've long had a policy called decapitation.
1:30:25 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
1:30:26 Speaker 00 We long ago targeted the individual apartments and dachas of this Russian leadership with individual warheads. I mean, in the window at high noon, because they were very accurate now. And they're totally stealthy if you're thinking about cruise missiles. We can put one in someone's window, and it's a nuclear warhead and not just a high explosive. So they've known that for a long time. That doesn't give anybody time to get into the bomb shelter. I mean, this has gotten really very hairy. It used to be pretty straightforward. Don't bomb us, we'll bomb you.
1:31:08 Speaker 00 Attack in some peripheral country and we won't bomb you because you might bomb us. We'll lose that little war, but we'll come in somewhere else. All of these things, that's complicated enough. But now we're talking about this other level.
1:31:23 Dwarkesh Patel? So in some sense, this idea that we can backstop conventional power with, you know, the Soviets had millions of men in their army after the, after World War Two stationed in Eastern Europe. What was it like 2 million people in the Red Army or something?
1:31:40 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:31:40 Dwarkesh Patel? And we said, we didn't have the troops remaining in Western Europe. But we said, listen, if you invade Western Europe, we'll respond with a nuclear attack. And so, I mean, I guess that worked. It does seem.
1:31:51 Speaker 00 That worked until August 1949, when the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb.
1:31:57 Dwarkesh Patel? Right.
1:31:58 Speaker 00 And that's when panic hit Washington. And the whole debate went on about do we build hydrogen bombs? And ultimately, the military prevailed and Truman signed on. And plus Fuchs was outed. And there was this whole knowledge that the Russians knew a lot. Cause Fuchs knew our early work on hydrogen weapons. Before the end of the war, we were exploring the possibility. All of that came together to with a kind of a terrible moment when, when the, the, the Teller side prevailed. And we said, let's build bigger bombs as if that would somehow. But there had been a balance of forces. You're quite right.
1:32:38 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
1:32:38 Speaker 00 They had 2 million men on the ground in Europe. We had to bomb. And then the balance of force was disrupted when they got the bomb. So then how do we rebalance? And the rebalance was the hydrogen bomb. And that's, you know, that's how you get to Armageddon ultimately, unfortunately.
1:32:56 Dwarkesh Patel? You talked to, I was reading the acknowledgements and you talked to Teller in writing the book. Is that right?
1:33:02 Speaker 00 I did.
1:33:02 Dwarkesh Patel? And obviously he was a big inspiration for the US pursuing the hydrogen bomb. I, what, what was his feelings when you talked to him about this?
1:33:11 Speaker 00 I made the mistake of going to see Teller at his house on the grounds of Stanford University. Early on in my research, when I really didn't. Didn't have as clear a grasp of who everyone was and what I should ask and so forth. I sent him a copy of an essay I'd written about Robert Oppenheimer for a magazine. And that set him off. He had reached the point where he was telling TV interviewers, asking them how much time he would actually be on the air. And if they said three minutes or whatever, he would say, all right, then I will answer three questions, no more.
1:33:55 Speaker 00 Trying to control because he was convinced that everyone was cutting the story to make him look bad. He really had quite a lot of paranoia at that point in his life. So when he read my essay on Oppenheimer, he used that as the basis for basically shouting at me, waving my big, heavy book, one of my big, heavy books at him. I remember thinking, oh, my God, he's going to hit me with my book. Then I thought, wait a minute, this guy's 80 years old, I can take him. But he finally said, all right, I will answer three questions. And we sat down and I asked him one, and he didn't give me an interesting answer. Asked him the second question, and it was worth the whole interview.
1:34:39 Speaker 00 I said, was Robert Oppenheimer a good lab director? And I thought, well, here's a chance where he'll slash him. But Oppenheimer's worst enemy said to me, Robert Oppenheimer was the best lab director I ever knew. And I thought, bingo. And then he chased me out of the house. And I went up the road to a friend's house and got very drunk because I was really shaken. It was so new to me, all of this. But that quote was worth the whole thing because, you know, Eisenhower in one of his memoirs says, I always liked Hannibal best of all the classical figures in the military
1:35:21 Speaker 00 of the Roman Empire because he comes down to us only in the written memoirs of his enemies. And if they thought he was such a good leader, he must have been a hell of a leader.
1:35:34 Dwarkesh Patel? You know, it's interesting, the way the Manhattan Project is organized because if you think of a startup in Silicon Valley, you have a technical founder usually and a non-technical founder, where the non-technical founder is in charge of In, you know, talking to investors and customers and so on. And the technical founders in charge were organizing the technology and the engineers. And in Oppenheimer, you had the guy who like understood all the chemistry, the metallurgy, the, obviously, the nuclear physics. And then Groves is like getting appropriations and it's a known store organization that you see it. But, okay, so why was Oppenheimer such a great lab director?
1:36:12 Speaker 00 Oppenheimer was a man with a very divided self and an insecure self. He had one of his closest friends, I I Robbie, who was a really profound and interesting human being. I'm going to be writing about him in my next book and I spent some time with Robbie just before he died. But Robbie said once of Oppenheimer, I always felt as if he could never decide whether he wanted to be president of the Knights of Columbus or Bene Barret. He was, he said, he was a certain kind of American Jew who, I mean, the German Jews
1:36:55 Speaker 00 who came over before and after the First World War were westernized. They were not from the shuttles of, of the Pale of Settlement, of the Eastern European Jews. They were sophisticated, they were well-educated, they, they were a totally different group. And as such, were able to assimilate fairly easily. Oppenheimer wasn't sent to a Jewish school. He was sent to the, the famous school that was opened in New York. There was the Ethical Culture School, it was called. And it was based on the idea of an ethical moral, moral education, but not a religious education. So they found this niche for him, his parents did.
1:37:40 Speaker 00 He never quite pulled himself together as a human being. And as is true with many people with that kind of personality structure. He was a superb actor. He could play lots of different roles and he did. Women adored him. He was one of the most lavish courters of women. He would bring a bouquet of flowers to their first date, which was apparently shocking to people in those days. He would, he was just a lovely courtly man. But in the classroom, if somebody made a stupid mistake, he would just chew them out.
1:38:16 Speaker 00 And he taught a course in physics that was so advanced that most of the best students took it twice because they couldn't store it all the first time.
1:38:29 Speaker 00 He, and he was nasty to people all the time in a way that bothered a lot of people. Louis Alvarez, who was someone I got to know pretty well because I helped him write his memoirs, one of the important scientists that left Alamos, really didn't get along with Oppenheimer at all because Oppenheimer was so condescending to everyone. And Louis was kind of a hothead and he didn't like people condescending to him. Oppenheimer never won a Nobel, Louis did, and so forth. So there was this layer of Oppenheimer being waspish all the time, which was his insecurity. And his insecurity extended to physics in that rather than dig deep into one problem,
1:39:12 Speaker 00 Robbie said later, he just, he didn't have the zits flesh. He couldn't sit down and focus on one problem because he always wanted to be someone who always knew everything that was going on in his, in physics. Well, you could call that someone who, who was a very sophisticated, knowledgeable scientist, or you call him a, someone who was superficial, and he was superficial. He knew broadly rather than deeply, if you will. Even though he did work, he and a graduate student of his developed the basic idea of the black hole long before it came up after the war. They published a paper on what was essentially the physics of a black hole in 1929.
1:39:57 Speaker 00 But it wasn't called a black hole yet. John Wheeler invented that term many years later. But the idea that a big enough sun, if it collapsed, would just keep on collapsing until nothing could be, could come out of it, including light, came from Oppenheimer. And if the black hole had been discovered out in space before he died, he certainly would have had a Nobel for the, for the theory. But that, that being said, he still was someone who was broad rather than deep. And he was someone who was really good at playing roles. So when General Groves, who himself had two or three degrees from MIT in engineering, he was no slouch.
1:40:40 Speaker 00 But his was more the industrial side of everything. How do you build a factory when you don't know what you're going to put in it? He built the factories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee to enrich uranium and start building the early piles that would later lead to the big reactors in Washington, before they even knew it was going to go in the factory. He got orders of magnitude numbers. He said, start laying the concrete. That we want it this big, we want this attached to it, we're going to need power, going to need water, going to need gas, whatever they needed. He was that kind of really great engineer. But he needed someone to help explain the physics to him.
1:41:21 Speaker 00 And he saw pretty quickly at the meetings he was holding at the University of Chicago, where they were building the first reactor, little one, that Oppenheimer was really good at explaining things. So he grabbed him. And he, Groves spent the war riding in trains back and forth among all these various sites. He'd have the advisors from one site, like Chicago, jump on the train while he was taking the train from Chicago to Santa Fe. Then he'd, they'd get off and take the next train back to Chicago. Then he'd pick up the guys who were going to go with him to Tennessee from Santa Fe, and they'd ride with him and round and round and round. That's how Groves, he got a plane later in the war, but most of the war, he just had people riding with him.
1:42:05 Speaker 00 And Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer said later, well, I became his idiot savant. And, and Oppenheimer did. He explained all the physics to Groves, because Groves had a little insecure around six Nobel laureates around a table and would say things like, well, you each have a PhD, but I think my work at MIT probably was the equivalent of about six PhDs, wouldn't you think? And they would think, who is this guy?
1:42:31 Dwarkesh Patel? Was he joking, was that sarcasm or?
1:42:33 Speaker 00 No, he did. He had multiple degrees.
1:42:35 Dwarkesh Patel? Right.
1:42:36 Speaker 00 You know how the military works when there's no war, they send their guys to school to get them better trained. So when the time came. To find someone to run. Oppenheimer had been pushing for a separate place where the scientists could get together and do what scientists must do if they're going to advance their science, and that is talk to each other. The system that Groves had installed around the country at all these factories and so forth was called compartmentalization for secrecy. And basically, it was you're only allowed to know just enough to do your job and not the overall picture of what your job might be for.
1:43:19 Speaker 00 So, for example, there were women at Oak Ridge running big magnetic machines that would separate uranium 235 from uranium 238 with magnetic coils of various kinds, taking advantage of the very slight difference in mass between these two otherwise identical materials. The ladies, the women who were doing this work, were set in front of a board with a big dial on it, a big arrow that went from zero to 10 or whatever, and told, keep the arrow about between right here on this. They didn't know what they were making, but they really got good at spinning their dials
1:44:00 Speaker 00 and maintaining what was basically the level of whatever electric process was going on in this machine. So, compartmentalization worked, but Oppenheimer said, if we are compartmentalized as scientists, we're not going to get anywhere. Science works by gift exchange. I discover something, I publish the results, all the other scientists in my field can read it or be told of it at a meeting, and then they can take that information, use that to move a little farther. And that's the way it's always been done, and that's the only way it works. As soon as you lock people up and tell them they can't talk to each other, it stops because the discovery over here...
1:44:44 Speaker 00 Doesn't get applied to a need over here. Simple. Gross reluctantly agreed to let Oppenheimer, to let this place have openness, as it was called. You see the parallel with the open world about the bomb. Same sort of thing. How can you know what's going on if you can't let people talk to each other, see what they're doing? But he insisted that the whole crew be put behind barbed wire in a faraway place where no one else was around. By then, Gross had worked with Oppenheimer enough. Oppenheimer was now playing the lab director. And he was superb at it, as Teller's remark about a good lab director would let you know.
1:45:28 Speaker 00 And for the period of the war, Hans Bethe told me this. He said, "Before the war, Robert really could be cruel. He would pounce on a mistake you made." And Bethe, Nobel laureate, Bethe discovered what makes the sun work. That's how important Bethe's work was and how significant. Bethe told me, and of course, everyone makes mistakes. I made mistakes. Oppenheimer would would charge me with a mistake if I spoke wrong. But he said, "Before the war, after the war, but not during the war." During the war, he was the superb, kind of wise, lab director.
1:46:09 Speaker 00 Because unlike most scientists, he was not only a physicist of of high class, but he really was psychologically astute as a human being, as I think insecure people often are, because gotta scope out what's going on. He, you know, Oppenheimer wrote pretty good poetry. He was interested in art. He wanted to read the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit. So he learned Sanskrit. He was very smart, needless to say, and a very high IQ. Not all the physicists who did first-class work did have high IQs. It took some other qualities as well.
1:46:51 Speaker 00 It took the zits flies, sitting down in a chair and focusing on one thing until you got through to it. That's what Robbie said, and he said that's why Oppenheimer never won a Nobel Prize. So, all in all, Oppenheimer became in this place that some of these people later were calling like Mount Olympus. I mean, remember, they were working on a bomb that was going to kill hundreds of thousands of people. But there was, it was the most curious collection of people who had felt like theirs was a spiritual field before the war. And here they were in the war, and they began to think, well, maybe this isn't so spiritual.
1:47:34 Speaker 00 Maybe we're doing something truly horrendous. When Bohr comes along and says, wait a minute. Even Oppenheimer, by then, was kind of a student of Bohr's. Oppenheimer had the job of recruiting everyone for Los Alamos without telling them what they would be doing because of a secret. So he would go to a university campus where there was a young physicist he wanted to recruit, and they would go out for a walk to get away from any hidden microphones. And Oppenheimer would say, I can't tell you what we're going to be doing. I can tell you that it will certainly end this war, and it may end all war. And that was quite enough.
1:48:17 Speaker 00 I mean, most of them figured out what they'd be doing anyway, because it was sort of obvious when you started looking at the list of people who are going there, they're all nuclear physicists. So, so Oppenheimer and Bohr brought up together, brought this idea to, to Los Alamos and later to the world. That there was a paradox, you could call it. So the bomb had two sides and they were in a sense complementary. Because although it's certainly true that this was going to be a very destructive weapon, it would also maybe be true if all worked out and they tried to make it work out, that it would put an end at least to large scale war.
1:49:01 Speaker 00 If you go to the numbers and graph the number of deaths from war, manmade deaths, starting in the 18th century. It's almost exponential up to 1943, when 15 million people died between the war itself and the Holocaust. And then it starts to decline as the war begins to, to come to an end. The wars really. 1945, it drops down to about 1 to 2 million deaths. And it stays there ever after. And although 1 to 2 million deaths a year from war is nothing to be proud of, we lose 6 to 7 million people in the world every year from smoking.
1:49:46 Speaker 00 So in a curious way, the dis-introduction of how to control nuclear energy changed the nation, the nature of nation-states, such that they could no longer, at the limit, defend their borders with, with war. They had to find some other way, at least when the scale goes up, they had to find another way. I think that's very important because people somehow don't really understand what a millennial change, the introduction of the release of nuclear energy into the world really was. You know, as we've been talking, I've been thinking over and over again about
1:50:31 Speaker 00 your question about AI.
1:50:34 Speaker 00 And the whole larger interesting question that you can see how it fits into the bomb story of unintended consequences. All the countries that worked on the bomb at some level were thinking, oh my God, we're gonna have a weapon that will surpass them all. One ring to bind them all. I mean, it's like, Lord of the Rings, this thing. They thought it would grandize national power, but what it did was put a limit to national power. For the first time in the history of the world, war became something that was historical rather than universal. It was something that would no longer be possible. And who did that?
1:51:17 Speaker 00 Scientists, going about their quiet work of talking to each other and exploring the way the universe works. Bohr, who's one of my favorite people in the world, Bohr liked to say, you know, science is not about power over nature, as people seem to think. Science is about the gradual removal of prejudice. And by that, he meant when Galileo and Copernicus changed the way everyone looked at the position of the Earth in the universe, not the center of the universe anymore, but just a planet revolving around a third-rate star. It changed the way everyone thought about the whole world.
1:52:02 Speaker 00 When Darwin, I mean, we're still having a debate about Darwin in the, in the world. When Darwin definitively identified our place in the natural world as, if you will, a brainy ape, it's still taking time for a lot of people to swallow that one. But inch by inch, these prejudices about where we are in the world and how powerful we are and what our purpose is and so forth are being drained away by science. And the science of nuclear fission and nuclear energy is draining away and has drained away. The, the theory that we are sort of universally capable of destroying each other and getting
1:52:47 Speaker 00 away with it. But...
1:52:51 Speaker 00 This is the unintended consequence. The dark side is it's only by having a Damocles sword over our heads, the potential for world destruction, or at least of the human world, that it's possible to limit war in this way. That's the threat. And when people start saying, well, look, we can have a conventional war if we've got nuclear weapons, because you're not going to attack us. You don't dare. We'll use our nuclear weapons on you. It's something's changed most recently in all of this. Not it's outside the range of all the books I've written. It's a whole new thing and it's,
1:53:33 Speaker 00 I guess you have to work through all the combinations, just as evolution does, before you come up with the one that actually fits the reality of the world.
1:53:42 Dwarkesh Patel? There's like at least 10 different things. I'm trying to think which branch of the tree I want to explore first. On the AI question, I mean, yeah, I'm trying not to like too explicitly connect the dots because there is always a danger of, I don't know. Every time I read something in history, I'm like, oh, this is exactly like so and so. But well, first of all, the broader outline of the super eclectic group of people who are engaged in this sort of historical pursuit. They understand it's a historical pursuit. They like kind of see the inklings of it. And one of the people, my second to last guest was Ilya Sutskever, who is the chief scientist at OpenAI, which is the big lab building this.
1:54:20 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:54:20 Dwarkesh Patel? And he was the first person, he was basically this lizard of AI, where he discovered a nuclear chain reaction. Sutskever was the first person to train a neural network that accomplished, it was called ImageNet. And anyway, so like he's from that moment on, he was one of these scientists who like, he sees like, oh, you could build a nuclear bomb immediately as soon as the news hits the floor. 10 years ago, he saw this coming, like scaled this up and you've got something that's human level intelligent. Anyways, one of, I mean, I was reading through the book and so many things like this came up. One was a good friend of mine works at one of these companies. And he does, you know, they train these models on GPUs,
1:55:02 Dwarkesh Patel? which are computers that can perform all these matrix calculations at peril. And I was thinking about these engineers who were in short supply during the making of the bomb, who were, you know, let's say they're working on the.
1:55:17 Dwarkesh Patel? Electromagnetic separation of the isotopes, right? And it's like this really esoteric thing. You're like a chemist or metallurgist or something that you're like really needed for this specific thing. And he's like in super high demand right now. He's like the one guy who can make these like very particular machines run as efficiently as possible. So you you start looking and there's so many analogies there, but.
1:55:36 Speaker 00 Well, I mean, look, I don't think there's much question that AI is going to be at least as transformative as nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.
1:55:47 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
1:55:48 Speaker 00 And it's scaring the hell out of a lot of people and a lot of other people are putting their heads in the sand. And others are saying, let's, let's live it around with laws, which certainly we should do. We've tried to do that with nuclear weapons and have some success. But people have no idea what's coming, do they?
1:56:07 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, yeah. Well, this is the thing I wanted to ask is one, one thing that impressed me is that, you know, some of these scientists didn't see this. They, they were, I think Fermi was like, you could never isolate, you can never refine uranium and get 235. But then some of these scientists like saw it coming. And I was actually impressed, I forget who, but a few of them got it down to the year where they're like, you know, by this time we'll have developed the atomic bomb. By this time, another one was like, you know, Russia is like five to 10 years behind or something. So I'm curious, what made some of these scientists really good at forecasting the development of this technology and its maturity? And what made some either too pessimistic or too optimistic?
1:56:49 Dwarkesh Patel? Like, was there, is there some pattern you noticed among the ones who could see the progression of the technology?
1:56:53 Speaker 00 That's a good question. Well, the experience that I've had in working with scientists, physicists, is that they really are not very interested in history or in the future. They're interested in now, where the work is, where the cutting edge is. They'd have to devote quite a bit of energy to projecting in the future. There, of course, have been a few. I mean, one thinks of.
1:57:22 Speaker 00 Some of the guys who wrote science fiction, some of the guys who wrote essays and so forth about where we were going. And if you ask them, particularly later on in their careers, when their, their basic work is already done. And I remember talking to a Nobel laureate in another line of science, but he said, I would never be a graduate student connecting up with a Nobel Prize winner because they've already done their best work. And he was one, so he was talking about himself too. So it just, it takes a certain mentality to do that. And maybe scientists aren't the best ones to do it. Alvarez told me, he said, you know, I was always a snoop and I would poke around at
1:58:06 Speaker 00 Berkeley in the various drawers of the benches of the laboratory. He said, one day I was poking around and I found this little glass cylinder about the size of a Petri dish with some wires inside. He said, and I realized it was the first cyclotron. They had, they just thrown it in a drawer. I said, so where is it now? He said, it's in the Smithsonian, of course. Where else would it be? I talked to the guy who invented the first laser and actually held one in my hand, the first laser. He was an engineer at one of the big telephone companies.
1:58:48 Speaker 00 He said, there's a laser, the first laser is supposedly in the Smithsonian. But he said, they don't have it. They got one in the lab and I took my first one home. He, he said, you want to see it? I said, God, of course. And we went to the Cordenza in his dining room and he opened a drawer and pulled out a little box. And inside it was basically a cylinder of aluminum about the size of a, of a film can, a little film can, which he opened up and took out a, a man-made ruby cylinder that was half silvered on each end, surrounded by a very high intensity flashbulb. And that was it. It was this beautiful, simple machine.
1:59:32 Speaker 00 But he said, they didn't, they didn't get the right one. I said, when did you give them the right one? He said, they didn't ask me. And he was angry all his life because he wasn't included in the Nobel Prizes. It went to the theoreticians who first theorized a laser, but he built the first laser. There it was, so.
1:59:52 Dwarkesh Patel? Well, when you were interviewing these scientists, how many of them do you feel regretted their work?
1:59:59 Speaker 00 You know, they'd been down the road so far, they really didn't think that way anymore. What they did think about was they regretted the way governments had handled their work. And most of them, there were some who were kind of hawks and patriots, Alvarez was one of those. But most of them had tried in the years since the war to move in the direction of reducing nuclear weapons, limiting nuclear weapons, eliminating nuclear weapons.
2:00:29 Speaker 00 It was a problem for them. When the war was over, these were mostly graduate students or new PhDs who had been recruited for this program. The average age at Los Alamos was 27. Oppenheimer was an old guy, he was 39, right? So, these were young guys who'd been pulled out of their lives, pulled out of their careers. They wanted to get back to the university and do the work they had started out to do. And by and large, they did, and Los Alamos just emptied out. Teller was horrified. Teller wanted the bomb program to continue because he wanted to build his hydrogen bomb. It was just going to be his, his, his bid for history, just as Oppenheimer's bid for history was the fission bomb,
2:01:14 Speaker 00 if you will. Teller's was going to be the hydrogen bomb. And over the years, after that work was done, he systematically and meanly tried to exclude, one by one, anyone else who'd helped him work on the hydrogen bomb. I mean, originally, he said it was, it was a mathematician, a Polish mathematician named Stan Ulam, whom I did interview also, who really came up with the basic idea for the hydrogen bomb. And took it to Teller, and together, Teller came up with an improvement. And then together, they wrote a paper which was signed by both of them. But by the 1980s, Teller was saying, "Ulam did nothing, nothing."
2:01:59 Speaker 00 Which wasn't true, but it was his, his piece of history, because he was scattered too, and he never won, did Nobel level work.
2:02:09 Speaker 00 So they didn't talk so much about their personal guilt. And I mean, honestly, I was a child in the Second World War. I was eight years old in 1945. So many young men had been killed on all sides in the war. It was a kind of a strange, peaceful time for children. Cars couldn't get tires, they were rationed. Cars couldn't get gasoline, it was rationed. So the streets were empty. We played in the streets. Meat was rationed, so we lived on macaroni and cheese. You got four ounces of meat a week, per person during the Second World War, and so forth. There was a...
2:02:52 Speaker 00 And that was kind of wonderful and peaceful, and kids running around in gangs and so forth. But in at least one house in almost every block in the city, there was a black velvet flag or drape hanging with a gold star on it. And that meant that someone in that family, a father, a brother, a son, had been killed. And I was a smart little kid, I understood what all that meant. I was reading newspapers by the time I was six, following the war. It was the strangest time of darkness and terror. We didn't know until 1943 if we were going to win the war. It was scary for a while up front, the war in Europe.
2:03:37 Speaker 00 We sort of set Japan aside, our government did, until the war in Europe was done, before we finished that other war. But it took a while for the United States to get its industrial plant up and cranking out planes at the rate of one a day, or more, and so forth. You know, Churchill famously said when Pearl Harbor occurred...
2:04:00 Speaker 00 The Lord hath delivered them into my hands, he said. And he explained later what he meant was, that means America's going to join the war. And I know we can win now because America is just one vast factory.
2:04:13 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
2:04:14 Speaker 00 Much more so than the British could have put together. So it was a peaceful time, but it was a very dark time even for a child. I understood well enough what it meant that some my my mother died when I was an infant. So I understood what the death of a family member was about.
2:04:30 Dwarkesh Patel? Do you remember the when the bombs dropped?
2:04:33 Speaker 00 So by 1945, we were so pissed off at the Japanese. We had destroyed their air force. We had destroyed their navy. We had destroyed their army. The population of Japan was down to about a thousand calories per person of the worst kind of stuff, buckwheat and weeds and whatever they could find. And yet they wouldn't surrender. And they still had a million men on the ground in Western Manchuria. And they did only had about a year's worth of bullets left. We knew that much, but that's a long time with a million men. With that in mind, and because they felt that the the Soviet Union was still neutral
2:05:17 Speaker 00 in the Eastern Front because it had basically fought the war in Europe. We didn't win the war in Europe, the Russians did. We didn't enter the war on the ground until June 1944. By which time they were already moving forward against the German forces that had attacked them in 41. So we didn't win the war in Europe, the Russians did. But the Japanese just wouldn't surrender. And I mean, the you could read the documents about the bombs. General George Marshall, who was leading the war, was in charge of all the forces, had this idea that maybe if we could use these bombs on the beaches
2:05:58 Speaker 00 when before we landed to kill any Japanese defense that was there, maybe they would get the message and be shocked, he said, and to surrender. But from the Japanese point of view, as it turned out later, you know, it's a myth that the bombs won the war. They contributed to winning the war, but they didn't win the war. What won the war was when Stalin. Finally was convinced that there were such things as atomic bombs. He was half convinced these were American pieces of disinformation. That we were feeding the espionage to the Soviet Union to make him spend a lot of money and waste a lot of time for something that didn't exist.
2:06:43 Speaker 00 When the news came back, which it did almost immediately from Hiroshima and then from Nagasaki, that these things existed, he called Igor Kurchataev in and said famously, "Comrade, give us the bomb. You have all the resources of the state at your disposal. Give us the bomb as soon as you can." But up until then, he wasn't so sure. He had told Truman and Potsdam that they would invade Manchuria with fresh Soviet forces on the 15th of August. And Truman was trying to get him to agree to invade at all.
2:07:24 Speaker 00 And then, when word came from New Mexico that the bomb had worked, which it did right in the middle of the Potsdam Conference, Truman then was trying to get Stalin to come in as late as possible because he figured the bombs would end the war before Stalin could take over enough of Japan to divide the country the way Europe was divided. He didn't want a Soviet zone and an American zone and a British zone. He knew we could do better with the Japanese than the Soviets would do. But Stalin, having heard that the bombs really worked, moved up the date of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria to the 8th of August,
2:08:08 Speaker 00 between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and invaded early. I found it very interesting that the conventional air forces on our side staged the largest firebombing raid of the war, of the fourteenth of August, after the Japanese were in the middle of their surrender negotiations. The air force wanted to get credit for winning the war, and they wanted to hold back the Soviets who were advancing down from Sakhalin Island to the northern islands of Japan, as well as inward from Manchuria. And so our bombing was in northern Japan. It was like a way of telling the Soviets, "Back off, buddy.
2:08:52 Speaker 00 We're not going to let you in here." And then, the Japanese leadership, the military leadership, which had been adamant that they would fight to the last Japanese, the hundred million, they called it, turned and finally realized that it was futile. And with the fresh Soviet army coming into Manchuria, with the United States and the British coming in from the west to the south, they were surrounded and there was no reason to continue. But, the bombs had their effect. The Japanese emperor used the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a reason for entering politics for the first time in Japanese history. He had always been a spiritual figure,
2:09:37 Speaker 00 but he wasn't allowed to kind of vote or veto the political arrangements. He stepped forth and said, "We must sue for peace." And in his final imperial re-script on the fifteenth of August, recorded and played out to the people by radio, he said, "A new and most terrible weapon of war has led us to think the unthinkable, and we must now lay down our arms." So the bomb had its effect, but it wasn't what we thought at the time. A lot of Americans said, "Thank God for the atomic bomb, because our voice came home." The actor Paul Newman was a friend of mine, and Paul was an eighteen-year-old bombardier
2:10:18 Speaker 00 on a two-man Navy fighter bomber, training for the invasion of Japan. He said to me once, "Roads..." I'm one of those guys who said, "Thank God for the atomic bomb." Because I probably wouldn't have come home if we'd invaded the Japanese Ham Islands. And a million men said that. And the truth is, there were so many Japanese who would have been killed if we had invaded, that even the killings of the two bombs would have been dwarfed by the killing that happened. For the first time in the history of war, more Japanese civilians were killed in World War II than had ever been killed in a war before.
2:11:01 Speaker 00 War was beginning to become what it has since become, which is a war against civilians, basically.
2:11:07 Dwarkesh Patel? So, one question I have, we were talking near the beginning about whether it was possible that the bomb could not have been built at all. And it seems like in the case of the nuclear physics involved here, it was sufficiently obvious. But seeing the history of that science and whether it was plausible or not to, for some conspiracy to just say, you know, to hold it off. How plausible do you think it is that there's some group of scientists somewhere else who have discovered some other phenomenon or technology? And they're like, "This is so destructive, we can't tell anyone about this." You know, one area I think this might be plausible is like bioweapons or something like that, where they discover something, they just like shut up about it.
2:11:49 Dwarkesh Patel? Do you, given the study of this history, do you think that's more or less plausible?
2:11:53 Speaker 00 I don't think it's very likely. To take bioweapons as an example, I remember talking to a biologist, one of the early DNA researchers who had been a physicist until, until DNA came along. And I said, "How'd you switch over to biology?" He said, "Well, it's molecules." So from his perspective, it wasn't very different. But we were talking about the question of, just the one you asked, but about biological agents. He said, "You know, nature has had millions of years to work all the combinations on the worst things you can imagine. The odds of anybody in a laboratory coming up with anything worse are really vanishingly small."
2:12:39 Speaker 00 I took that with great comfort. I went home and slept that night, you know. And I think he's probably right. Evolution has done such a job. We're still digging stuff out. I mean, it's just amazing how much of our technology started out as something in the natural world that we adapted it and simplified it and engineered it so we could make it too. That's still going on in all sorts of ways.
2:13:07 Dwarkesh Patel? I I I hope that's the case. You know, I was talking to a biologist and he was explaining to me, if you've seen things like Alpha Fold, which is this AI program that models that can predict how a protein will fold. You can run billions of different permutations of a protein and you can find smallpox, but it binds a hundred times better with human, you know, receptors or something.
2:13:31 Speaker 00 Well, I'll tell you a story, which I don't think is well known. I I wish it were. Back in the sixties, I think, the Russians proposed a world scale program of public health to eradicate smallpox to the UN. And they said, we'll contribute vaccine and other countries can contribute whatever they can contribute. This program got going. It was run out of Geneva by the World Health Organization. A wonderful American public health doctor, big old burly country boy looking guy who
2:14:13 Speaker 00 was DA Henderson, whom I followed around for several months, once in in Geneva and elsewhere. And by the late 1970s, the last case was smallpox, which happened to be a disease that's only spread among humans. And therefore was of all the diseases, the most obvious one to try to get rid of. Because if there are there are reservoirs in the natural world outside of the human world, then get to be a problem. It's also something that's carried around by rabbits or deer or whatever, then it's harder to deal with. But if it's just humans, then you all you have to do is someone starts showing signs
2:14:54 Speaker 00 of smallpox, vaccinate everyone around him and make sure they don't go anywhere for a while and the disease can't spread. And that's the method that they use to eliminate smallpox everywhere in the world.
2:15:08 Speaker 00 And then in the 90s, when the Soviet Union collapsed, DA learned, as we all did, although it wasn't terribly well-publicized, that there was a secret lab still operating, that the Russian plan had been to eliminate smallpox vaccination from the world, so that everybody except people in their country, who had been vaccinated for this purpose, would not be immune, and a bacteriological agent like smallpox could be used as a weapon of war.
2:15:45 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
2:15:46 Speaker 00 DA was so incensed, he took this story to our government, and we started a whole new section of the public health business to work on biological warfare. And he did for the last part of his life to try to get past this. And that lab was eventually, we hoped, closed down. So that scenario is not outside the bounds of possibility. But generally speaking, biological warfare isn't very effective because your own people could be infected as well. If not your war people, at least your civilian population. Much like poison gas, which used to blow back over the lines
2:16:30 Speaker 00 of the people who'd launched it, to their horror. So it never was a terribly good weapon of war, and it's one of the reasons, plus Hitler's experience of big gas in the First World War, that all sides decided not to use it in the Second. So that's part of it.
2:16:46 Dwarkesh Patel? Speaking of secret labs, by the way, is there a question you have about, I mean, you've written so many books about not only the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and Cold War and so on. Is there a question you have about any of those stories that you, one you're really interested in, that you haven't been able to get the answer to because the information is classified?
2:17:06 Speaker 00 You know, over the years, it's slowly leaked out. The latest thing I discovered is that from early on, our hydrogen bombs were used as spherical secondary. They were shaped sort of like a dumbbell, not quite so more spread out. But there's a picture of a...
2:17:26 Speaker 00 Kim Jong-un holding a, looking at a hydrogen bomb of North Korean make. And it's perfectly obvious that it's a real bomb because that's its configuration. So I didn't know that until just a year or so ago. But I mean, sooner or later, everyone tells you at least a little bit of this.
2:17:45 Dwarkesh Patel? And then is there anything you you've learned, but you can't put in your books because it's?
2:17:49 Speaker 00 The only thing I didn't put in the book, rightly so, was the dimensions of the Fat Man bomb that were on the original Fuchs documents that he passed to the Russians. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the scientists became available, I learned that the KGB and the interest in promoting its service to the state in this new world they were going into, had published a historical piece about their good work in stealing the secret to the bomb. And they included a picture of the sketch that Fuchs did showing the dimensions of each
2:18:30 Speaker 00 of the shells of this multi-shelled implosion weapon with the numbers there in millimeters. And when they realized, when the scientists realized that the KGB had published this stuff, they raised a great hue and cry and said, that's in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. They said, we got to pull all the issues of that journal. And they did. But I had a very enterprising assistant in Moscow, this geologist I mentioned before. And he said, I think I know where I can find a copy of the journal. And he jumped on the night train from Moscow to St. Petersburg and went to a science library there.
2:19:14 Speaker 00 And they said, no, of course not, we pulled that. And then he thought, wait a minute, where's the public library? It was across the street. And he went across the public library and he said, yeah, we have the journal. And handed it to him and he made a copy and gave me one. But when I realized that I had this, I never published that information. That's the only one, though.
2:19:34 Dwarkesh Patel? That is a wise thing to do.
2:19:36 Speaker 00 Yeah.
2:19:37 Dwarkesh Patel? One of the final questions, you, a lot of times people use the phrase, you know, we need a Manhattan Project for X. If it's, you know, some new technology or something. When you hear that, do you think that, you know, this is like a sort of naive comparison? Or does it make sense to use that terminology?
2:19:56 Speaker 00 No, I've, you know, it's been used so many times over the years for cancer, for this, for that. It was a very special time and it was a very special problem. The basic science was in hand. Oppenheimer once said in his funny way, he said, we didn't do any basic science between 1939 and 1945. And essentially it was a vast engineering program. There was some basic physics, but very little. It was mostly using Nobel laureate level physicists as engineers to develop a whole new weapon with the precision of a, of a Swiss watch that weighed 9,000 pounds. They did a beautiful job, considering the time and place and the Russian, all those things.
2:20:42 Speaker 00 They solved some problems that I don't know how anybody else could have solved. Like, how do you, how do you make plutonium explode without, without a gun? So, all of that, but you know, most of these problems aren't like that. Nobody was starting a startup with some investment from a investment company to, to build the bomb. This was a government project and it was secret. And if you divulge the secret, you'd go to jail. The, a lot of the parameters of what they were doing were carefully kept secret. It's, it's remarkable that 600,000 people worked on the bomb and the secret never got out.
2:21:24 Dwarkesh Patel? Did you say 600,000?
2:21:25 Speaker 00 Yeah.
2:21:26 Dwarkesh Patel? Okay, this is actually, this is one of the questions I want to ask you. Truman, when he became president, he, he had to be told about the, he didn't know about it, right? So the vice president of the United States, 600,000 people, at the time, I don't know how many people were working on it when he became president. But hundreds of thousands of people are working on it. The vice president doesn't know about it. Only, he only learns about it as president. How was it possible that with so many people working on it, the vice president doesn't know that the atom bomb is in the works? Like, how did they keep that so under wraps?
2:21:56 Speaker 00 One of Roosevelt's several vice presidents famously said, "The vice presidency isn't worth a bucket of warm, warm piss."
2:22:04 Dwarkesh Patel? Okay, you know, Kennedy had a saying, "I'm, I'm against vice in all its forms."
2:22:11 Speaker 00 Yes, well, interesting for me.
2:22:17 Speaker 00 Roosevelt wanted to keep secret, and so did Groves. They didn't want the word to get out. They didn't want the Germans to get ahead of us. And what was the vice president for? He was to sit around in a waiting room in case the president died, which in Truman's case, he hit the jackpot.
2:22:33 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
2:22:33 Speaker 00 He was just at the right time, because Roosevelt had several vice presidents in the course of his long reign. So, from their point of view, he didn't need to know, so he didn't... I mean, it was the need to know thing again. It was compartmentalization. And of course, as soon as he became president, Groves and Stimson and several others got together with Truman and filled him in on it. Truman had some inkling, because he was he was a crusading senator who had taken on the job of preventing waste in war. And if he heard about some industry that was sloughing off and putting money in people's pockets or whatever, he would go visit their factories, call them out. And he was ready to go to Hanford,
2:23:18 Speaker 00 Washington, and Oak Ridge and find out what these people were doing. But everybody... But Stimson, whom he greatly admired, the secretary of war at the time, one of the great elder statesmen of the era, said, "Mr. Vice President, please don't go. I guarantee you that what is happening is being well managed. Please don't go." And he said, "If you say so, Mr. Stimson, I will believe you." So he knew a little bit, but he didn't know very much. So... And, you know, I don't think that helped. I don't know how much Roosevelt understood either. He was not a scientist. Truman was not even a college graduate. Truman was self-educated.
2:23:59 Dwarkesh Patel? Oh, really?
2:24:00 Speaker 00 And a well self-educated guy. Someone once said, every time I go to the Library of Congress, it's one of the senators to pull out a book, Truman's name is always there. I think he read everything in the Library of Congress that the senator said.
2:24:15 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
2:24:15 Speaker 00 So, how the secret was so... Imagine today. I mean, it's partly there wasn't any way to communicate except by letter or telephone, and you didn't call long distance unless somebody died, basically. Tell someone they had a long-distance call and their woman would start crying, or a man, for that matter. You thought your son was probably dead in Iwo Jima. So, the communication was more limited, to be sure. But, but even so, it's extraordinary.
2:24:45 Dwarkesh Patel? But what was it? Was it culturally different in that the idea of leaking something would be much more frowned upon than it is now?
2:24:52 Speaker 00 I can't remember in my entire life a more patriotic time than the Second World War. We children gathered together pieces of tinfoil from the lining of cigarette packages, about the only place you could get tinfoil in those days, aluminum foil, watered it up into balls and took them to school so they could use it to make bombers. We collected this bacon grease from cooking meat in the kitchen and took it to school in cans because it had some application to making bullets. We collected newspapers for the same reason. The Boy Scouts during the Second World War took it as their special responsibility
2:25:34 Speaker 00 to collect the fibers that come off milkweed with this little ball that blows away, because it was used in place of K-Poc to line life vests for sailors. They collected 500,000 tons of milkweed fluff in the course of the war. We were all consumed with doing, with winning this thing, which didn't seem to be a certain thing at all, as I said earlier, before, before around 1943.
2:26:12 Speaker 00 And in that world, even though, of course, there was a black market and people got to see a farmer and pick up some steaks so they didn't have to live on some more macaroni and cheese for the next month, as we all did. But despite those changes, people were very, very patriotic and fought in every way we could to win the war.
2:26:34 Dwarkesh Patel? Speaking of Elder statesman, by the way, who, since the development of the nuclear bomb, has been the wisest political leader, not necessarily in the US, and not even necessarily as a leader of state, but contributed most to the stability and peace.
2:26:50 Speaker 00 You know, it depends on what period you're talking about.
2:26:53 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
2:26:54 Speaker 00 There's a question that Oppenheimer's advice to the government after the war was really good. I said, I don't think anyone except the Oppenheimer Committee, the Achtung-Lilly and Thol Committee, has ever found a better way of thinking about eliminating nuclear weapons in a world that understands how to build them. And that really was Oppenheimer. I don't mean he deluded anybody, he just led them straight down the path, all these engineers and industrialists who were on the committee with him, skeptical men, men who wouldn't have been easily convinced of anything, but he convinced them that this was the right way to go. So he, up until he was forced out of government because he made the mistake of not supporting
2:27:38 Speaker 00 the Air Force's favorite bomb, when they found a way to destroy him, basically, and they did destroy him. I talked to one of the scientists who was his closest friend, and he said, Robert was never the same after the security hearing in 1954. He was one of Yes's smiling public men after that. It really devastated him, that basic insecurity he had as a Jew in America, if you will, from all the way from childhood haunted him. And he became the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, and he wrote a lot of nice essays, but, so, I don't know.
2:28:19 Speaker 00 The leader that I've fallen into more and more is Niels Bohr. Niels Bohr tried to figure out a way to... Bring the openness of science into a world without nuclear weapons. And he fell up against, I mean, he really, he and Robbie taught Oppenheimer the ideas that ended up in the actions of Lilienthal Plan. And he and Robbie later were the ones who started up the scientific laboratory in Geneva that is now CERN, where they built these new giant colliders.
2:29:04 Speaker 00 With the idea in mind that at very least, if the scientists have devastated Europe, I mean, remember how what things were like for this former Soviet Union. People were living on crusts of bread and bags of old potatoes. They really were. And particularly people who'd worked for the government because their pensions weren't worth anything. That's what I saw when I went back there in the spring of forty ninety-two, after the place collapsed. There just wasn't, the money wasn't worth anything. The, their salaries weren't being paid. In the midst of all of that, Europe needed something to sustain it. And of course, there was the Marshall Plan, and that was absolutely amazing. And it's the, the help it gave to Europe when it needed it most.
2:29:49 Speaker 00 But Bohr wanted to make sure, and Robbie wanted to make sure that the scientists of Europe weren't tapped to go off somewhere and build nuclear weapons. And they invented this international laboratory in Geneva, which is still a thriving enterprise, where they could do basic physics and where they'd be paid for their work and could do the kind of exciting thing that good science is without having to drift over into the dark side of the whole thing. I don't know to the extent to, well, I mean, let's face it, it more or less worked. The French had to have the bomb, you know, because they're French.
2:30:27 Dwarkesh Patel? They need their lovers, they need their bomb.
2:30:29 Speaker 00 The British had to have the bomb because they knew how to build one. They'd worked with us all during the war. And then we'd cut them off from a supply of uranium and from any new developments along the way. And more, most of all, because the British Empire was bankrupt by the end of the Second World War. And Churchill was determined to get the bomb because without it, his country would fall away and wouldn't get to the table with the big boys. So they had reasons, typical reasons for getting bombs. Because you don't want to be left out because of the prestige. Or because you have an mortal enemy who's got the bomb or is getting the bomb. That's North Korea. That's Iraq. Its attempt, it didn't get there.
2:31:14 Speaker 00 That's Pakistan and India. The countries that did go for the bomb, with the exception of the, well, even the superpowers, really. We, because of Germany, the Soviets, because of us. By and large, the countries that did go toward the bomb, finally built bombs because they were afraid of another country having the bomb. And everyone else stood back and said, well, if you'll protect us with bombs, with atomic bombs, when somebody comes calling here in South Korea or Germany or wherever, we, we won't build them. And share your knowledge of how to make energy out of nuclear power.
2:31:53 Dwarkesh Patel? There's easily another three hours of questions I could ask you, but I want to be, I, I, I can't say I want to be respectful of your time because I haven't been with the extra hour I've taken, but I want to be less than totally disrespectful of your time. So I guess the, the final maybe question that we can go out on is, next 50 years, what odds do you put on a non-test nu going off?
2:32:17 Speaker 00 A nu going off in anger?
2:32:19 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah.
2:32:19 Speaker 00 That's the way I usually put it. I think the odds are high.
2:32:24 Dwarkesh Patel? Over 50%? Next 50 years?
2:32:26 Speaker 00 No, I don't know. I, I would put a number on it, but it's certainly higher than zero and it's probably higher than 10%. And that's high enough if we're talking about millions of people dying. You know, people think, well, there was a period when people in the field were talking about, well, maybe we'll have a little regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan and that'll scare everybody to the point where they realize they got to get rid of these things.
2:32:55 Speaker 00 The same guys who did the nuclear winter studies back in the 80s, decided in 2007, first to look at nuclear winter world-scale war, using the much better computers of today. And they found out that that would be even worse than they thought it would when they had only one-dimensional atmospheric models. Then they said, "Well, what would a small regional nuclear war look like?" So they simulated a war between India and Pakistan, where each country explodes 50 Hiroshima-sized, 15-kiloton, nuclear weapons over the enemy's cities. And what would follow from that? And it turned out, as the model develops, you can see it online,
2:33:40 Speaker 00 you can watch the graph develop, that even that small an exchange, less than some of our individual hydrogen bombs, about a megaton between the two countries, would be enough to cause enough fire from burning cities to spread smoke around the world and reduce the amount of sunlight. So they figured in the end that there would be 20 million prompt deaths from the explosions themselves and the fires. But then, over the course of the next several years, up to 2 billion people would die of starvation,
2:34:24 Speaker 00 because you would have the same phenomenon that the world had in the 18th century, I think, when there was an interim of rather cold, the sun was pulling back a bit, and it was freezing hard in July in New England, and the crops failed. And a mass of people died worldwide during that period of time, something that, like the flu epidemic of 1918, everybody seems to have forgotten. I don't know where our memory goes with these things, but... And therefore, even a small so-called nuclear war would must engage the whole world.
2:35:06 Speaker 00 Because it's going to engage us if it ever goes off. So we're still in a very precarious place. And as long as any country in the world has nuclear weapons, we're going to continue to be. There is a sort of domachlese over our heads. That has been the price of nuclear deterrence. It isn't necessary that that be the price. It's possible to have nuclear deterrence without actual weapons. But it's damned hard to convince leaders, particularly in totalitarian and authoritarian countries, that that's the case. So I, you know, the odds, I don't know, but there's no such thing as a machine that doesn't
2:35:49 Speaker 00 malfunction sooner or later. And these machines, these weapons that we've make us such supernatural powers of are just machines. We built, put them together, we can take them apart. We can put the ore back in the ground if we want to. We don't have to live with this. I think we're in a big, wide, long transition. Maybe the world-scale problem of solving global warming will help with this. Will help people see that if they work together. I mean, here I am saying there could be a good outcome from this technology. Well, there was a good outcome from the telephone. There was a good outcome from television.
2:36:31 Speaker 00 But there was also a dark side, and we're going to have to learn to handle dark sides better. Maybe that's the last thing to say on this subject.
2:36:39 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, that's a sound note to close on. The book is The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to talk as much about your new book on energy, but we, when your next book comes out, we'll get a chance to talk about the remainder that we didn't get a chance to talk about. It's true honor, incredible pleasure. Thank you so much for your
2:37:01 Speaker 00 My pleasure.
2:37:02 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, for the stories, the insights. It was really, it was really wonderful. Thank you.
2:37:08 Speaker 00 Thank you.
2:37:09 Dwarkesh Patel? Hey everybody. I hope you enjoyed that episode. As always, the most helpful thing you can do is to share the podcast. Send it to people you think might enjoy it, put it in Twitter, your group chats, et cetera. Just blitz the world. Appreciate your listening. I'll see you next time. Cheers.
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