Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Oppenheimer: Birth of the Atomic Age with Kai Bird About this episode If someone else led the Manhattan Project, would it have gone differently? Neil deGrasse Tyson discusses theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s film, and the creation of the atomic bomb with biographer Kai Bird.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Coming up on this episode of StarTalk is my exclusive one-on-one conversation with Kai Bird. He's the author of "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer", on which Christopher Nolan's hit movie Oppenheimer is based. We talk about Oppenheimer as a person. We talk about his religious beliefs, his sensitivity to the human condition. We talk about his angst and his triumphs, about all of his efforts to build the bomb. We talk about the trial. And then we end by wondering, what is the relevance of these topics as we go into
0:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? the future? We touch on all of these topics coming up on StarTalk.
0:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
1:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hi, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.
1:13 Speaker 01 And I'm Lindsay Nix-Walker, senior producer of StarTalk. And Neil and I just co-authored a brand-new StarTalk book, coming out September 12th.
1:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, this is the third in a series of collaborations with National Geographic Books, and this one is titled "Two Infinity and Beyond." And it's available for preorder from the StarTalk website, starTalkMedia.com/books. If you do preorder the book, you have a special access to a live conversation that I'll be having with Lindsay Walker. She's been my senior producer for years. She's behind the scenes in practically every StarTalk episode you've ever seen or heard. I look forward to doing a live stream for our audience, and they'd be able to submit
2:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? questions in advance. So, we'll see you there, we'll see you then. StarTalkMedia.com/books.
2:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Welcome to StarTalk, Kai Bird.
2:18 Speaker 02 Well, Neil, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to talk about Oppenheimer things.
2:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oppenheimer, anything Oppenheimer, you're good for it.
2:29 Speaker 02 Anything Oppenheimer.
2:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you're an historian, a journalist, and I just, this is, I love your title here, your official title, Executive Director of the CUNY Graduate Center, City University of New York, Leon Levy Center for Biography. Whoa. So, so there's a whole group of people just thinking about writing about the lives of others. Is that pretty much what you do there?
2:55 Speaker 02 That's exactly what I do. We started this about 15 years ago. There were a lot of biographers around the country who complained that we didn't get respect in the academy.
3:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I would get no respect.
3:13 Speaker 02 No respect. You know, historians weren't taking us seriously. And we biographers believe that biography as a vehicle is the best form of history. It's the most accessible, it's the most read, and it's deeply detailed, and we need...
3:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And contained, right? I mean, biographies tend to be, they can be large volumes, but they're still single volumes typically. Isn't that right?
3:40 Speaker 02 Yeah. We try to make them one volume. You know, my biography of Oppenheimer I did with a co-author who, alas, is no longer with us, Martin J. Sherwin. And Marty spent 25 years on this biography. He only brought me aboard in the year 2000, and it took us another five years to produce the book. But it's a very time-consuming, deeply scholarly endeavor.
4:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As it should be.
4:13 Speaker 02 Yes.
4:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As it should be. I mean, why not? Why wouldn't it be? Well, let me ask a different kind of question here. Suppose you're such a good biographer that the subject of your book, the person, rises higher than they ever did in real life. Is that allowed?
4:33 Speaker 02 Sure.
4:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, I ask, for example, we all know the film Patton, and George C. Scott, performing in that movie, he won the Academy Award, and it's a brilliant movie, and it's a powerful movie, but I don't know that I ever would have heard of this man were it not for this movie. And then I checked other generals of the era, and he's in there, but it doesn't rise up as high as the movie does. So if you write a brilliant book that wins a Pulitzer Prize, if my records are correct, who are you to place someone in a historical notch that maybe they either don't belong, never deserved, or where does that fit in, in the total picture of your of your task?
5:19 Speaker 02 Well, that's what historians and biographers do, is reevaluate the history and the person. And in retrospect, Oppenheimer, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist, the father of the atomic bomb, is becoming more and more an iconic figure, and more and more relevant to our own times, and therefore more and more important. You know, Christopher Nolan, the director who wrote the screenplay and directed the film Oppenheimer, has been going around saying that Oppenheimer was the most important man who ever lived. And I scratched my head for a moment about that, and was wondering, I mean, really? But the more you think about it...
6:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, he has a movie to sell, just be clear about that.
6:07 Speaker 02 He does have a movie to sell, and I have a book to sell, so to speak. But, but you know, it's, it gave me pause and I thought about it and you know, Oppenheimer gave us the atomic age, which is never going to go away. And we're always, as human beings, going to have to struggle with the notion of surviving the invention of atomic weapons.
6:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Remind us who, remind us who Prometheus is, because that's centered to this concept here that you're describing.
6:40 Speaker 02 Yes. Prometheus was the Greek god who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to humankind, and then was punished by Zeus for this thievery. And he was hung on a cliff and every night a giant eagle would chew out his liver, and then it would regrow, and then the whole thing would take, take place all over again the next day. And he, you know, he was being punished, tortured for having given humankind fire. And that's exactly what Robert Oppenheimer
7:19 Speaker 02 did. He gave mankind the atomic fire. And then he was punished nine years later and dragged through a security hearing and humiliated and stripped of the security clearance. And then this was broadcast on the front pages of newspapers all over the country.
7:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Another famous book that uses or references Prometheus is the subtitle of Mary Shelley's book Frankenstein. And, yeah, what, what, what's the full title? Frankenstein, A Modern Prometheus. So, I'm fascinated. So this is Dr. Frankenstein, not so much bringing fire to the world, but creating life. This seems like you're transgressing God or something, right?
8:06 Speaker 02 Yeah. Well, so Oppenheimer was transgressing the gods in that he, he gave human beings, these very dangerous mammals, this weapon of mass destruction. And, and for that reason, he's the most important man who ever lived.
8:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, I'm so my only, I think he was a brilliant scientist. Coming to this as a scientist, I would have said it a little differently. Like I said, you have a book and a movie to sell, so I don't want to get in the way of that. Plus, they're doing well. You don't need me to say one way or another about it. But when I think of systems and I think of nations and I think of geopolitics, we were building that bomb, whether it was Oppenheimer or any one of other dozen people who could have headed that project, who were active physicists at the time.
8:59 Speaker 02 That's right.
8:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so I can't think of him as uniquely as you are describing him. I can think of him as the project needed a leader. He's a good guy to do it, so you bring him on.
9:10 Speaker 02 Well, actually, he was a most improbable selection. And yet, General Groves, the man who was in charge of the Manhattan Project, selected him. He was, Robert Oppenheimer was only 38 years old and, and yet Groves saw.
9:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wasn't that old back then? Wasn't 38 old?
9:30 Speaker 02 No. I was pretty young.
9:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, fine. Okay, okay, okay.
9:37 Speaker 02 But, you know, Oppenheimer, Groves saw in Oppenheimer a charisma, a spark, a tremendous ambition and a man who was a scientist, a quantum physicist, but who could speak in plain English. And that was very important to Groves. He needed to understand what was happening. And he realized that Robert Oppenheimer loved French poetry and the novels of Ernest Hemingway and, and, you know, he learned Sanskrit so that he could read the Bhakavagita in the original. I mean, he was a polymath and that's what made him a good scientist
10:22 Speaker 02 and actually a good administrator of this secret city in Los Alamos that built the atomic bomb.
10:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Would you say it also gave him a dose of humanity? And humility that might not have otherwise been there?
10:37 Speaker 02 Oh, absolutely. And you know, in biographers bend over backwards to take iconic historical figures like Oppenheimer and humanize them. And the film does this too. Nolan is very brilliant at compressing into only three hours.
10:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Don't tell me it was originally six hours and they cut it back. It was a three hour movie, every minute of it.
11:02 Speaker 02 As I understand it, the screenplay as he originally wrote it was four hours.
11:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right.
11:08 Speaker 02 And he had to cut it down to maintain artistic control in Hollywood. But no, the film and the book both bend over backwards to, to explain actually how human and fragile the young Robert Oppenheimer was. This is a man, and this is portrayed in the film, who has a deep emotional psychic crisis at the age of 22, when he begins to fail for the first time in his life in the, as an experimental physicist. He keeps breaking things in the lab and, and then he suddenly realizes his forte is not experimental physics, but theoretical physics.
11:51 Speaker 02 And he, he's just, he happens to be coming of age just as quantum is being discovered.
11:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's a whole catalog of physicists of the era who all had a, were touched by or touched quantum physics, which was being invented in real time in the 1920s and early 30s. So it was, it was a remarkable period in physics. I try to let people know that we are in the centennial decade.
12:17 Speaker 02 That's right.
12:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of the discovery of quantum physics. And that was a watershed decade, not only the quantum, but Hubble discovered that there's more than one galaxy in the universe and that the universe is expanding. All that happened in the 1920s.
12:32 Speaker 02 It's incredible, yes. And yet, most Americans, most people do not understand quantum physics and...
12:42 Speaker 02 Still, still, it's hard, it's hard to describe. And the film, I think, I'd be interested in your opinion of this. The film, I think, makes a really valiant attempt to visually explain quantum physics. At one point, he has the young Robert Oppenheimer as a young physicist and wandering through a art gallery and comes across a Picasso painting that's in the Cubist mode. And he's staring at it.
13:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They zoom in on it.
13:17 Speaker 02 And they zoom in on it. And of course, this is a metaphor. Nolan is using Picasso's painting as a metaphor for quantum and how different it forces you to look at the world.
13:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, a disruption of perspective, which Cubism was to art. There have been some art historians who have analogized the two as arising in approximately the same era. And I think they tried to mention a cause and effect. I'm less convinced of that, but I'm intrigued that they did correspond. It was the era of relativity. Are you looking at the front of someone or the side of their head or the back of their head? There was a lot of modern physics that was disrupting our sense of what is normal and what isn't. And the art world was, I think, on some of the same track there. So let me ask you about the, let me give you my reaction to some parts of the film.
14:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The, as a scientist, I know most of the Oppenheimer story. But I'm not one of those, oh, they got that wrong. I'm not that guy. I'm not that guy. But what I did notice, and is this you in your original writings or is this Christopher Nolan? Who, by the way, if you allow me to give a quick commercial, we interviewed Christopher Nolan on StarTalk some years ago when we were just talking about how many films he's done that disrupt the timeline of events in the world. So he's, he's a very good sci-fi thinker in that regard. And we had a wonderful conversation with him, and you can find it on, in our archives.
14:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just search for Nolan and you'll go straight there. So what I found is the movie is full of these.
15:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? These simple gestures of scene, of script line, of gesture, of movement, of camera angle, that capture some interesting fact about the era. And, and to, to accomplish that without it looking forced, I thought was brilliant. And I'll just give one simple example, okay?
15:36 Speaker 02 Okay.
15:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Richard Feynman.
15:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Plays the bongos.
15:41 Speaker 02 And he's not identified.
15:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And he's not identified, and there's a scene where there's, at a party, and there's just some guy there, you look for him from behind, and he's playing the bongos. It's, it just, it just goes by. It doesn't zoom in on, here's Richard Feynman, you all heard, no, it's just a guy.
15:59 Speaker 02 Just a guy, and Nolan expects the audience to wonder about that, and to maybe go and find out, who is that guy playing the bongos? Was that real or not?
16:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is he giving too much credit for the audience to dig up that level?
16:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The movie's full of those details, is my point.
16:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, oh, I've seen the movie five times now, and each time I see it, I see new layers, new little.
16:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Excellent. And, and you, and you wrote the damn book.
16:31 Speaker 02 Yes. And it's only 720 pages.
16:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, another one is, again, Feynman goes un, un, I mean, the actor who plays Feynman is credited in the end credits, I stayed through them all, but Feynman is not identified as a character in the story itself. And there's a scene where there's someone sitting in the car.
16:55 Speaker 02 That's right.
16:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As they're all slathering themselves with the, the UV block for this explosion, and it's sitting in the car, and they said, you want some of this? And he says, no, the windshield blocks nearly all of the UV. This is a physics fact, physicists, we all know this, but that was famously written in one of Feynman's biographies.
17:18 Speaker 02 That's right.
17:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And that's Feynman saying that.
17:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
17:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And, and with a good rejoinder, well, okay, the window blocks the UV, but what blocks the window?
17:29 Speaker 02 Well.
17:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In the explosion. So, so little things like that were persistent throughout the storytelling. And he stitched it all together smoothly. I didn't feel anything was forced. And all of the elements of this, little things like the, we knew that in Germany, there was Hitler and that sort of the racist regime that that was. They elevated experimental physics to a higher level than theoretical physics. And so the Jews were relegated to the theory because that wasn't as high ranked. And so that would include Heisenberg and Einstein and all of these folks.
18:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so there's that one place in the movie where they say, oh, he'll be, if we know this, then Heisenberg will know it. And they say, no, he's Jewish. And they don't give him access to the lab.
18:26 Speaker 02 Right.
18:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so that encapsulates an entire worldview that the Nazis had. But you can't off-ramp to that in a movie that's through the POV of Oppenheimer. But you can throw a bone to it, and that's the examples of what I'm saying here.
18:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's incredible that Nolan has weaved all this into the film. And there, no, I, I've seen it five times, as I said, and I read the screenplay before they started to film. And he wanted me to do that to identify any gross errors. And I couldn't find any. It's remarkable in a Hollywood movie.
19:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He's a good guy. And he wrote the screenplay. Yeah, he's a good.
19:13 Speaker 02 He wrote the screenplay and it's, you know, it's damn accurate.
19:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, no, I did find an inaccuracy and I tweeted about it. I just thought I'd tell you.
19:22 Speaker 02 Okay, what'd you find?
19:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But let me just say, I led off the tweet by saying, he got so much correct that I give him a hall pass.
19:35 Speaker 02 Okay.
19:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. So, he's in the desert on July 16th, alright? This is three weeks after the summer solstice. The summer has the longest twilight of the year. It's 5:30 in the morning. He would have been well into twilight at 5:30 in the morning and would not have been pitch dark. But I give it to him because now he gets to have the explosion against complete darkness. There it is. I grant him that artistic license.
20:08 Speaker 02 Are you sure you took into account daylight savings time?
20:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I thought about that. So even including daylight savings time, that's a... Yeah, I totally took that into account.
20:32 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
20:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, as a biographer, you don't always know necessarily in advance you're going to be writing about a scientist. So, how do you... You know, you know how to think about people and places and relationships, I presume that's the baseline for you as an author and as a biographer and as a journalist. But now there's a subject matter. Science is as much a subject as the person Oppenheimer is. So how do you do your research to get the right amount of science into the biography of a scientist?
21:26 Speaker 02 Well, that's an interesting question. And precisely because it's so hard, or it's a different level of research that needs to be done when you choose a scientist. At my biography center at City University, we give out four fellowships a year to working biographers. And we've now established a fifth that is funded by the Alfred Sloan Foundation that is dedicated exclusively to doing biographies of scientists.
22:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so Sloan has a strong science leaning in their funding. So that makes complete sense here.
22:05 Speaker 02 And we did that because there's sort of another mountain to climb. If you're a biographer, when you're trying to write about a scientist. So coming back to Oppenheimer, you know, I'm the guy in college who took a course in physics, but it was called Physics for Poets.
22:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
22:27 Speaker 02 I confess. So I don't understand.
22:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? By the way, I heard this, just to slip this in here. There's Newton's laws of motion. And one of them is for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. That's one of Newton's three laws. So I was told this by someone who took Physics for Poets, that there's a poetical version of that law. And it's, you cannot touch without being touched.
22:54 Speaker 02 Okay.
22:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's beautiful.
22:55 Speaker 02 That's beautiful.
22:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's good.
22:57 Speaker 02 Good poetry, good science. So, yeah, no, so I had that problem trying to, as the biographer, writing about Oppenheimer's love life, his politics, his education, his privileged background growing up in New York City, but also his science is difficult. How do you explain what he was doing with quantum physics in the late 20s and 30s and black hole theory? And it was, it was... Very difficult. And particularly difficult to try to be able to explain some of this, some of his writings
23:42 Speaker 02 about physics and in plain English, in a language that people could understand in a biography. And anyway, it was hard.
23:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Among the mountains you scaled, that's one of them.
23:56 Speaker 02 Yep.
23:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
23:58 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
23:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, your book came out in 05. A Pulitzer Prize would have given it sufficient visibility at the time. Christopher Nolan is making films around then, I think. Why did it take so long to show up on the silver screen?
24:15 Speaker 02 No one handed him the book until early 2021.
24:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. Okay.
24:23 Speaker 02 You know, it's the uncertainty principle at work.
24:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I see what you did there, okay.
24:32 Speaker 02 You know, things happen by chance. And yes, Nolan turns out to have been the perfect director because of what you just said earlier, that he's always been interested in his film work about issues of time and space and memory. And so he got this book by pure chance in early 21.
24:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Not from you.
25:00 Speaker 02 Not from me, no.
25:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
25:02 Speaker 02 It came actually through a businessman who had studied physics actually at MIT, who bought the film auction back in 2015 and tried over, you know, six, seven years to get the film made and was failing. And finally, he went up, got in the middle of the pandemic, went on a private jet out to California. And this is a man named Dave Wargo. And he just had a passion for the subject and he flew out to Hollywood and had one contact there who happened to be a producer for.
25:41 Speaker 02 For Nolan. And that guy handed the book to Christopher Nolan. He read it. And Nolan, without contacting me or Marty, sat down over the spring and summer of 21 and wrote a very long screenplay. And then the first I heard about it was in September of 21. And he called me up and said that he had picked up the film option. He'd written a script and he was gonna do it.
26:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you, did you know, did you know of him at the time?
26:11 Speaker 02 Did I know?
26:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As a director?
26:12 Speaker 02 Did I? Well, I'd seen the Batman trilogy. I'd seen Memento. I'd seen Interstellar.
26:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So. Okay, all right. So you knew his portfolio?
26:23 Speaker 02 Yeah.
26:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mm hmm, mm hmm. Well, I think he was the right guy to do this. And I think possibly even at the right time, because the nuclear proliferation and the risks and tensions around the world now make the nuclear age much more relevant today than even just a few years ago. And this could sensitize people in a way that matters going forward.
26:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, we're worrying about Putin threatening to use tactical nukes in Ukraine. It's just, it's astonishing.
26:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, right. So let's, so the movie is two, it's basically two movies. There's the bomb and then there's the trial, or just his, his experience. Is your book, book split in that same kind of way?
27:09 Speaker 02 Well, you know, like most biographies, it's told chronologically.
27:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so therefore it would be.
27:16 Speaker 02 But, you know, it's, I'm very happy with the way the film came out because at one point when, just after I joined Marty Sherwin on his 20-year project at that point in the year 2000, he at one point turned to me and he said, you know, you and I wouldn't be spending all these years writing this long biography if it was just a story about the father of the atomic bomb. If it was just about building the H bomb, the atomic bomb and.
27:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of course, there's already a book with that title, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.
27:50 Speaker 02 By Richard Rhodes, right.
27:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Also, also a Pulitzer Prize winning book.
27:54 Speaker 02 That's right. That's right. And but Marty said that what made it really compelling as a story was the arc, the fact that Oppenheimer in 1945 was hailed as America's most distinguished scientist. His image was on the cover of Time and Life. And then nine years later, he's brought down and humiliated in this trial, this kangaroo court proceeding, and he becomes a public nonentity. That's what makes the story really interesting. And of course, it's a story about McCarthyism. So that's a story about our divisive politics today. So all of one piece. It's really relevant.
28:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's resonance.
28:39 Speaker 02 Yep.
28:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But so why? Because we all knew that McCarthyism was the backdrop. But McCarthy himself spent all his time bringing up like actors and, you know, no one's so heroic as Oppenheimer.
28:55 Speaker 02 Well, yes and no.
28:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
28:59 Speaker 02 Because in 1953, 54, one young Roy Cohen, McCarthy's chief of staff, tried to subpoena Oppenheimer. He wanted him to testify as to his communist leanings.
29:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
29:19 Speaker 02 And.
29:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? See, what's behind my question is, at no time in the film, unless I missed it, but I was pretty attentive, no one even mentions McCarthy.
29:28 Speaker 02 That's right.
29:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's just the, it's a framing of this.
29:32 Speaker 02 Right.
29:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so my, my sense was, well, is this all happening above McCarthy's pay grade?
29:39 Speaker 02 It was, exactly. That's a good way to put it.
29:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right? I mean, because we're not talking about security clearance for Hollywood actors who you want to blacklist.
29:48 Speaker 02 Right.
29:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right? We're talking about something that involved the military, the White House, and all these other layers.
29:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, the Eisenhower administration and Dwight Eisenhower, the president himself, made a decision that they had to bring down Oppenheimer because he was going public as America's most prominent scientist in his opposition to the building of the hydrogen bomb and to continued reliance on nuclear weapons as a defense. He said famously, just three months after Hiroshima, he said. These are weapons of terror. These are weapons for aggressors. They were weapons that were used on an essentially already defeated enemy.
30:32 Speaker 02 So, you know, he was speaking some really tough, hard truths to the American public. And this antagonized the American defense establishment, the generals, the Pentagon. And Eisenhower personally...
30:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But even Eisenhower, because Eisenhower famously in his farewell address, he coined the phrase "military industrial complex."
30:54 Speaker 02 That's true, that's right.
30:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Where he warned us that if you build up an entire industry that's equipped for war, then, and it's an economic part of our nation, then it would never go away and you'd always have to be fighting wars to support it. And so I would think he would have a slightly more charitable view of Oppenheimer's thoughts. But that wasn't the case?
31:21 Speaker 02 Well, it wasn't the case early in his administration in 1953 and 54 because Eisenhower latched on to the notion, he became convinced that atomic weapons are cheap and that they would represent a cheap defense vis a vis the Soviet Union and preparing and deterring a threat in Soviet land invasion of Western Europe. And of course, we now realize that these weapons are not cheap. We're now spending over the next 10 years, a trillion dollars to modernize our current nuclear weaponry.
32:00 Speaker 02 And so these weapons are not cheap and Eisenhower was wrong about that. And he became convinced by Louis Strauss, the man that he appointed as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1953.
32:17 Speaker 02 He, Straws convinced Eisenhower that Oppenheimer was a security threat. And in any case, he was someone that needed to be brought down because he was opposing their desire to build more of these weapons, and specifically the hydrogen bomb.
32:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, and the hydrogen bomb, you know, is 10 to 100, 1,000 times more deadly. And that's a whole other world. Right?
32:41 Speaker 02 Yeah. Oh, it's much worse.
33:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So here's an interesting question. And this was brought up in random banter, it wasn't random, in some of the banter of the film. And it's been discussed among historians that Truman just viewed the atom bomb as just another weapon in the arsenal of a war, not a specially deadly weapon. Of course, it was more deadly than others, but they made it clear, just a few weeks earlier, we had firebombed Tokyo, killing 100,000 people. And this bomb would not even kill that many. So, so, um, are we to believe or understand that Oppenheimer
33:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? didn't see this as just the next weapon in war? That he really saw this as some kind of presidium through which we walk and could never return?
33:57 Speaker 02 Yes, Oppenheimer understood that. From the, even before Trinity, even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he understood that this was an extraordinary weapon that would change things. In fact, his hope was that it would be perceived as so awful, such a terrible weapon, that it would end all war. And of course, you know, that was the hope. It's still, it's still the hope of many people. Truman had a much more simple understanding. And his, you know, he, he thought it was a weapon that would help to end the war. But, you know, after reading about what had happened on the second, the fact that a
34:41 Speaker 02 second Japanese city had been hit at Nagasaki, Truman actually noted in his diary that he had given the order to stop any further use of these weapons because he couldn't, he couldn't bear the thought of all those women and children being killed. This is in his private diary. So even Truman begins to evolve and have a clear understanding of the extraordinary awfulness of this weapon. And yet, there's that scene in the film where Oppenheimer tries to come into the Oval Office and explain that we should be concentrating on control, regulation, disarmament, ban the bomb.
35:25 Speaker 02 And Truman turns to him and interrupts him and says, "Well, Dr. Oppenheimer, when do you think the Russians are going to get the bomb?" And Oppenheimer says, "Well, in a few years." And Truman says, "No, no, never. He thinks that the Russians aren't capable of producing this." And Oppenheimer tries to argue, you know, "They have good physicists, too."
35:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, science doesn't know national borders.
35:50 Speaker 02 Exactly, yeah. Once the secret is out, everyone knows that this can be done. And he actually gives a speech around this time publicly in which he thinks, you know, he says, "You may think that these weapons are very expensive because we spent $2 billion on them, but they are actually cheap in that any country, however poor, that wants to build these weapons will be able to do so. It's just an engineering problem. The physics is all known."
36:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, that point was made, definitely. Now, let me ask you, what's the term that you guys use? Counterhistorical?
36:31 Speaker 02 Counterfactual.
36:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Counterfactual. So, thank you. So, let me offer a counterfactual scenario. If someone other than Oppenheimer were chosen as head of the Manhattan Project, whether or not it would have been interesting material for you to write a book on, do you think the project would have gone any differently than it did?
36:55 Speaker 02 Well, yes, and Oppenheimer was a much more interesting physicist to write about because he's
37:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, that's what I'm saying. In a counterfactual world, it doesn't care about you.
37:07 Speaker 02 Yes.
37:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don't care about history, okay?
37:11 Speaker 02 Yes, no, of course, Oppenheimer was endlessly complex and an interesting man to write about. But if he had not been chosen as scientific director at Los Alamos, they would have chosen someone else and the work would have been done, probably not as quickly as he was able to build the gadget. Probably not within two and a half years, probably not by the end of the war. So it would have happened after the end of World War II. And that actually poses another interesting counterfactual, because if the bomb hadn't been demonstrated during World War II in combat, then Oppenheimer's fear and Niels Bohr's
37:56 Speaker 02 fear, the famous Danish physicist, quantum physicist, their fear was
38:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Who they smuggled out of Northern Europe.
38:06 Speaker 02 That's right, in a small airplane. Their fear was that the next war would be fought by armed adversaries, both of whom would be armed with nuclear weapons, and this would be Armageddon, because people wouldn't realize what a genocidal weapon this was.
38:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what is it about Oppenheimer that you think had him make, turn this into an efficient operation? Because the military is all over it, right? I mean, they're, you know, military gets stuff done when they need to get stuff done.
38:44 Speaker 02 That's right.
38:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because the money is flowing like rivers in a war effort. So why are you so confident that someone else would have taken longer?
38:52 Speaker 02 Well, everyone that we interviewed at Los Alamos, who was there at the time, they always made a point of telling us this, that Oppie was just extraordinary, and that they had numerous Mountains to climb in building this gadget and technical issues to solve, engineering problems. And Oppenheimer was simply good at sort of standing back of the room and letting everyone, letting his scientists argue for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour. And then he would step in precisely at the right moment and summarize in plain English
39:35 Speaker 02 the options and where the path forward was. And he was charismatic. He motivated people to work hard and to play hard at La Salamos. And it's just, you know, it's extraordinary that, you know, only one physicist quit, walked away. And that was Joseph Rotblatt, who decided that he didn't want to have anything more to do with this when he learned from General Groves that in late 1944, that the gadget was probably going to be used on Japan, not Germany, because the Germans were so close to being defeated. So at that point, he walked away.
40:18 Speaker 02 But Oppenheimer, he persuaded his scientists to stay on the job, to work even harder. And precisely because he wanted to see this weapon demonstrated at least, maybe not in combat, but demonstrated during this war, so that the next war wouldn't be fought with nuclear weapons.
40:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So in the second half of the movie where we see basically the trial of Oppenheimer, that's very different material to work with relative to physicists knocking heads, trying to build the most destructive weapon ever. It's people sitting in a room having a conversation. So in your biography, did you use any special tactics for the reader to keep them interested? Or was the subject matter so enticing all on its own that you just simply needed to recount it and that would work as the prose of your work?
41:19 Speaker 02 Well, that's a good question, but I think the answer is that, you know, it was a courtroom drama. And as a courtroom drama, the actual testimony from of all the participants of Oppenheimer, of Louis Strauss.
41:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We have it all.
41:35 Speaker 02 It's there and it's very dramatic.
41:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We have it all.
41:39 Speaker 02 And Christopher Nolan actually uses straight out of the transcripts, much of the dialogue for the.
41:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, so no disrespect, but that whole part of the story wrote itself.
41:49 Speaker 02 Exactly. I'm confessing, that was the easiest part. I just told you the hardest part was describing quantum physics.
41:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. So what I thought was odd is in the narrow interrogation room, Oppenheimer is always on the back couch while people are testifying. Is this, would he have been in the room at the same time?
42:11 Speaker 02 Oh, yes. Oh, yes. That was everything, nothing was normal about this.
42:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, well, that's the answer.
42:18 Speaker 02 It wasn't a courtroom proceeding. They make that clear in the movie, too. It was, you know, a security hearing, no rules applied. But yes, he was there to defend his security clearance.
42:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just to be clear, it was not a literal courtroom, but the story unfolded the way courtroom dramas unfold.
42:38 Speaker 02 Exactly.
42:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The dynamics of the questioner and the squirming person who's just been questioned. And yeah, okay.
42:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. No, it was a tiny little room and there was a sofa and Oppi sat there with, often with Kitty by his side, listening to this awful, these awful accusations that he was commie, spy perhaps, not worthy of a security clearance.
43:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What the movie also threw a bone to, and I don't mean that to belittle it just because it's a, the movie has so much to talk about, it can only just briefly address what ultimately are very important facts that.
43:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Not all communism is the same, right? I mean, you can, there are variations of communism that the American government would find offensive. And then there's parts of communism where you just care about the worker who's being abused by, by, you know, management or something. So I thought that was addressed. Would you agree?
43:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think that came across very effectively. You know, Happe was, you know, he was, he was a science nerd in the twenties and then his girlfriend Jean Tatlock, you know, made him guilty for not caring more, feeling empathy for what was happening politically around him.
44:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? For the movement, yeah, right.
44:08 Speaker 02 In the midst of the depression. And, uh, and so, you know, he became active in Berkeley issues like trying to help to desegregate a public swimming pool in Berkeley. This was a project of the local Communist Party. He helped to raise money to send an ambulance to the Spanish Republic in the midst of the Civil War in 1936.
44:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, right, right.
44:34 Speaker 02 I mean, these are the kinds of issues that motivated him to contribute to causes of the Communist Party.
44:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And that, that came across, right? Because they said, did you give money to the Communist Party? I gave money to a cause that they managed.
44:48 Speaker 02 Right.
44:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That, that was clear, very clear.
44:50 Speaker 02 And in the, you know, in the, in the book, we go into great detail trying to wrestle with the mystery of whether he actually joined the party. And Marty and I weighed the evidence and decided that really, you know, he wasn't a joiner. He was a free intellectual. He discouraged his own brother Frank from joining the party. Frank did it anyway. Um, and yes, he contributed, you know, as much as $400 a year to sort of Communist Party activities, but he was a man of the left in the 1930s, which was not, not unusual.
45:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, not weird.
45:28 Speaker 02 On university campuses, yeah.
45:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And something you may know, I only know because my father was active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, that so much of Martin Luther King's efforts was to bring dignity and suitable compensation to the working class black person in America. Uh, and... The people who would have been ideally suited to attempt that would have been the American Communist Party, because it's all about workers. But the movement knew that you can't have communists leading this movement, because it would be squashed, because communists are, you know, the official Communist Party line denies God and all the rest of this. So you get a preacher to lead this.
46:14 Speaker 02 Right.
46:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you get a preacher to lead the labor movement, then you can't say he's communist, because he's a preacher, right? So there was tactical steps invoked, just to protect yourself against what would otherwise be a government intrusion, which already did happen anyway, but yeah.
46:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think civil rights leaders at the time understood the lessons of the McCarthyism and the lessons of the Oppenheimer trial. You know, you do not want to be tarred and feathered as a rat. And actually, you raise an interesting point, because Martin Luther King, at one point, early on, he had a close advisor named Stanley Levinson, who was a member of the Communist Party, and the FBI knew it, and, you know, he had to gently get, distance himself from his relationship with Levinson, precisely for that reason.
47:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, right. And two other points. I want to go back to something just briefly. So was it a tactical decision for the film, if not your book, to make no specific mention of McCarthy? Because those McCarthy trials were going on at the same time as what was being portrayed.
47:32 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. And the famous Army McCarthy hearings, televised hearings, were that spring of 54. So, yeah, I think, you know, Nolan's film is very complicated. It's conveying a lot of complicated history. And this is hinted at, but you don't need to go, you know, it's not a film about McCarthyism. It's a film about what happened to Oppenheimer. Now, in the book, we talk a lot about what Joe McCarthy was doing, and Roy Cohn, and... And their attempt actually to subpoena Oppenheimer, which was thwarted actually by the Eisenhower White House, who sent over the Vice President, one Richard Nixon, to explain to Joe McCarthy that he really was getting in the way.
48:16 Speaker 02 They had other plans for dealing with Oppenheimer, i.e. the security hearings.
48:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, there it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
48:23 Speaker 02 So.
48:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I'm a little jealous that you're calling him Oppie.
48:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do I get to call him Oppie? Or do I have to be his biographer to be on a nickname basis with the man?
48:39 Speaker 02 You just have to like the guy. So all his students called him Oppie.
48:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
48:45 Speaker 02 All his closest, you know, colleagues.
48:49 Speaker 02 Kitty, his wife, called him Robert, but.
48:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, I'll be in spirit. I'll think of him as Oppie, then I'll feel real close to him. So we're running short on time here. Do you have any just any reflections you want to share that might give insight to those who either haven't seen the film yet? Or don't know much about Oppenheimer? I mean, you would have deeper insights than practically anyone in the world on this. Just think, something to think about going forward, reflecting on the past?
49:18 Speaker 02 Well, I would just like to emphasize that the story of Robert Oppenheimer is a story for our time. It's a story about our fear of nuclear weapons, which we're still grappling with. You know, the atomic age began with Oppenheimer, and it's still over, and the story could end badly. It's a story about politics and McCarthyism, which we're still living with, because Joe McCarthy explains a lot about one Donald Trump.
49:51 Speaker 02 And it's also a story about the role of science and technology in our society. We're drenched with science and technology.
49:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Lives and in geopolitics, right?
50:01 Speaker 02 Yes, and yet many of our citizens don't seem to understand science. And part of the reason I'm convinced this is true is that we don't have, we don't value scientists as public intellectuals. And we don't give them a platform on which to get up and explain and debate the consequences of science. So we're seeing this beginning to happen with the debate over the implications for artificial intelligence. But we need more of this. And this was illustrated most dramatically during the pandemic, when public health officials
50:42 Speaker 02 like Anthony Fauci were tarred and feathered politically and their patriotism questioned and their honesty questioned in the same way that Oppenheimer's integrity was questioned in the 1990s.
50:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're saying we haven't learned a damn thing?
50:58 Speaker 02 We haven't learned a damn thing.
51:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? On that happy note.
51:06 Speaker 02 Sorry.
51:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. Well, I mean, your book and then the film, of course, these are two different marketplaces. The people who love to read and the people who only see movies. We get to hit them on both sides with these very important contemporary issues because everything old is new again.
51:24 Speaker 02 Yes.
51:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, Kai Bird, it's been a delight to have you as my guest on StarTalk in this exclusive conversation. Let me remind people, Kai Bird, along with the late Martin Sherwin, is author of American Prometheus, The Triumph and Chady of J. Robert Oppenheimer, came out in 2005, won a Pulitzer Prize, on which the recent Christopher Nolan film, Oppenheimer, is based. And you're the executive director of the CUNY Graduate Center, we all love CUNY here, at the Leon Levy Center for Biography. I'm delighted to even know that exists as a thing. So Kai, thanks for being my guest.
52:02 Speaker 02 Well Neil, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you for having me.
52:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Excellent. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.
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