Kai Bird on the Triumph and Tragedy of Robert Oppenheimer

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, HOST: The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book, “American Prometheus,” written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Bird discusses the triumph and tragedy of Robert Oppenheimer, and the impact of his creation on our modern world with Walter Isaacson.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Bianna. And, Kai Bird, welcome to the show.

KAI BIRD, AUTHOR, “AMERICAN PROMETHEUS”: Great to be with you, Walter.

ISAACSON: You and our beloved late friend, Martin Sherwin, wrote “American Prometheus,” the epic Pulitzer Prize winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Now, it’s the most anticipated film of the year, opening this weekend. Tell us first, who was J. Robert Oppenheimer?

BIRD: Well, he was an incredibly fascinating American physicist who brought the quantum physics, the new physics to America in the 1920s by founding the — a physics department in Berkeley, University of California. And he then became — he was chosen in a very odd choice by General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, to be the scientific director of Los Alamos, the secret city they built in the desert of New Mexico, to build the gadget of what became the atomic bomb.

And then, he — you know, his odyssey is incredible. He becomes America’s most famous scientist in 1945 as the father of the atomic bomb. And then, nine years later, he’s brought down in this witch hunt of a kangaroo court trial in 1954 and publicly humiliated and becomes a nonentity. It’s an incredibly complicated story.

ISAACSON: You mentioned General Leslie Groves tapping him to run the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. Interesting scene in the book, in the movie too with Matt Damon playing, who is then-Colonel Leslie Groves, he was about to be promoted.

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DAMON: Tolman (ph) thinks you have integrity, but he also strikes me as the guy who knows more about science than people.

MURPHY: Yet here you are, you don’t take much in trust.

DAMON: I don’t take anything on trust. Why don’t you have a Nobel prize?

MURPHY: Why aren’t you a general?

DAMON: They’re making me one for this.

MURPHY: Perhaps I’ll have the same look.

DAMON: Nobel prize for making a bomb?

MURPHY: Alfred Nobel invented dynamite.

DAMON: So, how would you proceed?

MURPHY: You’re talking about turning theory into a practical weapons system faster than the Nazis.

DAMON: Who have a 12-month head start.

MURPHY: Eighteen.

DAMON: How could you possibly know that?

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ISAACSON: So, General Groves says, I don’t take anything on trust. How in the world did he pick J. Robert Oppenheimer to run the Manhattan Project?

BIRD: Well, it was the most unlikely choice. You know, Oppenheimer and he were like oil and water, particularly politically speaking. Oppy was a man of the left. General Groves was rather conservative, gruff, hardworking, determined general who wanted to build this weapon of mass destruction. And Oppenheimer is a nerdy physicist. But Groves sees in Oppenheimer that he is a synthesizer, that he is someone who can actually speak in plain English. He’s a polymath. He’s not only a physicist but he’s someone who loves French poetry and the novels of Ernest Hemingway. And he can explain things. And that’s something that Groves appreciates and he can see that there is something in Oppenheimer that is both charismatic and a young man filled with ambition. It turns out to be a brilliant choice.

ISAACSON: You describe how he becomes a public policy figure, talking about the need for arms control. There is a great scene in the movie, with one of my favorite historical characters, Niels Bohr, the great physicist, who understands the atom for the first time, played by Kenneth Branagh, one of the greatest actors of all-time. And he says, you’re going to have to deal with this once it’s all over. Let’s show that clip.

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KENNETH BRANAGH, ACTOR, “OPPENHEIMER”: I am not here to help, Robert. I knew you could do this without me.

MURPHY: Then why did you come?

BRANAGH: To talk about after. The power your about to reveal will forever outlive the Nazis, and the world is not prepared.

MURPHY: You can lift the stone without being ready for the snake that’s revealed.

BRANAGH: We have to make the politicians understand this isn’t a new weapon, it’s a new world. I’ll be out there doing what I can, but you, you are an American Prometheus, the man who gave them the power to destroy themselves, and they will respect that.

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ISAACSON: I love the phrase he uses, you are an American Prometheus. Of course, you title your book that. Tell me why, being a Prometheus, does that turn him into somebody who fights on the public policy front?

BIRD: Well, Prometheus, of course, is the Greek God who gives a fire to man, stealing it from Zeus, giving it man. And then Zeus punishes him for doing this, and this is exactly what happened to Oppenheimer. He gave mankind atomic fire. And then, nine years later, he was publicly humiliated and sort of tarred and feathered in this kangaroo court because of his policy differences with the defense establishment.

ISAACSON: Something very poignant at the end of the movie, sorry about the spoiler alert, but after they tested and it works, Oppenheimer starts to think, maybe we were right. We set ourselves on a path to destroy the world. What did he mean by that?

BIRD: Well, he means that he has given us fire, atomic fire, and the story is not finished. You know, will humanity survive the atomic age? Well, we’re not sure. We still have weapons of mass destruction. We are still coping with living with the bomb. Just look at the war in Ukraine, where

Mr. Putin has threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons. So, it’s a question mark. I think this film is so very relevant to our times.

ISAACSON: It’s partly relevant to our times because we keep unleashing new technologies and we don’t worry about them quite as much as Oppenheimer and Einstein worried about having unleashed the bomb. For example, this comes just as we are debating artificial intelligence. Did you think there was some connection to sort of how we were going to deal with our technologies?

BIRD: Oh, absolutely. And, you know, we’re a society drenched in science and technology. And yet, we don’t seem to have many scientific gurus around, scientists who are public intellectuals, who can get up and explain, again, in plain English the choices, the policy choices. You know, we need to figure out how to integrate these technologies, particularly something as revolutionary as artificial intelligence, into a humane society.

And I think part of the Oppenheimer story, and it comes across in the film brilliantly, is that what happened to Oppenheimer in 1954, the public humiliation of America’s greatest scientist, sent an unfortunate message to all scientists to be aware of becoming a public intellectual, beware of getting out of your narrow lane and talking about politics or policy because you could be tarred and feathered like Robert Oppenheimer was in 1954.

ISAACSON: Let’s explain exactly what that problem was in terms of the loyalty and the security clearance. It was because people were very afraid that the Russians had suddenly gotten a bomb and actually correctly, they had gotten it from a spy at Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs. Not somebody Oppenheimer had hired, but this was a real scare and possibility. Oppenheimer had been — his brother had been in the communist party, he had been generally sympathetic, never a party member. Explain that to us.

BIRD: Yes, it’s complicated. You know, they used the fact that he had been a man of the left. He’d been pinko (ph) but not red. He had been sympathetic to some of the communist parties’ activities, like the desegregation of a public swimming pool in Berkeley and raising money to send an ambulance to the Spanish republic cause during the Spanish civil war. And so, they used the fact that he had given money to the communist party, although he had never joined it himself, to bring him down in 1954. But their real concern was not that he was a security risk or even a spy, there is no real evidence of that, but their real concern was that here, the father of the atomic bomb, beginning in 1945, just months after Hiroshima, had begun speaking out against reliance on these weapons. And specifically, after 1949 when the Russians acquired an atomic bomb, he spoke out against the development of the hydrogen bomb, the super bomb. And this was a threat to the budgets of the Defense Department, the budget of the air force and the navy who wanted to spend more money on these weapons. So, the father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer, was becoming a threat to their budgets, and this was the real motivation to bring him down, his policy differences with the national security establishment.

ISAACSON: One of the most interesting scenes, both in your book and in the movie, and I’ll say in the movie, it’s exactly the way it is in your book, is when Oppenheimer decides he has to go see President Harry Truman. And he says, I’ve got blood on my hands, Oppenheimer says. And Truman gets mad. Explain that to us and what Truman ends up saying.

BIRD: Well, Oppenheimer went into the Oval Office with an agenda, he wanted to take advantage of this one moment, his meeting with the president, to explain his worries about the bomb and how to contain it. He wanted to make the argument for international control, for coming to some kind of arms control agreement with the Russians, and not to have an arms race.

And before he can make the argument really, Truman interrupts him and says, so, Dr. Oppenheimer, when do you think the Russians are going to get this weapon? And Oppenheimer replies, well, I’m not sure. But in a few years. And Truman again interrupts and says, no, I know, never. They’re never going to get it. And at that moment, Oppenheimer understands that the president of the United States does not understand that there are no secrets, that the physics is known by everyone and that it’s a simple engineering problem. And that any country, however poor, with whatever resources, can indeed build these weapons. And of course, the Russians are going to get it. You know, they did have some spies at Los Alamos who helped them along early on, but at some point, the Russians were going to develop these weapons. And so, out of frustration, Oppenheimer turns to Harry Truman and says, sir, you don’t understand, I have blood on my hands. And of course, this is exactly the wrong thing to tell Harry Truman, the man who made the decision to drop two such weapons on two Japanese cities. And so, he becomes very offended, the meeting ends abruptly. And as Oppenheimer walks out, as you see this in the film, it’s — as it’s portrayed directly from the book, Truman says to one of his aides, I don’t ever want to see that crybaby scientist ever again, and he never did.

ISAACSON: Tell me about Oppenheimer conflicted feelings on whether or not we should drop the bomb, and whether your feelings, I’ve read about you over the years dealing with this issue, whether dropping the bomb by Harry Truman but also all the scientists there was the right decision.

BIRD: So, Oppenheimer, he didn’t actually select the target of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but he knew that the weapon was so large that it needed — that the only — it needed a large target, and that meant a city, not a military installation, not a battleship, it needed a whole city. And he was very ambivalent. On the one hand, he was extremely aware of the tragic human consequences this was going to be used on whole city in which most of the victims are going to be civilians. And yet, he was convinced of Niels Bohr’s argument. When he arrived in Los Alamos on the last day of 1943, Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist said, Robert, I have one question for you. Is it big enough? Is the bomb big enough so that humanity will understand that it can no longer fight wars? Will it end all wars? And Oppenheimer convinced himself that, you know, the weapon had to be demonstrated in this war, on a target, so that people would understand its horrible destructiveness. And therefore, the next war would not be fought with — by two adversaries, both of whom would be armed with nuclear weapons, and that would, of course, be Armageddon. So, it’s a very complicated, even philosophical argument —

ISAACSON: And how do you feel now, because it’s been almost 80 years? And in some ways, the Niels Bohr, Oppenheimer argument, that if we use it, it will be so terrible, we’ll never use something like this again, has held true for 80 years. Also, we wake up in the morning and think, maybe Putin is going to do something. Have do you feel the resolution is so far?

BIRD: Well, it’s a gamble, isn’t it? And yes, it’s true, we have not fought a war like World War II. We fought little wars like Vietnam and Korea with great casualties, but we haven’t use nuclear weapons again. We haven’t had total warfare as we did in World War II. So, maybe Niels Bohr and Oppenheimer were right.

On the other hand, in the course of human history, it seems the odds are that these weapons will be used again unless we do it Oppenheimer suggested, which was to essentially ban them and create an international atomic authority that would have the ability to monitor and inspect every laboratory, every factory everywhere in the world to make sure that no one is building these weapons. You know, he was trying to make the argument that we need to control this technology. So, coming back again to artificial intelligence, I think if he was with us today, he would be making the same argument, that we need to understand the consequences, socially, for society of artificial intelligence and regulate it. And he would be making the same argument today, he’d be appalled that we had an arms race. He’d be appalled that Mr. Putin is threatening tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and he’d be very fearful, as I am today, that someday we might actually see another nuclear war fought.

Maybe not between Russia and America, but between Pakistan and India. You know, they’re both nations who are enemies and they’re both armed with nuclear weapons. So, I don’t know. The story is not over. And it could still end badly.

ISAACSON: Kai Bird, thank you so much for doing this.

BIRD: Thank you, Walter.

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