--- title: Atomic Bomb Expert Weighs in on Oppenheimer description: Author Evan Thomas on whether the U.S. could have won the war in the Pacific without dropping the bombs and what he thought of the movie. canonical: https://time.com/6297240/atomic-bomb-expert-oppenheimer-interview/ author: Olivia B. Waxman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-07-24T21:29:21.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:51:04.376Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: An Atomic Bomb History Expert on the ‘Terrible Moral Dilemma’ in 'Oppenheimer' og:description: Author Evan Thomas on whether the U.S. could have won the war without dropping them and what he thought of the movie. og:url: https://time.com/6297240/atomic-bomb-expert-oppenheimer-interview/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5cee0000cb61e10d/698a3eeeb21a9ca5055076e4/oppenheimer-dilemma.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: oppenheimer-dilemma og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: An Atomic Bomb History Expert on the ‘Terrible Moral Dilemma’ in 'Oppenheimer' twitter:description: Author Evan Thomas on whether the U.S. could have won the war without dropping them and what he thought of the movie. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5cee0000cb61e10d/698a3eeeb21a9ca5055076e4/oppenheimer-dilemma.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # An Atomic Bomb History Expert on the ‘Terrible Moral Dilemma’ in _Oppenheimer_ > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. ## Video: The Real Oppenheimer - A Nuclear Historian's Perspective [Watch (HLS stream): The Real Oppenheimer - A Nuclear Historian's Perspective](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/I2oPNLYU.m3u8) (4:43)  _Published 2023-07-21. As the movie "Oppenheimer" opens across America, Alex Wellerstein - Historian of Nuclear Weapons at Stevens Institute of Technology - gives his perspective on a man he has studied his entire career._  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Jul 24, 2023 9:29 PM UTC  Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in the 2023 film, Oppenheimer. Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in the 2023 film, Oppenheimer. Universal Pictures  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Jul 24, 2023 9:29 PM UTC The summer’s most popular history-related film is [Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster _Oppenheimer,_](https://time.com/6295742/oppenheimer-review/) about the theoretical physicist and atomic bomb mastermind [J. Robert Oppenheimer](https://time.com/6295760/oppenheimer-true-story/)_._ The movie comes 78 years after the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, respectively, killing an estimated [more than 200,000 people](https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/bombings-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-1945/). On August 15, 1945, Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender, and the document was formally signed on September 2, 1945. To see how much the movie gets right and wrong about the end of World War II in the Pacific, we called up an expert on this history, former TIME editor Evan Thomas, whose recent book _Road to Surrender_ talks about Oppenheimer and focuses on three key men involved in the decision to drop the bomb: Henry Stimson, the American Secretary of War; Gen. Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific; and Shigenori Togo, Japan’s foreign minister. What Oppenheimer and these characters have in common is that “they all suffered from this terrible moral dilemma of how do you end a war, because you have to kill people to save people,” Thomas says. “And in this case, not just kill a few people, but kill 200,000 people to save more people. Nobody wants to be in that position.” **Read More:** [_In the Lab Oppenheimer Built, the U.S. Is Building Nuclear Bomb Cores Again_](https://time.com/6296743/los-alamos-lab-plutonium-pits-nuclear-weapons/) --- ### More from TIME --- In a phone conversation on July 24, Thomas addressed common misconceptions about Japan’s readiness to surrender, whether the U.S. could have won the war in the Pacific without dropping them, and what he thought of the movie. The following conversation has been lightly edited. ### **How well did** **_Oppenheimer_** **capture the U.S. decision to drop the bomb?** Here’s the funny thing about the decision to drop the bomb: there was no decision. What do I mean by that? It’s not like a bunch of men sat in a room and they said, “Are we going to drop the bomb or not?” That’s not the way it worked. There was a huge amount of momentum to drop that bomb no matter what. \[The U.S.\] spent $2 billion on it. In Oppenheimer’s case, he was torn because he worked so hard on it, \[and\] wanted to know that we could do it. There’s pride involved. There’s ambition. The movie captures that. But it’s not like they’re sitting in a room debating whether to do this. They’re going to do it. There’s a glancing impression that we could have gotten away with not dropping these bombs. That’s not true. ### **Your book has colorful tidbits about Oppenheimer. You cite Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard’s diary, which claims Oppenheimer said “the atomic bomb is sh-t” at one point— meaning it makes a big bang, but it isn’t useful as a weapon in war.** This shows up in the movie, too. Leo Szilard helped invent the bomb. He wants to stop us from using it. He tried to get to Truman, and he did get to Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer wants to shut him down, so he’s kind of impatient and contemptuous with Szilard, and he said that the bomb is sh-t—just a giant firecracker. It’s a heck of a bomb; it’s not a firecracker, but he’s trying to deflect Szilard. ### **You talk in your book about how Oppenheimer believed that using the atomic bomb could end all wars because people would see how terrible it was.** Yes, they do capture this in the movie. Oppenheimer knows it’s not really a combat weapon. It’s really a terror weapon. It’s just to terrify people. It’s really not for tactical advantage. The way Oppenheimer chooses to try to control that dissent is by saying, “Look, we use this thing, and we’ll never have to use it again. Because it’s so horrible. This will be the end of the war. People will see how terrible these weapons are, and so they won’t use them again.” Oppenheimer said that in various ways, and that comes through strongly in the movie. ### **Any myths about this history you want to debunk or set the record straight on?** The big one was that the Japanese were ready to surrender and would have surrendered even if we had not dropped those bombs. I think that is a myth. Oppenheimer seems to have believed that the weapon was used against a country that was about to surrender—as he puts it, essentially defeated. The Japanese were essentially defeated—that’s true. Their fleet had been sunk and their cities had been burned. But they were not ready to surrender. ### **Did the bombs lead to the Japanese surrender on Sep. 2?** Two atomic bombs forced them to. The dominant reason \[the U.S.\] used the bomb was to end the war. \[The U.S.\] thought the only way to end the war was to use these two terrible weapons. ### **Could the U.S. have won the war without dropping the atomic bombs on Japan?** Yes, they could have by starving the Japanese to death, by blockading Japan and continuing to bomb Japan with conventional weapons. Eventually, Japan would have surrendered. But it would have been a nightmare because there would have been mass starvation. The Japanese were running out of food. The rice crop was not coming in. It is a certainty that there would have been mass famine that fall, that winter. Hundreds of millions of people would have died. There might have been a civil war. ### **Your book focuses on three men central in the effort to end World War II in the Pacific. Why are they influential?** I chose these three people because they faced intense moral ambiguity. Two Americans were in favor of using the bomb but they struggled with it. Tooey Spatz, who is the Air Force General, writes in his own diary that he’s against using the bomb but he’s convinced that it will save lives. Stimson in his diary worries that science is going to overcome man’s ability to control things— that has some relevance today to AI. Togo is the only senior official in Japan who wants to surrender. It’s not inevitable the Japanese are going to surrender at all. There’s a coup attempt—soldiers running to the palace, trying to break the record of the Emperor’s surrender speech so that he can’t surrender in the morning. It’s that close. ### **How did the U.S. go from dropping the atomic bombs to calling Japan one of its biggest allies?** The great thing about this country—and it’s not true of every country—is that we are magnanimous in victory. We wanted to create a strong and democratic Japan and working with the Japanese, we succeeded. It was messy. We helped them jumpstart their own economy, and they became our ally pretty quickly against Soviet communism. I’m not saying this was a perfect process. But, by and large, as conquests go, the American conquest of Japan was magnanimous and constructive. ### **How is studying this period surrounding the decision to drop the atomic bomb in 1945** [**relevant in 2023**](https://time.com/6296257/oppenheimer-nuclear-nonproliferation/)**?** Nine countries have these weapons. Some of them are not the most stable countries, like Pakistan and North Korea. There’s talk of Russia using \[nukes\] as a tactical weapon in Ukraine. Wargame scenarios are not all that far fetched. I’ll give you one: the Chinese use missiles to sink American ships. And the United States retaliates by attacking Chinese missile bases on mainland China. The Chinese escalate by using a tactical nuclear weapon against American ships. Now I pray to God that’s never going to happen, but that’s not a totally inconceivable scenario. ## Transcript I don't know if we can be trusted with such a weapon, but we have no choice. Robert Oppenheimer was a key figure in the making of the atomic bomb during World War II, and a key figure in shaping early American nuclear policy after the war as well. That latter part of his work I think is less well known to most people. Most people know him as the father of the atomic bomb. A lot fewer people know that he was deeply involved with many discussions about maybe even the abolition of nuclear weapons, but also how you use nuclear weapons in a modern Cold War. I have been asked whether in the years to come it will be possible to kill 40 million American people in the 20 largest American towns by the use of atomic bombs in a single night. I'm afraid that the answer to that question is yes. The most interesting thing about Oppenheimer is that by any measure he is not who you would have picked to be the scientific director of the Manhattan Project. And people around were surprised that he was picked. He had no administrative experience. He had never led any group of people larger than a seminar room. His reputation was as a scientist-scientist. He is a head in the clouds, lots of equations. He was a terrible teacher. He would chain smoke while writing equations over other equations he had already written. This is a sort of famous tactic of his. The first thing that Oppenheimer does is he gets together some of the top theorists at a conference in Berkeley, and they sit around and they sort of plot out what is the problem to be solved in designing a nuclear weapon and sort of making this thing happen. And that's what it starts off as being. But the role expands dramatically because it turns out to be much harder to make nuclear weapons than they thought. They went into the Manhattan Project thinking it would be difficult but sort of modestly achievable and ended up being by some measures There may be five times harder than they expected. He was afraid that if the first bombs were not sufficiently spectacular that you would end up in a world with nuclear arms races and then the next war would be fatal for civilization. For him it was important that the first bombing be really awful so that the world gets its act together and realizes we can't continue down this path. The same path that led to World War I and World War II, World War III is not going to be tenable. That was his goal from all of this. For him, the worst things are in Japan, in some sense, the better. If there is another world war, this civilization may go under. We need to ask ourselves whether we're doing all we can to avert that. Easy to try and make Oppenheimer into a parable. And of course, all parables are a parable of our time. And so it'll be interesting to see what the parable of Oppenheimer is for us now, as opposed to what it was in the 50s or 60s when also fictional media were being made about him, or even the 80s. But he himself hated being cast as a parable. He was very bitterly resistant to any of these things in his time. He saw all of these things as being just sort of tawdry and not the right issue to be focusing on. Science has profoundly altered the conditions of man's life, both materially and in ways of the Spirit as well. It has extended the range of questions in which man has a choice. It has extended man's freedom to make significant decisions. No one can predict what vast new continents of knowledge the future of science will discover. But we know that as long as men are free to ask what they will, free to say what they think, free to think what they must, science will never regress, and freedom itself will never be wholly lost. 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