--- title: The Real Oppenheimer - A Nuclear Historian's Perspective | TIME description: 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. canonical: https://time.com/video/I2oPNLYU/ og:title: The Real Oppenheimer - A Nuclear Historian's Perspective og:description: 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. og:url: https://time.com/video/I2oPNLYU/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/I2oPNLYU/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Real Oppenheimer - A Nuclear Historian's Perspective twitter:description: 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. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/I2oPNLYU/poster.jpg?width=720 --- * U.S. # The Real Oppenheimer - A Nuclear Historian's Perspective > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## 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._ --- May 30, 2024 3:01 AM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [U.N. Chief Warns Humanity Cannot Survive Another "Oppenheimer," as Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Gains Support](/video/NO9ydtsM/) ### U.N. Chief Warns Humanity Cannot Survive Another "Oppenheimer," as Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Gains Support [More Than 120 Countries to Adopt the First-Ever U.N. Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons](/video/PmRyIRdg/) ### More Than 120 Countries to Adopt the First-Ever U.N. Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons [NASA's Next Mission](/video/kc7EDltB/) ### NASA's Next Mission --- ## 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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