-♪ -(clock ticking) jon else: robert oppenheimer was the father of the atomic bomb. he was this complex ball of contradictions. oppenheimer: they are weapons of aggression, of surprise and of terror. richard rhodes: oppenheimer wanted the bomb to be used. how else would the world know what it was? eleanor roosevelt: dr. oppenheimer, are we creating something we may not be able to control? oppenheimer: in a world of atomic weapons, wars will cease. (ticking) newsreel narrator: it is d-minus one for the test of the world's first atomic device. else: this cultured, nonviolent man was responsible for birthing the most violent weapon in human history. and he devoted the rest of his life to trying to control the monster that he had unleashed. oppenheimer: if there is another world war... ...this civilization may go under. kai bird: he became a political pariah. edward r. murrow: is it true that humans have already discovered a method of destroying humanity? (cameras clicking) else: and it finally ruined him. oppenheimer: "now i am become death, the destroyer of worlds." (explosion booming) we have made a thing that, by all standards of the world we grew up in, is an evil thing. (birds chirping) ellen bradbury reid: when i was 15, i had a chance to speak to oppenheimer alone. he was at a cocktail party. i was serving hors d'oeuvres... (faint chatter) ...and found oppenheimer standing alone. i said, "i think you're some sort of a saint." and he was very taken aback. and he said, "wh-why would you say that to me?" and i said, "because you had second thoughts." and he turned around and picked his hat up and walked out the door. it obviously struck him in a wa that i had never imagined. man: oppenheimer for cronkite, take one. (film beeps) walter cronkite: dr. oppenheimer, with all the inevitability of the decision that history demonstrates to us, you still seem to suffer, may i say, from a bad conscience about it. is that true, sir? uh, i think when you play a meaningful part in bringing about the death of over a hundred thousand people... ...uh, you naturally, uh, don't think of that with ease. christopher nolan: when you look at the history of oppenheimer, it's very difficult to find any person in history sitting in such a complex situation with all kinds of impossible questions and very few answers. (ticking) else: everybody has their own idea of what robert oppenheimer is. i mean, the fact is that he invented a weapon that can destroy human life on earth. i mean, don't forget that this weapon, which has the capacity to end civilization, was developed as a means to save western civilization. -(newsreel music playing) -(bell clanging) (shouting in german) (crowd chanting in german) bird: in the 1930s, millions of americans were following the news coming out of europe in their local theaters, watching newsreels. and oppenheimer was horrified by the rise of hitler. nolan: his sense of his own jewishness made him immediately and massively aware of the danger of fascism. (bell tolling) bird: when the war started in 1939, he was a professor at berkeley. and that same year, one of his students comes rushing into his office to convey the news that fission has been discovered. man: word has just come through from germany that the uranium atom under neutron bombardment actually splits into two parts. bird: initially, oppenheimer can't believe it. he runs to the blackboard and does some mathematics, and he comes to the understanding that you could use fission to generate energy. einstein showed explicitly that if you can convert matter into pure energy, the amount of energy is extraordinary. it's the speed of light squared, for crying out loud. (crackling) rhodes: they realize that from a very small amount of matter, you could make power to drive ships and planes and trains, whatever, make electricity, of course. and they also realize very quickly that it might be possible to make a weapon of untold destruction. (hitler shouting in german) (crowd chanting) we were deeply worried. after all, the discovery of fission was in nazi germany. mareena robinson snowden: nazi germany could potentially build a nuclear bomb. this was the worry. and it was very tangible. it was very real. (plane engines buzzing) franklin d. roosevelt: december 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. pearl harbor happens. franklin d. roosevelt: i assert that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us. (cheering, applause) alan carr: now the united states is an active combatant in the war. the idea at this point is we basically need to get this done as quickly as possible, because we could wake up tomorrow and hitler could have that nuclear monopoly that we all want to avoid. so, we need a place where we can design, build, tes and help deliver nuclear weapons. but even before we pick the place though, we need to find somebody who can lead that installation. and virtually nobody expected oppenheimer to be named the director of the weapons design laboratory. he was kind of this ethereal personality. he had no record of having big achievements. one of the scientists who knew oppenheimer said, "this is a man who couldn't run a hot dog stand." rhodes: oppenheimer's friends felt that he was a divided man not quite sure of his identity. he said at one point, "from my earliest days, "i never did anything "or thought anything or knew anyone where i didn't feel about mysel the deepest loathing." (ticking) jennet conant: oppenheimer was born in 1904 and into an age of great scientific possibility. the first two decades of the 20th century were periods of incredible intellectual daring. electricity, automobiles, fligh were all transforming daily life. and then you had incredible advances in science, and it looks like almost anything could be achieved. david eisenbach: story of robert oppenheimer is really the story of immigrant america. his father comes over from germany, gets a job in the garment industry and makes a tremendous amount of money, winds up on the upper west side on riverside drive. and he's got a picasso, and he's got three van goghs. herken: his mother was a paris-trained artist who exhibited her work at various galleries in manhattan. rhodes: she was a nervous person. she really didn't let this little boy go outside. bird: and he was very sheltered and extremely socially awkward. rhodes: when he finally went to camp one summer, he was so nasty to the other kids that they roughed him up. he said later they put him in the icehouse all night naked and painted him green, including his genitals. oddly enough, oppenheimer didn't protest. he just took his punishment stoically. it was a very odd reaction for a young boy at that age. rhodes: imagine this sensitive boy, this very smart boy, but one who has no idea how to deal with other people. certainly not with children his own age. he's had no experience. alex wellerstein: the real core psychological moment for oppenheimer appears to have been when he was in college. and he goes to study physics at cambridge, and he doesn't do very well. he ends up in a laboratory that's really about experimental physics, and he is not good at that. he doesn't really know how to d an experiment with his hands. and he has this sort of crisis of confidence. bird: this came to a head when he had a... what i think can only be described as a nervous breakdown. one of his friends stumbled upon him in an empty classroom where oppenheimer was standing at the blackboard. eisenbach: muttering to himself over and over again, "the point is, the point is, the point is." bird: and he could never finish the sentence. martin j. sherwin: and then another one of his friends went to his dorm room and heard this moaning inside and opened the door, and there was oppenheimer in a fetal position, rolling back and forth, groaning. he literally came close to committing suicide at that point. eisenbach: he saw a psychiatrist as a result of this, and the psychiatrist said that he's kind of living in his own world. rhodes: he was having an identity crisis, something we're clearer about these days than we were then. bird: his parents took him to paris, where he saw yet another psychologist, and in a very french way, prescribed a professional woman and red wine. (laughs) so... uh, we don't know if that happened. sherwin: he had always been the top of the class, the smartest person, admired for his intellectual capability by all his classmates. and suddenly, he was an incompetent. and he just couldn't deal with that at that point. and what snapped him out of tha was his discovery of theoretica physics, of quantum physics. at the time, it was sort of the golden age of physics. it's a very exciting time to be a theorist. and if you are young and quick and willing to think weird ideas that nobody else has ever thought, you can potentially make a huge amount of progress and a name for yourself. bird: so, when oppenheimer decided to move to göttingen in germany to study with max born, a theoretical physicist, he blossomed. he meets some of the leading physicists in germany at the time-- heisenberg, who, ironically enough, would lead the german atomic bomb project. wellerstein: and while he's over there, he sort of invents this oppie personality. this is where he gets the name. they call him opje, and this turns into oppie. and oppie is not an insecure young american who doesn't really know what he wants to do. oppie is the brilliant guy who is always five steps ahead of everybody else and can keep everything in his head. oppie is a genius who's very eccentric and interesting and strikes a really dashing figure and is chain-smoking. and you see these pictures of him from the '20s. it's very bob dylan. else: he had the eyes of an old testament prophet inside this frail body, and he sort of cocked himself with his funny little porkpie hat on top. wellerstein: so, oppie is this sort of construction of everything that he would want to be. and that recreation is immensely successful. ♪ ♪ engineered to minimize noise. and built for adventure. which can also be your own quiet cabin in the woods. the fully electric q8 e-tron. an electric vehicle that recharges you. how we get there matters. 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(ticking) newsreel narrator: when the cancerous nazi growth spread farther still, the people of europe-- and the world-- enter the new era. rhodes: certainly the first motivation for the scientists was to beat the germans to the bomb. there's nothing like the prospect of a hanging to concentrate the mind. and the threat of death of civilization as they knew it was so great that it swept away any ethical or moral doubts that they might have had. wellerstein: ultimately, whoever gets the bomb first is not just gonna win world war ii but is gonna run the entire world. ♪ newsreel narrator: by the summer of 1942, control of the atom bomb projec passes to the hands of the army under the code name manhattan engineering district. carr: the manhattan project really was a huge national effort. rhodes: and to plot out the industrial scale of the operation, they chose a dynamic, burly, six-foot-three, 240-pound general named leslie richard groves. he hated leslie. he went by dick. general groves had a problem. he was entrusted to hire the people that would build the atomic bomb. but he knew that we're talking about the people who are the finest scientists in the world. these are prima donnas. and now you have to have somebody who's gonna be the whipmaster. you have to have somebody that understands the physics, who has a reputation, so that these prima donnas will follow you. carr: oppenheimer and general groves are introduced in the fall of 1942. and these two individuals are just about as different as you can imagine. but general groves saw something in him that apparently no one else saw groves: when meeting oppenheimer, you were immediately impressed. you couldn't help it. there wasn't a better man. rhodes: he chose oppenheimer against the advice of most of these leaders that he had around him in the scientific community. oppenheimer had never led any large enterprise. but oppenheimer was really good at explaining things. wellerstein: he was extremely charming, and he had this ability to sort of hold a lot of things in his head at once and keep aware of how they all fit together. and this is apparently what general groves recognized in him. eisenbach: for security purposes, this project needs to happen away from everything. so groves tells oppenheimer to just come up with a place where this would actually work. and it was oppenheimer who suggests the new mexico desert. so they go to scope out a site. it's called los alamos. carr: oppenheimer knew the area well. he had spent a lot of time here. charles oppenheimer: when he left new york as a young man and went to new mexico... ...that was a-- just a really important part of his life. going to new mexico and meeting cowboys and riding horses. he just loved it. he loved every part of it. bird: he once said that his ambition was to combine the two loves in his life, physics and new mexico. and of course, he did precisely this. carr: now, the government shows up with bulldozers and architects and laborers and craftsmen to build a new community and laboratory where there essentially had not been one before. snowden: they're starting from scratch. and so much of what they were doing was unknow and unproven at the time. they didn't actually know that they would be able to achieve this. this was all theoretical. else: they knew that they had to get the best scientists if they were gonna get this weapon before the nazis did. (crowd chanting) (ship horn blowing) newsreel narrator: albert einstein flees to the united states. he leads a vanguard of refugee scientists, virtually stripping german universities of their best minds. wellerstein: all of the turmoil in europe had forced out a huge number of really top-grade physicists. enrico fermi. hans bethe. edward teller, who famously would go on to develop the hydrogen bomb. one can sort of go down the lists and find more and more and more of these amazing people. oppenheimer was famously known for his intellectual sex appeal. and he could go around the country and sort of flash his brain to people, and, you know, they'd sign up. rhodes: he would say, "i unfortunately can't tell you what we're doing, "but i can tell you that if we succeed, "it's likely to end this war, and it may end all war." 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(laughs) sherwin: they live ever after. and notice i didn't say "happily." (laughs) they are devoted to each other. but it's a difficult marriage because of the complexity of robert's life of their personalities, of the environment in which they live. nolan: she was an academic, and she was a biologist and a botanist, and ultimately, that work was all put to one side for the years at los alamos. i think she was very frustrated by being put in the position of a mother and