Transcripts For MSNBCW To 20240705 : vimarsana.com

By the use of atomic bombs in a single night. I am afraid that the answer to that question is yes. 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 dminus one for the test of the worlds 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 doeuvres. Faint Chatter . And found oppenheimer standing alone. I said, i think youre some sort of a saint. And he was very taken aback. And he said, whwhy 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, dont think of that with ease. Christopher nolan when you look at the history of oppenheimer, its 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, dont 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 cant 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. Its 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 couldnt run a hot dog stand. Rhodes oppenheimers 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 didnt 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 hes got a picasso, and hes got three van goghs. Herken his mother was a paristrained artist who exhibited her work at various galleries in manhattan. Rhodes she was a nervous person. She really didnt 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 didnt 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. Hes 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 doesnt do very well. He ends up in a laboratory thats really about experimental physics, and he is not good at that. He doesnt 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 hes kind of living in his own world. Rhodes he was having an identity crisis, something were 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 dont 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 couldnt 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. Its 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 gottingen 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 hes 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 doesnt 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 whos very eccentric and interesting and strikes a really dashing figure and is chainsmoking. And you see these pictures of him from the 20s. Its 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. dad its our phone bill. We pay for things that we dont need. mom thats a bit dramatic. dad we must tighten our belts mom a better plan to save is verizon vo thats right plans start at 25 per line guaranteed for 3 years. 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We make money from ads, but they dont follow you aroud join the millions of people taking back their privacy by downloading duckduckgo on all your devices today. ticking join the millions of people taking back their privacy 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. Theres 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, sixfootthree, 240pound 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 were talking about the people who are the finest scientists in the world. These are prima donnas. And now you have to have somebody whos 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 couldnt help it. There wasnt 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. Its 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 theyre starting from scratch. And so much of what they were doing was unknow and unproven at the time. They didnt 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 topgrade 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, theyd sign up. Rhodes he would say, i unfortunately cant tell you what were doing, but i can tell you that if we succeed, its likely to end this war, and it may end all war. Liberty mutual customized my Car Insurance and i saved hundreds. With the money i saved, i started a dog walking business. I was a bit nervous at first but then i figured its just walking, right . [dog barks] oh. No its just a bunny calm down taco. Sit duchess. Stop sesame no no. Archie walter dont, no, ahhhh. Ahhhhh youre lucky youre so cute. Only pay for what you need. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. When you shop wayfair, only pay for what you need. 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Carr by the time the laboratory was established, oppenheimer was a family man. He was married. He had a little boy. During his tenure as director at the laboratory, he had a little girl as well. Bird the summer of 1939, he was at a Cocktail Party in berkeley, and a young woman named Kitty Puening had spied him from across the garden and was immediately attracted to him. She was a firecracker laughs of a young woman. They fell in love, and by 1940, she was pregnant. laughs sherwin they live ever after. And notice i didnt say happily. laughs they are devoted to