Soundbite: Lessons and Legacy - Oppenheimer and The Manhattan Project
As you heard in the last episode, Oak Ridge National Laboratory is celebrating its 80th anniversary. The lab was born out of the Manhattan Project, a top-secret mission that would bring an end to World War II with the production of the world’s first nuclear weapons. Clandestine sites across the country worked unique pieces of the puzzle that would become the atomic bomb. While sites in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington, studied and produced the material for the weapons, scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, were focused on the design and assembly of the bomb. Those efforts in Los Alamos were led by renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer – a name that should sound particularly familiar this summer. Oppenheimer was the Manhattan Project mastermind behind the atomic bomb, and now his story is the focus of a new blockbuster film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. As part of the 80th celebration, Kai Bird recently visited ORNL and joined us for a discussion on the legacy of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project.
Transcript
[THEME MUSIC]
KAI BIRD: Oppenheimer famously said you cannot stop science. And for all his qualms about building the Gadget and seeing it used on a whole city, he knew that you couldn't stop human beings from inventing, from exploring the physical world, and you couldn't stop science.
[MUSIC TRANSITION]
JENNY: Hello everyone and welcome to a Soundbite from The Sound of Science. A shorter installment of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s podcast series.
MORGAN/JENNY: We’re your hosts, Morgan McCorkle and Jenny Woodbery.
[MUSIC TRANSITION]
JENNY: As you heard in the last episode, Oak Ridge National Laboratory is celebrating its 80th anniversary.
MORGAN: The lab was born out of the Manhattan Project, a top-secret mission that would bring an end to World War II with the production of the world’s first nuclear weapons.
JENNY: Clandestine sites across the country worked unique pieces of the puzzle that would become the atomic bomb.
MORGAN: While sites in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington, studied and produced the material for the weapons, scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, were focused on the design and assembly of the bomb. Those efforts in Los Alamos were led by renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer – a name that should sound particularly familiar this summer.
JENNY: Oppenheimer was the Manhattan Project mastermind behind the atomic bomb, and now his story is the focus of a new blockbuster film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.
KAI BIRD: I think it's a great opportunity for a new generation of Americans to learn just the basics about who Robert Oppenheimer was, the father of the atomic bomb, but also an opportunity to understand how complicated a personality he was, and to learn a lot of history.
MORGAN: That’s Kai Bird, one of the book’s co-authors. He recently visited ORNL as part of the lab’s anniversary celebration.
JENNY: During his visit, he gave a lecture to lab staff about a period in Oppenheimer’s life that may not be as well-known as his involvement with the bomb.
MORGAN: The success of the Manhattan Project and the resulting atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, made Oppenheimer a household name with great influence in scientific and policy circles. But the experience also haunted him – and he became a vocal critic against the development of the hydrogen bomb.
BIRD: It pained him to think that his name was going to be forever associated with Hiroshima. And yet, he never publicly apologized for having been the scientific director of a project that led to a weapon of mass destruction being used on a whole city, two whole cities. But he was painfully aware of the ethical quandaries. He was highly motivated to build the Gadget precisely because he feared that the Germans, the Nazis, were maybe in a race with him, and that they might get it first and win the war and fascism would prevail. That was his motivation. And yet he was also aware that there were going to be political quandaries after the war, even if we won the war. And he was painfully aware that he as a scientist should use that newly won stature in the public eye to try to educate people about, to ask the questions.
MORGAN: Oppenheimer’s security clearance was ultimately revoked by the Atomic Energy Commission, a shocking rebuke of the once heralded physicist that essentially ended his influential role in government and public policy.
JENNY: “American Prometheus” was decades in the making, and by the time the book was published and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, Bird and his co-author, the late Martin Sherwin, felt a very deep connection to Oppenheimer.
MORGAN: The pair decided to use the success of their book to seek a nullification of the 1954 decision from the head of AEC’s descendant agency, the Department of Energy. In addition to the redemption of Oppenheimer, Bird and Sherwin believed it would restore the integrity of the clearance process, which they believed had been corrupted by the 1954 committee.
JENNY: Nullification would also demonstrate that scientists and policymakers could debate honestly without fear of retribution, which Bird termed the worst outcome of the Oppenheimer clearance revocation.
BIRD: That's what Oppenheimer tried to do over the issue of whether to rely on these weapons of mass destruction, whether to build a hydrogen bomb in the wake of the Soviets acquiring an atomic bomb. And these were precisely the issues that got him into trouble and led to a security trial that stripped him of his security clearance and made him a public non-entity, politically speaking. So, this is why, this is the legacy that scientists have from the Oppenheimer case. They've been sort of taught: it’s dangerous territory to become a public intellectual. And I think that's very unfortunate. I think we need to have more public debate, we need to have scientists speaking out -- however wrongheaded or right-headed they may be. We need them speaking out and showing the public that there are, you know, that there are complicated sides to all of these issues.
MORGAN: The path to nullification was not a quick one, and the pair hit many roadblocks along the way, but their campaign finally picked up some momentum when Bird met with former ORNL director Thom Mason.
JENNY: Mason is now the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where Oppenheimer served as director from 1943-1945. He understood the importance of nullification to the security clearance process, and drafted a letter to the Secretary of Energy, with the support of the eight living Los Alamos lab directors.
MORGAN: Bird and Sherwin’s hard work finally paid off when Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm reinstated Oppenheimer’s security clearance in December 2022. Sadly, Sherwin died a year before nullification was achieved.
JENNY: After his lecture, we had a chance to sit down with Kai Bird and discuss the legacies of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project.
BIRD: I think the relevance is that the Manhattan Project story, and what happened to Robert Oppenheimer as a scientific figure, and then as the chief sort of celebrity victim of the McCarthy era, is a lesson about how we should understand and debate the role of science in our society. Oppenheimer famously said you cannot stop science. And for all his qualms about building the Gadget and seeing it used on a whole city, he knew that you couldn't stop human beings from inventing, from exploring the physical world, and you couldn't stop science. And so likewise, today, where we are faced with many really interesting issues that are going to affect our society, we need scientists to be debating, publicly debating. We need the common citizen, seeing that scientists themselves disagree about some of these issues. And that would inform the debate.
MORGAN: And while the Manhattan Project has been a theme in Bird’s career for some time, he’d only visited Los Alamos before coming to Oak Ridge. After touring ORNL, we asked for his perspective on the lab’s evolution from a wartime resource to a robust scientific institution.
BIRD: It's a terrific legacy. And it is obviously a direct outgrowth of the Manhattan Project. And I was blown away by seeing Frontier and being told that it's the largest supercomputer ever and we got to walk around it and seeing that technician pulling out a panel and replacing parts in it and gives you a sense of the complicated innards of the machine. And yet it's in this huge warehouse building, quiet, cooled by water, I gather, not air. And it's an amazing, amazing thing. And it made me think, oh, you know, we need to spend more money on these things. But that's a political issue. And that's, again, an example of why we need to see more scientists speaking out about the utility, the benefits to society from something like Frontier.
This lab is on the cutting edge of all sorts of technological innovations from new battery technology to AI, and there are ethical and political consequences to all of this. And as a society, most Americans are probably not prepared for how quickly the world is going to change in the next coming years and decade. And this is exactly the kind of issue that Robert Oppenheimer was faced with building the Gadget, as it was called in the 1940s. And he was painfully aware of the moral and political quandaries that he was facing. And he was a role model for I think, how a scientist should also become a public intellectual, and learn how to speak in plain English about science, and educate people and engage common citizenry in conversations about the science and the scientific issues that are going to dramatically change our society in the next coming years.
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JENNY: Thank you for listening to this Soundbite from The Sound of Science.
MORGAN: If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts, so you won’t miss the next installment of our special 80th anniversary series.
JENNY: Until next time!