01:03:40

(someone): I remember the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that one way or another. So in other words, this was not an expression of unvarnished horror, but rather a continuation of his line of reasoning of hoping that this new tool would awe the world into doing the right thing and bringing an end to this war and hopefully soon to all wars. It is not true that Robert was morose or horrified after the detonation of the test at Trinity. The attitude back at Los Alamos was euphoric and Robert was euphoric too. Though in the coming days, he would have growing reservations about the bomb's use, he never disavowed his work, and in fact, he helped advise the Air Force on how to use the bomb. Having said that, as I said, he did have some reservations. At least one person did catch him in his office, puffing on his pipe and muttering, those poor little people, those poor, poor little people. The first bomb was dropped less than a month later, on August 6, 1945. General Groves called up Oppenheimer to congratulate him. "'I'm proud of you and all your people,' Groves said. "'It went all right?' Oppenheimer asked. "'Apparently it went off with a tremendous bang,' Groves responded. "'Oppenheimer,' said, "'Everybody is feeling reasonably good about it, and I extend my heartiest congratulations.

00:02:50

(someone): There were celebrations, cheers, and congratulations, but other than that, for nearly a minute and a half, the men watched the mushroom cloud and the dawn of the atomic age in silence. I'm going to show you how great I am. This was a sighting, fellas. I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, I'd like to take this chance to apologize to absolutely nobody. Hello and welcome to How to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson. Today we're talking about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist who is popularly known as the father of the atomic bomb. And why study Oppenheimer? He's a little different from other people we've talked about on this show. He didn't become fabulously wealthy or gain a lot of personal power, but I think there's a lot we can learn from him. First of all, I think there's a lot to learn from him because he was a great leader in the field of science. I think when we think of leadership, our minds often default to either military leaders like Napoleon, or founders, entrepreneurs, business leaders, even social leaders, or even sports coaches before we think of science. But leadership is something that is important in every field, and few things are as important as scientific progress, so I think it's cool to see how great leadership plays out in the field of science. He also changed the world enormously with the atomic bomb. And so it's the story of a technological innovator. It's an interesting story of 20th century history. His story tells us a lot about World War II, democracy, fascism, communism, and the world that we have inherited today.

00:46:07

(someone): This is a skill that I have never heard articulated before. Here's what he said. He was very persuasive, very cogent, elegant in language and able to listen to what other people said and incorporate it into what he would say. I had the impression that he was a good politician in the sense that if several people spoke, he could summarize what they said and as a result they would realize that they agreed with each other. A great talent. And so I think that's so interesting. He's good at building consensus by summarizing what other people say and smushing it together and helping them see that maybe what they say doesn't actually conflict and showing them where they agree with each other and therefore building consensus, helping people move forward. So he's quickly becoming a great leader. One of the first decisions that he and Groves have to make together is where they will locate the main secret research laboratory that is going to be at the front of this project. And he and Groves agreed that it should be at a remote site due to security concerns, somewhere where it'd be easy to keep an eye on all the scientists and difficult for a spy to come and peer over the fence and see what's going on. And Oppenheimer, sly devil that he was, goes on a trip to New Mexico and proposes the location of Los Alamos as though he had never seen the place before. He just says, look at this place. This is amazing. Isn't this great? In reality, it was less than 50 miles from his ranch. And so he knew the land very well. He loved that part of the country and he really wanted to be there.

00:55:34

(someone): I'm going to acquire us all the uranium we need within 24 hours. But Oppenheimer was also really crucial in that process because he could understand not only the science, but the whole scope of the project and how it all fit in with each other. This is Edward Teller, one of the physicists wrote this about Oppenheimer. He said, Oppenheimer was probably the best lab director I have ever seen because of the great mobility of his mind, because of the successful effort to know about practically everything important invented in the laboratory. He knew and understood everything that went on in the laboratory, whether it was chemistry or theoretical physics or machine shop. He could keep it all in his head and coordinate it. It was clear also at Los Alamos that he was intellectually ahead of us, and he understood immediately when he heard anything and fitted it into the general scheme to write conclusions. There was just nobody else in the laboratory who came even close to him in his knowledge. So you can see there, it's his ability to grasp everything, all the different scientific discoveries and issues, and the logistics, the industrial, and fit them all together in his head. That was what made him a great leader of Manhattan Project. Now, one of the other things he does is inspire everyone, keep them motivated to work on project. And that becomes an issue in 1944 as it becomes clear that Germany is going to lose the war. There had always been voices of dissent within the Manhattan Project, people who had concerns about developing a weapon of mass destruction. But those voices of dissent had been quiet as long as the bomb was built. to be dropped on Germany. Many of these physicists were Jewish and they held special disdain for Germany, for the Nazi regime.

00:59:42

(someone): If you were to take out a battleship in harbor, then it's going to clear out a bunch of the city too. This is a weapon that cannot be used without civilian casualties. The physicists make their recommendations and kind of try and talk people down, but at the end of the day, they're not in charge. The military is in charge of actual use of the weapon. In fact, in the end, the decision came from the very top. Franklin Roosevelt, the president of the United States, had died, so the new president, President Truman, decided that the bomb would be dropped. An important deadline was set. A test needed to be conducted before the Postum Conference on July 17th, 1945. The heads of state of the allied powers would be there to work out the details of a new post-war world order. It was thought that the United States possessing an atomic weapon would give them powerful negotiating leverage over the Soviet Union. They could say, hey, look what we got. You got to knock it off. You got to retreat from Europe. So there's this powerful motivation to test the nuclear bomb before July 17. And so Oppenheimer had his marching orders. One final push to have the bomb ready for testing by mid-July. The summer of 1945 was intense. It was a particularly hot summer in New Mexico, and Oppenheimer drove his scientists to work harder and longer hours than ever before. Everyone seemed on edge. The easy, fraternal attitude and the casual drinking seemed to dry up with the landscape. One person observed, there was tension and accelerated activity.

00:31:41

(someone): So that's my assessment of it. Robert probably was a secret communist party member. As one colleague later put it, he said he didn't know if Oppie, and that's what his friends called him, nickname Oppie. He said he didn't know if Oppie was ever an actual party member, but it wouldn't have made much of a difference. He was so involved in radical progressive causes, in unions and civil rights groups and reading groups, discussion groups, things like that, that whether he was an official member of the communist party or not, everyone knew where he stood. Everyone knew that he was intellectually a communist. Oppenheimer's politics were important to him. He found a lot of meaning in them, but they would soon become an issue for him. In 1939, in Germany, nuclear fission was created for the first time. This was the first time that someone had generated energy from the power of the atom. There's a great story that one of the physicists in Berkeley, his name is Alvarez. He was this Spanish guy, and he's getting a haircut when he reads in the newspaper that fission has been created. Essentially, Adam has been split in Germany. And so he gets up and starts running mid haircut. You know, his hair is half done, and he runs back to the lab to tell everyone that this has happened and show them the newspaper. And within a day, they replicate the findings to show that this is possible. And this quickly becomes the zeitgeist that becomes the important thing that everyone in physics is talking about and studying and pushing forward. And that includes Robert Oppenheimer as well.

00:39:28

(someone): He is abrasive and sarcastic. He disregards all normal organization channels. He is extremely intelligent. He has the guts to make timely difficult decisions. He is the most egotistical man I know. I hated his guts. And so did everybody else. But we had our form of understanding. And so that seems to be how everyone felt about Groves. No one liked him. This was the most abrasive, difficult man. He was educated at MIT and also an officer in the army, soon to be a general. And so he was brilliant. He was extremely smart and kind of alpha personality, go-getter, get things done. So everyone respected him for his ability to get things done. which was almost unmatched. I mean, he was unbelievably gifted that way, but it was a real pain to work with him because he was just going to steamroll you if you weren't exactly on point in every detail. If you weren't very, very valuable, he was going to roll right over you. Oppenheimer said about him, oh yes, Groves is a bastard, but he's a straightforward one. And Groves was absolutely crucial to the Manhattan Project. And the relationship between him and Oppenheimer was one of those magical unions that spurred both of them to greater things. It was the combination of Oppenheimer's sheer brilliance and Groves' unmatched ability to get things done. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

00:37:02

(someone): They're bouncing ideas off of each other. And so a lot of these physicists who are involved in the nuclear project are talking to Oppenheimer unofficially, even though he can't be in the project because of his communist ties. And so they're getting very annoyed with this, the military, of like, you can't keep talking to this guy. He could be leaking secrets to the Soviet Union. And eventually they're like, all right, we cannot stop people from talking to Robert Oppenheimer because he's a top physicist. So honestly, maybe it's just better to have him in the project than outside of it because once he's in the project, it'll be easier to keep tabs on him. It'll be easier to monitor him. And so they do, they bring him into the project, both because Lawrence vouches for him and because he's such a security risk that they kind of can't leave him outside of the project. Oppenheimer quickly proves himself to be a very valuable voice in these nuclear meetings with his ranging knowledge. He's good at tying together disparate ideas. And so you have one research project going on about one element of nuclear physics and, you know, another experiment going on about something totally different. And he's able to kind of synthesize all the information, tie them together and get people on the same page. And so he's a natural leader. And they were looking for a lead physicist, a lead scientist on this project. But even though he's kind of demonstrating himself to be a leader, he's not necessarily the natural choice to actually lead the project.

00:43:31

(someone): It was so much that he was doing the wrong thing. He just wasn't doing anything. One physicist complained, he didn't know the basics of putting together an organization and running it. The project operated for weeks without so much as an organization chart or a schedule. It was just, all right, people, start researching. And finally, Groves marches into Oppenheimer's office and demands he writes down an org chart. So Oppenheimer reluctantly takes out pencil and paper and drew out four boxes. Theoretical Physics, Experimental Physics, Metallurgy, and Ordinance. He also wrote out a name to head up each division. And in charge of the Theoretical Physics division, he wrote his own name. With time, Oppenheimer slowly improved as a leader, and a real turning point came when he realized that he needed to fire himself as the head of the theoretical physics department. He couldn't be the leader of the project and an individual researcher at the same time. He would have to choose, and he chose his role in leadership, which was smart. That was the thing that no one else could do. You know, he was so curious. His mind was so wide ranging. He knew so much about so many different things. that no one else was like that. No one had that breadth of knowledge. So he was much more valuable as a leader than he was as an individual researcher. After this change, leadership was no longer a thing that got in the way of his research, but was itself the focus of his incredible mental faculties.

00:02:50

(someone): There were celebrations, cheers, and congratulations, but other than that, for nearly a minute and a half, the men watched the mushroom cloud and the dawn of the atomic age in silence. I'm going to show you how great I am. This was a sighting, fellas. I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, I'd like to take this chance to apologize to absolutely nobody. Hello and welcome to How to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson. Today we're talking about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist who is popularly known as the father of the atomic bomb. And why study Oppenheimer? He's a little different from other people we've talked about on this show. He didn't become fabulously wealthy or gain a lot of personal power, but I think there's a lot we can learn from him. First of all, I think there's a lot to learn from him because he was a great leader in the field of science. I think when we think of leadership, our minds often default to either military leaders like Napoleon, or founders, entrepreneurs, business leaders, even social leaders, or even sports coaches before we think of science. But leadership is something that is important in every field, and few things are as important as scientific progress, so I think it's cool to see how great leadership plays out in the field of science. He also changed the world enormously with the atomic bomb. And so it's the story of a technological innovator. It's an interesting story of 20th century history. His story tells us a lot about World War II, democracy, fascism, communism, and the world that we have inherited today.

00:42:02

(someone): And so Oppenheimer is sort of the top physicist who doesn't need to actually be researching in order for the bomb to work. So Oppenheimer's made the head of the secret weapons lab for the Manhattan Project. And despite all those nice things I just said about him, at first Oppenheimer was a complete and total disaster as a leader of the Manhattan Project. And we'll hear why after this break. In the early days of the war, the perception was that the United States was two years behind the Germans in developing an atomic bomb. The US had taken a long time to get involved in the war and consequently had started nuclear research later and with less urgency. A German, Otto Hahn, had been the first to discover nuclear fission in 1938. So that gave them an obvious head start. One of the leaders of the nuclear project in Germany was a brilliant physicist named Werner Heisenberg. He and Oppenheimer had known each other in Göttingen. They had been friendly, though competitive. They had even gone after the same girl at one point. And Heisenberg was not a Nazi, but he considered it his patriotic duty to stay and offer his services to his home country in the war. There was a wall of secrecy around Germany, but the impression was that Heisenberg and his colleagues had been doing top-notch atomic research for years. So Oppenheimer is working with urgency. He's trying to make up for lost time, but he's doing a horrible job. It was so much that he was doing the wrong thing. He just wasn't doing anything.

00:38:16

(someone): And they were looking for a lead physicist, a lead scientist on this project. But even though he's kind of demonstrating himself to be a leader, he's not necessarily the natural choice to actually lead the project. There are a few reasons for that. One is that he hadn't led anyone before. He hadn't run any organizations. He'd never had to do anything like that. He had never led so much as a lemonade stand, as a fellow physicist put it. Others complained that he wouldn't do a good job because he didn't have a Nobel Prize. And so many of these physicists did have Nobel Prizes. So there's this worry, oh, are they not going to respect him because they're Nobel winning physicists and he's not? And the reason that he never won a Nobel Prize is just, like I said, he didn't like to do that sort of in-depth research. He liked to flip from topic to topic. But so there's that concern as well. So you have these concerns. The man who would actually be deciding on the lead physicist was an army officer named Colonel Leslie Groves. And Groves was six feet tall and 250 pounds. He was this enormous guy. One colleague described him this way, quote, he is most demanding. He is most critical. He is always a driver, never appraiser. He is abrasive and sarcastic. He disregards all normal organization channels.

01:03:40

(someone): I remember the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that one way or another. So in other words, this was not an expression of unvarnished horror, but rather a continuation of his line of reasoning of hoping that this new tool would awe the world into doing the right thing and bringing an end to this war and hopefully soon to all wars. It is not true that Robert was morose or horrified after the detonation of the test at Trinity. The attitude back at Los Alamos was euphoric and Robert was euphoric too. Though in the coming days, he would have growing reservations about the bomb's use, he never disavowed his work, and in fact, he helped advise the Air Force on how to use the bomb. Having said that, as I said, he did have some reservations. At least one person did catch him in his office, puffing on his pipe and muttering, those poor little people, those poor, poor little people. The first bomb was dropped less than a month later, on August 6, 1945. General Groves called up Oppenheimer to congratulate him. "'I'm proud of you and all your people,' Groves said. "'It went all right?' Oppenheimer asked. "'Apparently it went off with a tremendous bang,' Groves responded. "'Oppenheimer,' said, "'Everybody is feeling reasonably good about it, and I extend my heartiest congratulations.

00:44:43

(someone): So he was much more valuable as a leader than he was as an individual researcher. After this change, leadership was no longer a thing that got in the way of his research, but was itself the focus of his incredible mental faculties. And so it's unsurprising that once he decided to focus on leadership, a genius like Oppenheimer would be able to master it. He ends up having something they call the Oppenheimer effect. Whenever he enters a room, people want to step up, want to do their best. One physicist, Edward Teller, described his leadership this way. Throughout the war years, Oppie knew in detail what was going on in every part of the laboratory. He was incredibly quick and perceptive in analyzing human as well as technical problems. Of the more than 10,000 people who eventually came to work at Los Alamos, Oppie knew several hundred intimately, by which I mean he knew what their relationships with one another were and what made them tick. He knew how to organize, cajole, humor, soothe feelings, how to lead powerfully without seeming to do so. He is an exemplar of dedication, a hero who never lost his humanness. Disappointing him somehow carried with it a sense of wrongdoing. Los Alamos' amazing success grew out of the brilliance, enthusiasm, and charisma with which Oppenheimer led it. He was also very good at building consensus and mediating conversations. One colleague, David Hawkins, put it this way. I think this is very interesting. This is a skill that I have never heard articulated before. Here's what he said.