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Jonathan Hafetz

Hi, I'm Jonathan Heifetz, and welcome to Life on Film, a podcast that explores the rich connections between law and film. Law is critical to many films. Film and turn tells us a lot about the law. In each episode, we'll examine a film that's noteworthy from a legal perspective. What legal issues does the film explore? What does it get right about the law and what does it get wrong?

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Jonathan Hafetz

And what does the film teach us about the law, and about the larger social and cultural context in which it operates? Our film today is Oppenheimer Oppenheimer's IT 2023 movie starring Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist known as the father of the atomic bomb for his role as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War Two, which developed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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Jonathan Hafetz

The film was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, based on the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. The film traces Oppenheimer's early life as a physicist. His rise to world prominence through the Manhattan Project, and his subsequent downfall after being stripped of his security clearance in 1954 due to his alleged past Communist sympathies and outspoken criticism of the direction of the nuclear arms race.

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Jonathan Hafetz

The cast also includes Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer's wife Kitty. Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project. Robert Downey Jr as Louis Straw, as a founding member and later chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, a rival of Oppenheimer who helped orchestrate Oppenheimer's downfall. And Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer's lover and former Communist Party member Jean Tatlock.

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Jonathan Hafetz

The film has garnered critical acclaim and achieved tremendous box office success. It provides a penetrating insight not only into one of the 20th century's most iconic figures, but also into the swirling political and social forces that surrounded the birth of the Atomic Age and America's transition from World War Two to the Red scare and the Cold War. With me to discuss this film is Audra Wolfe.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Audra is a writer, editor, and historian based in Philadelphia. She has a background in both science with a B.S. in chemistry from Purdue University and in history with a PhD in history and the sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarly work has focused on the role of science during the Cold War, a period when science held a special place in maintaining and projecting state power.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Audra has written a lot about the contemporary intersection of science, history, and politics. She has provided insights on science and the Cold War in two books, Freedom's Laboratory The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science and Competing with the Soviets science, technology, and the State in Cold War America. Her writing and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, science, The New Scientist, La, Be, slate, and the popular history podcast American History Tellers.

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Jonathan Hafetz

I just talked about Science and Power on Freakonomics, PRI's The World Spy Cast Radio Times, and NPR. In addition to her work as a writer and historian, Audrey operates an editorial and publishing consulting company, The Outside Reader, that helps writers of serious nonfiction develop their craft. There, she offers both on site and online publishing workshops. Audra, welcome.

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Audra Wolfe

Thanks so much for having me.

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Jonathan Hafetz

So Oppenheimer portrays attempts at the regulation of nuclear weapons, pitting those who favored greater transparency and international control, like Oppenheimer and many other scientists, against those who supported rapid and more aggressive development of nuclear weapons as the best deterrent. People like Lewis, Stross and many others. Can you talk a little bit about the debate, how it's portrayed in the film, and some of the larger implications?

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Audra Wolfe

Sure. You know, I think the film does a really tremendous job in reinvigorating debates about the bomb, the bomb's role, both in postwar life but also as kind of an ongoing concern. These ideas of these debates between Oppenheimer and Einstein about whether the bomb should have been developed in the first place. And in real life and to a certain extent in the movie as well, one of the central things driving the conflict between Oppenheimer and Straws was Oppenheimer's original opposition to the H-bomb.

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Audra Wolfe

And one thing the film kind of elides is that once it became clear that the H-bomb was, in fact, technically possible, Oppenheimer didn't really do a lot to stand in its way. But Oppenheimer was part of a group of scientists who were providing technical advice to the Atomic Energy Commission that advised in 1949 that the hydrogen bomb shouldn't be developed, but it was unclear whether it could work.

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Audra Wolfe

But even if it were feasible that there was no way to do it, no way that you could use that weapon that wouldn't constitute genocide. And for that reason alone, that the bomb should not be developed. They offered their opinion as scientists, as advisors. Truman and his colleagues decided to disregard that advice and to proceed with the H-bomb.

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Audra Wolfe

And this was really the central conflict dividing straws and Oppenheimer. Certainly, these questions about the international control of atomic energy were part of that. That was maybe the second most important like of that stool and the third, which the film really plays up. It's just their personal animosity. Some people just don't get along. And the Oppenheimer and Straws managed to rub each other in every possible wrong way the two men can.

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Audra Wolfe

But in terms of policy, their main disagreements were really these questions about who should control the bomb and separately, should the H-bomb be developed and the question of the H-bomb. It is a question of whether it should have been developed. But the conflict was really what is the role of the scientist here? Are they just giving advice or are they making policy?

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Audra Wolfe

And that fundamental disagreement about what the scientist's role was really drives the conflict to the movie. But it also drove up many, many discussions about the role of science in policy advising circles throughout the Cold War and in many ways, into the present.

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Jonathan Hafetz

That's so interesting in the history of that period, where you have the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, as you describe it, kind of so important in a film brings that out in retrospect. It's interesting because we kind of just look at it as like the birth of nuclear age and the rapid rise of nuclear arms. And looking back, it gets kind of lumped together a little bit, but it's kind of so critical that separation between the atomic bomb and the H-bomb and what it means for nuclear power and whether these bombs would ever be used, whether it ever need to be used.

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Audra Wolfe

Yeah. And also what it means to have a group of people with such specialized knowledge, what that means for democracy. When you look at that debates about the role of science in that period from 1945 through 1953, and really through the Oppenheimer hearings, this was a live debate, a topic of endless essays and bestsellers. You know, it seems like every era has the topic where people are writing big Idea books, and these books were just kind of flying off the shelves.

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Audra Wolfe

I don't know if they were actually flying off the shelves, but they were certainly filling bookstores. with titles like Science and Democracy and kind of the role of the scientist. One way that it was discussed, we need to bridge the president of Caltech at the time had a phrase that put the question in terms of whether scientists should be on tap or on top.

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Audra Wolfe

And that question really animated just so many of these debates and disagreements.

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Jonathan Hafetz

So the film really does a good job in kind of capturing this relationship and the changing relationship between the role of scientist, relationship between scientists and state power. And you talked about Einstein, Oppenheimer and Stross, and also, I think, right, strong as being more of a politician, a bureaucrat. But of the scientist, you have Einstein, Oppenheimer, and then you have, I guess, teller Oppenheimer somewhere seemingly kind of in the middle, right?

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Jonathan Hafetz

Kind of pulled in both directions. There's a mix of, you know, personal ambition and principle, but very conflicted about it. I think I'd start having maybe stronger views on one end and then teller on the other end, I don't know. That's how I saw it in the movie. I don't know if that's accurate.

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Audra Wolfe

Within the world of the movie. And I think within the policy circle of scientists who were providing this advice, the two poles of the folks who were most engaged in the debates, who who actually had influence. Of course, there were a wider set of views of people who weren't necessarily in the room, but of the folks who were in the room.

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Audra Wolfe

On the one end, you have people like Hans-Peter and Robbie, and on the other end you have Ed Teller, and Oppenheimer is somewhere in between there. You know, once it became clear that there was a good design for the H-bomb, he dropped his resistance to it in some ways, kind of a pragmatist when it came to what scientists could do.

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Audra Wolfe

At the same time, you know, I think the film really plays up this idea of Oppenheimer as naive. But, you know, particularly in terms of his relationships with individuals who are in the Communist Party, just kind of his political judgment generally. But one flavor of Oppenheimer's naivety that the film touches on doesn't name as much, but in some ways it is the heart of the film.

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Audra Wolfe

His naivete about what the role of the scientist in the policy discussion was, that Oppenheimer and that group of scientists who signed the appendix to the General Advisory Council recommendation, saying that there shouldn't be an H-bomb. They really seem to think that as the scientists who were giving the advice that they were the ones who should be listened to, that they had a right to be listened to, that it was their prerogative, their duty.

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Audra Wolfe

In some cases, some of them felt that they had blood on their hands, but others of them felt that even the balance between democracy and technocracy, that there was a solid argument for technocracy, and that their voices should carry more weight than other people's voices, should. That's a different kind of naivete, and it certainly comes up in the movie.

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Audra Wolfe

But Oppenheimer wasn't alone in that misperception about how much authority scientists held at that time.

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Jonathan Hafetz

There's a scene where Oppenheimer and other scientists, some who are opposed to using the nuclear weapon against Japan, they had bought into it for the use against the Nazis and would been defeated by that point. They meet with Secretary of War Stimson, that by James Riemann and Leslie Groves by Matt Damon and other U.S. officials. That's where the decision is made.

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Jonathan Hafetz

The selection of targets to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And there's that line by Simpson saying they want to spare Kyoto because of its cultural importance and the fact that Stimson and his wife had honeymooned there. Apparently, that line was ad libbed by the actor James Monroe, though it's, I think, rooted in historical fact. Certainly, Kyoto was spared.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Let me play this clip for you now.

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Oppenheimer Dialogue

The firestorm in Tokyo killed 100,000 people, mostly civilians. I worry about America when we do these things, and no one protests Pearl Harbor in three years of brutal conflict in the Pacific. But there's a lot of latitude with the American public enough to unleash the atomic bomb. Their bomb might not cause as much damage as the Tokyo bombings.

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Oppenheimer Dialogue

What are we estimating in a medium sized city with 20 or 30,000 dead? But don't underestimate the psychological impact of. Of an atomic explosion. A pillar of fire 10,000ft tall. Deadly neutron effects for a mile in all directions from one single device dropped on a barely noticed B-29, the atomic bomb would be a terrible revelation of divine power.

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Oppenheimer Dialogue

That's true. It would be definitive. World War Two would be over, and boys would come home. Military targets. But there aren't any big enough, perhaps vital war plans with workers housed nearby. Now we could issue a warning to reduce civilian casualties. They send everything they have up against us, and I'd be up in that plane. But if we announce it and it fails to go off, we'd scupper any chance of the Japanese surrender.

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Oppenheimer Dialogue

Is there no way to demonstrate the bomb to Japan? To provoke surrender? We intend to demonstrate it in the most unambiguous terms twice. Once to show the weapons power, and a second to show that we can keep doing this until they surrender. We have a list of 12 cities to choose from. Sorry. 11. I've taken Kyoto off the list due to its cultural significance to the Japanese people.

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Oppenheimer Dialogue

Also, my wife and I honeymooned there. It's a magnificent city. Let me make this simple for you, gentlemen. According to my intelligence, which I cannot share with you, the Japanese people will not surrender under any circumstances. Short of a successful and total invasion of the home islands. Many lives will be lost. American and Japanese. The use of the atomic bomb on Japanese cities will save lives.

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Oppenheimer Dialogue

If we retain moral advantage also, if we use this weapon without informing our allies, they'll see it as a threat and we'll be in an arms race. How open can we be with the Soviets? Secrecy won't stop the Soviets from becoming part of the atomic world. We've been told they have no uranium. You've been misinformed. A Russian bomb is a matter of time.

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Oppenheimer Dialogue

The program needs to continue at full pace after the war. I submit them soon, if I may. Not all scientists on the project are in agreement. In fact, this might be a moment to consider other opinions. If you talk. This project has been plagued from the start by certain scientists of doubtful discretion and uncertain loyalty. One of them just tried to meet with the president.

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Oppenheimer Dialogue

We need these men. But as soon as it's practical, we should sever any such scientists from the program. Wouldn't you agree, doctor? If a Russian bomb is inevitable, perhaps we should invite their top scientists to Trinity. President Truman has no intention of raising expectations that Stalin be included in the atomic project. Informing him of our breakthrough in presenting it as a means to win the war did not make him capable promises.

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Oppenheimer Dialogue

But the Potsdam Peace Conference in July will be President Truman's last chance to have that conversation. Can you give us a working bomb by then? Absolutely. We will test before the conference.

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Jonathan Hafetz

This is, I think, an important scene for many reasons, debates about the necessity of the bomb goal versus the number of casualties, the feasibility of warnings, and then the desire to send a message to the Soviets before Potsdam in light of the looming Cold War. Oppenheimer is, as you describe, conflicted, but ultimately he supports it. Is there anything else that we can tease out of the scene about the relationship between science and the military in this period?

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Audra Wolfe

I'm not sure that the scene tells us a lot about science in the military, but I think it does provide some insights into how Nolan wants us to understand the question of the bombs use. There is a question in the scholarship on the dropping of the bomb. You know, the question used to be whose decision was this? Why did Truman want to do this?

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Audra Wolfe

You know, this question of would a test have been sufficient, etc., etc. but in the past 20 years or so, that debate has really shifted to the question of whether there was a decision at all or whether, given the extent of firebombing in Japan, whether the military brass really saw this weapon as different in-kind from anything else that they had been using.

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Audra Wolfe

World War Two was a devastating war in Europe and Japan. It was just an absolutely devastating war, and everyone involved by that point in the war was fairly dedicated to using any tools at their disposal to win and or end the war. The United States and its allies had invested extraordinary sums of money in this weapon. They had also invested extraordinary sums of money in some other scientific weapon, scientific and technical weapons as well, including radar and the proximity fuze in particular.

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Audra Wolfe

But the scale of the research on the bomb, the scale of the investment, was unprecedented. So on the one hand, yes, there was this argument from some of the scientists that there might have been a test demonstration and there were debates about where specifically the bomb should be dropped. But in the end, the first two bombs didn't require presidential authorization in the ways that we think about atomic warfare or atomic weapons requiring today.

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Audra Wolfe

They had not yet obtained a special status as a different kind of weapon. Noland, I think, is portraying it very much as this. It is a different kind of weapon. And historically it was a new and terrifying kind of weapon. But in the immediate context of that conflict, it didn't seem so different from the scale of destruction that was being rained down on other major cities full of civilians at the time.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah. I mean, the thing they talk about that their casualties would be fewer potentially, than what had happened in the firebombing of Tokyo or of Dresden. So to your point, there is that sense of not knowing and very interesting, too, about the regulation. Truman made the decision. But I think what you're saying is, if the fact that Truman made it was more a matter of policy or politics than a legal requirement at the time.

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Audra Wolfe

Yes. And there wasn't, for instance, a specific launch code or the idea that the pilots could change targets if they needed to. As they did so, the procedure of dropping it was simply different than the rules that were established later on, particularly once the United States was not the only country that had a nuclear weapon, because the consequences of using one would be different.

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Audra Wolfe

There were some other interesting things happening in that scene, though. So on the one hand, some of the military brass are saying, we can't use this because of secrecy, that it would be revealing too much if, you know, if we reveal that we had this weapon. Whereas some of the scientists in the room, particularly Oppenheimer, are pushing the idea that there would not be a secret.

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Audra Wolfe

Once the bomb was used, period, that there would be nothing to hide, that the bomb itself was not, in the grand scheme of things, as difficult to engineer as one might think, that it was a feat of engineering, but the actual concepts of how you put together a bomb are relatively straightforward, at least if you were a theoretical physicist, and that the main question was, would such a device work in the first place?

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Audra Wolfe

And so for Oppenheimer, that scene is pointing ahead to some other questions about how much secrecy there should be. Later. And Oppenheimer was in a camp that said there's no point. There's nothing to hide here. Some of the other people in the room, Groves in particular, seem very confident that no one else will have a bomb in the near future, even if they know that secret.

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Audra Wolfe

And that's because of something that is hinted at in the movie, but never actually explained, which was the general Groves had brought up what he thought to be the vast majority of the world's supplies of uranium, circa 1945. He turned out to be wrong about that. That was one of the reasons why the Soviet Union was able to test an atomic weapon as soon as it did, because it had more access to uranium from news stores that the United States wasn't aware of.

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Audra Wolfe

But Groves actually kind of raises an eyebrow. Or the actor playing Groves raises an eyebrow, and he does it again in another scene where there's kind of an implicit discussion of how soon the Soviets can get the bomb, and Groves and Truman are pretty sure it's going to be a while, because they know that in their minds, there's no more uranium to be had.

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Audra Wolfe

They turned out, like I said, to be a little wrong about that.

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Jonathan Hafetz

So interesting. And, you know, you can potentially critique some of the scientists who are opposing the bomb or calling for international control as the best way to prevent its spread is potentially naive. But they were pretty clearly right. You know, that basically said Russia's got really good scientists. They're going to have a bomb and it's not going to be long.

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Jonathan Hafetz

And it was the U.S. military. The notion that they would have this very powerful, awesome tool to themselves are a little bit naive on that score.

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Audra Wolfe

Yeah. And I think they would actually double down on that naivete in 46 and 47 for some reasons that have nothing to do with the bomb, but actually have to do with Hitler and German science, and it has to do with formations of how Americans were understanding the nature of science and its relationship to democracy. After the war, when the conflict was winding down in Europe.

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Audra Wolfe

The United States sent a team as part of various scientific intelligence collection efforts to try and understand why the Germans had made so little progress on developing a bomb, and there were a lot of reasons to that. But the report that they wrote partially landed on ideology then, because German scientists had either been eliminated from their post or had left the country or were killed in other ways, they weren't involved in the bomb project.

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Audra Wolfe

And that idea of having a racial and ideological purity in terms of the science of the bomb limited their ability to develop it. They also felt that there was a sense of personal loyalty to some of the actors involved. Heisenberg. That was not helpful, and that was limiting scientists ability to generate new ideas. So part of how they interpreted the German bomb experience kind of was built into these ideas of the special ways that science supposedly worked in the United States, that scientists weren't subject to military control, they weren't subject to government control, that they had a different kind of freedom of thought, and that that freedom of thought was essential to how the United

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Audra Wolfe

States had won the war. And it was true that the idea for this bomb came from scientists, and that when the military first heard about it, they drugged their feet, that it was people like Leo Szilard and Einstein. And for Bush, who were ultimately pushing to say, this is a thing that we need to do, that that was not coming from military leaders.

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Audra Wolfe

And so, you know, in 1945, the United States was trying to understand this in terms of what had happened in Nazi Germany. But as the Cold War was becoming a stronger conflict, as the United States was trying to understand the nature of its conflict with the Soviet Union, they really came to see it as this ideological and even psychological conflict.

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Audra Wolfe

And they kind of caricatured some of these ideas about how science would work in the Soviet Union. And so they assumed that, as had happened in Nazi Germany, that there would be a kind of ideological alliance and that scientists who didn't have certain ideas about physics in this case that would follow Marxist thought might be excluded from the project and that the Soviet bomb project would falter.

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Audra Wolfe

They were wrong about that, actually. It turned out that in the Soviet Union that getting the bomb to work was much more important than participating scientist ideas about dialectical materialism. That just wasn't the most pressing issue. They wanted a working bomb. And of course, the Soviets also had access to they had inside information to what had happened to the Manhattan Project that helped.

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Audra Wolfe

And they had also seen that the bomb worked. As Oppenheimer and his colleagues pointed out, once you know, it works, you know the most important thing. So then they just had to do it.

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Jonathan Hafetz

You had all the scientists who came over at some point from Germany, right? And elsewhere in Eastern Europe because of the Nazi regime. And what it was doing contributed to the building of the atomic bomb. But in Russia, they had their reservoir reserve of scientists, and they made it a priority of the state. And it's interesting because, as you suggested, it was Germany, right.

00;23;06;13 - 00;23;21;17

Jonathan Hafetz

And Heisenberg that the scientist Oppenheimer and the others thought were ahead of the United States, and they were racing to catch up with Germany and prove it does a good job of portraying that. How very quickly Germany wasn't the focus anymore, really very quickly and well before the bomb was dropped was Russia.

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Audra Wolfe

And I think for people who have come of age after the Cold War ended, after the Berlin Wall fell and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that is really hard to keep track of. And I know, certainly when I've spoken to undergraduates, this idea that the Soviet Union was one of the United States allies, albeit a complicated ally, but an ally in the war is really hard to wrap your head around, given the way that the conflict changed so quickly.

00;23;45;00 - 00;23;46;18

Audra Wolfe

So quickly thereafter.

00;23;46;20 - 00;24;04;16

Jonathan Hafetz

And that all gets tied up into a lot of the security issues, which you can move to in a minute in terms of why there was this support for or sympathy for the Soviet Union. I mean, it has to do with support for leftist causes during the 30s, but also the fact that even during the war, the Soviet Union was our ally.

00;24;04;16 - 00;24;35;18

Jonathan Hafetz

So why not share? And I think the film does a kind of really good job of navigating some of those questions in the very different views that a lot of people in the military establishment had. The film talks about FBI surveillance of Oppenheimer and other scientists. How significant was this surveillance and have you come across examples in your work suggesting that the impact or the types of things that are in these sort of FBI files that were gathered and the way it impacted scientist during the Cold War?

00;24;35;20 - 00;25;01;15

Audra Wolfe

So Oppenheimer is an extreme case, and I think it's important for viewers of the film and for listeners to understand that, that there were, you know, certainly some scientists to whom this kind of surveillance happened. But at least if Oppenheimer's biographers Hubbard and Martin Sherwin are to be believed, and there's no reason not to believe them. Their book, American Prometheus, is an amazing and amazingly thorough book on Oppenheimer's life.

00;25;01;17 - 00;25;23;19

Audra Wolfe

The specifics of the FBI's surveillance of Oppenheimer was requested by straws. This wasn't a case where J. Edgar Hoover was saying, let's go out and surveil Oppenheimer. This is a case where straw is saying, you need to put Oppenheimer under constant surveillance. Now, that isn't to minimize the effects of the surveillance on Oppenheimer and Kitty Oppenheimer's life and their friends lives.

00;25;23;22 - 00;25;44;24

Audra Wolfe

They were searching Kitty Oppenheimer's parents luggage when she traveled. Even after the hearing, when the Oppenheimer's went to take a vacation in Saint Johns and the US Virgin Islands, they were being surveilled there. They had installed bugs underneath photographs and framed pictures in the homes of their friends if they knew they were going to be visiting. The surveillance was constant.

00;25;44;26 - 00;26;13;19

Audra Wolfe

It was making them both incredibly anxious. It was oppressive. And this did happen to some other scientists, particularly ones who had known communist affiliations. And there were other scientists who lost various kinds of credentials or who had troubles getting their security clearances. A very famous example that only comes up in passing in the movie but is relevant involved Ed Condon, who had been also very involved in the bomb project and in postwar work.

00;26;13;19 - 00;26;36;28

Audra Wolfe

Goodman at the Bureau of Standards and Ed Condon couldn't keep his clearance and eventually ended up leaving government to work in the private sector, then also needed a clearance there, and so that was challenging. Linus Pauling famously couldn't get his passport. Now, what's interesting about all these cases, though, are that no one's going to jail. People are having trouble getting their clearances, and sometimes people are having trouble with their passports and a passport.

00;26;36;28 - 00;27;00;14

Audra Wolfe

One I think is, to my mind, a more serious and more egregious issue than not getting a clearance for the majority of these scientists whose stories we know and whose stories we tell when they're having trouble with red baiting. It often is in terms of threats, of being called before you act. It's in terms of university departments who are unwilling to renew their teaching appointment.

00;27;00;16 - 00;27;26;22

Audra Wolfe

It's kinds of blacklisting, but most of the time, and this is happening less now because most of them have passed on given the passage of time and generations. But when a lot of these debates and conversations looking back on, say, Oppenheimer's role in the 90s and 2000 were still happening, some of these scientists were still alive, and they would request their FBI files, and you would hear stories from people who, in retrospect, were fairly mainstream characters, pointing out the fact that they requested their own FBI file.

00;27;26;22 - 00;27;55;17

Audra Wolfe

And it was hundreds and hundreds of pages long. Now, I have seen some of these FBI files because I, too, have requested them after hearing these stories. One of them is the file of a man named Bentley Glass, who plays a big role in my second book, freedom. Celebratory. Glass had a fairly national reputation. He refused to sign Loyalty Oath, and he became a figure who was often grouped in conversations with Linus Pauling for his unwillingness to sign loyalty oaths and the trouble that that was getting him into in some policy corners.

00;27;55;20 - 00;28;14;06

Audra Wolfe

But glass had a high clearance, and glass was doing a lot of international work on behalf of the government. He was also the head of any number of professional organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and eventually he became the provost at Stony Brook. I mean, this is not a man whose career suffered too much because he's refused to sign this loyalty oath.

00;28;14;08 - 00;28;37;05

Audra Wolfe

And so when you see these FBI files that are hundreds of pages long for scientists who were involved in policy discussions during this time period, often it's just standard background checks because they need to re-up their security thing. That doesn't mean there aren't ridiculous things in the files. Glass was a very kind of moderate. Let let's call him a white racial moderate for that time period.

00;28;37;07 - 00;28;58;26

Audra Wolfe

You know, he gave $5 to some interracial student group and that would show up on his FBI files for 20 years. Other groups that he gave money to was supposedly a fellow traveler group. And so every time he needed to renew his security classification, they had questions about the $5 that he had given to this inner racial youth group.

00;28;58;29 - 00;29;33;17

Audra Wolfe

What I'm saying is not a defense of the FBI. I mean, Hoover's FBI was doing atrocious things that they should not have been doing at the same time. It is also very true that many of the scientists who had clearances, who participated in these discussions during these time, there's some of them have felt it in their interest to suggest that they had a more oppositional stance to the government, maybe, than they actually did when they were doing things like advising on the development of weapons, that if their chief complaint was that they couldn't simultaneously give speeches about the dangers of fallout and advise the government on how to develop a bomb.

00;29;33;22 - 00;29;43;12

Audra Wolfe

I mean, you know, I think it's useful for us to reflect on what exactly they're complaining about here and in what ways their rights have been infringed.

00;29;43;14 - 00;30;08;01

Jonathan Hafetz

Such an interesting history. The film just kind of touches on a central aspect in the film. Like you mentioned, the revocation of Oppenheimer's security clearance, which is, the film makes clear, kind of a politico all maneuver orchestrated by straws, the decision of the Atomic Energy Commission on the appeal. I think it should like a day before the commission was going to expire anyway, just to make a point.

00;30;08;07 - 00;30;21;12

Jonathan Hafetz

What else can you tell us about the background of the proceeding and what the actual accusations were against Oppenheimer, who had been such a celebrated, prominent figure for his role in the Manhattan Project.

00;30;21;14 - 00;30;44;02

Audra Wolfe

I want to start answering that question by drawing listeners attention to the word preceding, kind of what kind of incident this was. I don't think it'll be a surprise to your listeners that you and I corresponded a little bit before we talked about what we were going to talk about. This is what normally happens in podcasts. And I noticed when I was looking at what you wanted to talk about, that you referred to it as a trial.

00;30;44;05 - 00;30;45;17

Jonathan Hafetz

A political trial, right.

00;30;45;17 - 00;31;11;10

Audra Wolfe

A political trial. It was not a trial. Right. And this was an administrative hearing, within the AEC about whether, Oppenheimer's, security clearance and technically was appeal. Technically, it had already been revoked a few months earlier. And so this was a hearing to see whether it would be reinstated. And that difference matters a lot for what actually happened in both in terms of how they justified it at the time.

00;31;11;11 - 00;31;37;28

Audra Wolfe

Now, the morality and ethics of what they were doing may be a separate question, but it is important to understand that this was not a trial in a criminal sense or even a civil trial. This was a proceeding in which the ASI had elected to rescind his clearance in December. So this hearing was in response to the idea that Oppenheimer's security clearance had been removed in December, and this was in response to some actions that Straus had taken.

00;31;37;28 - 00;31;57;10

Audra Wolfe

And Eisenhower won over to be what he called a blank wall between Oppenheimer and all the security information in terms of what Oppenheimer was actually doing at this time. He was a consultant. He wasn't working for the AEC on a regular basis, according to some accounts. The AEC had actually only called on him for a total of six days in the past two years.

00;31;57;12 - 00;32;20;11

Audra Wolfe

So if they had concerns about Oppenheimer, one way to approach the problem was simply not to ask him for help. And most of the body of most of the charges against him were things that the AEC had previously considered. Many, many times. These questions about his personal relationships with people who were communists before he met them were communists when he was with them.

00;32;20;19 - 00;32;43;17

Audra Wolfe

The question of whether he himself was a communist, something called the Chevalier affair, which is very complicated and we don't need to get into the weeds. And let's assume that everyone listening has seen the movie. Maybe you've encountered the seven year affair. The real impetus for why this was coming to a head had to do with Eisenhower's election, which meant a change in parties that we went from a Democrat in the white House to a Republican to the white House.

00;32;43;19 - 00;33;13;00

Audra Wolfe

And so Eisenhower was appointing a new head of the AEC. And that new head was Lewis Straws, who, as we have established, did not get along with Oppenheimer. At the same time, there was a policy debate happening about how frank the government needed to be with the American people about the dangers of atomic weapons. All of these things that I've said earlier about these debates about the H-bomb, it's so essential to know that all of that was happening in secret.

00;33;13;02 - 00;33;38;01

Audra Wolfe

Basically, everything about nuclear weapons policy was happening in secret. No one could talk about any of it. And so Oppenheimer had been part of a group of scientists who not only had been wanting international control of atomic energy, but they had been asking for what they called candor. And this actually became a name within the administration. Operation candor, the question of how frank the administration should be about this.

00;33;38;01 - 00;33;59;14

Audra Wolfe

And so Oppenheimer gave a speech to the council, Foreign Relations, that stars in particular found deeply upsetting and inappropriate. But again, part of what Oppenheimer was doing that was kind of pressing Strauss's buttons was Oppenheimer wasn't just saying, here's what I know about theoretical physics. Oppenheimer was saying, here is what you do. The government here is how you should conduct your atomic policy.

00;33;59;17 - 00;34;19;02

Audra Wolfe

And for hawks like straws, this was inappropriate and a sign that the scientist who he didn't trust in the first place, they were overstepping their balance. And so that was the straw that broke the camel's back for straws. And it led to this, this issue with the hearing. And so then Oppenheimer had a choice. Straws was hoping that Oppenheimer would simply resign.

00;34;19;04 - 00;34;36;21

Audra Wolfe

And actually, that's also what Einstein told him to do, that he should simply resign. But he didn't need this in his life, that he could simply walk away from this. Why did he want to be part of an operation that he thought was terrible anyway? But Oppenheimer felt that it was important that he clear his name, and so he decided to fight the charges.

00;34;36;24 - 00;34;41;05

Audra Wolfe

And that is the administrative hearing that we see represented in the movie.

00;34;41;08 - 00;34;56;23

Jonathan Hafetz

So important that it is not a trial right, a political trial to trial like Joan of Arc. It's a show trial. The film, in fact, it opens, I think, in the opening moments of the film, saying it might be Oppenheimer or someone refers to a trial and someone says during the hearing, this is not a trial. Forget about a criminal trial.

00;34;56;23 - 00;35;18;29

Jonathan Hafetz

It doesn't have anything resemblance to a civil trial or even kind of a modern administrative hearing with basic elements of due process. And there was evidence that Oppenheimer's counsel never got to see that was presented. A limited ability to call or cross-examine witness is a lack of impartiality. I mean, a host of reasons. At least one character in the film to refer to it as kind of a kangaroo court.

00;35;18;29 - 00;35;39;19

Audra Wolfe

Yes. There is no question that straws stack this deck as the head of the A straws picked the members of the panel and then was able to influence then how the panel's recommendations came to the rest of the commissioners. But one of the most important ways. But Oppenheimer didn't receive the rights of a person who was on a different kind of trial.

00;35;39;22 - 00;36;04;08

Audra Wolfe

So a lot of what the prosecution had at their fingertips and with the judges on the administrative panel, had they had access to all of these, I think fair to say, you know, legal FBI wiretaps and surveillance of Oppenheimer. And they had other information from during the Manhattan Project that was considered classified. Oppenheimer's legal team didn't have a clearance.

00;36;04;13 - 00;36;45;27

Audra Wolfe

And so the prosecutor and the judges had access to vast troves of evidence that Oppenheimer and his legal team were not allowed to see. They couldn't know who the witnesses were going to be beforehand, just any number of issues that were fairly egregious in terms of due process. One can also question the wisdom of Oppenheimer's counsel approach. His lead counsel was Lloyd Garrison, who did not particularly who wanted to really demonstrate Oppenheimer's cooperative that he was cooperating and that he was reasonable in retrospect, that was no match for Strauss's desire to humiliate Oppenheimer in any possible way that he could.

00;36;45;29 - 00;37;07;23

Jonathan Hafetz

Or rob the prosecuting attorney, who was extremely effective and was an important right wing figure. Although I learned in preparing for the podcast, he represented Earl Browder. I don't. If you knew early in his career the head of the Communist Party, which I thought was kind of interesting. So, I mean, he later shifted. He Nixon put him on the D.C. circuit, but he did a very effective he was very effective in trying to demolish Oppenheimer.

00;37;07;23 - 00;37;16;21

Jonathan Hafetz

Mean the only one, at least during the film, were really seem to have any effect in pushing back was Kitty during his cross-examination of her. But I seem to otherwise get kind of the best of everybody.

00;37;16;24 - 00;37;47;09

Audra Wolfe

Absolutely. Even Leslie Groves, who came hoping to support Oppenheimer and managed to find himself backed into a corner. I think the prosecutor was very skilled, and the scientists in particular, I think, weren't really prepared to be treated that way, which was enlightening to many of them. And that is touched on a little bit in the film. But the question of Oppenheimer, his legacy and what happened to Oppenheimer afterwards is an interesting one in that, you know, reasonable people can disagree about whether Oppenheimer was destroyed.

00;37;47;09 - 00;38;11;04

Audra Wolfe

But what happened at the hearing? He lost his clearance. He was no longer consulting for the AEC. You know, he remained at the helm of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies for the rest of his career, and very much became an intellectual celebrity, even did kind of international work representing the face of American scientist as a figure going abroad for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was a CIA backed group that was kind of promoting American values abroad.

00;38;11;07 - 00;38;26;11

Audra Wolfe

So, yes, Oppenheimer lost his clearance. He would never be involved in defense consulting in the same way. Was he ostracized from his professional life? Was Oppenheimer truly canceled? In my heart of hearts, I do not believe that Oppenheimer was canceled. But yes, he lost his clearance.

00;38;26;13 - 00;38;44;16

Jonathan Hafetz

He lost his clearance. Although he was sort of getting frozen out anyway. They just weren't calling him to consult as much. And I mean, I think you know why he decides to participate. I don't know, but the film seems to suggest, I think later on that he wanted to kind of make himself a martyr. And ultimately he certainly was resurrected.

00;38;44;16 - 00;39;10;24

Jonathan Hafetz

Later in December 2022, Jennifer Granholm, the secretary of energy, the head of the successor the AEC, vacates the 1954 revocation of Oppenheimer's security clearance. So he gets this kind of posthumous validation. But even during his lifetime, as you said, he still was this prominent intellectual figure and garnered a certain degree of sympathy. So at the end of the day, all he lost was his clearance, not to kind of justify the result, but the consequences were, practically speaking, maybe not that great.

00;39;10;26 - 00;39;34;28

Audra Wolfe

Yes, I found Granholm decision to do this in 2022 so interesting because the federal government had, in some ways already apologized when he was awarded the Fermi Award in December 1963, which Oppenheimer was expecting to receive from Kennedy. But of course, Kennedy was killed a few weeks earlier. He did receive that from Johnson, I believe. If I'm not mis recalling, this is in the movie where he gets this award from Johnson.

00;39;34;28 - 00;39;57;20

Audra Wolfe

So it's less than a decade later, he's back in the white House getting the same award that Ed Teller, of all people, had received the previous year. So I think Oppenheimer's ostracism is greatly overstated, at least in my opinion. Clearly, it was very personally upsetting to him, and it was devastating on a personal psychological basis. I have no question about that.

00;39;57;22 - 00;40;17;19

Audra Wolfe

But why he chose to fight it, you know, in the first place, it is absolutely true that Oppenheimer's political judgment and sense of his own importance, you know, the man had a high belief in his own ability to get out of any problem, whether he wanted to fight it, thinking that he was going to be a martyr or whether he wanted to fight it, thinking that he could actually win, I think is an open question.

00;40;17;19 - 00;40;33;02

Audra Wolfe

I cannot hazard what went on inside the mind of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oh, but it is clear that there were a few challenges that he had not overcome thus far in his life, and I think some part of him probably looked forward to the idea of showing straws that he was wrong.

00;40;33;04 - 00;40;53;28

Jonathan Hafetz

We have the consequences for Oppenheimer and what that meant to someone who was either an atomic bomb, such a celebrated iconic figure, and what that meant for the country to kind of do that to him through revocation of the security clearance. But with the larger implications. I mean, it's seen as kind of like when you look at Cold War history, I'm not anywhere nearly as immersed in it as an expert like yourself.

00;40;53;28 - 00;41;08;25

Jonathan Hafetz

But this is kind of one of those seminal moments when you're talking about what happens in America shifting to the Cold War, what happens with Oppenheimer and the political, the hearing or political trial and the revocation of the clearance? I mean, the larger significance socially and culturally. And for scientists.

00;41;08;28 - 00;41;38;26

Audra Wolfe

It's so hard to separate what happened with scientists authority and the question of the bomb. These are with Oppenheimer. These are the other things that were happening in 1954. One thing that is not mentioned in the film at all, and it is a fascinating omission, was that the United States had tested its hydrogen bomb in the Castle Bravo test in March of 1954, and this test very famously went terribly wrong.

00;41;39;02 - 00;42;01;17

Audra Wolfe

And one of the things that happened was that a Japanese fishing boat got caught in the fallout Marshall Islanders had to leave their homelands to. At the time that this administrative hearing was taking place, the Japanese fishermen had already returned home and Japanese fish markets were realizing that they were seeing a lot more radioactivity than they should have in some of the harvest.

00;42;01;19 - 00;42;31;14

Audra Wolfe

And there was a great debate about how dangerous this was. And so at the very same moment that straw was orchestrating Oppenheimer's downfall, that really changed how scientists understood their relationship to the security apparatus. Literally the same month, straws was all over the airwaves, trying to assure people that fallout was harmless, that there would be no repercussions of this scaled up program of nuclear testing.

00;42;31;16 - 00;43;11;22

Audra Wolfe

One of the fishermen died that fall. He lasted through the summer, but he did die that fall. And a debate about the safety of nuclear or atmospheric nuclear testing was really kicked off, not so much by the test itself, but by straws. His insistence that it was harmless and the clear evidence that it was not harmless. There were so many U.S. servicemen and so many Marshallese and the Japanese fishermen who had been exposed during that test, and who saw the dangers of that test, that that test really sparked off a conversation about the safety of atomic testing, the biological dangers, the environmental dangers.

00;43;11;22 - 00;43;31;20

Audra Wolfe

So much so that there were periods in the late 1950s and early 60s where there were brief moratoriums on atmospheric testing, and this ultimately culminated in 1963, in the partial nuclear test ban Treaty, which barred testing of atomic weapons in space, in the atmosphere and in the water. So parties that were signature to that agreement moved that underground.

00;43;31;22 - 00;44;02;09

Audra Wolfe

So that debate was really kicking off at the same time that this hearing was taking place. And when we followed the trajectories of these scientists over the next few years, that debate is what we keep coming back to. There was very famous televised debates between Pauling and Teller about the biological effects of atomic radiation, with Pauling saying people are giving their consent, they're being exposed to this, and teller saying the dangers of exposure to fallout are so minimal compared to the dangers of communism that that it's worth it.

00;44;02;10 - 00;44;23;22

Audra Wolfe

We have to do this no matter what. So that's a very long way of saying that. The contours of that debate were changing really rapidly. In 1954, and it was becoming much more apparent to everyone that this was no longer just a question of scientific authority and what the scientists knew. But these were political questions about kind of wish to be tested.

00;44;23;22 - 00;44;42;02

Audra Wolfe

Putting even aside the question of how these weapons could be used, how could you even test them without the consent of people on the globe, everywhere, who went on to be exposed to these weapons? And many, many scientists chose to participate in that debate, even as they were often advising the AEC as so was a very complicated period.

00;44;42;02 - 00;44;54;06

Audra Wolfe

But that month of April, 1954 was really when all of this was coming to a head, and scientists were beginning to understand how much more complicated their role in this process really was.

00;44;54;09 - 00;45;16;03

Jonathan Hafetz

It's such an interesting history and element of this. And so there are multiple things going on at the same time. Just to go back to the hearing, you mentioned Leslie Groves, who I think you had said kind of came up to help Oppenheimer. You know, I don't know how accurate is, but the film demonstrates or portrays this kind of slightly antagonistic but overall kind of amicable role.

00;45;16;03 - 00;45;38;27

Jonathan Hafetz

They at least worked together well. Groves and Oppenheimer, you know, Groves managed to see Oppenheimer's talents. And Oppenheimer, I think, recognized some sense that Groves, you know, had good judgment in some areas. But under the cross-examination, there some questions posed by Rob to Groves about Oppenheimer's loyalties, sympathies, his view on the H-bomb and whether he should still maintain a clearance.

00;45;39;04 - 00;46;01;05

Jonathan Hafetz

At the end, Leslie Groves, played very effectively by Matt Damon, says well, Oppenheimer is not disloyal, but under the security criteria that are in effect today, he acknowledges it wouldn't clear Oppenheimer wouldn't have cleared any of those guys. Scientist. He tell us a little bit more about the relationship between the two and Groves at the hearing. And Leslie Groves generally, because I it's really interesting.

00;46;01;05 - 00;46;02;04

Jonathan Hafetz

Finger.

00;46;02;06 - 00;46;25;19

Audra Wolfe

Yeah, I hadn't expected to come away from that movie feeling so sympathetic to Leslie Groves that in some ways the movie portrays Groves as the most clear eyed person involved in the project. No delusions that they could simply develop a bomb and then treat it as an intellectual exercise that if they were going to do this kind of thing, of course it would be used a real sense of the limits of their political power.

00;46;25;21 - 00;46;56;10

Audra Wolfe

That moment of the hearing is, in some ways, the first time that we see Groves taking any kind of political misstep in the whole film. Groves was a fairly brilliant political actor and administrator in that sense. He put up with a lot from Oppenheimer, but Oppenheimer clearly wanted to treat many parts of the Manhattan Project like a university department in the midst of a war, in the midst of doing this deeply scientific project.

00;46;56;13 - 00;47;17;22

Audra Wolfe

So when various members of the panel, you know, said that they had real questions about Oppenheimer's judgment from the light of history, I'm not sure that's a bad assessment that Oppenheimer repeatedly was. Then the problem with the people he was talking to, it wasn't that they were communists, but that wasn't the problem. You know, because one can hold any number of political beliefs.

00;47;17;22 - 00;47;52;06

Audra Wolfe

The problem was that some of them were actively passing on information and made that clear to Oppenheimer, and he still felt that it would be fine to have them working on the project. That I think reasonable people can say is probably an error of judgment. And when we look at the ways that he was trying to orchestrate scientists influence over the question of the H-bomb, he did misread the scientists amount of power and in many ways seemed to feel that if they gave scientific advice, that their advice would be followed.

00;47;52;08 - 00;48;12;27

Audra Wolfe

And that's not, you know, scientific advice is important. It is essential for any number of decisions in a democracy. But scientists aren't necessarily the ones making those decisions. So Oppenheimer has a history of doing this kind of thing. Whereas Groves understands the parameter of a project, he understands its budget, and Groves is very dedicated to getting a project done in time.

00;48;12;27 - 00;48;45;06

Audra Wolfe

It's no coincidence that he built the Pentagon. This is what the man is known for. He's known for getting things done on time and on schedule. But there is this moment in this hearing where he says that using the same standards, that none of the men would have been allowed on the project. And I think the film does a really good job of conveying, you know, how widespread support was on the left in the 1930s for either the Communist Party or just short of the Communist Party for leftist causes, that this was absolutely a mainstream thing.

00;48;45;12 - 00;49;23;22

Audra Wolfe

You know, in 1936, especially in a university faculty, that Oppenheimer was not alone in doing that. You know, that there are actually even characters in this film who had personal relationships with people who went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. I mean, leftist politics were just kind of a part of their lives. And this continued to be an issue for the United States to figure out how to navigate into the 50s, and particularly when trying to build relationships with intellectuals in Europe, like in France, the number of French intellectuals who either had been or were still members of the Communist Party was quite high in the United States, was going to need to

00;49;23;22 - 00;49;42;26

Audra Wolfe

find ways to work with them in ways that Congress often found difficult to understand. There were a lot of consequences of that in terms of what the United States could and couldn't do for scientific intelligence. But that's not the question you asked me. You ask me about Leslie Groves. So I would say that the problem of what to do about scientists who also had leftist affiliations was a live one.

00;49;43;03 - 00;49;47;10

Audra Wolfe

So in 1950, for me, we continued to be alive one for some time.

00;49;47;12 - 00;50;13;06

Jonathan Hafetz

The other figure, who is really doesn't have a large role in the film. I think that, you know, he's depicted he raises Kitty's testimony, respond sympathetically. Is Henry DeWolf Smith to the sets? He's the judge who dissents from the decision. The majority says they've extended the concept of security risk beyond its legitimate justification. This is a dangerous precedent by misusing the label of security threat, to deny the country the services of a person of great talents like Oppenheimer.

00;50;13;09 - 00;50;19;18

Jonathan Hafetz

Is there anything to say about how he ends up on this panel? I mean, it's the only dissent. So I was just kind of curious.

00;50;19;20 - 00;50;38;13

Audra Wolfe

I wish I could tell you about the panel part. That's not something I can speak to, but what I can tell you is that one of the most interesting roles that Smith had in this broader story is that his name is attached to what became known as the Smyth Report, which basically publicized a lot of the workings of the bomb immediately after its usage.

00;50;38;20 - 00;51;03;04

Audra Wolfe

Then, when the scientists were trying to figure out when the government was also trying to figure out, like, well, clearly we have to release a statement, how much do we want to say? Smith's name went on the report that came out then, which honestly, it's sort of shocking how much material was released. It didn't give specifics of, say, the implosion mechanism, but short of that, it was a very detailed document on the bomb's workings.

00;51;03;08 - 00;51;26;27

Audra Wolfe

And that document, it later became, you know, the question of hindsight for that document, when the Soviet Union exploded its own weapon in 1941, that was one of the documents that that came up, the question of whether the Soviets even needed spies. Given the existence of the Smyth Report, I will say there was another character who I had expected to have a bigger role in the film, and that was Vancouver Bush.

00;51;27;00 - 00;51;46;05

Audra Wolfe

I had looked at the cast list before I went to see the movie, and as somebody who's written two books on science of the Cold War, I was so excited. There's any number of deep cut science policy figures were cast by well known actors in this film. But what's interesting is that they're often not identified. They are deep cuts.

00;51;46;07 - 00;52;05;03

Audra Wolfe

And it wasn't until one of the final scenes in the hearing where somebody refers to Doctor Bush, where I'm realizing that there's this man, you know, this older, thin man with glasses, and I slapped the knee of the person I was with at the theater, and I said, that's the never bush. That's supposed to be the never Bush.

00;52;05;06 - 00;52;25;00

Audra Wolfe

And in retrospect, he had been in many of the prior scenes, even some fairly important scenes, for instance, talking about that DAC report advising against the bomb. They're all like at a banquet table. And the straws is there too. And there's big flowers on the table, and they're talking about whether they should develop the H-bomb. but so the person who is supposed to be the neighbor Bush is in that scene, too.

00;52;25;06 - 00;52;43;15

Audra Wolfe

He's at one of the earliest scenes where they come into Lawrence's lab, and they have to ask Oppenheimer to leave, because Oppenheimer hasn't been cleared to join it yet. He's one of the people in the room, but he is never identified by name until that very last scene. So there's a lot of ways in which the film is fairly accurate.

00;52;43;15 - 00;52;58;24

Audra Wolfe

I think, to historical reality in many ways, and it's actually more accurate than it might seem at first glance, but you have to have a pretty deep knowledge of the underlying stories to see some of those accuracies play out on the screen.

00;52;58;27 - 00;53;21;05

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah, as you say, Vancouver Bush, who's played by Matthew Modine, I mean, all these people are played by very good actors. But you really do kind of have to bring some additional knowledge to pick up on what's going on. I, another one who has a lot of play in the movie is Robin Wright, who's another Jewish scientist. I mean, you get the kind of Eastern European versus old Jewish German tension or whatever you want to call it, between him and Oppenheimer.

00;53;21;05 - 00;53;28;22

Jonathan Hafetz

Right. But he's an important figure, too. So it's really interesting. So many of the scientists in the movie, so much history that they're.

00;53;28;24 - 00;53;45;08

Audra Wolfe

Yeah. If you're interested in the cast of characters for early Cold War science policy, I can't imagine another movie that will ever assemble such a cast of characters that will ever attempt to put all of these people up on a screen together again.

00;53;45;11 - 00;54;13;09

Jonathan Hafetz

So I would just go back to Starz for a second, because in rewatching the film, I noticed just how central the preceding the congressional proceeding over straws is. Nomination by Eisenhower to be the Secretary of the Department of Commerce. How important that proceeding plays in the movie, right? It really kind of alternates between Oppenheimer's administrative hearing on the one hand, which is shot in color, and then the congressional on straws nomination, which is in black and white.

00;54;13;12 - 00;54;43;13

Jonathan Hafetz

You know, film makes a lot of this hearing. I don't know how significant this was historically. One of the things that seemed noteworthy was that I think it's the American Federation of Scientists, or a large part of the scientific community had kind of banded together to ultimately derail, Strauss's nomination because of how strong was treated. Oppenheimer, what can you say about straws is hearing, and it's important it's relationship to the themes in the movie.

00;54;43;15 - 00;55;06;12

Audra Wolfe

So the fact that straws was not confirmed in a position he had been acting Secretary of Commerce, that that was fairly unusual to not win a confirmation. I mean, at that time, it was just unusual for someone not to get confirmed in the first place. But given that he had been acting secretary and a man of his prominence who had led the AEC for so long, there's no question it was absolutely humiliating for straws.

00;55;06;14 - 00;55;37;22

Audra Wolfe

Now. Yes, the Federation of American Scientists opposed him. And what happened with Oppenheimer was absolutely a large part of why they opposed him. But it's also important to acknowledge something that wasn't really discussed much in the film. But the Federation of American Scientists in particular, you know, many of them had been involved with the bomb. They were also absolutely outraged by the ways that straws had handled, the fallout controversy, the question about the dangers of fallout and particularly, the fallout related to the Castle Bravo test in 1954 that were happening at the same time as the Oppenheimer hearings.

00;55;37;24 - 00;56;01;03

Audra Wolfe

So the scientists who had been involved with the atomic project had a lot of concerns about, loose straws. The went back to his original opposition to the international control of atomic energy. It was not solely limited to Oppenheimer, although certainly his treatment of Oppenheimer was a huge part of that, and I think made them made many scientists more personally invested in straws as humiliation than they might otherwise have been.

00;56;01;06 - 00;56;32;12

Audra Wolfe

But many of them felt that his advice had been actively dangerous to American security, and questions about nuclear testing had taken on a different political valence. I believe that there was actually a nuclear testing moratorium in place during the time, straws his confirmation hearing, his role in claiming the fallout was harmless, were having dramatic international repercussions there were damaging the United States credibility, and atomic scientists had more authority to make that claim than almost any other group.

00;56;32;15 - 00;56;37;26

Jonathan Hafetz

So it was tied up with Oppenheimer as well as his kind of continuing positions and his view on testing.

00;56;38;03 - 00;56;39;01

Audra Wolfe

Absolutely.

00;56;39;03 - 00;56;57;04

Jonathan Hafetz

It's a fascinating character for people to learn about the era, but also learn about the kind of Lewis Straws figure. one of the many, many takeaways from the film. maybe a little more trivial note is Robert Downey Jr was so good and kind of realizing how many other great films he could have been in if he hadn't been Iron Man, but, he's just such a good actor.

00;56;57;04 - 00;56;58;01

Jonathan Hafetz

I thought he was.

00;56;58;03 - 00;57;05;17

Audra Wolfe

He was terrific as Lou Straws. Just absolutely terrific. He he really inhabited that man. And it's.

00;57;05;19 - 00;57;31;05

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah, he really did. One of the things that struck me also in doing the research for the podcast was, oh, the trial transcript for me classified the transcripts, the security hearing. It wasn't until Obama made public hundreds of pages that had been declassified from the secret hearing. Why did it take so long to learn, or for these documents to be declassified about the proceeding?

00;57;31;07 - 00;57;51;04

Audra Wolfe

Well, as a national security scholar yourself, you know, probably even better than I do that one speculates at one's own peril as to the logic of what is and isn't declassified. and then when it comes to the history of DoD documents, and for listeners who aren't familiar with the specifics of this, the Department of Energy is the successor institution for the atomic Energy Commission.

00;57;51;10 - 00;58;16;16

Audra Wolfe

Carter changed this in the 70s, so the DoD took over all of the ACS responsibility, which is why the DoD holds responsibility for declassifying matters related to Oppenheimer and other issues in the history of the bomb. But, you know, it's the short answer is sometimes it's specific words. You know, that the most obvious answer is if there are things in it that are embarrassing, to the government that they try to keep those held closely for as long as possible.

00;58;16;18 - 00;58;37;05

Audra Wolfe

When it comes to atomic weaponry, the policies are different than in many other areas of policy. There's a fabulous book by Alex Wallerstein called Restricted Data The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States that really talks about how classification policy is bound up with the history of atomic weaponry. It's a fascinating book. So that's part of it.

00;58;37;12 - 00;59;06;28

Audra Wolfe

But also, like a lot of it is just arbitrary. I cannot overstate how arbitrary declassification procedures are. You know, when I was working on my second book, I requested some items go back for another review. And these weren't from the D.o.e.. They were from various other government agencies. These were boxes that had been cleared in 2008, and there were still documents that had withdrawal slips at the archives that I requested to be declassified, and I eventually got most of them, in some cases as late as.

00;59;06;28 - 00;59;25;20

Audra Wolfe

So in some cases it took ten years. But I did eventually get most of them. And some of them you can see why they were probably still classified, it seems maybe sensitive in terms of how the United States was collecting intelligence in general, matters related to intelligence operations can be classified indefinitely, even if it's something that happened 70 years ago.

00;59;25;23 - 00;59;54;09

Audra Wolfe

but other times there really do seem to be trigger words like one of the documents concerned plans for a exhibit that NASA was going to have at a world's fair in Japan, a completely innocuous document, but it included the language of psychological warfare that the poster would be an important part of NASA psychological warfare operations. And presumably, you know, somebody even in 2008, thought that it would be damaging to release the idea that the United States had psychological warfare policies.

00;59;54;15 - 01;00;05;23

Audra Wolfe

So I hope this isn't a surprise to any of these listeners to know that the United States had psychological warfare strategies during the Cold War. But I hate to tell you the United States did, and that involved even agencies like NASA.

01;00;05;26 - 01;00;28;19

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah, we covered it on another podcast. So at least listeners of this podcast will know. But I yeah, I agree, you can speculate only at your peril about the mystery behind why things both become classified and remain classified long after the fact. Well, just moving to kind of the legacy questions. Before we wrap up, there have been a number of dramatizations of Oppenheimer, and particularly the preceding the theater for film, for television.

01;00;28;19 - 01;00;39;13

Jonathan Hafetz

I mean, in some way, this is kind of introducing Oppenheimer to a new generation and reminding other people of it being a really very powerful film. Do you see any impact for the film on Oppenheimer's legacy?

01;00;39;16 - 01;01;01;00

Audra Wolfe

I think it may be too early to say. I think that many viewers probably won't be as familiar with his legacy that, you know, when I was in grad school, 25 years ago as a historian of science, and everybody was talking about the authority of the scientist, that's what how I got into this topic. In general, the question of physicists authority and levels of independence was really front and center at that literature.

01;01;01;02 - 01;01;21;14

Audra Wolfe

And a lot of that literature has moved on since then, in part because many of the actors died. Many of them didn't die until the 1990s or the aughts. And I think with the passing of that generation, historians have been able to have other and perhaps in some ways, more productive conversations about scientists individual responsibility and or capabilities during the Cold War.

01;01;21;16 - 01;01;48;22

Audra Wolfe

but I thought the movie did such a good job in highlighting the limits of scientists agency, in some ways, even better than the book that it's based on. I think American Prometheus, which was published in I believe, in 2005, is still very invested in this idea that Oppenheimer and some of those around him had special knowledge that maybe he should have given them special roles in the government and that he was, deeply, particularly wronged by straws in this way.

01;01;48;24 - 01;02;24;01

Audra Wolfe

And yes, I don't want to undersell the extent to which straws personally wronged Oppenheimer, because he did. But with some hindsight and with some distance, we can see the ways that scientists were telling themselves some pretty limited stories about their responsibilities and power, the ways that they were being used in supporting these ideas of freedom. As somebody who's written about the ways that Americans confused and got wrapped up ideas about science and democracy and freedom, Oppenheimer's subsequent participation in the Congress of Cultural Freedom works.

01;02;24;04 - 01;02;52;14

Audra Wolfe

I still can't quite wrap my head around that. You know that here was a man who was going out trying to represent and foster discussions about science and democracy and the nature of freedom, even as he's J. Robert Oppenheimer. So he's a man without a clearance. But in some ways, the fact that he wasn't in jail, was very, you know, that in itself was telling and something that the Americans could send him out on an international stage, you know, as a symbol that there was a possibility for dissent in the United States.

01;02;52;14 - 01;03;00;10

Audra Wolfe

There might be consequences for that dissent. but the consequences might be losing your clearance. It wasn't, being sent to a log.

01;03;00;12 - 01;03;18;18

Jonathan Hafetz

Just to reflect on that in terms of the moment we're at now and in terms of the role of science coming out of the pandemic, where there were a lot of interesting questions raised about science and power in the government, the rise of a possibly rise of Donald Trump and increasing tensions with China, and some of the policies have been directed towards scientists working in that area.

01;03;18;18 - 01;03;22;28

Jonathan Hafetz

So I don't know if you had any thoughts on how the film might speak to some current issues.

01;03;23;01 - 01;03;53;02

Audra Wolfe

Very well, actually, because I think the film does a good job at communicating the idea that we need scientists insights, that there are things that can't be done without expertise. That expertise is essential to national security, but also to kind of other parts of running a government. In some ways, the optimism that they're talking about in the 30s is related to this idea that you need expertise to accomplish various kinds of goals.

01;03;53;02 - 01;04;15;08

Audra Wolfe

And I think the film actually does a pretty good job at suggesting that scientists then aren't the only ones who get to make those decisions, that in a democracy we have elected representatives, we elect people, and they are the ones who are often ultimately making decisions. It is not the scientists who have been appointed to the panel. They can make recommendations.

01;04;15;11 - 01;04;28;07

Audra Wolfe

And certainly this is a theme that came up a lot during Covid. The recommendation is based on science for what you can do might not be the same as the recommendations that a population will live with.

01;04;28;09 - 01;04;37;09

Jonathan Hafetz

One thing hopefully coming out of this movie that people will see, and I don't know if you agree, is the significance of science, even in all its complications.

01;04;37;12 - 01;05;21;10

Audra Wolfe

Absolutely. And particularly I would say the specific kind of science with you're talking about the science of atomic weaponry. It's not something that we think much about until we have to. I think that most Americans aren't thinking about nuclear weapons on a regular basis. They're not thinking about the chain of command. They're not thinking about what to do with aging, nuclear stockpiles and whatever else one can say about the movie's use of Einstein, you know, ending the movie, really focusing on Einstein, reflecting on what scientists had done in choosing to develop the weapon is incredibly powerful, and it is essential that we continue to have a debate about what to do about nuclear weapons, that

01;05;21;10 - 01;05;39;24

Audra Wolfe

the world is not safe with nuclear weapons in them. This is not a conversation that comes up often, particularly in movies that might be winning an Oscar. So I think for it to have that conversation front and center is itself an enormous service. And I hope we continue to talk about what are the roles of nuclear weapons and national security.

01;05;39;26 - 01;06;02;11

Jonathan Hafetz

In such a popular movie between people saw it. It does sort of reraise that issue because I don't feel like myself. But I certainly remember when nuclear weapons was a dominant in a political issue. But it really has kind of dropped off the general radar, right? When people think about security and war and conflict, but they're still there.

01;06;02;14 - 01;06;24;23

Audra Wolfe

You know, one consequence of the Partial Test Ban Treaty is that most nuclear weapon testing does happen underground these days. Not everybody tests their nuclear weapons underground, but the number of people who have seen a live nuclear explosion has dwindled, you know, considerably since 1963. And I think there are some dangers associated with that.

01;06;24;25 - 01;06;43;12

Jonathan Hafetz

So final important question, Audrey. And another fascinating thing around the movie was the fact that it was paired with Barbie in terms of the experience, the Barb and Hymer phenomenon, did you see Barbie at the same time as Oppenheimer? Did you just reserve your day for Oppenheimer?

01;06;43;15 - 01;07;08;09

Audra Wolfe

You know, I saw them on separate days. I saw them within a week of each other. I didn't partially have the stamina to do a six hour, but I also wanted to give both the movie its due course and the the perennial Barb and Hymer question of which one you see first. I honestly could not solve. And so I thought, you know, I want to give each of these movies the appropriate space in which I could enjoy and reflect on each of them, but they're both great.

01;07;08;10 - 01;07;10;08

Audra Wolfe

You should go see both of them if you haven't already.

01;07;10;15 - 01;07;23;26

Jonathan Hafetz

I have the same as you, and there's probably no right or wrong answer on which one goes first, but I'm glad I saw them separately. Well, I want to thank you again for coming on the podcast. It's been great to chat with you about Oppenheimer, about science, about nuclear weapons and all these other issues.

01;07;23;29 - 01;07;25;16

Audra Wolfe

My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on.