Richard Rhodes — The making of the atomic bomb

Key Takeaways

by 1945 we were so pissed off at the Japanese we had destroyed their Air Force we had destroyed their Navy we had destroyed their army and yet they wouldn't surrender the people who are working on AI right now they're are huge fans of yours the way they see the progress in the field is exactly like when they start reading this book oppenheimer's worst enemy said to me Robert Oppenheimer was the best lab director I ever knew and then he chased me out of the house so can make a pretty high level nuclear explosion just by taking two subcritical pieces of uranium all this business about Secret Designs and so forth is is hogwash we're still in a very precarious place and as long as any country in the world has nuclear weapons we're going to continue to be that has been the price of nuclear deterrence okay today I have the great honor of interviewing Richard rhods who is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of of the making of the atomic bomb and most recently the author of energy a human history I'm really excited about this one um let's jump in actually at a current event which is the fact that there's a new movie about Oppenheimer coming out which I understand you've been consulted about what did you think of the trailer what are your impressions they've really done a good job I think of things like the Trinity test device which was the sphere covered with c of various kinds and you know I had watched pey blinders where the actor who's playing Oppenheimer also appeared and he looks so much like Oppenheimer to start with Oppenheimer was about six feet tall he was rail thin not not simply in terms of weight but in terms of structure they someone said he could sit in a children's high chair comfortably so he but he never weighed more than about 140 pounds wow and and that quality is there in the actor I think so who knows it all depends on on how the director uh decided to tell the story there are so many aspects of the story you could never possibly squeeze them into one two-hour movie I think that we're waiting for the multi-part series that would really tell the a lot more of the story not the story but it looks exciting uh we'll see there have been some terrible depictions of Oppenheimer been some terrible depictions of the bond program and uh maybe they'll get this one right yeah yeah hopefully you know it is always great when you get an actor who resembles it resembles their role so well Brian Caron for example played LBJ and they have the same physical characteristics of the BD the big ears but okay so in the case of Oppenheimer one question I had since we're talking about him I understand that there's evidence that's come out that he wasn't a communist spy or he wasn't directly a communist spy but is there any possibility that he was leaking information to the Soviets or in some way helping the Soviet program he was a communist sympathizer right he had been during the 1930s yeah but less for the for the theory if you will than for the Practical business of helping Jews escape from Nazi Germany one of the loves of his life who was busy working on extracting Jews from Europe during the 30s as well was a member of the Communist party and Jean tatlock and she I think encouraged him to come to meetings but I don't think there's any possibility whatsoever that he either shared information or was in any way uh ail in fact he said he read marks on a train trip people travel by train in those days between Berkeley and and Washington one time and thought it was a bunch of hooie just ridiculous he I mean he was a very smart man and he read the book with an eye to its logic and he didn't think there was much there so I think you have to see him as you know he really didn't know anything about human beings and their struggles he was born into considerable wealth there were impressionist paintings all over his family apartments in New York City his father had made uh a great deal of money uh cornering the market so to speak on uniform linings for military uniforms during and before the first world war so there was a lot of wealth I think his income if I remember and if I'm right in this when he was during the War years and before was somewhere around $100,000 a month and that's a lot of money in the 1930s so he just lived in his head for most of his early early years until he got to Berkeley and discovered that Prime students of his were living on cat food I mean you know cans of God aful cat food because they couldn't afford anything else and once he understood that there was great suffering in the world he jumped in on it as he always did when he became interested in something so all of the things come together I do think his brother well there's no question that his brother Frank was a member of the party as was Frank's wife and the whole question of oppenheimer's lying to the security people during the second world war which he did about who approached him and who was maybe trying to get him to sign on to some Espionage I think was primarily an effort to cover up his brother's involvement not that his brothers gave away any secrets I I don't think he did but but if the Army security had really understood Frank oppenheimer's involvement uh he probably would have been shipped off to the Illusions or some other some other distant place for the duration of the war and Oppenheimer quite correctly wanted Frank around he was someone he trusted let's start talking about um the the making of the bomb one question I have is if World War II doesn't happen is there any possibility that the bomb just never gets developed and nobody bothers that's really a good question and I've wondered over the years but the more I look at the sequence of events the more I think it would have been essentially inevitable though perhaps not so such an accelerated program Obama was pushed so hard during the second world war because we thought the Germans had already started working on one nuclear fishion had been discovered in Nazi Germany in Berlin in 1938 nine months before the beginning of the second world war in Europe so from our perspective without the kind of elaborate uh National Security Programs that we have developed since then I mean technological surveillance none of that was available during the war the only way you could find out something was to send in a spy or have a mole or something human and we didn't have that evidently so we didn't know where the Germans were but we knew the bomb had not the bomb but the the the basic physics reaction that would could lead to a bomb had been discovered there a year or more before anybody else in the west got started thinking about it so there was that most of all to push the urgency and there would not have of course have been that and you're hypothetical however as soon as good physicist thought about the reaction that leads to nuclear fusion where a slow Neutron room temperature Neutron very little energy uh bumps into the the the nucleus of a uranium 235 atom Isador Robbie one of the great physicists of this era said it would have been like the moon struck the Earth that kind of massive response so a very little energy in and a huge amount of energy out the reaction was physicists say fiercely exothermic I mean it puts out a lot more energy than you have to use to get it to get it started once they did the numbers on that and once they figured out how much uranium you would need to have in one place to make a bomb or to make fision get going and once they were sure that there would be a chain reaction meaning a couple of neutrons would come out of the reaction from one atom and those two or three would go on and bump into other uranium atoms which would then figon them and you get a uh geometric uh exponential you get 1 2 4 8 16 32 and off from there so in about 80 generations for most of our bombs today I'm sure the initi fishion leads to in 80 generations to a city busting explosion and then they had to figure out how much material they would need and that's something the Germans never really figured out fortunately for the rest of us they were still working in the idea that somehow a reactor would be what you would build uh when when Neil bore the great Danish physicist escaped from Denmark in 19 43 when the Germans invaded and came to first England and then the United States he brought with him a sort of a rough sketch that verer Heisenberg the leader of science the leading scientist in the German program had handed him in the course of trying to find out what bore knew about what America was doing and he showed it to the guys of lelos and Hans beta one of the great nooran physicist in the group said the trying to throw a reactor down on us well I mean you can make a reactor blow up we saw that at Chernobyl but it's not a nuclear explosion on the scale that we're talking about with the bomb so when a couple of these igr Jewish physicists from Nazi Germany were whing away their time in England after they escaped because they were still technically enemy aliens and therefore could not be introduced to Top Secret discussions one of them asked the other well how much would we need of pure uranium 235 this rare isotope of uranium that chain reacts how much would we need to make a bomb and they did the numbers and they came up with one pound which was startling to them of course it is more than that it's about 125 pounds but that's just a softball that's not that much material and then they did the numbers about what it would cost to build Factory to to pull this one rare isotope of uranium out of the natural metal which has several Isotopes mixed together and they figured it wouldn't cost more than it would cost to build a battleship which is not that much money for a country at War certainly the British had plenty of battleships at that point in time so they put all this together and they wrote a report which they handed through uh their Superior physicist at Manchester University where they were based who quickly realized how important this was the United States lagged behind because we were not yet at War but the British were they were London was being bombed in the blitz so they saw the urgency first of all of beating Germany to the punch second of all of the possibility of building a bomb in this report these two scientists wrote that there would be no physical structure that they could think of that you could build that would protect you against a bomb of such ferocious explosive power so they said in this report from 1940 understand this is long before even the man hun project got started they said in this report the only way we could think of to protect you against a bomb would be to have a bomb of similar destructive force that could be threatened for use if the other side attacked you that's deterrence that's a concept that was developed even before the War Began in the United States you put all those pieces together and you have a situation where you have to build a bomb because whoever builds the first bomb theoretically could uh prevent you from building more or prevent you another country from building any and could dominate the world and the notion in particular of Adolf hit dominating the world the Third Reich with nuclear weapons was horrifying so put all that together and I think the answer is every country this is the case actually every country that had the technological infrastructure to even remotely have the possibility of building everything you'd have to build to get the material for a bomb started work on thinking about it as soon as nuclear fusion was announced to the world France the Soviet Union Great Britain the United States even Japan so I think it would have happened but maybe not so quickly yeah I think you talk in the book that for some reason the Germans thought that the critical mass was something like 10 tons they had done some miscalculation a reactor right um you also have some interesting stories in the book about how different countries found out the Americans were working on the bomb for example the Russians saw that all these physicists and chemists and metallurgists who were the top of their field were no longer publishing they just like gone offline and so they figured well something must be going on I'm not sure if you're aware by the way the subject of the making of the atomic bomb in end of itself is incredibly fascinating but also this book has become uh a cult classic in AI are you not familiar with this no the people who are working on AI right now they are huge fans of yours they're the ones who initially recom recommended the book to me because the way they see the progress in the field is exactly like when they start reading this book this like yeah you start off with these initial scientific hints that with deep learning for example here's something that can teach itself any function similar to slizard noticing the nuclear Chain Reaction you progress to somebody figuring out in AI um there's these scaling laws that say that if you make the model this much big bigger it gets this much better at you know reasoning at predicting text and so on and then you can extrapolate this curve and you can see huh we get two more orders magnitude and we get to something that looks like human level intelligence anyway so a lot of the people who are working in AI have become huge fans of your book because of this reason they see a lot of analogies um in the next few years from I they must be like page 400 in their minds of project was we uh we must later on talk about unintended consequences yes I find the subject absolutely fascinating I think my next book might be called unintended consequences so you you mentioned that a big reason why many of the scientists were wanted to work on the bomb especially the Jewish igrs was because they're worried about Hitler getting it first now at some point as you mentioned it was becoming obvious maybe I don't know what the exact year would be 1943 44 that Hitler the Nazis were not close to the bomb and I believe that almost none of the scientists quit after they found out that the Nazis weren't close so why did more of them say oh I guess we were wrong the Nazis aren't going to get it we don't need to be working on it and there was only one Joseph RPL yeah when he heard that Germany had been defeated in May of 1945 he packed up and left General grov the imperious Army core of engineers General who ran the entire Manhattan Project was really upset he was afraid he'd spill the beans so he threatened to have him arrested and put in jail but radplat was quite determined not to stay any longer he was not interested in building bombs for uh to aize the National Power of the United States of America which is perfectly understandable but why was no one else yeah by then let me tell it in terms of Victor viop Victor viop was an Austrian theoretical physicist who like the others escaped uh when the Germans then the Nazis took over Germany and then Austria uh and ended up at Los Alamos Vice wrote later there we were at Los Alamos he said in the midst of the darkest part of our science we had been he said he meant they were working on a weapon of mass destruction certainly that's pretty dark he said before it had almost seemed like a spiritual Quest and it's really interesting how different physics was considered before and after the second world war before the war one of the physic in America named Louie Alvarez told me when he got his PhD in physics at Berkeley in 1937 or so and went to a CO parties people would say what's your degree in he would tell them chemistry I said Louie why he said because I didn't have to explain what physics was That's how little known if you will this kind of science was at that time there were only about a thousand physicists in the whole world in 1900 by the mid-30s there were a lot more of course there' been a lot of nuclear physics and other kinds of physics done by then but it was still our and they didn't feel as if they were doing anything mean or dirty or warlike at all they were just pure science then nuclear fion came along it was publicized worldwide people I think who've been born since after the second world war don't realize it was not a secret at first the news was published first in a German chemistry Journal not the revision ch often and then in and then in the the British journal Nature and then in American journals and there were headlines in the New York Times in the Los Angeles Times in the Chicago tribun and all over the world here at last was people had been reading about and thinking about how to get energy out of the atomic nucleus for a long time it was clear there was a lot there all you had to do was get a piece of radium and see that it glowed in the dark you didn't plug it into a wall it just sat there a chunk of this material and if you held it in your hand it would burn you so where' that energy come from well the physicist realized it all came from the the the nucleus of the atom which is a very small part of the whole thing one 100,000th the diameter of the whole atom is the nucleus someone in England described it as about the size of a fly in a cathedral most of the energy in that's involved all the energy that's involved in chemical reactions comes from the electron cloud that's around the nucleus but the nucleus was the center of powerful forces this was clear but the question was how do you get them out the only way that the nucleus had been studied up to 1938 was by bombarding it with protons which have the same electric charge as the nucleus positive charge which means they're repelled by it so you had to accelerate them to high speeds with various versions of the big machines that we've all come become aware of since then the cyclotron most obviously built in the 30s but there were others as well and even then at best you could chip a little piece off you could change an atom One Step Up or one step down the periodic table this was the CL IC transmutation of of medieval Alchemy to be sure but it wasn't much you didn't get much out so everyone came to think of the nucleus of the atom as like a little rock that you really had to hammer it hard to get anything to happen with it because it was so small and dense that's why nuclear fision with this slow Neutron drifting in and then going sort of floating into it and then the whole thing just goes bad was so so startling to everybody so startling that when it happened most of the physicists who would later work on the bomb and others as well realized that they had missed the reaction that was something they could have staged on a lab bench with the equipment on the Shelf didn't have to invent anything new didn't have just and and they Louie Alvarez again this physicist at Berkeley told me he said I was getting my haircut when I read the news in the newspaper I pulled off the the robe and half with my haircut ran to my lab pulled some equipment off the shelf set it up and there it was so he said I discovered nuclear fusion but it was two days too late so and that happened all over people were just sure hitting themselves on the head and saying what well Neil's bore said what fools we've all been so this is a good example by the way in science of if your modle is wrong the one you're working with in your head doesn't lead you down the right path there was only one physicist who really was thinking the right way about the uranium atom and that was Neil's bore he realized somewhere in the 30s that the nucleus of the uranium at of the last natural element in the periodic table why is it the last one what is different about the others that would come later well he VIs visualized it as a liquid drop I always like to say visualiz is a as a waterfill balloon it's wobbly it's not very stable the the proton in the nucleus are held together by something called the strong force but they still have the repellent positive electric charge that's trying to push them apart when you get enough of them into a nucleus it's it's a it's almost a standoff between the strong force and all the all the electrical charge so it is like a wobbly balloon of water and then you see why a a neutron just falling into the nucleus would set it to wobbling around and in one of its configurations it might take a dumbbell shape and then you'd have basically two charged atoms just barely connected trying to push each other apart and and often enough they went the whole way when they did that these two new elements half the weight of uranium way down the periodic table would reconfigure themselves into two separate nuclei and in doing so they would release some energy and that was the energy that came out of the reaction and there was a lot of energy so B thought about the model in the right way the chemists who actually discovered nuclear fion didn't know what they were going to get they were just bombarding a solution of uranium nitrate with neutrons thinking well maybe we can make a new element maybe a first man-made element will come out of our work so when they found these as they they analyzed the solution they had after they bombarded it they found these elements like I never can remember the names of the elements but they're halfway down the periodic table they're they shouldn't have been there and they were totally Baff what is this doing here do we contaminate our solution no they had been working with a physicist named Lisa miter who was a theoretical physicist an Austrian Jew she had gotten out of Nazi Germany not long before but they were still in correspondence with her so they wrote her a letter I held that letter in my hand when I visited Berlin and I was in tears you know you don't hold history of this scale in your hands very often and it said in German it said basically we we found this strange reaction in our solution what are these elements doing there that don't belong there and she went for a walk in a little village in Western Sweden with her nephew Oto frish who was also a nuclear physicist and they thought about it for a while and they remembered bores model this wobbly water-filled balloon and they suddenly saw what could happen and that's then where the news came from the physics news as opposed to the chemistry news from the guys in Germany that was published in all the Western journals and all the newspapers and you know everybody been talking about what you could do for years before if you had that kind of energy a glass of this material would drive the Queen Mary back and forth from New York to London 20 times and so forth just your automobile could run for months no but you see people were kind of getting a the getting thinking about what would be possible if you had that much avail available energy and of course people had thought about reactors oh and again when the news reached Berkeley while Louie Alvarez was running over to to run the experiment Robert Oppenheimer who was the professor there one of his students told me his response was within a week he said Robert had a drawing on the Blackboard he said a rather bad drawing of both a reactor and a bomb so again because the energy was so great the physics was pretty obvious whether it would actually happen depended on some other things like could you make it chain react but fundamentally the idea was all there at the very beginning and everybody jumped on it h how do you think about the spectrum of damage caused by the different weapons that have become available and ver available at the time so first of all it is actually the best history of World War II I've ever read which is um I mean it's about the atomic bomb but it's interspersed with the events that are happening in World War 2 which you know motivate the creation of the bomb or the you know the release of it like why it had to be dropped on Japan given the Japanese response anyways but the first third is about the scientific roots of the physics um and it's so it is it also it's also the best book I've read about the history of Science in the early 20th century and the organization of it I mean there's some really interesting stuff in there about for example there's a passage where you talk about how there was a real real master Apprentice model in early science where if you wanted to like learn to do this kind of experimentation you will go to Amsterdam where the master of it is reciting it's much more individual focused had the whole European model of graduate study which is basically the wandering scholar you could go wherever you wanted to and sign up with whoever was willing to have you sign up but so the the question I want to ask regarding the um history you made of you know World War II in general is there's one way you can think about the atom bomb is that it is completely different from any sort of Weaponry that has been developed before it another way can think of it is there's this like Spectrum we on one end you have the thermonuclear bomb in the middle you have the atom bomb and on this end you have you know the fire bombing of cities like Hamburg and Dresden and Tokyo do you think of these as completely different categories or does it seem like a sort of escalating gradient to you I think until you get to the hydrogen bomb it's really an escalating gradient the hydrogen bomb which can be made arbitrarily large the biggest one ever tested was 50 6 million tons of TNT equivalent 56 megatons the Soviets tested that that had a fireball more than five miles in diameter just the fireball so that's really an order of magnitude change but the other one's known in fact I think one of the real problems this has not been much discussed and it should be when American officials went to hoshima and Nagasaki after the war well one of them said later I got on a plane in Tokyo we flew down the long green archipelago of of the Japanese home Island when I left Tokyo it was all gray broken roof tiles from the fire bombing and the other bombings and then all this Greenery and then when we flew over heroshima it was just gray broken roof tiles again so the scale of the bombing with one bomb in the case let's say of hoshima was not that different from the scale of the firebombings that had preceded it with tens of thousands of bombs the difference was it was just one plane in fact the the people in Hiroshima didn't even bother to go into their bomb shelters because one plane had always just been a weather plane coming over to check the weather before the bombers took took off so they didn't see any reason to hide or protect themselves which was one of the reasons so many people were killed the guys at Los Alamos had planned on the Japanese being in their bomb shelters they did everything they could think of to make the bomb as as much like ordinary bombing as they could for example it was exploded high enough above ground 1,800 yards I believe roughly that the fireball that would form from this really very small nuclear weapon tactical scale by modern standards 15 kilotons 15,000 tons of TNT equivalent that the fireball wouldn't touch the ground and stir up dirt and irradiate it and caused massive radioactive fallout it never did that they weren't sure there would be any Fallout they didn't think that they thought the plutonium and the bomb over Nagasaki now would just kind of turn into a gas and blow away that's not exactly what happened but people don't seem to realize and it's never been emphasized enough these first bombs like all nuclear weapons were firebombs their job was to start Mass fires just exactly like all the six pound incendiaries that had been destroying every major city in Japan by then every major city above 50,000 population had already been burned out the only reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were around to be Atomic bombed is because they'd been set aside from the target list because General Grow wanted to know what the damage effects would be the only way that he could study that obviously the bomb that was tested in the desert didn't tell you anything killed a lot of rabbits knocked down a lot of cactus melted some sand but but you couldn't see its effect on buildings and on people so the bomb was Del libery intended to be as much not like poison gas for example as because we didn't want the reputation for being people like the war in Europe during the first world war where people were killing each other with horrible gases we just wanted people to think this was another bombing so in that sense it was of course there was radioactivity and of course some people were killed by it but they calculated that the people who would be killed by the IR radiation The Prompt Neutron radiation from the original Fireball would be close enough to the epicenter of the explosion that they would be killed by the blast or the the flash of Light which was 10,000 degrees the world's worst sunburn you know you've seen stories of people walking around with their skin hanging off their arms I've had sunburns almost that bad but not over my whole body obviously you know where the skin actually peel blisters and peels off that was a sunburn from a 10,000 degree artificial sun so that that's not the heat that's just the light that's the light wow yeah well light and heat 10,000 degrees radiant light radiant heat the but the blast itself only extended out a certain distance it was fire and all the nuclear weapons have that have ever been designed are basically firebombs that's important because the military in the United States after the war probably everywhere not being able to figure out how to calculate the effects of this weapon in a reliable way that that match their previous experience would calculate only the blast effects of a nuclear weapon when they figured their targets that's why we had what came to be called Overkill really I mean we wanted redundancy of course a stockpile but I mean 60 nuclear weapons on Moscow was Way Beyond what would be necessary to destroy even that big a city because they were only calculating the blast but in fact if you exploded a 300 kiloton nuclear warhead over the Pentagon at 3,000 ft it would blast all the way out to the capital which isn't all that far but if you counted the fire it would start a mass fire that would reach all the way out to the Beltway and burn everything between the Epis center of the weapon and the Beltway all organic matter would be totally burned out leaving leaving nothing but but but uh mineral matter basically I I want to emphasize two things you said because they really hit me in reading the book and I'm I'm not sure if the audience has fully integrated them the first is in the book they the military planners and Groves they talk about needing to use the bomb sooner rather than later because they were running out of cities in Japan where there were enough buildings left that it would be worth bombing in the first place right which is insane like an entire City's already sorry an entire country is almost already destroyed from firebombing alone and the second thing about the category difference between thermonuclear and atomic bombs I I forget his name but the nuclear planner who wrote the Doomsday Machine one of his p in one of his passages he talks about you know people don't understand that the atom bomb in the case of a hydrogen bomb the atom bomb which we the pictures we see of Nagasaki and Hiroshima that is simply The Detonator of a modern nuclear bomb um you know which is an insane to thing to think about so you know for example 10 and 15 kilotons is the Hiroshima Nagasaki and the SAR B uh which was 50 megatons so you know more than a thousand times as much and that wasn't even as big as they can make it right they kept the uranium tamper off because they didn't want to like destroy all of Siberia but um so you could get like over 100 more than like 10,000 times as powerful when you know teller Edward Teller one of the dark Forces in the story teller was the co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb and later on when he was Consulting with our military just for his own sake he sat down and calculated how big could you make a hydrogen bomb he came up with a thousand megatons and then he looked at the effects th000 megatons would be a fireball 10 miles in diameter and the atmosphere is only 10 miles deep so he figured that it would just be a waste of energy because would all blow out into space it wouldn't some of it would go laterally of course but most of it would just go out in space so he figured that a bomb more than a 100 megatons would just be totally a waste of time of course 100 Megaton bomb is also a total waste because there's no target on Earth big enough to justify that from a military point of view Robert Oppenheimer when he had his security clearance questioned and then of course lifted when he was being punished for having uh resisted the development of the hydrogen bomb was asked by the interrogator at the Security hearing well Dr Oppenheimer if you had a hydrogen bomb for HOSA well wouldn't you have used it and Oppenheimer said no the interrogator said why is that said because the target was too small so I hope that scene is in the film I'm sure it will be so after the war when our bomb planners and some of our scientists went into hosan Nagasaki just about as soon as the surrender was was signed what they were interested in was the scale of destruction of course and the city those two cities didn't look that different from the other cities that had been firebombed with small incendiaries and ordinary High explosives they went home to Washington the the policy makers with the thought that ah these bombs are not so destructive after all they had been touted as City Busters basically and they weren't they didn't completely burn out cities they were not certain more destructive than the firebombing campaign when everything of more than 50,000 population had already been destroyed that in turn influenced the judgment about what we needed to do is to be the Soviet Union when the Soviets got the bomb in 1949 there was a general sense that one you could fight a war with nuclear weapons deterrence or not to you would need quite a few of them to do do it right and the Air Force once it realized that it that it could grandis its own share of the federal budget by cornering the market if you will and delivering nuclear weapons very quickly decided that they needed that that they would only look at the blast effect and not the fire effect it's like tying one hand behind your back most of it was a fire effect so that's where they came up with numbers like we need 60 of these to take out Moscow and the more bombs this is what the Air Force figured out by the late 1940s the more bombs the more targets the more bombs the more bombs the more planes the more planes the biggest share of the budget yeah so by the mid 1950s the Air Force commanded 47% of the federal defense budget and the other branches of services which had not gone nuclear particularly by then woke up and said we'd better find some use for these weapons in our branches of service so the Army discovered that it needed nuclear weapons uh tactical weapons for field use fired out of cannons there was even one that was fired out of a shoulder mounted rifle there was a satchel charge that you two men could carry way about 150 PBS that would be used to dig a ditch so that Soviet tanks couldn't cross into Germany all sorts of wonderful and of course the Navy by then had been working hard with General rickover on building a nuclear submarine that could carry ballistic missiles underwater in in Total Security no way anybody could trace the submarines once they were quiet enough and a nuclear reactor is very quiet it just sits there with neutrons running around making heat so the other services jumped in and this famous Triad you know we must have these three different kinds of nuclear weapons baloney interesting interesting we would be perfectly safe if we only had our nuclear submarines yeah and only one or two of those one nuclear submarine could take out all of Europe or all of the Soviet Union because it has multiple nukes on it because they have 16 intercontinental ballistic missiles with mved Warheads at least three per missile wow I had a former guest Richard hania has a book about foreign policy where he points out that our model of thinking about why countries do the things they do especially in foreign affairs is wrong because we think of them as these rational actors individual rational actors when in fact it's these like competing factions within the government and in fact you see this especially in the case of Japan in World War II where I forgot the name of the book there was a great book of Japan leading up to World War II where they talk about how I mean it was basically the you know I forget which branch of the Japanese military they needed you know more oil to continue their campaign in Manchuria and so they forced these other branches to escalate but yeah that's so interesting that's why we have so many new because that the different branches are competing for funding well they not the Air Force dream ever since the first world war ever since what's his name du an Italian uh theorist of of air power he had been in the trenches in the first world war this one somebody called The Trenches of the SEC first world war the long grave already dug because millions of men were killed and the trenches never moved a foot this way a foot this way all this horror and duay came up with the idea that if you could fly over the battlefield to the homeland of the enemy and Destroy his capacity to make war then the people of that country he theorized would rise up in rebellion and throw out their their leaders and sue for peace and this became the dream of all the air forces of the world but particularly ours until around 1943 it was called the US Army Air Force and the dream of every guy in the Air Force every officer was to get out from under the Army not just be something that uses delivers ground support or air support to the Army as it advances but a power that could actually win Wars and the missing piece had always been the scale of the Weaponry They Carried so when the bomb came along you can see why Curtis lame who really ran the Strategic Air Command during the prime years of that force was pushing for bigger and bigger bombs because if a plane got shot down but the one behind it had a hydrogen bomb then it would be just almost as effective as as the two planes together so they wanted big bombs and uh they went after Oppenheimer because he thought that was a terrible way to go that there was really no military use for these huge weapons furthermore that the United States had more cities than Russia did than the Soviet Union did and we were making ourselves a better Target basically by introducing a weapon that could destroy a whole state I used to live in Connecticut and I once calculated I saw a map that showed the air pollution that blew up from New York City to Boston and I thought well now with that was Fallout yeah we'd be dead right up here in green lovely Connecticut and it would have been I mean that was the scale that it was going to be with these big new weapons so on the one hand you had some of the important leaders in the government thinking that these weapons were not the the war-winning weapons that the Air Force wanted them and realized they could be and on the other hand you had the Air Force cartering the market on on a nuclear solutions to to battles if you will all because some guy in a trench in World War I was sufficiently horrified and sufficiently theoretical about what what was possible with their power I mean remember they were still flying biplanes when uh HG Wells wrote his novel The World set free 1913 predicting an atomic war uh that would lead to World Government he had Air Forces delivering atomic bombs but he forgot to update his Planes they were the guys in the back seat the bombadiers were sitting in a biplane open cockpit and when the pilots had dropped the bomb they would reach down and pick up their HG wells's idea of an atomic bomb and throw it over the di so which which is kind of what was happening in Washington after the war and it led us to to a really I think terribly misleading and unfortunate perspective on how many weapons we needed which in turn fermented the arms race with the Soviets uh and and just chased off you know the Soviet Union they had a practical perspective on factories every Factory was supposed to produce 120% % of its Target every year that was considered good Soviet realism and they did that with their nuclear war weapons so by by the height of the Cold War they had 75,000 nuclear weapons which would have been and nobody had heard yet of nuclear winter so if if both sides had set off this string of mass traps that we had in our arsenals it would have been the end of the human world without question yeah you know that actually it raises the interesting question if the military planners thought that the the conventional nuclear weapon was like the firebombing would it have been the case that if there wasn't a thermonuclear weapon that there actually would have been a nuclear war by now because people wouldn't have been thinking of it as this hard red line I don't think so because I mean we're talking about one bomb versus 400 and one plane versus 400 planes and thousands the bombs that scale was clear I think deterrence was the more important business everyone seemed to understand even the spies that the Soviets had connected up to were wholesaling information back to the Soviet Union there's this comic moment when Turman is sitting with Joseph Stalin at poom and he tells Stalin we have a powerful new weapon and that's as much as he's ready to say about it and stal and the looks at him and says good I hope you put it to good use with the Japanese Stalin knows exactly what he's talking about he's seen the design of the fat man type Nagasaki plutonium bomb he's held it in his hands because they had Spies all over the place well how much longer would have it taken the Soviets to develop the bomb if they didn't have any spies probably not any longer really when the when the S Union collapsed in the winter of 92 I ran over there as quickly as I could get over there because the scientists in this limbo between forming a new kind of government and some of the countries pulling out and becoming independent and so forth all of a sudden their nuclear scientists the ones who' worked on their bombs were free to talk and I found that out through uh uh Elena Bonner uh Andre Sakura's Widow who was connected to people I knew and she said said yeah come on over and her secretary who was a geologist about 35 years old SRA became my guide around the country and we went to various Apartments where retired guys from the bomb program were living on as far as I could tell a sack of potatoes and some salt they really you know they had government pensions and the money was worthless all of a sudden yeah I I was buying photographs from them partly because I needed the photographs and partly because I thought I mean 20 bucks was two months income at that point so it was easy for me and it helped them and in turn they told me about by 1947 they had first class physicists at Soviet Union they do in R today so by 1947 they had a design for a bomb that they said was half the weight and twice the yield of the fat man bomb Batman bomb was the plutonium implosion right so forth and it weighed about I don't know 9,000 pounds so they had a much smaller and much more deliverable therefore bomb with a with a yield of about 44 kilotons wh why why was Soviet physics so so good I mean you know you would think that is like poor Society the Russi mind I don't know you know they learned all their technology from the French in the 19th century which is why there are so many French words in Russian so they got good teachers the French are superb technicians they aren't so good at building things but they're very good at designing things there's something about Russia I don't know if the language or the education they do have good education they did but but I mean I remember asking them when they were working I said on the hydrogen bomb you didn't have any computers yet we only had really early primitive computers to do the complic ated calculations of the hydrodynamics of that explosion I said what did you do they said oh we just use nuclear there we just used theoretical physicist which is what we did at Los Alamos right we had guys come in who really knew their math and they would sit there and work it out by hand and women with old marshan calculators running numbers so they basically they were just good scientists and they had this new design and they katov who ran the program took it to lenti Baria this monster of the who ran the nkvd who was put in charge of the program and said look we can build through a better bom do you really want to waste the time to make that much more uranium in plutonium and barus said comrade I want the American bomb give me the American bomb or you and all your families will be Camp dust he said so and I talked to one of the leading scientist in the group and he said so we valued Our Lives we valued our families we gave them a copy of the plutonium implosion bomb which it was it strikes me now that you explained this that when the Soviet Union fell if I was like North Korea or Iran on some or something why did not why didn't they or did they you know let's send a few people to the Fallen Soviet Union get recruit a few of the scientists to start their own program buy off their stock piles or something there was some effort by countries in the Middle East to get hold of the enriched uranium which they wouldn't sell them they were these were responsible scientists I mean they told me look we worked on the bomb of course you had it we didn't want there to be a monopoly on the part of any country in the world so patriotically even though Stalin was in charge of our country and he was a monster we still felt even even uh uh sakuro felt that way he felt very much that it was his responsibility to work on these things they all did so there was a great Rush at the end of the second world war to get hold of German scientists and about I think an equal number were grabbed by the Soviets all of the leading German scientists like uh Heisenberg and Han and others went West as fast as they could they didn't want be captured by the Soviet but but there were some who were and they helped them work you know people have the idea that Los Alamos was where the bomb happened and it's true that at Los Alamos we had the team that that designed developed and built the first actual weapons but the truth is the important material for weapons is the uranium or plutonium one of the scientists in the Manhattan project told me years later he said you know you can make a pretty highlevel nuclear explosion just by taking two CR subcritical pieces of uranium putting one on the floor and dropping the other by hand from a height of about six feet if that's true then all this business about Secret Designs and so forth is is hogwash all you what you really need for a weapon is the critical mass of plutonium or uranium 235 or highly enriched uranium 90% new 235 if you've got that there are lots of different ways to make the bomb we had two totally different ways that we used you know the gun on the one hand for uranium and then because plutonium was so reactive that if you fired up the barrel of a cannon at 3,000 feet per second it would still melt down before the two pieces made it up so for that reason they had to invent an entirely new technology which was an amazing piece of work from the Soviet point of view and I think this is something people don't know either but it puts the Russian experience into a better context all the way back in the 30s since the beginning of the Soviet Union after the first world war they had been sending over Espionage agents connected up to American who were willing to to work for them to collect together industrial technology they didn't have it when the when they began their country was very much an agricultural country and in that regard you know people still talk about well those damn spots stealing our secrets we did the same thing with the British back in colonial days we didn't know how to make a canal that wouldn't drain out through the soil the British had a certain kind of clay that they would line their canals with there were canals all over England in the 18th century uh that was impervious to to the flow of water and and we bought a British engineer brought him over a great expense to teach us how to make the lining for the canals that opened up the the middle west and then the West so they were doing the same thing and one of those SP was a guy named Harry gold who was TR working all the time for them he gave them some of the basic technology of Kodak film making for example and so forth Harry gold was the connection between David Greenglass and one of the American spies at Les alabamos and the Soviet Union so it was not different so the model was never give us something that someone dreamed of that hasn't been tested and you know works so it actually be blueprints for factories not just a patent and therefore when barria after the war said give us the bomb he meant give me the American bomb because we know that works I don't trust you guys who knows what you'll do you're probably too stupid anyway he was that kind of man yeah so for all of those reasons they built the second bomb they tested was twice the yield and half the way to the first bom in other words it was their their new design and so was our because the technology was something that we kne