"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 43

In this episode: Did Oppenheimer’s Atomic Bomb Make the World Safer?

February 26, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 43

Episode 43: Did Oppenheimer’s Atomic Bomb Make the World Safer?

The wild success of “Oppenheimer,” with 13 Oscar nominations and nearly $1 billion in ticket sales, has revived a debate about the most destructive weapon ever created — and renewed concerns about how close the world might be to nuclear war. The leader of the project to build the bomb during WWII, Robert Oppenheimer, believed — at first — that it could help prevent wars between the superpowers. There hasn’t been one since. So was he right?

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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ARCHIVAL Oscar Nominations News Coverage: The Oscar nominations are in. Big morning for Oppenheimer

By now, you've probably heard about all the awards and nominations, the film Oppenheimer took home recently.

ARCHIVAL News Coverage: …film about the making of the atomic bomb received 13 nominations…

ARCHIVAL News Coverage: The Critic’s Choice Award goes to Oppenheimer!

ARCHIVAL News Coverage: Oppenheimer dominated the Globes…..

ARCHIVAL News Coverage: Last night it was the big winner - eight awards, including Best Picture…

ARCHIVAL News Coverage: And the Golden Globe goes to Oppenheimer!

A lot of people have seen the film directed by Christopher Nolan. In fact, it's grossed nearly a billion dollars at the box office.

I happen to be one of them. I LOVED this movie about the man who helped give the world the atomic bomb.

Frankly, I fell asleep during Barbie, but Oppenheimer, this was movie-making on a very grand scale that only a few directors like David Lean and Stanley Kubrick have achieved.

So if you haven't seen it, well, you should.

But in the meantime—if you haven't yet—the movie and the book it's based on tell three big stories: the making of the atomic bomb during World War II, the onset of the Cold War and Robert Oppenheimer's increasing discomfort with the power of the bomb, and how his career was ruined during the paranoid era of McCarthyism.

It was really wonderful to go and see a movie that treated the audience like adults who could actually handle some complex themes and stories.

ARCHIVAL Oppenheimer Film / Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy): I don't know if we can be trusted with such a weapon, but I know the Nazis can’t. We have no choice.

The day the Oscar nominations were announced was actually the same day the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced the time on its Doomsday clock. That’s the symbolic clock that tracks how close we are to engaging in a nuclear war.

The closer the hands on the clock move towards midnight, the closer we are to catastrophe.

ARCHIVAL Doomsday Clock Spokesperson: Last year, we expressed amplified concern by moving the clock to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been. Today, we once again set the doomsday clock to express a continuing and unprecedented level of risk. It is 90 seconds to midnight.

Oppenheimer was actually one of the scientists who helped create the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as part of an effort to warn the public about the threat of nuclear weapons.

And ever since I saw the movie and also read American Prometheus, the 700-page biography it was based on, I've been thinking about the big question that Oppenheimer himself wrestled with.

Did the creation of the atomic bomb make us safer by helping to prevent major wars between the superpowers or did it put us at greater risk?

It was something that Oppeheimer spoke about often, including in this interview with NBC in 1965.

ARCHIVAL J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1965 Interview: We were inclined to think that if It was needed to put an end to the war, and had a chance of so doing, we thought that was the right thing to do. We knew the world would not be the same.

(Theme music)

So that's what we're going to discuss with Kai Bird. He’s the co-author of American Prometheus.

Kai Bird: I was shocked to see how many young people who had no idea who Oppenheimer was nevertheless went to see the film and saw it a second and third time, because suddenly their attention has been grabbed by the thought, ‘Oh, my God, we are still living with weapons of mass destruction and look at what's happening in Ukraine. Look at what's happening in the Middle East today, and look at Oppenheimer and how prophetic he was in warning us about how difficult it was gonna be to live in the atomic age and how dangerous it was gonna be.’

And we’re also going to talk to Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear arms control who advises the State Department on nuclear issues.

Jeffrey Lewis: We try to imagine people who make decisions about nuclear weapons have lofty ideals and a sense of strategic purpose and they know what they're doing. And, in fact, they're just kind of all grubby, little power-hungry fools like the rest of us. And I think Oppenheimer gets that right.

I'm Peter Bergen. This is In the Room.

(Theme music)

The Manhattan Project, which was first called the Manhattan District, was a top-secret US government-funded program to make the first atomic bomb during World War II.

ARCHIVAL 1965 Oppenheimer documentary: On Capitol Hill, congressmen who have appropriated two billion dollars for the Manhattan District do not know on what the money is being spent.

The bomb was built in a laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the leadership of scientist Robert Oppenheimer - A scientist who'd already made a name for himself as a theoretical physicist.

Kai Bird: He was a philosopher-scientist, so he wanted to philosophize and think about the ethical quandaries and the implications of this science.

Kai Bird is one of the authors of American Prometheus and someone who truly understands what motivated Oppenheimer. His co-author, Martin Sherwin died in 2021.

Kai Bird: You know, co-authorship can be fraught with various perils. Initially I told Marty, no, I don't want to join you because I like you too much.

But Marty, you know,: he had gathered all this fabulous material - 50,000 pages of archival documents, and he'd interviewed 150 or so friends of Oppenheimer's. And it was just very colorful, vibrant material and I quickly consented.

The book chronicles Oppenheimer's entire life through to his death. The movie begins much later in his life, but closely follows the book.

Kai Bird: What Christopher Nolan did was extraordinary. This script he came up with, he wrote in four months, and it's based entirely on the book.

We thought this is just never going to happen. Hollywood can't do it, can't grapple with this complicated history and this very enigmatic human being, but Nolan proved us wrong.

Oppenheimer grew up in New York, the son of a wealthy German textile importer, and a painter. He was a precocious kid who excelled, not just in science, but also in languages, reading Plato in Greek and Virgil in Latin.

He began his study of physics at Harvard University, then went to Cambridge University in England and eventually earned a PhD in physics from Göttingen University in Germany.

As a young man, he struggled.

Kai Bird: He had, at the age of 22, a psychological collapse, he was almost expelled from Cambridge University in England. He survived this, and I think in surviving it, it gave him a sense of his own fragile personality and he was able to transform himself. He was the kind of man who could grow. Initially, he was a terrible teacher. You know he never had administered anything more than a handful of graduate students but he transformed himself into a charismatic speaker. And then in 1942, he's chosen to be the scientific director of this secret city at Los Alamos, where he eventually is the administrator for a staff of 6,000 people. And, he's brilliant at it.

Oppenheimer was teaching at CalTech and Berkeley when he was tapped to lead the atomic bomb project by Lieutenant General Leslie Groves. The general had traveled all around the United States meeting lots of different scientists, but he chose Oppenheimer.

Groves believed that Oppenheimer’s personality would make him pliable.

And he also thought Oppenheimer was a genius, and he once said you could talk to him about just about anything, “except sports.”

ARCHIVAL Oppenheimer Film:

Groves (Matt Damon): You're a dilettante, a womanizer, a suspected communist.

Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy): I'm a New Deal Democrat.

Groves: I said suspected. Unstable, theatrical. Egotistical, neurotic.

Oppenheimer: Nothing good, no? Not even he's brilliant, but-

Groves: Well, brilliance is taken for granted in your circle, so no.

Peter Bergen: Why did General Groves tap him to run the project? I mean, his background was theoretical physics. He, as you said, had never really managed anything. Now he's managing arguably the most important project in, certainly in American history, maybe world history. How did that process happen?

Kai Bird: He was just very good at bringing together the physicists and the chemists and the engineers and motivating them to work hard, You know, he hosted parties up there in the mountains in Los Alamos and mixed his very potent gin martinis and encouraged people to play hard as well as to work hard.

And he understood the atomic bomb was all a matter of figuring out how to make the thing ignite. And to do that, you needed collaboration, you needed to be able to get people brilliant scientists in a room and get them to collaborate and argue amongst themselves.

Oppenheimer, who was Jewish, had experienced antisemitism in his own life. And he certainly didn’t want the Nazis to get their hands on a weapon like the bomb he was developing

Kai Bird: When he was hired in 1942, he was eager to become involved in the projectHe was motivated to build this terrible weapon because he knew that the German physicists with whom he had studied in Germany in the 1920s were perfectly capable, as he was, of building this weapon. And so he was in a race with the German physicists he feared would give Hitler this terrible weapon and fascism would triumph.

And as the bomb was being built at Los Alamos, there was a lively debate among the scientists there about the ethics of creating such a weapon.

But Oppenheimer, at least while he and his team were working on the bomb, wasn’t dissuaded. In fact, he was convinced they needed to see the project through, even as the Nazis were clearly losing the war.

Kai Bird: The physicists gathered and argued amongst themselves, well, why are we working so hard to build this gadget?

When Germany is clearly defeated and Hitler is dead.

ARCHIVAL Oppenheimer Film:

Oppenheimer: Hitler is dead. It's true. But the Japanese fight on.

Scientist: Their defeat seems assured.

Oppenheimer: Not if you're a G. I. preparing to invade. We can end this war.

Scientist: But how do we justify using this weapon on human beings?

Kai Bird: And Oppenheimer let them have this debate in Los Alamos, and then just at the right moment, he stepped forward into the auditorium and said, you know, I want to remind you what Niels Bohr said on the last day of 1943 when he arrived, having escaped from Nazi Europe, uh, when he arrived in Los Alamos.

He had one question for me. He said, ‘Robert, is it big enough? Is the gadget going to be big enough, terrible enough to end all war?’

As Bird explains it, Oppenheimer thought it was impossible to stop the invention of nuclear weapons. So he wanted the atomic bomb to be completed and tested to show just how terrible it was. He believed THAT would help prevent future wars.

Kai Bird: So his argument was that we need to finish our job. Give it to the powers that be in Washington to decide how to use it. And Oppenheimer himself participated in some of those meetings and was skeptical that there was any possible peaceful demonstration of the power of the atomic bomb, you know, on an uninhabited island, or blowing off the top of Mount Fuji, or— He thought, you know, nothing is going to convince humanity of the terribleness of this weapon except its use on a city.

One bomb destroying a whole city.

He thought that this is the only way that human beings will understand the enormity of what we have created, and will therefore understand that we can never engage in total warfare again.

On August 6th, 1945, during World War II, an American B-29 bomber dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

ARCHIVAL Hiroshima News Coverage, 1945: The atomic bomb blast virtually erased this city of 340, 000 people from the earth. As far as the eye can see, stretch scenes of desolation and ruin.

The explosion immediately killed an estimated 80,000 people, tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure.

ARCHIVAL Hiroshima survivor Keiko Ogura: My house was full of smell, pus, and blood.

ARCHIVAL Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow: The strange thing was there was no screaming and yelling, all they could say was a whisper - water please, water, please…”

ARCHIVAL Hiroshima survivor: Their skin was peeling off and hanging. And at first, I saw some and I thought they were holding something, a rag or something. But that was really skin.

Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on another Japanese city, Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people.

And soon after, Oppenheimer began to have his doubts.

Kai Bird: As soon as Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened, within three months, he was giving public speeches, saying things like — astonishing things — saying, you know, if you think this weapon was expensive because we spent $2 billion on it — well, actually it's very cheap, and there are no secrets to it. And any country, however poor, will be able to manufacture these weapons if they so decide. He was predicting, you know, of course, North Korea and Pakistan and Israel and Russia and China. He was predicting the world we live in.

He was also warning us that if you think this weapon is a defensive weapon - you're wrong. It's a weapon for aggressors. Its only purpose is terror.

You know, after Hiroshima, after Nagasaki, he feared that America was going down the wrong road, that we were engaging in a dangerous arms race with the Russians, that international agreements could have been negotiated to ban this weapon, just as we had banned chemical warfare after World War I.

I managed to track down — while we were writing the book - Oppenheimer's last secretary at Los Alamos, a woman named Anne Wilson.

And Anne told me the following story. She said, you know, one day she was walking to work with Oppenheimer in Los Alamos. And it was after the Trinity test.

That was the test the scientists conducted to make sure the bomb would work.

Kai Bird: And suddenly she hears him muttering to himself, those poor little people, those poor little people. And she stopped him and said, Robert, what are you talking about? He said, well, you know, the test at Trinity was a success, and now we know it's going to be used on a target in Japan. And the victims are going to be civilians, and women and children and old men. And I went back and I told Marty about this interview and this particular anecdote and he said, well — that was the same week, we know chronologically speaking, that Oppenheimer was briefing the bombardiers who were going to be on the Enola Gay to drop the first atomic bomb. And he was instructing them exactly at what altitude it should be released to have the most maximum destructive power.

(Music)

Peter Bergen: When Oppenheimer visits President Truman at the White House, there's a wonderful scene in the film, and also in the book, where Oppenheimer says something to Truman that Truman takes great exception to. Can you tell us about that moment?

Kai Bird: Well, this was in October 1945, 3 months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it's Oppenheimer's essentially his one moment to explain to the president of the United States what he thinks should happen next. And he believes that the next step should be to try to negotiate with the Russians and our other wartime allies, a nuclear regime, creating an international atomic authority that would have the power to regulate all things nuclear.

And that we would ban the bomb and, uh, that we would get the Russians to agree not to develop a bomb.

ARCHIVAL Oppenheimer Film:

Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy): Mr. President, um I feel that I have blood on my hands.

President Truman (Gary Oldman): You think anyone in Hiroshima or Nagasaki gives a shit who built the bomb? They care who dropped it. I did.

Kai Bird: And of course, this is exactly the wrong thing emotionally to tell the President of the United States, who made the decision to allow two bombs to be dropped on two Japanese cities.

And Truman takes offense and, uh, ends the meeting abruptly and, and as Oppenheimer is walking out, or maybe, uh, a day later, we're not quite sure, he does say to several aides, you know, I don't want to see that crybaby scientist ever again.

Peter Bergen: Do you think when Truman made the decision to drop the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was that about as much as anything about sending a signal to the Soviets that we have this weapon, we're prepared to use it, and that he saw the Cold War coming? Uh, and it wasn't so much about ending the war with Japan, it was more about signaling how the, how we would approach the Cold War with the Soviets?

Kai Bird: Well, the short answer is yes. That was certainly a strand of his thinking. And we know this from Truman's own handwritten diary. We know it more specifically from the writings and memos of his Secretary of State that he had newly appointed, Jimmy Byrnes, a very conservative politician from South Carolina, who explicitly told Truman that you should not water down the terms of unconditional surrender.

Because that would be seen to be politically weak, in terms of domestic politics. And you should realize that this new weapon we have, it should be displayed like a pistol in our back pocket. It'll make it easier for us to deal with the Russians after the war.

As the United States began to develop ever more powerful nuclear weapons, like the hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer became more outspoken about the need to try and regulate these weapons.

Kai Bird: When we developed the hydrogen bomb by the mid-1950s, we were testing these weapons, and they were a thousand times the strength of the bomb that was used at Hiroshima.

And Oppenheimer just thought this was insanity.

And he feared that we could stumble into a nuclear war. So he had, you know, growing doubts about it all and began to go more and more public with these doubts. But he failed at every juncture. So it's a story of great irony that the father of the atomic bomb is the very man who becomes the prophet of trying to warn us against its further development and use.

Because of his activism around nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer was accused of being a spy for the Soviets. And in 1954, during the height of the McCarthy Red Scare, the Atomic Energy Commission launched an investigation.

At his hearing, Oppenheimer was forced to admit publicly that he’d had an affair.

And the man who’d been featured on the cover of Time Magazine saw his reputation very publicly destroyed. He was stripped of his security clearance, which effectively ended his career.

Kai Bird: He had sort of fallen in love with being a member of the establishment, being able to walk into the Oval Office and brief the President or walk the halls of the Pentagon to have access to that power.

But also, he was genuinely worried that, you know, people didn't understand the dangers of these weapons. It was a Shakespearean tragedy in that way, and he was brought down, and he was devastated, personally. He was a destroyed man after that.

It's a sad, sad story, you know, you know, what we did to Oppenheimer.

Peter Bergen: How did Oppenheimer view his own legacy?

Kai Bird: Ah, he was, he was tortured by it.

And that was clear even two decades after the atomic bombs were dropped, in this interview he gave in 1965.

ARCHIVAL Oppenheimer Interview 1965: I think when you play a meaningful part in bringing about the death of over a hundred thousand people and the injury of a comparable number, uh, you naturally, uh, don't think of that as with ease. I believe we had a great cause to do this, but I do not think that our consciences should be entirely easy.

Kai Bird: You know, he never apologized. He never said that he regretted what he had done. He never visited Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but he did visit Japan once in about 1960, I believe. And he was greeted at the Tokyo airport by a group of Japanese reporters who all wanted to know if he had any regrets.

And typically Oppenheimer's answer was enigmatic. He said, ‘Well, let me just say that I have not slept any worse last night than the night before.’

(Music)

Well, it's been eight decades since Oppenheimer led the development of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos. And since then, there hasn't been another nuclear war.

So, did we just get lucky?

It's a question I posed to nuclear arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis.

Jeffrey Lewis: I go back and forth on lucky. I think, obviously, the fact that it hasn't happened is down to a certain degree of luck.

I think it's true that nuclear weapons are effective at deterring war. I don't, I don't doubt that at all. My caution is, how long do we plan to do this? You know, we're, we're really making a trade. We're saying, we don't know how to prevent war other than with the threat of widespread civilizational destruction.

And so we will make this bargain. We will use this threat to prevent war on the belief that leaders will always be wise enough to stop at the last minute, to hold back. And I think that's a good bet almost every day. The problem is we have now been doing this for 70 years, and it really looks like we're planning on doing it for 700 years.

And, you know, will that bet pay off every day forever? Probably not.

Peter Bergen: Three-quarters of a century is not statistically necessarily a particularly long period of time to be running this experiment where at the end you have Uh, some kind of nuclear exchange, not necessarily between the United States and, uh, one of its rivals, but, you know, more likely between, say, Pakistan and India, which still would be a complete and utter catastrophe for the rest of the world.

Jeffrey Lewis: Yes, we really do not have a good understanding of what the climactic and environmental impacts of a nuclear war would be. I think there is some awareness that extremely large nuclear exchanges would have really deleterious effects on the climate and might trigger famines and we just I think have no idea where that threshold is.

So this is this giant science experiment we're running and you know it’s been ok for a while.

And he says this science experiment with deterrence has been working, for example, in the current war between Russia and Ukraine.

Jeffrey Lewis: We have seen in the conflict in Ukraine that both the United States and Russia have been deterred from certain actions because they are afraid of escalation. I think you've seen the Biden administration has been reluctant to engage directly in the conflict and has withheld certain weapons.

And I think very notably, you've seen the Russians not strike lethal assistance that's piling up on the NATO side of the border. Uh, so, I think if, if nuclear weapons didn't exist, there's a higher chance things might have escalated.

Peter Bergen: Yeah, and I guess it's really a dilemma because they lower the threshold of major conflict and yet on the other hand, people make mistakes, people miscalculate, and if a miscalculation or a mistake is made, then you're getting into a much worse conflict.

Jeffrey Lewis: Oh, and it's worse than a dilemma, because it's — it's not a bug, it's a feature. You can't have successful deterrence without the risk that everything goes wrong. You know, if deterrence was perfect, if it always functioned in exactly the way it was supposed to, if no one ever made a mistake, then it wouldn't have any effect at all because you would just go right up to the edge and then everyone would stop.

So it is this really thorny bargain we've made where we suppress conflict and we deter conflict. But we do it at the cost of catastrophe. And if you take away that inherent risk, if you made it perfectly safe, it would cease to work. So it's baked in, that threat of civilizational destruction.

Peter Bergen: When I look at Pakistan and India, um, you know, they fought three major wars since the 1947 partition. Now, both sides do have nuclear weapons and the likelihood of major conflict and the, you know, they haven't fought a major conflict since.

And yet, on the other hand, they seem to have, perhaps like the United States and the Soviet Union did in the 50s, kind of immature nuclear doctrines. Uh, they, I mean, I think, I believe both sides possess tactical nuclear weapons. So, you know, if India invaded Pakistan and for the fourth time seemed to be winning a major war, because Pakistan has always lost in these wars, wouldn't there be tremendous pressure on the Pakistani military establishment, which effectively runs the country, to maybe deploy these weapons.

Jeffrey Lewis: Oh I think so, I think the Pakistani plan is if they are facing conventional defeat and the destruction of their state by the Indians that they will use nuclear weapons and so it leads to this really thorny question of when do the Pakistanis feel that way and do the Indians know exactly where that line is?

One of the most jarring things that I experience in conversations with Indian and Pakistani academics and experts and officials is how confident they are that they know where each other's red lines are and it just seems unrealistic to me because you can talk to them and they will be so confident that they know where the other side's red lines are and then you will talk to the other side and they will be equally confident, but they will also tell you that the other side what they have said is just wrong.

So, again, I think this is one of those things where most of the time it works out, but what we're all waiting for is that day it doesn't.

And we all know that there have been some pretty famous near misses.

ARCHIVAL President John F Kennedy: Good evening, my fellow citizens.

Like the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

ARCHIVAL President Kennedy: Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.

When the U.S. and the Soviet Union almost had a nuclear conflict.

ARCHIVAL President Kennedy: The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.

Jeffrey Lewis: We do not hear about all the near misses. We often only learn about the near misses decades later.

Like the case that involved a guy called Stanislav Petrov, who, back when it happened in 1983, was an obscure Lieutenant Colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces.

Petrov was on duty in a secret bunker outside of Moscow when the early warning system he was monitoring detected what appeared to be five approaching U.S. nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The screen flashed the word: LAUNCH.

At that moment, Petrov had to decide whether to treat this like a false alarm or tell his superiors, who likely would have launched a counterattack. Luckily, Petrov decided it was a false alarm.

Jeffrey Lewis: The Petrov case in 1983, we didn't know that in real time. It actually took the collapse of the Soviet Union for the Petrov story to emerge. There were some reports, for example, in the late 1970s that there had been some false alarms showing missile launches that didn't really happen, um, in the U.S. system. And then years later, it was declassified that they were shockingly common because it was a new system. So I think we are constantly learning with hindsight these horrible things that happened.

Peter Bergen: And the Petrov example, by human intuition, said, there's something wrong about this warning that we're under attack. And I'm not going to do anything about it. Even though, in the Soviet system, that would be very unusual. Uh, because in the Soviet system, you just follow orders and that's it. You don't make independent decisions at a lower level.

Jeffrey Lewis: By the way, he doesn't get a medal for this, right? He was supposed to report it. He gets in trouble

I think we have this idea that the exception is the rule. That at the last moment, people won't turn the key, that people won't report the alarm, that people, being human beings, will always make the right decision. But, in fact, hey, we live in a world in which people make mistakes all the time.

Peter Bergen: Yeah, I mean, incompetence is probably the best explanation of almost all human activity.

Jeffrey Lewis: I think so. I mean, we're - I often, when I am confronted with one of these stories about how the system is going to work perfectly, I always say the same thing, and it gets exactly the same laugh. I just say, ‘The humans. Have you met them?’

Peter Bergen: (laughs)

And aside from all the possibilities that exist for humans to screw up, something else Lewis worries about a lot actually is a reliance on computers and potentially Artificial Intelligence.

Jeffrey Lewis: Russia today has a very large computer that they use to predict conflict, and it gets fed in all this data, and it is supposed to produce a number that says how likely an attack is today. And they have enormous enthusiasm in Russia for using AI to make these kinds of assessments. And so I worry very much that there is this growing emphasis on data-driven decisions.

And in a case like that, you know, if you have the false alarm that shows up on the computer screen and you have trained the computer to say, Yes, a war is likely if, you know, the price of blood in London goes up. Or, you know, some ridiculous kind of variable that only a computer engineer would put into a model.

You might get real confirmation bias.

Peter Bergen: Yeah.

Jeffrey Lewis: I mean that’s really what I worry about, you know, and it's, it's a little bit like, think about how dependent we all are on navigation apps on our phone when we drive. I used to be able to read a map. I used to be able to follow directions. And now, if my phone doesn't work, I'm totally helpless behind the wheel.

I do not need the president of Russia or the United States to feel helpless behind the wheel in the face of AI giving them bad advice.

Peter Bergen: Oppenheimer did think that atomic weapons at one point would make the world safer. Was he right?

Jeffrey Lewis: I think nuclear weapons make the world safer in the short term. We don't know how to prevent war other than with this terrible threat. And so, there is real truth in deterrence. There's real value in deterrence. But it is this funny thing, you know, we live now in an era in which all of the warheads in the U.S. arsenal are a hundred kilotons or, or bigger, and the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima was tiny, somewhere between 10 and 20 kilotons. That is to say, the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT. In practical terms, what that meant was a single bomb dropped in the center of Hiroshima devastated the entire urban area.

This summer I was standing in a skyscraper and looking around downtown Hiroshima. And I worked out how far buildings had been completely flattened and obliterated and I was shocked. I just — I hadn’t really gotten a sense of that scale. So really the entire city was flattened. And then a second thing happened, which is — the city caught fire.

And it burned in what's called a firestorm, which is a fire that is so intense that it begins sucking in oxygen and making its own weather, right? And it becomes a literal storm of fire. And that did even more damage to the city. And this completely devastated the ability of the Japanese to bring in assistance and aid.

And so then you had this period where, for days, people are suffering radiation sickness and, and they're dying these incredibly slow, painful deaths. And it's impossible really for them to get in food, water, medical care, because all the hospitals have been destroyed.

And so. You know, people often ask me, you know, like, do you prepare for a nuclear war? Do you have like a shelter? And the answer is if there's going to be a nuclear war, like I'm going up on the roof with a six pack of beer and a big, I am number one foam finger. And like, I'm watching it come in because I don't want to live through that.

Now, the amazing thing is the radiation effects are relatively short lived. And so Hiroshima today is a big, beautiful, vibrant city. It's one of my favorite cities in the world. It has the best whiskey bar in the world, which I will not disclose the location for fear that some Instagram influencer will ruin it.

But it is such a strange feeling because you are in this big, beautiful, clean, modern city. And every now and again, you realize what it would be like for a bomb to go off and to devastate the city again, right? To kill all these people, to create all this carnage. And it's, it's very jarring.

Because it's one thing to look at a black and white picture because then you can put distance, right? You can say, well, it's, that's a long time ago. Those people are not me. But when you actually stand there and you look around and you see a family pushing a stroller or some kids playing, and you realize that you're sharing this place, and that you could share that same fate, it's really quite moving and, and, and really reminds me at least that these weapons are terrible and we should never, ever, ever use them if we can possibly avoid it.

Oppenheimer recognized the tremendous power that would be unleashed by the atomic bomb.

Stories differ somewhat about when Oppenheimer first quoted a line from Hindu scripture that he’d learned to read in the original Sanskrit. The line would become famous and forever intertwined in the public mind with the dawn of the nuclear age.

ARCHIVAL J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1965 Interview: I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, Vishnu. He's trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form, and says,” Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

If you want to learn more about the issues and the stories we discussed in this episode, we recommend American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin and The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States by Jeffrey Lewis. Both are available on Audible.

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IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced by Alexandra Salomon with help from Holly DeMuth and JP Swenson.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes

Erik German

Laura Tillman

Luke Cregan

AND Sandy Melara

Our theme music is by Joel Pickard