Richard Rhodes - Making of Atomic Bomb, AI, WW2, Oppenheimer, & Abolishing Nukes

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 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.
You 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 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 Rhodes, who is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and most recently, the author of Energy, A Human History. I'm really excited about this one.
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 cables of various kinds.
And, you know, I had watched Peaky 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 simply in terms of weight, but in terms of structure.

Someone said he could sit in a children's high chair comfortably.

But he never weighed more than about 140 pounds.

And that quality is there in the actor, I think. So who knows? It all depends on how the director 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 a lot more of the story,

not the whole story.

But it looks exciting.

We'll see.

There have been some terrible depictions of Oppenheimer,

been some terrible depictions of the Bond program,

and maybe they'll get this one right.

Yeah, yeah, hopefully.

You know, it is always great when you get an actor

who resembles their role so well. Brian Cranston, for example, played LBJ, and they have the same physical characteristics of the beady eyes, 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 before 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 affiliated. In fact, he said he read Marx on a train trip, people traveled by train in those days, between Berkeley and Washington one time and thought it was a bunch of hooey.
Just ridiculous. 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 a great deal of money 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 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-awful 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 those 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 don't think he did. But if the army security had really understood Frank Oppenheimer's involvement, he probably would have been shipped off to the Aleutians or 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 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 such an accelerated program.
The bomb was pushed so hard during the Second World War because we thought the Germans had already started working on one. Nuclear fission 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 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, not the bomb, but the basic physics reaction that 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, of course, have been that in your hypothetical.
However, as soon as good physicists thought about the reaction that leads to nuclear fission, where a slow neutron, room temperature neutron, very little energy, bumps into the nucleus of a uranium-235 atom. Isidore Rabi, 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 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 fission 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 fission them, and you get a geometric exponential. You get one, two, four, eight, 16, 32, and off from there.
So in about 80 generations, for most of our

bombs today, I'm sure, the initial fission 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 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. When Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist, escaped from Denmark in 1943 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 Werner Heisenberg, the leader of science, the leading scientist in the German program, had handed him in the course of trying to find out what Bohr knew about what America was doing. And he showed it to the guys at Los Alamos.
And Hans Bethe, one of the great Nobel laureate physicists in the group, said, the Germans 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 emigre Jewish physicists from Nazi Germany were whiling 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 a factory 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 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.
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 Manhattan 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 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 Hitler 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, 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.
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 at the top of their field were no longer publishing.
They had 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 and of itself is incredibly fascinating. But also this book has become a cult classic in AI.
Are you not familiar with this? No. The people who are working on AI right now, they're huge fans of yours.
They're the ones who initially recommended the book to me because the way they see the progress in the field is exactly like when they start reading this book. 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 Slizzard noticing the nuclear chain reaction.
You progress to somebody figuring out in AI, there's these scaling laws that say that if you make the model this much 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, we get two more orders of 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 in the next few years from, they must be like page 400 in their minds where the Manhattan Project was.
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 mentioned that a big reason why many of the scientists wanted to work on the bomb, especially the Jewish emigres, was because they were 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 didn't 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.
There was only one, Joseph Rettblatt, when he heard that Germany had been defeated. In May of 1945, he packed up and left.
General Groves, the imperious Army Corps 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 Röthblatt was quite determined not to stay any longer.
He was not interested in building bombs to aggrandize 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 Weiskopf. Victor Weiskopf was an Austrian theoretical physicist who, like the others, escaped when the Germans, then the Nazis took over Germany and then Austria and ended up at Los Alamos.

Weisskopf 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 physicists in America named Louis Alvarez told me

when he got his PhD in physics at Berkeley in 1937 or so and went to cocktail parties, people would say, what's your degree in? He would tell them chemistry. I said, Louis, 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.

And by the mid-30s, there were a lot more, of course.

There'd been a lot of nuclear physics and other kinds of physics done by then.

But it was still arcane.

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 fission 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 through Wissenschaften, and then in 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 Tribune, 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 did that energy come from? Well, the physicists realized it all came from the nucleus of the atom, which is a very small part of the whole thing. One one hundred thousandth 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 that's involved, all of 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 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 classic transmutation 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 fission with this slow neutron drifting in and then going, sort of floating into it, and then the whole thing just goes back, was 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 a 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.
And Louis Alvarez, again, this physicist at Berkeley, told me, he said, I was getting my hair cut. When I read the news in the newspaper, I pulled off the robe in 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. And that happened all over.
People were just hitting themselves on the head and saying, well, Niels Bohr said, what fools we've all been. So this is a good example, by the way, in science.
If your model is wrong, the one you're working with in your head, well, it 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 Niels Bohr.
He realized somewhere in the 30s that the nucleus of the uranium atom is 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 visualized it as a liquid drop.
I always like to say visualized as a water-filled balloon. It's wobbly.
It's not very stable. 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 almost a standoff between the strong force and all the electrical charge.
So it is like a wobbly balloon of water. And then you see why 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 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 it was a lot of energy. So Bohr thought about the model in the right way.
The chemists who actually discovered nuclear fusion 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 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 shouldn't have been there. And they were totally baffled.
What is this doing here? Did we contaminate our solution? No. They had been working with a physicist named Lisa Meitner, 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 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, Otto Frisch, who was also a nuclear physicist. And they thought about it for a while, and they remembered Bohr's 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 had 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. Your automobile could run for months.
No. But you see, people were kind of thinking about what would be possible if you had that much available energy.
And of course, people had thought about reactors. And again, when the news reached Berkeley, while Luis Alvarez was running over to run the experiment, Robert Oppenheimer, who was a 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. How do you think about the spectrum of damage caused by the different weapons that had become available and very available at the time? So first of all, it is actually the 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 ii 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's a real master-apprentice model in early science where if you wanted to learn to do this kind of experimentation, you will go to Amsterdam where the master of it is residing.
It's much more individual-focused. 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 question I want to ask regarding the history you made of 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 we can think of it is there's this like spectrum where on one end you have the thermonuclear bomb, in the middle you have the atom bomb, and on this end you have the firebombing 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 56 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 ones, no. And in fact, I think one of the real problems, this has not been much discussed, and it should be, when American officials went to Hiroshima 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 the Japanese home island.

When I left Tokyo, it was all gray broken roof tiles from the firebombing and the other bombings. And then all this greenery.
And then when we flew over Hiroshima, it was just gray broken roof tiles again. So the scale of the bombing with one bomb, in the case, let's say, of Hiroshima, was not that different from the scale of the fire bombings that had preceded it with tens of thousands of bombs.
The difference was it was just one plane. In fact, 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 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 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,

I don't know. 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 cause massive radioactive fallout.
It never did that. They weren't sure there would be any fallout.
They thought the plutonium in 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 Groves 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 you couldn't see its effect on buildings and on people. So the bomb was deliberately intended to be as much not like poison gas, for example, 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 irradiation, 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 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 peeled, blisters and peels off. That was a sunburn from a 10,000 degree artificial sun.
So that's not the heat. That's just the light.
That's the light. Wow.
Yeah. Well, light and heat, 10,000 degrees.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Radiant light, radiant heat.
But the blast itself only extended out a certain distance. It was fire.
And all the nuclear weapons 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 matched 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 feet, it would blast all the way out to the Capitol, 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 epicenter of the weapon and the beltway. All organic matter would be totally burned out, leaving nothing but mineral matter, basically.
I want to emphasize two things you said, because they really hit me in reading the book, and I'm not sure if the audience has fully integrated them. The first is, in the book, the military planners in Groves, they talk about needing to use the bomb sooner rather than later, because they were running out of cities in japan where there are enough buildings left that it would be worth bombing in the first place right which is insane like an entire city's already i'm 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 forget his name but the nuclear the nuclear planner who wrote The Doomsday Machine, 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, you know, which is an insane thing to think about.
So, for example, 10 and 15 kilotons is the Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the SAR bomb, which was 50 megatons, so more than 1,000 times as much.
And that wasn't even as big as they could make it. They kept the uranium tamper off because they didn't want to destroy all of Siberia.

But 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 this 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.
Thousand 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 it would all blow out into space. Some of it would go laterally, of course, but most of it would just go out into space.
So he figured that a bomb more than 100 megatons would just be totally a waste of time. Of course, 100 megatons 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 resisted the development of the hydrogen bomb, was asked by the interrogator at the security hearing, well, Dr. Oppenheimer, if you'd had a hydrogen bomb for Hiroshima, well, wouldn't you have used it? And Oppenheimer said, no.
The interrogator said, why is that? He 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 Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just about as soon as the surrender 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 policymakers, 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 certainly 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 vis-a-vis 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. Two, you would need quite a few of them to do it right.

And the Air Force, once it realized that it could aggrandize its own share of the federal budget

by cornering the market, if you will, on delivering nuclear weapons,

very quickly decided 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. 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, 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 two men could carry, weighed about 150 pounds, 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 total security.
No way anybody could trace those 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. We would be perfectly safe if we only had our nuclear submarines.

And only one or two of those.

One nuclear submarine can 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 MIRV warheads, at least three per missile.
I had a former guest, Richard Hanania, 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 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 nukes, is that the different branches are competing for funding.
Well, you know, the Air Force dream ever since the First World War, ever since, what's his name, Due, an Italian theorist of air power. He had been in the trenches in the First World War.
When somebody called the trenches of the 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 Dewey 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 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 U.S.
Army Air Force. The dream of every guy in the air force, every officer, was to get out from under the army, not just be something that 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 LeMay, 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 the two planes together. So they wanted big bombs.
And 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, if that was fallout, we'd be dead 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 war-winning weapons that the Air Force wanted them and realized they could be. And on the other hand, you had the Air Force cornering the market on nuclear solutions to battles, if you will, all because some guy in a trench in World War I was sufficiently horrified and sufficiently theoretical about what was possible with air power.
I mean, remember, they were still flying biplanes. When H.G.
Wells wrote his novel, The World Set Free, 1913, predicting an atomic war that would lead to world government, He had air forces delivering atomic bombs, but he forgot to update his planes. The guys in the backseat, the bombardiers, were sitting in a biplane open cockpit.
And when the pilots had dropped the bomb, they would reach down and pick up H.G. Wells' idea of an atomic bomb and throw it over the side, which is kind of what was happening in Washington after the war.
And it led us to a really, I think, terribly misleading and unfortunate perspective on how many weapons we needed, which in turn fomented the arms race with the Soviets and just chased off. In 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 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 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. You know, that actually raises the interesting question.
If the military planners thought that the conventional nuclear weapon was like the fire bombing, 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 and one plane versus 400 planes and thousands of 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 Truman is sitting with Joseph Stalin at Potsdam, and he tells Stalin, we have a powerful new weapon. And that's as much as he's ready to say about it.
And Stalin 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.
How much longer would it have taken the Soviets to develop the bomb if they didn't have any spies? Probably not any longer. Really? When the Soviet 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'd worked on their bombs, were free to talk.
And I found that out through Elena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov's widow, who was connected to people I knew, and she said, yeah, come on over. And her secretary, who was a geologist about 35 years old, Sasha, 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.
I was buying photographs from them, partly because I needed the photographs, 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 the Soviet Union. They do in record 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. Fat Man bomb was the plutonium implosion, right, and 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 yield of about 44 kilotons.
Why was Soviet physics so good? I mean, you know, you would think that it was like a poor society. The Russian 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 it's the language or the education.
They do have good education. They did.
But 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 complicated calculations of the hydrodynamics of that explosion. I said, what did you do? They said, oh, we just used nuclear.
We just used theoretical physicists, which is what we did in Los Alamos. 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 Marchand calculators running numbers. So they basically, they were just good scientists.
And they had this new design. And Khrushchev, who ran the program, took it to Lavrenti Beria, this monster who ran the NKVD, who was put in charge of the program, and said, look, we can build through a better bomb.
Do you really want to waste the time to make that much more uranium and plutonium? And Beria 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 scientists 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 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, recruit a few of the scientists to start their own program, buy off their stockpiles 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.

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 Sakharov 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 Heisenberg and Hahn and others went west as fast as they could.
They didn't want to be captured by the Soviets. 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 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 high-level nuclear explosion just by taking two 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 hogwash. What you really need for a weapon is the critical mass of plutonium or uranium-235, or highly enriched uranium, 90% of your 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 Americans who were willing to work for them to collect together industrial technology.
They didn't have it when they began their country. It was very much an agricultural country.
And in that regard, you know, people still talk about all 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.
And there were canals all over England in the 18th century that was impervious to the flow of water. And we bought a British engineer, brought him over at great expense to teach us how to make the lining for the canals that opened up the Middle West and then the West.
So they were doing the same thing. And one of those spies was a guy named Harry Gold, who was working all the time for them.
He gave them some of the basic technology of Kodak filmmaking, for example, and so forth. Harry Gold was the connection between David Greenglass and one of the American spies at Los Alamos and the Soviet Union.
So it was not different. So the model was never give us something that someone dreamed up that hasn't been tested and you know works.
So it would actually be blueprints for factories, not just a patent. And therefore, when Beria, 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 those reasons, they built, the second bomb they tested was twice the yield and half the way to the first bomb. In other words, it was their new design.
And so it was ours, because the technology was something that we knew during the war, but it was too theoretical still to use. You just had to put the core and have a little air gap between the core and the explosives so that the blast wave would have a chance to accelerate through an open gap.
And therefore, Alvarez told me, he couldn't tell me what it was, so he said, well, look, you can get a lot more destructive force with a hammer if you hit something with it rather than if you put the head on the hammer and push. And it took me several years before I figured out what he meant.
I finally understood he was talking about what's called levitation. On the topic of the fact that the major difficulty in developing a bomb is either the refinement of uranium into U-235 or its transmutation into plutonium.
I was actually talking to a physicist in preparation for this conversation. And, you know, he explained the same thing that if you get two subcritical masses of uranium together, you wouldn't have the full bomb because it would start to tear itself apart without the tamper, but you would still have more than one megaton.
Well, it would be a few kilotons. Oh, sorry.
Alvarez's model would be a few kilotons, but that's a lot. Yeah, I mean, cool.
But he claimed, sorry, I meant kiloton. He claimed that one of the reasons why we talk so much about Los Alamos is that at the time, the government didn't want other countries to know that if you refine uranium, you've got it.
And so they were like, oh, we did all this fancy physics work in Los Alamos that you're not going to get to. So don't even worry about it.
I don't know what you make of that theory. That basically it was like a sort of a psyop to convince people that the Los Alamos was so important.
You know, again, I think all the physics had been checked out by a lot of different countries by then. It was pretty clear to everybody what you needed to do to get to a bomb.
That it was a fast fusion reaction, not a slow fusion reaction, like a reactor. They'd work that out.
So I

don't think that's really the problem.

But to this day,

no one ever talks about the fact that

the real problem isn't

the design of the weapon.

You could make one with wooden

boxes if you wanted to.

The design, the problem

is getting the material. And that's good

because it's damned hard to make that stuff. And it's something you can protect.
We also have gotten very lucky. I mean, if lucky is a word you want to use, I think you mentioned this in the book at some point.
But the laws of physics could have been such that, you know, unrefined uranium ore was enough to build a nuclear weapon, right?

Yeah.

In some sense, we got lucky that it takes a nation state level actor to really refine and produce the raw substance. Yeah, no, I was thinking about that this morning on the way over.
And, you know, all the uranium in the world would already have destroyed itself. Oh.

Most people have never heard of the living reactors that developed on their own in a bed of uranium ore in Africa about 2 billion years ago. Yeah.
Right? When there was more U-235 in a mass of uranium ore than there is today because it decays like all radioactive elements. And the French discovered it when they were mining the ore and found this bed that had a totally different set of nuclear characteristics.
They were like, what happened? But there were natural reactors in Gabon once upon a time. And they started up because some water, a moderator for them to make the neutrons slow down, washed its way down through a bed of much more highly enriched uranium ore than we still have today, maybe 5-10% instead of three and a half or one and a half, whatever it now is.
And they ran for about 100,000 years and then shut themselves down because they had accumulated enough fusion products that the U-235 had been used up. Interestingly, it never migrated, this material never migrated out of the bed of a war.
People today who are anti-nuclear say, well, what are we going to do about the waste? Where are we going to put all that waste? It's silly. Shove it in a hole.
Yeah, basically. That's exactly what we're planning to do.
Holes that are deep enough and in beds of material that will hold them long enough for everything to decay back to the original war. It's not a big problem, except politically, because nobody wants it in their backyard.
On the topic of the Soviets, one question I had in reading the book was, listen, we renegotiate with Stalin at Yalta and we surrender a large part of Eastern Europe to him under his sphere of influence. And we know, I mean, obviously we saw, you know, 50 years of immiseration there as a result.
And then at the time only we had the bomb. Would it have been possible given the fact that, you know, we had the bomb that we could have just like knocked out the Soviet Union or at least prevented so much of the world from succumbing to communism in the aftermath of World War II? If you just kept it going, is that a possibility? When we say we had the bomb, we had a few partly assembled, handmade bombs.
It took almost as long to assemble one as the battery life of the batteries that would drive the original charge that would set off the explosion. It was kind of a big bluff.
You know, when they closed Berlin in 1948 and we had to supply Berlin by air with coal and food for a whole winter, we moved some B-29s to England. The B-29 being the bomber that had carried the bombs.
They were not outfitted for nuclear weapons. They didn't have the same kind of bomb-based structure.
The weapons that were dropped in Japan had a single hook that held the entire bomb. So when the bay opened and the hook was released, the thing dropped.
And that's very different from dropping whole rows of, you've seen the photographs in the film footage of small bombs. So it was a big bluff on our part.
We took some time after the war, inevitably, to pull everything together. Here was a brand new technology.
There was a brand new weapon.

Who was going to be in charge of it?

There was a battle between the military wanted control.

Truman wasn't about to give the military control.

He'd been an artillery officer in the First World War.

He used to say, no damn artillery officer captain

is going to start World War III when I'm president.

I grew up in the same town he lived in.

I know his accent.

Independence, Missouri.

Yeah.

Used to see him on his front steps taking pictures with tourists after he,

well, he was still president, actually.

So he used to step out on the porch and let the tourists take photographs.

About a half a block from my Methodist church where I went to church. So it was interesting.
Interestingly, his wife was considered much more socially acceptable than he was. She was from old family, independence, Missouri people.
And he was some farmer from way out in Grandview, Missouri, south of Kansas City. So values.
Anyway, at the end of the war, there was a great rush from the Soviet side of what was already a zone, right? There was a Soviet zone, a French zone, British zone, an American zone. Germany was divided up into those zones.
To grab what's left of the uranium ore that the Germans had stockpiled.

And there was evidence that there were several, a number of barrels of the stuff in a warehouse somewhere in the middle of all of this.

And there's a very funny story about the Russians ran in and grabbed off one site full of uranium ore, this yellow-black stuff in what were basically wine barrels. And we, at the same night, just before the wall came down, as it were, between the zones, were running in from the other side, grabbing some other ore and taking it back to our side.
But there was also a good deal of requisitioning of German scientists.

And the ones who had gotten away early came west,

but there were others who didn't and ended up helping the Soviets.

And they were told, look, you help us build the bomb.

You help us, actually, you help us build the reactors

and the uranium separation systems that we need.

And we'll let you go home and back to your family.

We're just going to get started. Help us build the reactors and the uranium separation systems that we need.
And we'll let you go home and back to your family, which they did. Early 50s by then, the German scientists who had helped the Russians went home.
And I think our people stayed here and brought their families over. I don't know.
Was there an opportunity after the end of World War II for the U.S., before the Soviets developed the bomb, for the U.S. to do something where either it somehow enforced a monopoly on having the bomb, or if that wasn't possible, make some sort of credible gesture that, you know, we're eliminating this technology.

You guys don't work on this.

We're all just going to step back from this. We tried both.

Before the war ended, General Groves, who had the mistaken impression that there was a limited amount of high-grade uranium ore in the world,

put together a company that tried to corner the market on all the available supply. For some reason, he didn't realize that a country the size of the Soviet Union is going to have some uranium ore somewhere.
And of course it did in Kazakhstan, rich uranium ore, enough for all the bombs they wanted to build. But he didn't know that, and I frankly don't know why he didn't know that, but I guess uranium's use before the Second World War was basically as a glazing agent for pottery, all that famous yellow pottery and orange pottery that people owned in the 1930s.
Those colors came from uranium, and they're sufficiently radioactive, even to this day, that if you wave a Geiger counter over them, you get some clicks. In fact, there have been places where they've gone in with masks and suits on and grabbed the Mexican pottery and taken it out in a lead line case.
People have been so worried about it. But that was the only use, really, for uranium, and to make a particular kind of glass.
So once it became clear that there was another use for uranium, a much more important one, Groves tied the corn to the world market, and he thought he had. So that was one effort to limit what the Soviet Union could do.
Another was to negotiate some kind of agreement between the parties. That was something that really never got off the ground because Truman's secretary of state was an old Southern politician.
He didn't trust the Soviets. He went to the first meeting, where was it, Geneva, I think, in 1945 after the war was over.
And kind of strutted around and said, well, I got the bomb in my pocket. So let's sit down and talk here.
And the Soviets basically said, screw you. We don't care.
We're not worried about your bomb. Go home.
So that didn't work. Then there was the effort to get the United Nations to start to develop some program of international control.
And the program was proposed originally by a committee put together by our State Department that included Robert Oppenheimer, rightly so, because the other members of the committee were industrialists, engineers, government officials, people with various kinds of expertise around the very complicated problems of technology and the science and, of course, the politics, the diplomacy. Oppenheimer taught them in a couple of weeks, taught them the basics of the nuclear physics involved and taught them what he knew about bomb design, which was everything, actually, since he'd run Los Alamos during the war.
And they came up with a plan. And people have scoffed ever since at what came to be called

the Atchison-Lillienthal plan, named after the State Department people. But it's the only plan I think anyone has ever devised that makes real sense as to how you could have international control without a world government.

Basically, every country would be open to inspection by any agency that was set up. And the inspections would not be at the convenience of the country, but whenever the inspectors felt they needed to inspect.
So what Oppenheimer called an open world. And if you had that, and then if each country then developed its own nuclear industries, nuclear power, medical uses, whatever, then if one country tried clandestinely to begin to build bombs, you would know about it at the time of the next inspection.
And then you could try diplomacy. If that didn't work, you could try conventional war.
If that wasn't sufficient, then you could start building your bombs too. And at the end of this sequence, which would be long enough, assuming that there were no bombs existent in the world, and the ore was stored in a warehouse somewhere, six months, maybe, maybe a year, it would be time for everyone to scale up to deterrence with weapons rather than deterrence without weapons, with only the knowledge.
That, to me, is the answer to the whole thing. And it might have worked.
But there were two big problems. One, no country is going to allow a monopoly on a nuclear weapon, at least no major power.
So the Russians were not willing to sign on from the beginning. They just couldn't.
How could they? We would not have. Two, Truman assigned a kind of a loudmouth, wise old Wall Street guy to present this program to the United Nations.
And he sat down with Oppenheimer after he and his people had studied and said, where's your army? Somebody starts working on a bomb over there. You got to go in and take that out, don't you? He said, what would happen if one country started building a bomb? And Oppenheimer said, well, that would be an act of war.
Meaning then the other countries could begin to escalate as they needed to, to protect themselves against one power, trying to overwhelm the rest. Well, Baruch never, Bernard Baruch was the name of the man.
He didn't get it. So when he presented his revised version of the Acheson-Lolenthal plan, which was called the Baruch plan, to the United Nations.
He included his army. And he insisted that the United States would not give up its nuclear monopoly until everyone else had signed on.
So, of course, who's going to sign on to that deal? I feel like he has kind of pointed in the sense that, listen, World War II took five years or more. You know, if we find that the Soviets are starting to develop a bomb, it's not like within the six months or a year or whatever it would take them to start refining the ore.
And to the point we found out that they've been refining ore to when we start a war and engage in it and doing all this diplomacy. By that point, they might already have the bomb.
And so, you know, we're behind because we dismantle our weapons. We're only starting to develop our weapons once we've exhausted these other avenues.
Not to develop. Presumably we would have developed.
And everybody would have developed anyway. But rather to not have, I mean, I think of this, another way to think of this is as delayed delivery times.
It takes about 30 minutes to get an ICBM from central Missouri to Moscow. that's the that's the time window for doing anything other than starting a nuclear war.
So take the warhead off those missiles and move it down the road 10 miles. So then it takes three hours.
You've got to put the warhead back on the missiles, if the other side is willing to do this too. And you both can watch and see.
We require openness, a word bore introduced to this whole thing, in order to make this happen. You can't have secrets.
You have to absolutely have, and of course, as time passed on, we developed elaborate surveillance from space, surveillance from planes, and so forth. It would not have worked in 1946, for sure.
There wasn't the surveillance. But that system, by the way, is in place today.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has detected systems in air, in space, underwater. They can detect 50 pounds of dynamite exploded in England from Australia with the systems that we have in place.
So we have a system in place exactly. It's technical rather than human resources, but it's there.
So it's theoretically possible today to get started on such a program. Except, of course, now, unlike 1950, the world is awash in nuclear weapons.
Despite the reductions that have occurred since the end of the Cold War, there's still 30,000, 40,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Way too many.
Yeah, that's really interesting. What percentage of warheads do you think are accounted for by this organization? Like if there's 30,000 warheads, what percentage are? Oh.
Really? Okay. They're allowed to inspect anywhere without having to ask the government for permission.
But presumably not like North Korea or something, right? North Korea is an exception. But we keep pretty good track of North Korea, needless to say.
Are you surprised with how successful non-proliferation has been? The number of countries with nuclear weapons has not gone up for decades. Given the fact, as you were talking about earlier, it's simply a matter of refining or transmuting uranium.
Is it surprising that there are more countries that have it? That's really an interesting part. Again, a part of the story that most people, I think, have never really heard.
In the 50s, before the development and signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was, I think, 1968, and it took effect in 1970. A lot of countries that you would never have imagined were working on nuclear weapons.
Sweden, Norway, Japan, South Korea, a lot of countries. They had the technology.
They just didn't have the materials. And it was kind of dicey about what you should do.
But I interviewed some of the Swedish scientists who worked on their bomb. And they said, well, look, we weren't talking about, we were just talking about making some tactical nukes that would slow down a Russian tank advance on our country long enough for us to mount a defense.
I said, so why did you give it up? They said, well, when the Soviets developed hydrogen bombs, it would only take two to destroy Sweden. So we didn't see much point.
And we signed then the Non-Proliferation Treaty, they said. And our knowledge, they said, these scientists of how to build nuclear weapons helped us deal with countries like South Africa, which did build a few bombs in the late 1980s.
Six World War II type gun bombs fueled with enriched uranium because South Africa is awash in uranium ore and makes a lot of uranium for various purposes. So efforts were starting up, and that's where John Kennedy got the numbers that in a famous speech he delivered where he said, I lose sleep at night over the real prospect of there being 10 countries with nuclear weapons by 1970 and 30 by 1980.
And of course, that would have been a nightmare world because the risk of somebody using them would have gone up accordingly. But we offered after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
We and the Soviet Union basically said we got to

slow this thing down for us and for others as well.

And the treaty that was then put together and negotiated offered a good deal. It said, if you don't build nuclear weapons, we will give you the knowledge to build nuclear energy technology that will allow you to forge ahead very successfully with that.
And these countries had not, you know, there was a belief in the early years of nuclear weapons that as soon as the technology was learned by a country, they would immediately proceed to build the bomb. And no one really thought it through.
It seemed sort of self-evident, but it wasn't self-evident. There are dangers to building a nuclear weapon and having an arsenal.
If you're a little country and you have a nuclear arsenal, you have the potential to destroy a large country, or at least disable a large country, because you have these terribly destructive weapons, that makes you a target. That means that large country is going to look at you and worry about you, which they never would have before.
That kind of logic dawned on everybody at that point, and they were getting a good deal. And the other part of the deal was the part that the nuclear powers never kept to this day, which was an agreement that we would work seriously and vigorously toward nuclear disarmament.
We didn't do that. We just told them we would.
And then kind of snuck around on the sides.

So much so that by this treaty, because no one was quite trusting of the whole deal. Treaties are usually signed and they exist in perpetuity.
They don't have any end date. They go on until somebody breaks the rules.
But this treaty was given a 25-year review period, which would have been 1995 at which point if the countries

had chosen to abrogate the treaty, it would have been set aside and everybody could have gone back to making nuclear weapons. Now, it almost came to that for the very reason that the main nuclear powers had not fulfilled their agreement to start reducing arsenals.
You know, we didn't start reducing our nuclear arsenal until the end of the Cold War, until the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's when we began cutting back, as did the former Soviet Union.
A diplomat who's a friend of mine, Tom Graham, was assigned the task by our State Department of going around to the countries that were going to be voting on this renewal or not of the treaty and convincing their leaderships around the world that it wasn't in their best interest to abrogate the treaty at that point. Tom spent two years on the road.
The only place he thought he should go is not the UN, where there's a second level diplomat he could have talked to, but back to the home countries. And he convinced enough countries around the world.
I mean, he's another hero who's never been properly celebrated. He convinced enough countries around the world that they did agree to extend the treaty in perpetuity, with the proviso that the goddamn nine nuclear powers get busy eliminating their nukes.
And of course, George H.W. Bush, bless him, I didn't like his politics otherwise, but he stepped forward and split the nuclear arsenal in half right away.
We dropped our numbers way, way lower than we had been. He pulled them out of South Korea, which was a great bugaboo for both the Soviets and the North Koreans and China, and did a lot of good work toward moving toward a real reduction in nuclear arsenals.
And the Russians agreed at that time. It was before Putin took power.
So there was a change for the better, but there are still too many around, unfortunately. So that's why there are only nine nuclear powers to this day.
How worried are you about a proxy war between great powers turning nuclear? For example, you know, people have been worried about the Ukraine conflict for this reason. In the future, if we're facing an invasion of Taiwan by China, that's another thing to worry about.
I had a friend who understands these things really well, and he was, we're arguing, because I thought, listen, if there's like a war, if there's a risk of nuclear war, let him take Taiwan, you know, we'll in Arkansas. Who cares? And he explains, no, you don't understand.
Because if we don't protect Taiwan, then Japan and South Korea decide to go nuclear because they're like, America won't protect us. And if they go nuclear, then the risk of nuclear actually goes up, not down.
Or they just decide to align with China because Yeah. Because we didn't protect them with our nuclear umbrella the way we promised.
Right. Well, I guess we haven't promised Taiwan that, but it's implied, I guess.
I think it's implied. Yeah.
If we said we're going to help defend them, that's what that means. Yeah.
But anyway, so the question was, how worried are you about proxy wars turning in nuclear?

I think the best evidence, and there's been a lot of argument about whether nuclear deterrence actually works or not. The best evidence is that the United States fought a number of wars on the periphery, beginning with Korea and then Vietnam and so forth, and some other smaller things in between.
where we were willing to accept defeat.

We accepted defeat in Vietnam for sure, rather than use our nuclear arsenal. Always because behind those peripheral countries, if you will, was a major nuclear power, China, Soviet Union, whatever.
And we didn't want to risk a nuclear war.

So at that level, deterrence really seemed to work for a long time. But there's been a change lately.
And it's kind of terrifying, I find it at least. And the first manifestation was when India and Pakistan, which both went nuclear full scale in the late 1990s, India had tested one bomb in 1974, which they claimed was a peaceful explosion, whatever that is.
But they hadn't proceeded anywhere from there. and Pakistan had not tested well they tested their first bomb in China

when they got it from A.Q. Khan, the same guy who was trying to proliferate to Iran a little later and Iraq.
But they didn't build a lot of warheads either. And then their conflict or the personalities involved in the governments got sideways with each other.
And both sides tested a quick flurry of four or five bombs each around 1997 or eight, I think. So there they were.
Now they were full-fledged nuclear powers on the scale of two regional countries. But then in 1999, there was a border conflict between the two countries.
And Pakistan came up with a whole new argument about nuclear deterrence. Not only could you prevent a nuclear escalation, but if you kept your deterrent in place, you could have a conventional war with the other side not willing to escalate to nuclear because you still had your nuclear arsenal.
And that, which came very close to a nuclear exchange, we jumped in with both feet, believe me, and were all over both countries about don't do this, don't go this far. And they backed off.
But Putin or someone in the Russian complex picked up on that new approach. And it's the one Putin is using now.
He's basically saying, I'm having a conventional war here. And don't you dare introduce nuclear weapons, or I will.
In fact, if you defeat me, I may introduce nuclear weapons. Screw you.
I'm going to use my nukes as a backup. That's new.
And it's terrifying, because it's a totally different kind of deterrence that risks going too far too fast to be able to know what's going on. And in some sense, he is calling our bluff in that, or at least I hope he is, because I hope the government, I mean, obviously, you shouldn't say this, but hopefully the government would not respond to a tactical use in Ukraine by getting the U.S.
annihilated. I don't think we would respond with a full-scale nuclear attack.
Right. But I do think we would respond with some level of possibly nuclear exchange with Russia.
Wow. And I think, or maybe just with that part of Russia.
I don't know. We've long had a policy called decapitation.
We long ago targeted the individual apartments and daches of this Russian leadership with individual warheads. I mean, in the window at high noon, because they were very accurate now.
And they're totally stealthy if you're thinking about cruise missiles. We can put one in someone's window, and it's a nuclear warhead and not just a high explosive.
So they've known that for a long time. That doesn't give anybody time to get into the bomb shelter.
I mean, this has gotten really very hairy. It used to be pretty straightforward.

Don't bomb us, or we'll bomb you. Attack in some peripheral country, and we won't bomb you, because you might bomb us.
We'll lose that little war, but we'll come in somewhere else. All of these things, that's complicated enough.
But now we're talking about this other level. So in some sense, this idea that we can backstop conventional power with, you know, the Soviets had millions of men in the army after the after World War II stationed in Eastern Europe.

What was it, like two million people in the Red Army or something?

Yeah.

And we said we didn't have the troops remaining in Western Europe.

But we said, listen, if you invade Western Europe, we'll respond to the nuclear attack.

And so, I mean, I guess that worked. It worked until August 1949 when the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb.
And that's when panic hit Washington. And the whole debate went on about do we build hydrogen bombs? And ultimately, the military prevailed and Truman signed on and Klaus Fuchs was outed.
And there was this whole knowledge that the Russians knew a lot because Fuchs knew our early work on hydrogen weapons before the end of the war. We were exploring the possibility.
All of that came together to, with a kind of a

terrible moment when, when the, the, the teller side prevailed and we said, let's build bigger bombs as if that would somehow,

but there had been a balance of forces. You're quite right.
Yeah.

They had 2 million men on the ground in Europe. We had the bomb.

And then the balance of force was disrupted when they got the bomb. So then how do we rebalance? And the rebalance was the hydrogen bomb.
And that's, you know, that's how you get to Armageddon ultimately, unfortunately. You talked to, I was reading the acknowledgements and you talked to Teller in writing the book, is that right? I did.
And obviously he big inspiration for the u.s pursuing the hydrogen bomb i what was his feelings when you talked to him about this i made the mistake of going to see teller at his house on the grounds of stanford university early on in my research when i really didn't didn't have as clear a grasp of who everyone was and when I should ask and so forth. And I sent him a copy of an essay I'd written about Robert Oppenheimer for a magazine.
And that set him off. He had reached the point where he was telling TV interviewers, asking them how much time he would actually be on the air.
And if they said three minutes or whatever, he would say, all right, then I will answer three questions, no more. Trying to control, because he was convinced that everyone was cutting the story to make him look bad.
He really had quite a lot of paranoia at that point in his life. So when he read my essay on Oppenheimer, he used that as the basis for basically shouting at me, waving my big heavy book, one of my big heavy books at him.
I remember thinking, oh, my God, he's going to hit me with my book. Then I thought, wait a minute, this guy's 80 years old, I can take him.
But he finally said, all right, I will answer three questions. And we sat down and I asked him one and he didn't give me an interesting answer.
I asked him the second question and it was worth the whole interview. I said, was Robert Oppenheimer a good lab director? And I thought, well, here's a chance where he'll slash him.
But Oppenheimer's worst enemy said to me, Robert Oppenheimer was the best lab director I ever knew. And I thought, bingo.
And then he chased me out of the house. And I went up the road to a friend's house and got very drunk because I was really shaken.
It was so new to me, all of this. But that quote was worth the whole thing because, you know, Eisenhower in one of his memoirs says, I always liked Hannibal best of all the classical figures in the military of the Roman Empire because he comes down to us only in the written memoirs of his enemies.
And if they thought he was such a good leader, he must have been a hell of a leader. You know, it's interesting the way the Manhattan Project is organized because if you think of a startup in Silicon Valley, you have a technical founder usually and a non-technical founder where the non-technical founder is in charge of in you know talking to

investors Think of a startup in Silicon Valley. You have a technical founder usually and a non-technical founder.
The non-technical founder is in charge of talking to investors and customers and so on. And the technical founder is in charge of organizing the technology and the engineers.
And in Oppenheimer, you had the guy who understood all the chemistry, the metallurgy, obviously the nuclear physics. And then Groves is getting appropriations.
And it's an interesting organization that you see. But OK, so why was Oppenheimer such a great lab director? Oppenheimer was a man with a very divided self and an insecure self.
One of his closest friends, I.I. Robbie, who was a really profound and interesting human being, I'm going to be writing about him in my next book, and I spent some time with Robbie just before he died.
But Robbie said once of Oppenheimer, I always felt as if he could never decide whether he wanted to be president of the Knights of Columbus

or B'nai B'rith. He said he was a certain kind of American Jew who, I mean, the German Jews who came over before and after the First World War were westernized.
They were not from the shuttles of the Pale of Settlement,

the Eastern European Jews.

They were sophisticated.

They were well from the shuttles of the Pale of Settlement, the Eastern European Jews. They were sophisticated.
They were well-educated. They were a totally different group and as such were able to assimilate fairly easily.
Oppenheimer wasn't sent to a Jewish school. He was sent to a famous school that was opened in New York.
It was the Ethical Culture School, it was called. And it was based on the idea of an ethical, moral education, but not a religious education.
So they found this niche for him. His parents did.
He never quite pulled himself together as a human being. And as is true with many people with that kind of personality structure, he was a superb actor.
He could play lots of different roles, and he did. Women adored him.
He was one of the most lavish courters of women. He would bring a bouquet of flowers to their first date, which was apparently shocking to people in those days.
He was just a lovely, courtly man. But in the classroom, if somebody made a stupid mistake, he would just chew them out.
And he taught a course in physics that was so advanced that most of the best students took it twice because they couldn't store it all the first time. And he was nasty to people all the time in a way that bothered a lot of people.
Louis Alvarez, who was someone I got to know pretty well because I helped him write his memoirs, and one of the important scientists at Los Alamos, really didn't along with Oppenheimer at all, because Oppenheimer was so condescending to everyone. And Louie was kind of a hothead, and he didn't like people condescending to him.
Oppenheimer never won a Nobel. Louie did, and so forth.
So there was this layer of Oppenheimer being waspish all the time, which was his insecurity. And his insecurity extended to physics in that rather than dig deep into one problem, Robbie said later he just, he didn't have the zit splash.
He couldn't sit down and focus on one problem because he always wanted to be someone who always knew everything that was going on in physics. Well, you could call that someone who was a very sophisticated, knowledgeable scientist, or you could call him someone who was superficial.
And he was superficial. He knew broadly rather than deeply, if you will.
Even though he did work, he and his graduate student of his developed the basic idea of the black hole long before it came up after the war. They published a paper on what was essentially the physics of a black hole in 1929.
But it wasn't called a black hole yet. John Wheeler invented that term many years later.
But the idea that a big enough sun, if it collapsed, would just keep on collapsing until nothing could come out of it, including light, came from Oppenheimer. And if the black hole had been discovered out in space before he died, he certainly would have had a Nobel for the theory.
That being said, he still was someone who was broad rather than deep. And he was someone who was really good at playing roles.
So when General Groves, who himself had two or three degrees from MIT in engineering, he was no slouch. But his was more the industrial side of everything.
How do you build a factory when you don't know what you're going to put in it? He built the factories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee to enrich uranium and start building the early piles that would later lead to the big reactors in Washington before they even knew it was going to go in the factory. He got orders of magnitude numbers.
He said, start laying the concrete. We want it this big.
We want this attached to it. We're going to need power, going to need water, going to need gas, whatever they needed.
He was that kind of really great engineer. But he needed someone to help explain the physics to him.
And he saw pretty quickly at the meetings he was holding at the University of Chicago, where they were building the first reactor, little one, that Oppenheimer was really good at explaining things. So he grabbed him.
And Groves spent the war riding in trains back and forth among all these various sites. He'd have the advisors from one site, like Chicago, jump on the train while he was taking the train from Chicago to Santa Fe.
Then they'd get off and take the next train back to Chicago. Then he'd pick up the guys who were going to go with him to Tennessee from Santa Fe, and they'd ride with him and round and round and round.
That's how it grows. He got a plane later in the war, but most of the war, he just had people writing with him.
And Oppenheimer said later, well, I became his idiot savant. And Oppenheimer did.
He explained all the physics to Groves because Groves had a little insecure around six Nobel laureates around the table. And would say things like, well, you each have a PhD, but I think my work at MIT probably was the equivalent of about six PhDs, wouldn't you think? And they would think, who is this guy? Was he joking? Was that sarcasm? No, he did.
He had multiple degrees. You know how the military works.
When there's no war, they send their guys to school to get them better trained. So when the time came to find someone to run, Oppenheimer had been pushing for a separate place where the scientists could get together and do what scientists must do if they're going to advance their science, and that is talk to each other.
The system that Groves had installed around the country at all these factories and so forth was called compartmentalization for secrecy. And basically it was, you're only allowed to know just enough to do your job and not the overall picture of what your job might be for.
So for example, there were women at Oak Ridge running big magnetic machines that would separate uranium-235 from uranium-238 with magnetic coils of various kinds, taking advantage of the very slight difference in mass between these two otherwise identical materials. The ladies, the women who were doing this work, were set in front of a board with a big dial on it, a big arrow that went from zero to 10 or whatever, and told keep the arrow about between right here on this.
They didn't know what they were making. They really got good at spinning their dials and maintaining what was basically the level of whatever electric process was going on in this machine.
So compartmentalization worked. But Oppenheimer said, if we are compartmentalized as scientists, we're not going to get anywhere.
Science works by gift exchange. I discover something.
I publish the results. All the other scientists in my field can read it or be told of it at a meeting, and then they can take that information and use that to move a little farther.
And that's the way it's always been done, and that's the only way it works. As soon as you lock people up and tell them they can't talk to each other, it stops, because the discovery over here doesn't get applied to a need over here.
Simple. Groves reluctantly agreed to let Oppenheimer, to let this place have openness, as it was called.
You see the parallel with the open world about the bomb, same sort of thing. How can you know what's going on if you can't let people talk to each other, see what they're doing? But he insisted that the whole crew be put behind barbed wire in a faraway place where no one else was around.
By then, Groves had worked with Oppenheimer enough. Oppenheimer was now playing the lab director.
And he was superb at it, as Teller's remark about a good lab director would let you know. And for the period of the war, Hans Beda told me this.
He said, before the war, Robert really could be cruel. He would pounce on a mistake you made.
And Beda, Nobel laureate of Beda discovered what makes the sun work. That's how important Beta's work was and how significant.
Beta told me, and of course, everyone makes mistakes. I made mistakes.
Oppenheimer would charge me with a mistake if I spoke wrong. But he said, before the war, after the war, but not during the war.
During the war, he was the superb, kind of wise lab director. Because unlike most scientists, he was not only a physicist of high class, but he really was psychologically astute as a human being, as I think insecure people often are, because you've got to scope out what's going on.
You know, Oppenheimer wrote pretty good poetry. He was interested in art.
He wanted to read the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit, so he learned Sanskrit. He was very smart, needless to say, and a very high IQ.
Not all the physicists who did first-class work did have high IQs. They took some other qualities as well.
It took the zit splat, sitting down in a chair and focusing on one thing until you got through to it. That's what Robbie said, and he said that's why Oppenheimer never won a Nobel Prize.
So all in all, Oppenheimer became in this place

that some of these people later were calling like Mount Olympus.

I mean, remember, they were working on a bomb

that was going to kill hundreds of thousands of people.

But it was the most curious collection of people

who had felt like theirs was a spiritual field before the war. And here they were in the war.
And they began to think, well, maybe this isn't so spiritual. Maybe we're doing something truly horrendous.
When Bohr comes along and says, wait a minute, even Oppenheimer by then was kind of a student of Bohr's. Oppenheimer had the job of recruiting everyone for Los Alamos without telling them what they would be doing because of a secret.
So he would go to a university campus where there was a young physicist he wanted to recruit. And they would go out for a walk to get away from any hidden microphones.
And Oppenheimer would say, I can't tell you what we're going to be doing. I can tell you that it will certainly end this war.
And it may end all war. And that was quite enough.
I mean, most of them figured out what they'd be doing anyway, because it was sort of obvious when you start looking at the list of people who are going there, they're all nuclear physicists. So Oppenheimer and Bohr brought up together, brought this idea to Los Alamos and later to the world, that there was a paradox, you could call it.
So the bomb had two sides, and they were in a sense complementary. Because although it's certainly true that this was going to be a very destructive weapon, it would also maybe be true, if all worked out and they tried to make it work out, that it would put an end at least to large-scale war.
If you go to the numbers and graph the number of deaths from war, man-made deaths, starting in the 18th century, it's almost exponential up to 1943, when 15 million people died between the war itself and the Holocaust. And then it starts to decline as the war begins to come to an end, the wars really.
In 1945, it drops down to about one to two million deaths. And it stays there ever after.
And although one to two million deaths a year from war is nothing to be proud of, we lose six to seven million people in the world every year from smoking. So in a curious way, the introduction of how to control nuclear energy changed the nature of nation states such that they could no longer at the limit defend their borders with war.
They had to find some other way. At least when the scale goes up, they had to find another way.
I think that's very important because people somehow don't really understand what a millennial change the introduction of the release of nuclear energy into the world really was. You know, as we've been talking, I've been thinking over and over again about your question about AI and the whole larger, interesting question that you can see how it fits into the bomb story of unintended consequences.
All the countries that worked on the bomb at some level were thinking, oh, my God, we're going to have a weapon that will surpass them all. One ring to bind them all.
I mean, it's like Lord of the Rings, this thing. They thought it would aggrandize national power, but what it did was put a limit to national power.
For the first time in the history of the world, war became something that was historical rather than universal. It was something that would no longer be possible.
And who did that? Scientists, going about their quiet work of talking to each other and exploring the way the universe works. Boer, who's one of my favorite people in the world, Bohr liked to say, you know, science is not about power over nature, as people seem to think.
Science is about the gradual removal of prejudice. And by that, he meant when Galileo and Copernicus changed the way everyone looked at the position of the Earth in the universe, not the center of the universe anymore, but just a planet revolving around a third-rate star.
It changed the way everyone thought about the whole world. When Darwin, I mean, we're still having a debate about Darwin in the world.
When Darwin definitively identified our place in the natural world as, if you will, a brainy ape, it's still taking time for a lot of people to swallow that one. But inch by inch, these prejudices about where we are in the world and how powerful we are and what our purpose is and so forth are being drained away by science.
And the science of nuclear fission and nuclear energy is draining away and has drained away. The theory that we are sort of universally capable of destroying each other and getting away with it.
But this is the unintended consequence. The dark side is it's only by having a Damocles sword over our heads, the potential for world destruction, or at least of the human world,

that it's possible to limit war in this way.

That's the threat.

And when people start saying, well, look, we can have a conventional war if we've got nuclear weapons, because you're not going to attack us.

You don't dare.

We'll use our nuclear weapons on you.

Something's changed most recently in all of this. It's outside the range of all the books I've written.
It's a whole new thing. I guess you have to work through all the combinations just as evolution does before you come up with the one that actually fits the reality of the world.
There's at least 10 different things. I'm trying to think which branch of the tree I want to explore first.
On the AI question, I mean, yeah, I'm trying not to like too explicitly connect the dots, because there is always a danger of, I don't know, every time I read something in history, I'm like, oh, this is exactly like so and so. But first of all, the broader outline of the super eclectic group of people who are engaged in this sort of historical pursuit, understand it's a historical pursuit they like kind of see the inklings of it and one of the people my second to last guest was uh ilia suskover who is the chief scientist at open ai which is the big lab building this yeah and he was the first person he was basically this lizard of AI where he discovered the nuclear chain reaction.

Susquevur was. And he was the first person.
He was basically this lizard of AI where he discovered a nuclear chain reaction. Sutskover was the first person to train a neural network that accomplished.
It was called ImageNet. And anyway, so like he's from that moment on, he was one of these scientists who like he sees like, oh, you could build a nuclear bomb immediately as soon as the news hits the floor.
Ten years ago, he saw this coming, like scaled this up and you've got something that's human level intelligent. Anyways, I mean, I was reading through the book and so many things like this came up.
One was a good friend of mine works at one of these companies and he does, you know, they train these models on GPUs, which are computers that can perform all these matrix calculations in peril. And I was thinking about these engineers who were in short supply during the making of the bomb who are, you know, let's say they're working on the electromagnetic separation of the isotopes, right? And it's like this really esoteric thing.
You're like a chemist or metallurgist or something that you're like really needed for this specific thing. And he's like in super high demand right now.
He's like the one guy who can make these like very particular machines run as efficiently as possible. So you start looking and there's so many analogies there.
Well, I mean, look, I don't think there's much question that AI is going to be at least as transformative as nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. And it's scaring the hell out of a lot of people.
And a lot of other people are putting their heads in the sand. And others are saying, let's lube it around with laws, which certainly we should do.
We've tried to do that with nuclear weapons and have some success. But people have no idea what's coming, do they? Yeah, yeah.
Well, this is the thing I wanted to ask is one thing that impressed me is that, you know, some of these scientists didn't see this. They were, I think Fermi was like, you can never isolate, you can never refine uranium and get 235.
But then some of these scientists like saw it coming. And I was actually impressed.
I forget who, but a few of them got it down to the year where they're like you know by this time we'll have built the atomic bomb by this time another one was like you know russia is like five to ten years behind or something so i'm curious what made some of these scientists really good at forecasting the development of this technology and its maturity and what made some either too pessimistic or too optimistic? Is there some pattern you noticed among the ones who could see the progression of technology? That's a good question. Well, the experience that I've had in working with scientists, physicists, is that they really are not very interested in history or in the future.

They're interested in now, where the work is, where the cutting edge is.

They'd have to devote quite a bit of energy to projecting in the future.

There, of course, have been a few.

I mean, one thinks of some of the guys who wrote science fiction,

some of the guys who wrote essays and so forth about where we were going.

And if you ask them, particularly later on in their careers,

when their basic work is already done.

And I remember talking to a Nobel laureate in another line of science,

but he said,

I would never be a graduate student connecting up with a Nobel Prize winner because they've already done their best work. And he was one.
So he was talking about himself too. So it takes a certain mentality to do that.
And maybe scientists aren't the best ones to do it. Alvarez told me, he said, you know, I was always a snoop, and I would poke around at Berkeley in the various drawers of the benches in the laboratory.
He said, one day I was poking around, and I found this little glass cylinder about the size of a Petri dish with some wires inside. He said, and I realized it was the first cyclotron.
They'd just thrown it in a drawer. I said, so where is it now? He said, it's in the Smithsonian, of course.
Where else would it be? I talked to the guy who invented the first laser and actually held one in my hand, the first laser. He was an engineer at one of the big telephone companies.
He said, there's a laser. The first laser is supposedly in the Smithsonian.
But he said, they don't have it. They got one in the lab, and I took my first one home.
He said, you want to see it? I said, God, of course. We went to the credenza in his dining room, and he opened the drawer and pulled out a little box.
And inside it was basically a cylinder of aluminum about the size of a film can, a little film can, which he opened up and took out a man-made ruby cylinder that was half silvered on each end, surrounded by a very high-intensity flash bulb. That was it.
It was this beautiful, simple machine. But he said, they didn't get the right one.
I said, why didn't you give them the right one? He said, they didn't ask me. And he was angry all his life because he wasn't included in the Nobel Prizes.

He went to the theoreticians who first theorized a laser, but he built the first laser. There it was.
When you were interviewing the scientists, how many of them do you feel regretted their work? You know, they've been down the road so far. They really didn't think that way anymore.
What they did think about was they regretted the way governments had handled their work. And most of them, there were some who were kind of hawks and patriots.
Alvarez was one of those. But most of them had tried in the years since the war to move in the direction of reducing nuclear weapons, limiting nuclear weapons, eliminating nuclear weapons.
It was a problem for them. When the war was over, these were mostly graduate students or new PhDs who had been recruited for this program.
The average age at Los Alamos was 27. Oppenheimer was an old guy.
He was 39. Right? So these were young guys who'd been pulled out of their lives, pulled out of their careers.
They wanted to get back to the university and do the work they had started out to do. And by and large, they did.
And Los Alamos just emptied out. Teller was horrified.
Teller wanted the bomb program to continue because he wanted to build his hydrogen bomb.

It was going to be his bid for history, just as Oppenheimer's bid for history was the fission bomb, if you will. Teller's was going to be the hydrogen bomb.
And over the years, after that work was done, he systematically and meanly tried to exclude, by one anyone else who'd helped him work on the hydrogen bomb. I mean, originally he said it was a mathematician, a Polish mathematician named Stan Ulam, whom I did interview also, who really came up with the basic idea for the hydrogen bomb.
I took it to Tell. And together, Teller came up with an improvement.
And then together, they wrote a paper, which was signed by both of them. But by the 1980s, Teller was saying, Erlheim did nothing, nothing, which wasn't true.
But it was his piece of history because he was scattered too. and he never, one, did Nobel-level work.
So they didn't talk so much about their personal guilt. And, I mean, honestly, I was a child in the Second World War.
I was eight years old in 1945. So many young men had been killed on all sides in the war.
It was a kind of a strange, peaceful time for children. Cars couldn't get tires.
They were rationed. Cars couldn't get gasoline.
It was rationed. So the streets were empty.
We played in the streets. Meat was rationed.
So we lived on macaroni and cheese. You got four ounces of meat a week per person during the Second World War and so forth.
And that was kind of wonderful and peaceful and kids running around in gangs and so forth. But in at least one house in almost every block in the city, there was a black velvet flag or drape hanging with a gold star on it.
And that meant that someone in that family, a father, a brother, a son, had been killed. And I was a smart little kid.
I understood what all that meant. I was reading newspapers by the time I was six following the war.
It was the strangest time of darkness and terror. We didn't know until 1943 if we were going to win the war.
It was scary for a while up front, the war in Europe. We sort of set Japan aside, our government did, until the war in Europe was done before we finished that other war.
But it took a while for the United States to get its industrial plant up and cranking out planes at the rate of one a day or more and so forth. You know, Churchill famously said when Pearl Harbor occurred, the Lord hath delivered them into my hands, he said.
And he explained later what he meant was, that means America's going to join the war, and I know we can win now because America's just one vast factory. Yeah.
Much more so than the British could have put together. So it was a peaceful time, but it was a very dark time even for a child.
I understood well enough what it meant. My mother died when I was an infant, so I understood what the death of a family member was about.
Do you remember when the bombs dropped? So 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.

The population of Japan was down to about 1,000 calories per person of the worst kind of stuff, buckwheat and weeds

and whatever they could find.

And yet they wouldn't surrender.

And they still had a million men on the ground in western Manchuria.

They only had about a year's worth of bullets left. I mean, we knew that much, but that's a long time with a million men.
With that in mind, and because they felt that the Soviet Union was still neutral in the Eastern Front, because it had basically fought the war in Europe, we didn't win the war in Europe, the Russians did. We didn't enter the war on the ground until June 1944,

by which time they were already moving forward

against the German forces that had attacked them in 1941.

So we didn't win the war in Europe, the Russians did.

But the Japanese just wouldn't surrender.

And I mean, you can read the documents about the bombs.

General George Marshall, who was leading the war, was in charge of all the forces, had this idea that maybe if we could use these bombs on the beaches before we landed to kill any Japanese defense that was there, maybe they would get the message and be shocked, he said, and surrender. But from the Japanese point of view, as it turned out later, it's a myth that the bombs won the war.
They contributed to winning the war, but they didn't win the war. What won the war was when Stalin finally was convinced that there were such things as atomic bombs.
He was half convinced these were American pieces of disinformation, that we were feeding the espionage to the Soviet Union to make him spend a lot of money and waste a lot of time for something that didn't exist. When the news came back, which it did almost immediately from Hiroshima and then from Nagasaki, that these things existed, he called Igor Kuchatov in and said famously, Comrade, give us the bomb.
You have all the resources of the state at your disposal. Give us the bomb as soon as you can.
But up until then, he wasn't so sure. He had told Truman and Potsdam that they would invade Manchuria with fresh Soviet forces on the 15th of August.
And Truman was trying to get him to agree to invade at all. and then when word came from New Mexico

that the bomb had worked, which it did right in the middle of the Potsdam Conference, Truman then was trying to get Stalin to come in as late as possible because he figured the bombs would end the war before Stalin could take over enough of Japan to divide the country the way Europe was divided. He didn't want a Soviet zone and an American zone and a British zone.
He knew we could do better with the Japanese than the Soviets would do. But Stalin, having heard that the bombs really worked, moved up the date of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria

to the 8th of August between Hiroshima and Nagasaki

and invaded early.

I found it very interesting that the conventional air forces

on our side staged the largest firebombing raid of the war

on the 14th of August after the Japanese were in the middle of their surrender negotiations. The Air Force wanted to get credit for winning the war, and they wanted to hold back the Soviets who were advancing down from Sakhalin Island to the northern islands of Japan, as well as inward from Manchuria.
And so our bombing was in northern Japan. It was like a way of telling the Soviets, back off, buddy.
We're not going to let you in here. And then the Japanese leadership, the military leadership, which had been adamant that they would fight to the last Japanese, the hundred million, they called it,

turned and finally realized that it was futile. With the fresh Soviet army coming into Manchuria, with the United States and the British coming in from the west and the south, they were surrounded and there was no reason to continue.
But the bombs had their effect. the Japanese emperor used the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a reason for entering politics for the first time in Japanese history.
He had always been a spiritual figure, but he wasn't allowed to kind of vote or veto the political arrangements. He stepped forth and said, we must sue for peace.
And in his final imperial rescript on the 15th of August, recorded and played out to the people by radio, he said, a new and most terrible weapon of war has led us to think the unthinkable, and we must now lay down our arms. So the bomb had its effect, but it wasn't what we thought at the time.
A lot of Americans said, thank God for the atomic bomb because our boys came home. The actor Paul Newman was a friend of mine, and Paul was an 18-year-old bombardier on a two-man Navy fighter bomber training for the invasion of Japan.
He said to me once, Rhodes, I'm one of those guys who said, thank God for the atomic bomb, because I probably wouldn't have come home if we'd invaded the Japanese home islands. And a million men said that.
And the truth is, there were so many Japanese who would have been killed if we had invaded, that even the killings of the two bombs would have been dwarfed by the killing that happened. For the first time in the history of war, more Japanese civilians were killed in World War II than had ever been killed in a war before.
War was beginning to become what it has since become, which is a war against civilians, basically. So one question I have, we were talking near the beginning about whether it was possible that the bomb could not have been built at all.
And it seems like in the case of the nuclear physics involved here, it was sufficiently obvious. But seeing the history of that science and whether it was plausible or not to for some conspiracy to just say, you know, to hold it off.
How plausible do you think it is that there's some group of scientists somewhere else who have discovered some other phenomenon or technology? And they're like, this is so destructive. We can't tell anyone about this.
You know, one area I think this might be plausible is like bioweapons or something like that, where they discover something, they just like shut up about it. Given the study of this history, do you think that's more or less plausible? I don't think it's very likely to take bioweapons as an example.
I remember talking to a biologist, one of the early DNA researchers who had been a physicist until DNA came along. And I said, how did you switch over to biology? He said, well, it's molecules.
So from his perspective, it wasn't very different. But we were talking about the question of just the one you asked, but about biological agents.
He said, you know, nature has had millions of years to work all the combinations on the worst things you can imagine. The odds of anybody in a laboratory coming up with anything worse are really radishingly small.
I took that with great comfort. I went home and slept that night, you know.
And I think he's probably right. Evolution has been done such a job.
We're still digging stuff out. I mean, it's just amazing how much of our technology started out as something in the natural world, and then we adapted it and simplified it and engineered it so we could make it too.
That's still going on in all sorts of ways. I hope that's the case.
I was talking to a biologist and he was explaining to me, if you've seen things like AlphaFold, which is this AI program that can predict how a protein will fold, you can run billions of different permutations of a protein and you can find smallpox, but it binds 100 times better with human receptors or something. Well, I'll tell you a story, which I don't think is well known.
I wish it were. Back in the 60s, I think, the Russians proposed a world-scale program of public health to eradicate smallpox to the UN.
And they said, we'll contribute vaccine, and other countries can contribute whatever they can contribute. This program got going.
It was run out of Geneva by the World Health Organization, a wonderful American public health doctor, big old burly country boy looking guy who was D.A. Henderson, who I followed around for several months once in Geneva and elsewhere.
And by the late 1970s, the last case was smallpox, which happened to be a disease that's only spread among humans. And therefore was of all the diseases, the most obvious one to try to get rid of.
Because if there are reservoirs in the natural world outside of the human world, then get to be a problem. It's also something that's carried around by rabbits or deer or whatever, then it's harder to deal with.
But if it's just humans, then all you have to do is start showing signs of smallpox and vaccinate everyone around him and make sure they don't go anywhere for a while. And the disease can't spread.
And that's the method that they use to eliminate smallpox everywhere in the world. And then in the 90s, when the Soviet Union collapsed, DA learned, as we all did, although it wasn't terribly well publicized, that there was a secret lab still operating, that the Russian plan had been to eliminate smallpox vaccination from the world so that everybody except people in their country who had been vaccinated for this purpose would not be immune and a bacteriological agent like smallpox could be used as a weapon of war.
DA was so incensed. He took this story to our government and we started a whole new section of the public health business to work on biological warfare.
And he did for the last part of his life to try to get past this. And that lab was eventually, we hope, closed down.
So that scenario is not outside the bounds of possibility. But generally speaking, biological warfare isn't very effective because your own people could be infected as well.
If not your war people, at least your civilian population. Much like poison gas, which used to blow back over the lines of the people who launched it to their horror.
So it never was a terribly good weapon of war. And it's one of the reasons, plus Hitler's experience of being gassed in the First World War, that all sides decided not to use it in the second.
So that's part of it. Speaking of secret labs, by the way, is there a question you have about, I mean, you've written so many books about not only the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and Cold War and so on.
Is there a question you have about any of those stories that you, one you're really interested in that you haven't been able to get the answer to because the information is classified?

You know, over the years, it's slowly leaked out. Latest thing I discovered is that from early on, our hydrogen bombs were used as spherical secondary.
They were shaped sort of like a dumbbell, not quite so, more spread out. But there's a picture of Kim Jong-un holding a, looking at a hydrogen bomb of North Korean make.

And it's perfectly obvious that it's a real bomb because that's its configuration.

So I didn't know that until just a year or so ago.

But I mean, sooner or later, everyone tells you at least a little bit of this.

And then is there anything you've learned, but you can't put in your books because it's...

Thank you. just a year or so ago.
But I mean, sooner or later, everyone tells you at least a little bit of this. And then is there anything you've learned, but you can't put in your books because it's...
The only thing I didn't put in the book, rightly so, was the dimensions of the Fat Man bomb that were on the original Fuchs documents that he passed to the Russians. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the scientists became available, I learned that the KGB and the interest of promoting its service to the state in this new world they were going into had published a historical piece about their good work in stealing the secret to the bomb.
And they included a picture of the sketch that Fuchs did showing the dimensions of each of the shells of this multi-shelled implosion weapon with the numbers there in millimeters. And when they realized, when the scientists realized that the KGB had published this stuff, they raised a great hue and cry and said, that's in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

They said, we got to pull all the issues of that journal.

And they did.

But I had a very enterprising assistant in Moscow, this geologist I mentioned before.

And he said, I think I know where I can find a copy of the journal. And he jumped on the night train from Moscow to St.
Petersburg and went to a science library there. And they said, no, of course not.
We pulled that. And then he thought, wait a minute, where's the public library? It was across the street.
And he went across the public library. And they said, yeah, we have the journal.
And handed it to him and he made a copy and gave me one. But when I realized that I had this, I never published that information.
That's the only one, though. That is a wise thing to do.
Yeah. One of the final questions.
A lot of times people use the phrase, you know, we need a Manhattan Project for X. If it's, you know, some new technology or something.
When you hear that, do you think that, you know, this is like a sort of naive comparison or does it make sense to use that terminology? No, I've, you know, it's been used so many times over the years for cancer, for this, for that. It was a very special time, and it was a very special problem.
The basic science was in hand. Oppenheimer once said in his funny way, he said we didn't do any basic science between 1939 and 1945.
In a sense, it was a vast engineering program. There was some basic physics, but very little.
It was mostly using Nobel laureate level physicists as engineers to develop a whole new weapon with the precision of a Swiss watch that weighed 9,000 pounds. They did a beautiful job considering the time and place and the rush and all those things.
They solved some problems that I don't know how anybody else could have solved. Like, how do you make plutonium explode without a gun? So all of that.
But, you know, most of these problems aren't like that. Nobody was starting a startup with some investment from an investment company to build the bomb.
This was a government project and it was secret. And if you divulge the secret, you can go to jail.
A lot of the parameters of what they were doing were carefully kept secret. It's remarkable that 600,000 people worked on the bomb and the secret never got out.
Did you say 600,000? Yeah. This is actually one of the questions I want to ask you.
Truman, when he became president, he had to be told about the – he didn't know about it, right? So the vice president of the United States, 600,000 people – at the time, I don't know how many people were working on it when he became president. But hundreds of thousands of people are working on it.
The vice president doesn't know about it. He only learns about it as president.

How was it possible that with so many people working on it,

the vice president doesn't know that the atom bomb is in the works?

Like, how do they keep that so under wraps?

One of Roosevelt's several vice presidents famously said,

the vice presidency isn't worth a bucket of warm piss.

You know, Kennedy had a saying, I'm against vice in all its forms. Yes.
Well, interesting for me. Roosevelt wanted it kept secret and said it grows.
They didn't want the word to get out. They didn't want the Germans to get ahead of us.
And what was the vice president for? He was to sit around in a waiting room in case the president died, which in Truman's case, he hit the jackpot. So he was just at the right time because Roosevelt had several vice presidents in the course of his long reign.
So from their point of view, he didn't need to know. So he didn't, I mean, it was the need to know thing again.
It was compartmentalization. And of course, as soon as he became president, Groves and Stimson and several others got together with Truman and Phil de Meno.
Truman had some inkling because he was a crusading senator who had taken on the job of preventing waste in war. and if he heard about some industry that was sloughing off and putting money in people's pockets or whatever, he would go visit their factories, call them out.
And he was ready to go to Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge and find out what these people were doing. But Stimson, whom he greatly admired, the Secretary of War at the time, one of the great elder statesmen of the era, said, Mr.
Vice President, please don't go. I guarantee you that what is happening is being well managed.
Please don't go. And he said, if you say so, Mr.
Stimson, I will believe you. So he knew a little bit, but he didn't know very much.

So, and, you know, I don't think that helped.

I don't know how much Roosevelt understood either.

He was not a scientist.

Truman was not even a college graduate.

Truman was self-educated.

I really didn't.

And a well-self-educated guy.

Someone once said, every time I go to the Library of Congress, it's one of the senators to pull out a book. Truman's name is always there.
I think he read everything in the Library of Congress that the senator said. Yeah.
So how the secret was so, imagine today. Yeah.
I mean, it's partly there wasn't any way to communicate except by letter or telephone. And you didn't call long distance unless somebody died, basically.
Tell someone they had a long distance call and their woman would start crying. Or a man, for that matter.
You thought your son was probably dead in Iwo Jima. So the communication was more limited, to be sure.
But even so, it's extraordinary. But the culture different in that the idea of leaking something would be much more frowned upon than it is now? I can't remember in my entire life a more patriotic time than the Second World War.
We children gathered together pieces of tinfoil from the lining of cigarette packages, about the only place you could get tinfoil in those days, aluminum foil, watered it up into balls and took them to school so they could use it to make bombers. We collected the bacon grease from cooking meat in the kitchen and took it to school in cans because it had some application to making bullets.

We collected newspapers for the same reason. The Boy Scouts during the Second World War took it as their special responsibility to collect the fibers that come off milkweed with this little ball that blows away because it was used in place of kapok to line life vests for sailors.
They collected 500,000 tons of milkweed fluff in the course of the war. We were all consumed with winning this thing, which didn't seem to be a certain thing at all, as I said earlier, before around 1943.
And in that world, even though, of course, there was a black market and people got to see a farmer and pick up some steaks so they didn't have to live on some more macaroni and cheese for the next month, as we all did. But despite those changes, people were very, very patriotic and fought in every way we could to win the war.
Speaking of Elder Statesman, by the way, who, since the development of the nuclear bomb, has been the wisest political leader, not necessarily in the U.S., and not even necessarily as a leader of state, but contributed most to the stability and peace. You know, it depends on what period you're talking about.
There's no question that Oppenheimer's advice to the government after the war was really good. I said, I don't think anyone except the Oppenheimer Committee, the Atchison-Lillienthal committee, has ever found a better way of thinking about eliminating nuclear weapons in a world that understands how to build them.
And that really was Oppenheimer. I don't mean he deluded anybody.
He just led them straight down the path. All these engineers and industrialists who were on the committee with him, skeptical men, men who wouldn't have been easily convinced of anything.
But he convinced them that this was the right way to go. So he, up until he was forced out of government because he made the mistake of not supporting the Air Force's favorite bomb, when they found a way to destroy him, basically, and they did destroy him.
I talked to one of the scientists who was his closest friend, and he said Robert was never the same after the security hearing in 1954. He was one of Yace's smiling public men after that.
It really devastated him. That basic insecurity he had as a Jew in America, if you will, from all the way from childhood haunted him.
And he became the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, and he wrote a lot of nice essays. But so I don't know.
The leader that I've fallen into more and more is Niels Bohr. Niels Bohr tried to figure out a way to bring the openness of science into a world without nuclear weapons.
And he fell up against, I mean, he really, he and Robbie taught Oppenheimer the ideas that ended up in the Atchison-Lillienthal plan. And he and Robbie later were the ones who started up the scientific laboratory in Geneva that is now CERN, where they built these new giant colliders.
with the idea in mind that at very least, if the scientists have devastated Europe, remember what things were like for the former Soviet Union. People were living on crusts of bread and bags of old potatoes.
They really were. And particularly people who'd work for the government because their pensions weren't worth anything.
That's what I saw when I went back there in the spring of 1992 after the place collapsed. The money wasn't worth anything.
Their salaries weren't being paid. In the midst of all of that, Europe needed something to sustain it.
And, of course, there was the Marshall Plan, and that was absolutely amazing. And it's the help it gave to Europe when it needed it most.
But Bohr wanted to make sure and Robbie wanted to make sure that the scientists of Europe were tapped to go off somewhere and build nuclear weapons. And they invented this international laboratory in Geneva, which is still a thriving enterprise, where they could do basic physics and where they'd be paid for their work and could do the kind of exciting thing that good science is without having to drift over into the dark side of the whole thing.
I don't know to the extent to it. Well, I mean, let's face it, it more or less worked.
The French had to have the bomb, you know, because they're French. They need their lovers.
They need their bomb. The British had to have the bomb because they knew how to build one.
They'd worked with us all during the war. And then we'd cut them off from a supply of uranium and from any new developments along the way.
And most of all, because the British Empire was bankrupt by the end of the Second World War. And Churchill was determined to get the bomb because without it, his country would fall away and wouldn't get to sit at the table with the big boys.
So they had reasons, typical reasons for getting bombs. Because you don't want to be left out because of the prestige.
Or because you have an immortal enemy who's got the bomb or is getting the bomb. That's North Korea.
That's Iraq. It's attempted.
It didn't get there. That's Pakistan and India.
The countries that did go for the bomb with the exception of the, well, even the superpowers, really. We, because of Germany, the Soviets, because of us, by and large, the countries that did

go toward the bomb finally built bombs because they were afraid of another country having

the bomb.

And everyone else stood back and said, well, if you'll protect us with bombs, with atomic

bombs, when somebody comes calling here in South Korea or Germany or wherever, we won't build them. And share your knowledge of how to make energy out of nuclear power.
There's easily another three hours of questions I could ask you, but I want to be, I can't say I want to be respectful of your time because I haven't been with the extra hour I've taken, but I want to be less than totally disrespectful of your time. So I guess the final maybe question that we can go out on is next 50 years, what odds do you put on a non-test nuke going off? A nuke going off in anger? Yeah.
That's the way I usually put it. I think the odds are high.
Over 50%? Next 50 years? You know, I don't know. I would put a number on it, but it's certainly higher than zero and it's probably higher than 10%.
And that's high enough if we're talking about millions of people dying. You know, people think, well, there was a period when people in the field were talking about, well, maybe we'll have a little regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan.
And that'll scare everybody to the point where they realize we've got to get rid of these things. The same guys who did the nuclear winter studies back in the 80s decided in 2007 first to look at nuclear winter world-scale war using the much better computers of today.

And they found out that that would be even worse than they thought it would

when they had only one-dimensional atmospheric models.

Then they said, well, what would a small regional nuclear war look like?

So they simulated a war between India and Pakistan

where each country explodes 50 Hiroshima-sized, 15 kiloton nuclear weapons over the enemy cities. And what would follow from that? And it turned out, as the model develops, you can see it online, you can watch the graph develop.
That even that small in exchange, less than some of our individual hydrogen bombs, about a megaton between the two countries, would be enough to cause enough fire from burning cities to spread smoke around the world and reduce the amount of sunlight. So they figured in the end that there would be 20 million prompt deaths from the explosions themselves and the fires.
But then over the course of the next several years, up to 2 billion people would die of starvation because you would have the same phenomenon that the world had in the 18th century, I think, when there was an interim of rather cold. The sun was pulling back a bit and it was freezing hard in July in New England and the crops failed and a mass of people died worldwide during that period of time.
Something that, like the flu epidemic of 1918, everybody seems to have forgotten. I don't know where our memory goes with these things.
And therefore, even a small so-called nuclear war must engage the whole whole world because it's going to engage us if it ever goes off. So 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. There is a sort of Domocles over our heads.
That has been the price of nuclear deterrence. It isn't necessary that that be the price.
It's possible to have nuclear deterrence without actual weapons. But it's damned hard to convince leaders, particularly in totalitarian and authoritarian countries, that that's the case.
So, you know, the odds, I don't know, but there's no such thing as a machine that doesn't malfunction sooner or later. And these machines, these weapons that we make us such supernatural powers of are just machines.
We put them together. We can take them apart.
We can put the ore back in the ground if we want to. We don't have to live with this.
I think we're in a big, wide, long transition. Maybe the world-scale problem of solving global warming will help with this, will help people see that if they work together, I mean, here I am saying there could be a good outcome from this technology.
Well, there was a good outcome from the telephone. There was a good outcome from television.
But there was also a dark side, and we're going to have to learn to handle dark sides better. Maybe that's the last thing to say on this subject.
Yeah, that's a sound note to close on. The book is The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to talk as much about your new book on energy.

But when your next book comes out, we'll get a chance to talk about the remainder that we didn't get a chance to talk about.

A true honor.

Incredible pleasure.

Thank you so much for your...

My pleasure.

Yeah, for the stories, the insight.

It was really wonderful.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for my pleasure. Yeah.
For the stories, the insight. It was really, it was really wonderful.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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