American Experience

Narrator: The news shocked Americans everywhere. If Robert Oppenheimer could not be trusted with the nation’s secrets, who could be? Brilliant, proud, charismatic, a poet as well as a physicist, Oppenheimer had seemed to enjoy the full trust and confidence of his country’s leaders. He was a national hero… The man who had led the scientific team which devised the atomic bomb… the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Oppenheimer came to prominence through unspeakable violence, and suffered all the ambiguities and contradictions he had helped create.

J. Robert Oppenheimer (archival): We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu Scripture the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

Richard Rhodes, writer: What he was trying to help the world understand is that these are not weapons. These are forces of destruction so great that we finally, as a species, are in a position where we can destroy the entire human world, without question.

Narrator: As the nation’s top nuclear weapons advisor, Oppenheimer tried to warn his countrymen of their dangers, but powerful figures within the government feared he was a threat to America’s security. They determined to destroy him.

Marvin Goldberger, physicist: The country asked him to do something and he did it brilliantly, and they repaid him for the tremendous job he did by breaking him.

Roger Robb, courtroom prosecutor (Michael Cumpsty): Doctor, do you think that social contacts between a person employed in secret war work and Communists or Communist adherents is dangerous?