[music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, distinguished biographer, author, and science thinker, Alec Nevala-Lee.

He is author of the new book Collisions: A Physicist Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs.

Welcome, Alec.

Thanks so much.

I'm very happy to be here.

And, last year, this was one of The Economist best books of 2025.

As you're thinking about, the project today.

And I do want to give you a platform to tell us about the physicist, about whom you wrote.

But first, what's the most remarkable piece of feedback you've gotten in response to the book?

About, the physicists that you, profile and chronicle.

Oh, good question.

So this is a book about a man named Luis Alvarez, and, he is a Nobel Prize winning physicist.

I'm sure we'll talk a lot about him in the next half hour or so.

But he was a Manhattan Project, you know, physicist, who worked, on the bomb and was a observer at Hiroshima.

And so probably the most, remarkable, piece of encouragement I received was from a guy named Richard Rhodes, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian who wrote a book called The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which is one of my all time top ten nonfiction books.

And, he actually knew Alvarez.

He worked with Alvarez on Alvarez's memoirs.

And had lots of Alvarez stories.

And so I reached out to him, and he was very helpful and cooperative.

But eventually, you know, he read the manuscript and gave me a blurb and said it was great.

He thought Alvarez would have loved it.

And to hear that from someone who has thought about this material, this period, the science, you know, as deeply as Rhodes has, you know, was a huge deal for me.

Last year, we hosted on The Open Mind, the grandson of Robert Oppenheimer, Charles Oppenheimer.

In the context of the Oppenheimer legacy.

What is it, that you want to tantalize and entice our viewers and listeners with, about this other seminal figure in the Manhattan Project's history?

Obviously, there's $1 billion worth of advertising for, Alvarez's friend, Oppenheimer.

But what about Alvarez?

And what would Oppenheimer say about him?

Wow.

So what I love about this is that if you see the movie Oppenheimer, Alvarez appears very briefly.

He has a very, short, but, memorable scene where, Oppenheimer sees him running out of a barbershop because he's just seen a newspaper headline saying that the Germans have split the atom.

And there's a cute scene where, Oppenheimer originally doubts this is possible, and, he's invited to come next door, at the lab because, his friend Lawrence tells him that Alvarez did it.

Alvarez has done what these scientists have have claimed.

It's a true story.

Alright, so this actually happened.

It reflects how close these two men were.

They were colleagues at Berkeley, and then Alvarez essentially disappears from the movie.

Which is really funny to me because, he played a huge role in the events of that movie.

You know, as I'll talk about later, you know, he was kind of, a key player in the Manhattan Project itself.

And that later, kind of infamously, Alvarez became one of the few scientists to testify on the behalf of the government at the Oppenheimer hearings.

So if you seen that movie, you know that Oppenheimer was eventually stripped of his security clearances and kind of this star chamber proceeding.

And most scientists were against this.

You know, most scientists that he knew testified on his behalf.

But Alvarez and Edward Teller were probably the two most prominent scientists, to testify essentially against Oppenheimer, for complex reasons.

-But, honestly... -Well, -Yeah.

Go ahead.

-tell us about those reasons.

-Yeah.

-What were the reasons?

So, Alvarez and Oppenheimer were colleagues.

I would say they were friends, for a long time.

And they had a falling out after the war.

Because, after the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb, Lawrence and Alvarez, became convinced that the, best response was to develop the thermonuclear bomb like a much bigger, more powerful fusion bomb.

And they were very adamant.

This should be, like the next big project.

And Alvarez was kind of shocked to discover that Oppenheimer was opposed to it.

I think Oppenheimer foresaw that it would lead to this, you know, devastating arms race.

And so Alvarez, kind of took it personally.

He saw Oppenheimer as having derailed this project that Alvarez, had a considerable professional and personal investment in.

And eventually, I think, Alvarez convinced himself that Oppenheimer was a security risk.

But I think the main reason that Alvarez testified against Oppenheimer at that hearing is to kind of neutralize Oppenheimer, because at that point, the hydrogen bomb was going ahead as planned.

You know, there was nothing that Oppenheimer could do to stop it, but he was still a prominent voice, kind of, against the government's policies on the bomb.

And so I think, Alvarez thought that if we could remove Oppenheimer from that conversation, that things would go more smoothly for the H-bomb.

And so I think Alvarez made a choice to kind of, you know, like, testify against his friend, and the two men never really reconciled.

I think that that's fairly clear.

So I think it's fair to say that Oppenheimer had very mixed feelings about Alvarez toward the end.

And we're starting at the end, and we'll get to the middle and the beginning.

But, toward the end.

Did Alvarez, you know, in any way like Oppenheimer have, misgivings, revelations, guilt, associated with, they're undertaking this mission that, led to a Cold War and then a constant fear that, nuclear weaponry could be deployed at any moment?

Right.

The answer is no.

Never.

It's a huge contrast to Oppenheimer.

Alvarez, always defended the decision to use the bomb, again, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He ws there, agian.

He volunteered, essentially, to be an observer at Hiroshima.

What did that mean?

What was the process of being an observer and what impact did it have on him?

So he'd work on the bomb, and he really wanted to be there when it was used against Japan.

And so he actually invented a reason to be there.

He essentially said, to Oppenheimer, well, we don't know how powerful the Hiroshima bomb is going to be.

Because we only have one of them.

It has to be detonated, you know, essentially over Japan.

So let me go there.

I will figure out a way to measure the blast, you know, pressure.

And we can estimate how powerful the bomb was.

And so he comes up with this, kind of a gauge system that is dropped by parachute from an observation plane.

And when the Enola Gay flies over Hiroshima, he's in the plane behind it.

And so he is there.

He sees the bomb, and he sees the mushroom cloud.

He drops his gauges, but it's very clearly a pretext for him, because he really wants to be there, you know, to sort of see the fulfillment of this project that he had worked so hard on.

So that that kind of shows how, unambivalent he was about the use during the war.

That's extraordinary.

Yeah, yeah.

And then later on, yeah, he, later says that he thinks that, Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, deserved the Nobel Peace Prize more than anyone else who had ever lived, because he thought that the, arms race and the Cold War standoff had essentially bought time for, the US and the Soviets to kind of come to terms, which is a very controversial position.

You know, I don't actually agree with it, but, Alvarez never expressed these doubts, the kind that you see -with people like Oppenheimer.

-Right.

In a sense, his postulation has been, vindicated or by virtue of there not being any nuclear, interference, Armageddon, whatever you might call it in the intervening years.

No?

Well, I mean, it was a close call.

It was not obvious.

And there are huge psychological and political costs to that situation.

I'm currently investigating this in my next book, which is about the Cold War from another angle.

And so I'm very mindful of the fact that, you know, like saying... You were alluding to the Cuban Missile Crisis?

-Or just the general, on edge?

-Just in general.

Yeah, I think, we came close to war, you know, at least once.

And, it was a, you know, that Cold War came at a cost.

Right?

And I think that, Alvarez tended to underplay that point, because he was anxious to avoid, you know, criticizing, kind of the situation.

I think he was a person who enjoyed being part of the government intelligence slash scientific community.

And he was, you know, he'd see what happened to Oppenheimer.

He'd seen what happened to a scientist who did criticize those things.

And so he's very careful to avoid saying these things in public.

When he took on the mission of observing, I'm just curious what the tick tock was of, like, where he ultimately landed, and if he was aware of the health risks associated with, breathing in, toxins, and the fallout from the nuclear weapons, even if he was, you know, tens or hundreds of miles away, there was still an environmental risk.

Yeah.

I mean, the biggest risk to Alvarez was being shot down, by the Japanese, which was a real risk for that mission.

Because it took off from Tinian, which is an island that they used to stage attacks against Japan.

And so, the Enola Gay, and Alvarez's plane, The Great Artiste, took off and, they never landed, you know, they dropped the bomb, and then they veered around very quickly, to go back.

But, you know, he was very aware that, if, he was shot down, he didn't want to be captured alive.

You know, he declined to wear a parachute because he didn't want to be captured by the Japanese.

And the entire mission was I would say, you know, riskier than people tend to acknowledge now.

He talks about this like writing a letter to his family in case he didn't come back.

And having to have anti-aircraft, or, like, flak gear.

You know, that was issued to the entire crew.

So, yeah, it was an incredibly dangerous mission, from the point of view of the people, on those planes.

But, you know, he was never directly exposed to, you know, the effects of the bomb itself.

So where did he ultimately land, after observing?

So they took a round trip.

They basically took off from Tinian, flew to Japan, dropped the bomb and then landed because Alvarez had to immediately get to work and analyzing the data that he had obtained from his gauges.

And he wanted to come up with an estimate for how powerful that bomb was right away.

And he also knew that the Nagasaki bomb, which he had actually helped design, was, you know, going to be dropped a few days later.

So, again, for give me for missing this detail when I was reading the book, but he literally landed where?

After the, when he returned, -he was measuring from -Yes.

-somewhere on the ground?

-No.

So the planes... Or he was measuring in the air?

Yes.

So these two planes, you know, stayed in the air the entire time.

And he had parachutes, that he dropped with these gauges attached.

Gotcha.

And the signals from the gauges were radioed back to his plane.

He recorded the, readouts essentially on an oscilloscope and then took the material back without landing to Tinian, the island where the US, you know, was based Gotcha.

at that point and then analyzed the data that he'd obtained.

So take us now, towards the end of Alvarez's life and the discovery of dinosaurs extinction.

And the controversy around that.

That's another really fascinating part of the book.

Yeah.

I mean, one thing that drew me to Alvarez was that he had an incredible career as a physicist.

You know, kind of in establishment big hardware kind of guy, at Berkeley, won the Nobel Prize and then got a little bit tired of physics or a little bit tired of the kind of like, you know, kind of big scale, experiments that he was in charge of.

And so he becomes essentially a freelance detective.

He starts to look into other interesting issues, you know, including things like the JFK assassination, and the pyramids.

But, in the late 70s, when he's already, essentially retired, his son Walter, who's a geologist, comes to him and they collaborate on, a project that eventually ends up, arriving at the hypothesis that the dinosaurs, were wiped out by an asteroid impact, which, again, it's kind of like a, you know, conventional wisdom now.

I grew up learning this fact in school.

But, it was incredibly controversial.

And they just looked at the evidence, looked at this layer of, clay that had been left behind during that impact, or like during the extinction, period and kind of reasoned backwards from the evidence to say, well, the, layer here was probably caused by, you know, something from space.

An asteroid is the most likely, candidate.

And they spent years essentially defending that idea, you know, from really, like, personal attacks, from paleontologists and geologists who didn't accept that theory.

And I think took, until after Alvarez died, when they found the crater.

The Chicxulub crater, for that, theory to be accepted.

So he was vindicated and, despite having some, antagonism and, people who disagree with him.

What was the mainstream view at the time that he contended, that the asteroid had, in fact, been responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs?

What were the alternative views?

So idea was that the extinction of the dinosaurs was gradual.

Okay.

Because I think one thing I learned reading, writing this book is that, geologists tend to think in gradual terms.

You know, they don't like, catastrophes.

They don't like these explanations that, tinge on cataclysmic events in the past because to them, it sounds like pseudoscience.

It sounds like, the biblical flood narrative, you know, they've been dealing with these kinds of theories, you know, for a long time.

And so they say, no, things happen in the present the way they did, or things happened in the past the way they do in the present, you know, gradually, incrementally.

And that was kind of the conventional wisdom when it came to the dinosaur extinction.

So, Alvarez says no, actually it was a literal, you know, catastrophe.

It was an asteroid from space.

And, you know, that was controversial because it goes against sort of the, way geologists tend to think.

And it was also, controversial because Alvarez was an outsider.

He was not a paleontologist or a geologist.

He was a physicist who essentially came into this field, almost out of nowhere and is upending, you know, what people have been thinking and teaching for a long time.

And so whenever you have someone like that, you know, like a very aggressive, confident outsider entering a new field, there's bound to be some pushback.

And he discovered this or theorized this with his son, right?

Who was a bonafide geologist in his own right?

Or also was a physicist?

No, Walter, is a geologist, and he's still around.

I got to know him a bit, while writing this book.

And, you know, what interests me is the fact that, for a long time, Luis Alvarez, his father did not think that geology was an interesting field.

Like, he was little surprised that his son had, entered, you know, like a discipline that he didn't think was that, you know, exciting.

And it wasn't until Walter showed Luis a piece of rock that had that clay layer and it said, oh, this is where the dinosaurs disappeared.

That, Alvarez, the father kind of decided that.

Oh, this is actually really interesting.

And this is the kind of big problem, headline grabbing problem that I can apply my skills to.

I do want to shift to your latest investigation because I think it's super timely to a lot of current events.

But before I do, when you're a person like Alvarez, who's now attempted to document, one Armageddon some centuries ago and actually saw the, a kind of mini Armageddon in the form of, you know, atrocity and even if we were on the morally correct side of that as Americans, this is a person who must have felt like at any given moment, the planet could be ablaze?

Yeah.

I mean, this is kind of like the backdrop to his career.

It's the backdrop to the career of a lot of scientists in this period.

You know, the Cold War.

The stakes seem very high.

Right?

And I think one thing about Alvarez is that he saw himself as being, talented in certain ways that could be useful to the US.

And he definitely framed it in terms of we're in this Cold War, you know, what are the things that I can do as a physicist?

What are the tools I have, that, you know, might be helpful?

You know, during this being a very fraught period.

And I think that explains a lot of the things he did, you know, both as a scientist and as a private individual.

But, you know, he felt like every day could be his last day.

I mean, did that, did studying these events and even participating in something like the dropping of the bomb, I mean, did he feel like every day could be his last day?

-Is that how he lived?

-Interesting question, I mean, you know, to a certain extent that was true of, like, everyone during that period, the only thing about him is that he's very ambitious.

And so he's always thinking long term and trying to, find these big projects.

But yeah, there's no question that he was psychologically affected, in ways that he didn't always acknowledge by these things and, and even things like the Kennedy assassination, you know, he you know, knew Kennedy.

He worked with the Kennedy administration, was really shocked by, you know, the president's death and ends up investigating, kind of on behalf of the lone gunman theory to kind of like, find closure, right?

To kind of, you know, use his intelligence and his skills to come to terms almost with, events that, you know, even, like a rational person would have trouble, you know, coming to grips with.

So you are now studying the RAND Corporation.

Did they call them the best and the brightest too?

Or what did they call these people you're studying?

They're a subset of the best and the brightest.

But the term that is often used as the whiz kids.

So these are, civilian analysts who were, originally, at the RAND Corporation, which is a think tank based in California who were then hired to go to the Pentagon in the 60s to kind of, rethink, you know, how defense was, studied and carried out.

And what are you finding so far?

Without giving away all the plots.

Well, you know, there's a clear, connection to the Alvarez story because Alvarez, you know, was a RAND consultant.

You know, he worked for them quite a bit over the years.

And, you know, with someone who thought that the tools of science could be put to use, for policy.

And that's kind of like what the RAND people got to do because they'll have theorists, you know, who strategize about these things in the abstract.

And the whiz kids, you know, who got to go work with Robert McNamara at the Pentagon are among the few people who ever were given the chance to put those ideas into practice.

So they were actually put in charge of projects and, had a huge impact on things like defense spending, nuclear war strategy, and, you know, the Vietnam War and said, okay, we're going to take a more rational, you know, quantitative, approach to things that have mostly been done before with, you know, intuition or with like, you know, kind of military, a military approach and apply a more scientific approach to these things.

And I guess the question I'm looking at currently is like, what happened?

Like, did it go well, you know, there are obvious places where it did not but I'm still working through the story, trying to figure out exactly what it means to have people like that, you know, put in charge of these policies.

And what period are you studying of their involvement and influence on American foreign policy?

-Military decisions?

-Yeah.

Yeah.

It's from, what year to what year, roughly?

So Robert McNamara, becomes secretary of defense in '61, and he's the one who brings in a lot of the people I'm talking about, including, people like Charles Hitch, who became the comptroller, and Daniel Ellsberg, you know, becomes famous later on for leaking the Pentagon papers, is a big part of the story.

And that period essentially ends after McNamara, resigns and leaves in '68.

So it's that period from '61 to '68 where the so-called whiz kids had the greatest influence.

And why did those years in particular intrigue you just because of their influence?

Or, is it Vietnam?

Curiosities about the escalation of the military industrial complex?

Right.

I mean, to me, it was just kind of like, it comes out of this interest I have in futureology especially, like, how do we talk about the future?

How do we plan for the future?

What are some of the tools that we developed to think about the future?

And, you know, this is what RAND did.

I mean, RAND essentially was, the place for futureology was born.

And from '61 and '68, you had these ideas being put into practice in a tangible way, you know, nuclear war strategy, this is futureology.

Because, there hasn't been a nuclear war.

You know, there hasn't been one yet.

But you're planning out these, like scenarios in great detail.

You know, it's almost like writing a science fiction, where you say, okay, if you do this, the Soviets might do this, and you kind of follow that logic, you know, in what do you think is like a very systematic way.

And you kind of end up sometimes with, conclusions that are very strange or that seem counterintuitive.

And I love that story.

I love that process.

And, you know, it's one thing to talk about it kind of in terms of, just on a theoretical level.

But the idea that this actually influenced the way the US approach to the Cold War, for real, during this period, you know, to me is incredibly interesting.

Michael Rich, who at the time was the president of RAND, and Jennifer Kavanagh appeared on The Open Mind to talk about truth decay, and I believe our viewers will know best.

But this was during the first Trump administration, and the beginning a feeling as though, we were living under a dystopian existence, with relevant fact based, determinations now, being in question.

And so I associate RAND, with Jennifer's work at the time again at RAND, and their book, on the degrading, eroding discourse, in our current political life.

From that period, the end of that period that you're documenting through the present of 2026, where did RAND go, and what is RAND now?

Right.

Well, also the the peak of their influence in policy was during the 60s.

You know, it's diminished ever since.

And I think a big reason for that has to do with like the backlash against, what was seen as RAND's involvement in things like the Vietnam War.

I think it made it harder for RAND to recruit people and to, exercise the same amount of, you know, impact they had.

And so they diversified into social, you know, sciences and, like, non-military, non-defense topics.

So, they're still around, you know, they still produce interesting papers.

But, honestly as an outsider... But they're no more, impactful than, let's say, you know, a -think tank.

You know, that it, -Yes.

I mean, the analogy to today would be, I suppose the Federalist Society, given that, they wrote Project 2025.

Yeah, that's a good analogy.

You know, RAND in some ways, was the original think tank.

And they arrived at a point when, you know, this was a fairly novel idea that they would have, you know, these people thinking full time about, you know, policy issues outside the government.

Another lot of them obviously competing for attention.

And RAND is just, you know, one of them and I think, yeah, like clearly like the impact that they have.

I guess they were replaced by Halliburton -in the Bush years.

-Yeah.

That's the question too, right?

The question is like how much impact can, you know, a think tank like RAND really have, right?

Yeah.

Given their approach, given their history.

And these are things I'm still investigating.

So let me ask this to close our conversation.

As an award winning biographer and, someone who's interested in the humanism of these stories, what do you think about the outsized influence of military expenditures and investments?

I've often said, and said here on The Open Mind that one of the reasons that our electeds are not so interested in advertising where our taxpaying dollars go each year, come April, whatever, 15th, is because you would see such a hugely disproportionate investment in the military industrial complex and such a minute and truly minute investment in public services, or healthcare, education, sanitation, environmental protection of water and air.

And I just wonder how you compute that, -because it seems as though -Mm hmm.

when President Trump is talking about we need, what did he say?

We need another half trillion in the US military budget?

2 trillion is not enough?

Or 3 trillion is not enough?

I forget where it's been going from 1 trillion to 1 and a half you'll tell me what was correct.

But when you hear that, and then you see the numbers in the pie chart of, health and human care, it's nothing.

And I just wonder how you digest that?

That's a great question.

You know, and I'm still coming to terms with what the answer is.

Because one thing I've learned just looking at RAND is that you know, you look at these numbers are like, where did you know, like these thousands of nuclear bombs come from, for example.

And you realize that there are other incentives besides logic involved.

You know, you have, a competition between the services.

You know, the Navy wants their own, you know, weapon systems as opposed to the Air Force.

And those are important factors for, you know, kind of almost an internal arms race.

You have the fact that, you know, it's actually very hard to question military spending politically, you know, and I think, RAND, the whiz kids felt this because they were trying to cut costs.

They were trying to make things more cost effective.

And they were accused of, supplying, our troops with substandard systems, when in fact, you know, they actually made a good point.

You make a good point, which is that nothing in this world is free, right?

The US has a budget.

The more we spend on, you know, weapons and defense, the less we have to spend on other things that we might find, you know, important or useful.

And I think, the one thing about the whiz kids that you can say, and I think it's a positive thing, is that they made that point and they made it very, you know, honestly, you know, that they said that their role here is to make sure that we are getting the most defense value for the money we spend, which can be forgotten sometimes.

I think politically, those questions can be very inconvenient.

And, you know, they didn't do much to to staunch, you know, like the inflow of military spending.

If you look at the actual numbers, and how much it's grown since then.

But, you know, I think that they made some good points.

Right?

And the fact that they, you know, were involved with some fairly messy situations in the 60s, I'm trying to separate that fact from some of the value that I think is still there.

And those ideas and that approach to these policies.

And for our viewers, just to set the record straight, -it's a 1.5 trillion defense -Okay.

budget that President Trump is pursuing compared to what I think is on the books or the expectation was 1 trillion, for 2027.

-In any event, -Yeah.

Alec, it's a pleasure to learn about Alvarez and to bring up, a spotlight on an unsung and important scientist.

And I hope folks, do check out Collisions.

It's really a, there it is, an important book.

An escape from the present climate with someone, that you may not have heard of, but, will keep you curious about the world.

Alec Nevala-Lee, thank you so much for your insight today.

Great.

Thank you.

This was great.

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