(Music) HEFFNER: I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on the Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, grandson of Robert Oppenheimer, Charles Oppenheimer.

He's the founder of the Oppenheimer Project that is carrying forward his granddad's legacy for a safe equitable planet.

An honor to be with you today, Charles.

OPPENHEIMER: Thank you, Alexander.

HEFFNER: Charles, we were talking just a moment ago about our shared passion for safe ingenuity, and safe ingenuity in this world means being open to new sources of technology.

You also have been an entrepreneur, but also understanding the guardrails of where those technologies can be destructive.

And your vision really has been one that is pro-nuclear energy, but anti-nuclear weapon.

I'd love if you could expound on that, and you recently were in Japan talking about just that.

OPPENHEIMER: Yeah.

That challenge of kind of what we do with the technology that humans create was the central, it will always be the central symbol of Robert Oppenheimer.

Like he effectively symbolizes that along with, I guess, Prometheus and various mythological-type people that bringing the power of technology, something as powerful of fission into the human ecosystem has this huge impact.

And we have to decide like, what are we going to do with it?

It's such a complicated difficult thing to deal with.

I find it really comforting to look back to the people who brought that technology into the world, because they happen to be these like super intelligent and wise people like Niels Bohr, Einstein, my grandfather, Robert Oppenheimer.

The whole collection of them, even statesmen at the time, like Henry Stimson, Theodore Roosevelt, they thought about this.

They knew what they were doing of using the extent of pushing science so far with their understanding of the world that it could create this tremendous power.

And they knew we would be stuck with it.

And they kind of gave us guidelines of how to deal with that.

And so I see as my central mission kind of repeating their wisdom and their words, because policymakers and people in modern age kind of feel like we're stuck with these very difficult questions that keep coming up over and over.

What should we do with nuclear technology?

What should we do when we invent a new version of AI that may have some risk?

How do we deal with that?

And the common thread that I believe that, especially my grandfather promoted, is that focusing on the technology itself, the specific control, and trying to build a faster version of that atomic weapon, for example, is not the path to safety, but it's actually dialogue and cooperating with other tribes and other groups of humans, and that we're kind of in this new world post-1945, where we have to do that.

And the institutions themselves, especially war-making and military industrial complexes, haven't really adopted to the new world where you used to be able to make a big pile of weapons and go beat your enemy, and you actually can't do that anymore.

And that's the new world where we're in.

So it's kind of a heady topic, but that's my philosophical outlet that lets me pursue this.

HEFFNER: I'm very interested in your dialogues with nations of the world and our political figures.

Let's start with the geopolitical question.

You said you recently returned from Japan.

You must have had exchanges that were informed by the dropping of the bomb and the legacy of what caused, the hardship and harm for the Japanese people, the more expedited resolution of World War II in the stoppage of atrocities in Europe.

As you think of that tension now and dialogue being pivotal to continuing to preserve peace and international tranquility, what is the feedback you're getting on that message, with the Japanese and other nations of the world?

OPPENHEIMER: Yeah, so going back to that some part that I kind of skipped in your last answer, the connection between nuclear energy and bombs.

I went to Japan and actually Korea before that with that specific exploration.

I promote nuclear energy and believe that cooperation around controlling fissionable material is actually a peace building exercise.

And having that outlook in Japan as an Oppenheimer is a sensitive thing.

You know, I don't want to walk into the country.

I had some business goals.

I was meeting with people in Japan about how can we promote nuclear energy, but I also felt that it was the right thing to do to go to Hiroshima for the first time.

My grandfather had been to Japan in the 1950s and had been advised don't go to Hiroshima.

It's too sensitive.

But I didn't feel the same constraints.

I went there and I talked to survivors of from the bomb and had just kind of a personal one-on-one connection with people who had survived the weapons.

I think that method of connecting to people instead the political version or even the media version is so effective.

I was able to have dialogue with individuals.

And we felt a lot of kinship.

These are people who had actually survived the bombing in 1945 and were still alive and still felt affected by it.

Some of them told me that: I never felt an ability to talk about this in my life.

They had dealt with their whole life after 1945, not talking about being a survivor, but later they felt like the biggest impact they could have as talking about the use of bombs and how it should inform their time going forward.

And I said, well, that feels like me.

I spent a lot of my life not talking about being in Oppenheimer and atomic bombs, but that you can turn towards it and have a dialogue.

In terms of the government level, I had to just brief conversation with the government officials in Japan and a press conference.

And I called in those for more dialogue between US, China and Russia in Japan.

And that's not a very real, that's not something that a diplomat can do, for example, in Japan.

They can say, my boss's boss's boss, you know, Japanese president doesn't think that's very possible.

And I don't feel that same constraint as an outside influencer.

I could say, well, you might not think it's a possible, but I can tell you philosophically that's what we have to do.

Somebody in the world has to be driving for some common ground, even in the height of the biggest tensions.

And so I try to take advantage of that when I can, say it in the media and try to eventually drive towards more dialogue, more humans coming together, especially with the biggest areas of tension with the superpowers.

HEFFNER: So you have these two events emanating from the Great World War.

You have the tragedy but also savior of humanity, from both perspectives.

You have the dropping of the bomb, you have the advent of the UN shepherded by Roosevelt, and then Truman.

Now, it seems to me that the lack of cooperation, the lack of any capacity right now to do the type of due diligence, auditing the world's nuclear facilities and supply, and then the process of pausing, suspending new weaponry, activity, if not downsizing, is that there are not those trusted institutions.

The UN was intended to be that body where they could have objective nonpartisan inspectors from countries that are your neighbors, your allies.

But I don't think that there are those bodies right now that would be capable of enacting what is a trusted process even among Allied Powers, if you will, or, or our non-adversaries.

So obviously a US delegation is not going to visit China or North Korea, or Russia anytime soon, and be part of an audit of nuclear material, or making the determination of what constitutes downsizing.

But there isn't really even that body anymore that has the legitimacy to convene a process.

And that's what's so troubling to me.

And I wonder where you're looking, Charles, at a body that is capable of opening up those diplomatic channels once again.

OPPENHEIMER: Yeah.

The UN was a great achievement as a great goal of kind of being an antidote for was a direct output of the entire world in 1945 saying, we shouldn't have wars.

We should have a body, a version of international cooperation, but it's only as powerful as its member states allow it to be.

And when there's bad faith between the leaders of the parties, it really is hard to overcome that.

And I will say that IAEA International Atomic Energy Agency, as it's actually not part of the UN affiliated with the UN, does have a mandate that really does include multiple parties.

Today, they do hold dialogue with Russia and with China, and they're not totally beholden.

So I've aligned myself more with the IAEA and the Oppenheimer Project than some other parts of the UN just as a small nonprofit.

We can't rely on the power of institutions in international politics.

You know, there's kind of a real politic view of things that I don't think is inaccurate, that if a country is at threat from another country, there's no higher power, you know, and the UN certainly is not a higher power that can, that can stop it.

And I don't think that means that we should discard what the UN can do, but that sometimes, you have to go out of conventions and you know, like, for example, my dialogue with the Japanese foreign ministers and some other people in the nonproliferation regime will just say, these are how things are, and we can't change that.

Sometimes you have to go outside of that.

So I feel, for example, I have this fantasy of calling an Oppenheimer Convening that does do exactly what you said is impossible, invite Chinese, Russians and Americans to a place that either uses the spirit of scientific cooperation or philosophy, something that's not overtly political, that does invite powerful input from leaders of the countries, and it's going have to be at that level, especially when you're dealing with China and Russia, arguably the US isn't too far off of that.

That only some kind of autocratic-type, very top leader saying, let's at least have some increased level of dialogue.

And having the view that I have, which should be hopeless, but just that there is some chance that you can influence it, that I won't give up on that.

I would just won't accept the fact that, oh, we're just going to not get along and we're going head into nuclear weapons is the thing that you can do as an advocacy organization and push for it.

HEFFNER: It seems to me too, that a climate of populism and protectionism, at least if it is informed by other rising countries and people that it's not going be conducive to the Oppenheimer Project and the convening you envision, which is a noble enterprise and one that I think can happen too.

My question is this, is not the most realistic way of realizing a suspension of nuclear weapon buildup having a vision where any country that is in the buildup stage will instead just reallocate its nuclear towards energy.

That just strikes me as one of the more practical ways that you can shift away from proliferation of weapons.

But it also strikes me as so hard to discern to kind of hold powers to account that they're merely shifting from nuclear weapons to nuclear energy.

Is not nuclear energy the foundation of nuclear weapons?

So how do we deal with that conundrum?

OPPENHEIMER: Yeah.

Well, I love that, that suggestion.

That's a page right out of the book of the Oppenheimer Project that you could have a shift being possible, but especially that could be attractive.

It's so hard to sit down and talk about let's reduce our weapons, right?

Like, you need all the way you would need full military support, but it's not as hard to sit down and talk about could we cooperate more on nuclear energy?

And it's obviously the same science, and there's kind of a technical element there that really is the same, which is monitoring fissionable material and fissionable material that method of monitoring fissionable material was the suggestion in 1946 following the war that my grandfather and some other policy makers made, that if you monitored fissionable material in the production of it to weapons grade, it was so industrial heavy that you could monitor it even with 1945 technology, and we can certainly do it today.

So that general access around cooperation of fissionable material is still possible, much more so than say, AI or even pandemics, where you can't stop the things.

But with nuclear technology, it's technically possible.

And it comes down, that's something that I think has confused people, just generally.

It's just basic scientific principles.

Uranium enriched to the point of creating energy is not the same as making weapons.

You have to have a complete system to make weapons, you have to have plans, you have to have huge industrial systems to get there, and it's obvious to everybody.

And so that has just generally stopped nuclear energy all around the world.

I mean, it's kind of a media story, the idea and the conflation that nuclear energy is the same as weapons, and they're technically and principally not the same.

And it absolutely hasn't been the case in the world where countries have pursued nuclear energy and then suddenly they stumble their way into weapons.

It doesn't just happen that way.

It's completely, uh, opposed.

Now that being said, our view that that's an attractive move to allocate resources from weapon systems to energy is not generally shared, but I think that there's some room to make it practically shared by keeping the budgets in the same place.

For example, if you go to the military and we say, we hate weapons and they're evil, and you guys are morally corrupt, and we're taking your money away, you're not going to get anywhere.

But if you said, you know, you guys are great, you're providing a defense system and we know you want to put your energy and budget into things that make safer, could we allocate some of that safety towards climate components, battling the effects of climate change, putting directly fission energy into making more energy?

I think it has to be a rational and practical argument, not just like a peace protest argument to get us there.

HEFFNER: It may also be one of the only starting points of that global convening, bringing powers together from the world.

OPPENHEIMER: Yeah, you have to have something to agree on, right?

If you have as little thread of an agreement point, you can start talking HEFFNER: Whether that's China, Russia, even Iran and North Korea, as well as the western nuclear powers.

It also might be the only way you can get Democrats and Republicans, when you think of this the question I wanted to ask you, which was in the history of your family and your granddad.

At least from the book and the film, there was clearly a stigmatization around downsizing, you know?

Seeing the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and your grandfather being aware of the need to have a check in place.

That became synonymous to some with some sort of perception of disloyalty, and really the position of most elected officials in the United States right now is nukes for me, not for thee.

And this is one of the only ways I could see you bringing together Republicans and Democrats, to understand the, the value and virtue of shifting to nuclear.

You keep jobs, you may save your constituents money, and you are still investing in your national security apparatus.

So there seems to be a very pointedly and clear rationalization of that.

And it may, to me, to my mind, negate some of that still living stigmatization of anybody who wants to say, let's suspend or downsize.

And you're just saying suspend, it's not quite as harsh.

But whether you're saying suspend or downsize, the point is the futility of armament versus energy, right?

Energy will continue to serve and need resources.

Whereas we're building arms under the assumption that we'll continue living because of mutually assured destruction.

And we most of the nuclear-powered nations have enough, one fraction of their stockpile will end the planet.

So how do you do it ?

How do you get, Senator Ernst, for example, and Senator Markey together to see the value of shifting from the reservoir of nuclear weaponry to new to nuclear energy?

OPPENHEIMER: Okay.

Simple question.

Let me start here.

So, you know, there is two kind of distinct components.

The rationalization for US domestic nuclear energy has been growing in bipartisan support.

And that really is coming from the left, I assume typical lefties, and most of your audience who said nuclear energy is the worst thing ever.

You know, it's going to kill everybody, and it's the most dangerous thing I was in that camp until I looked at the science and facts behind it, and you look at the measurements and see that spent nuclear fuel has never killed a single person after 70 years.

And a certain point you have to say, Hey, we thought it was the same as weapons.

We thought it was terribly dangerous, but as measurements, it's not so that, that's happened.

So the shift in US political support for it is really quite high in the us and it's one of those rare areas of we need to produce more nuclear energy.

Now having an agreement that we need to produce more nuclear energy has not turned into more nuclear energy in the us We have a tremendous problem actually investing, financing and expanding nuclear energy in the United States.

So that's one set of problems.

And it was traditionally left and right, but it's at a moment of bipartisanship.

But your question was mostly around like, how do you leverage that idea in the even more complicated intersection with nuclear weapons and other states?

I have a relatively simple policy goal that I've been trying out, which is that China is on the path of expanding the number of their nuclear weapons from around 500 to thousands because they're an emerging world super power, and they hear threats and they say, Hey, it's just in our interest expand the nuclear weapon arsenal, and US is able, I've seen an article in the, in the papers with some of the lab leaders of Los Alamos who I know personally, who are able to say with a straight face, we need to expand the budget for nuclear weapons to improve our safety against China and Russia.

So they kind of believe that as a philosophical out, you know, basis that the more weapons you have, the more mutually assured destruction you have, the better off you are.

I of course am philosophically on the other side, and I use my platform every time I can to say that there was first principles in the Atomic Age that you cannot win an arms race.

And that having more weapons doesn't make us safer.

So as a simple policy goal, having the US and Russia say, Hey, China, we will go towards your number of weapons instead of expanding ours is kind of a fig leaf of cooperation.

It wouldn't be an easy offer for us and Russia to make to China.

Um, but domestically you could make the economic argument, you know, with shifting budgets that we were talking about.

And it is a fact that we having 500 nuclear weapons in the US as safe as us having 3000, you know, the 5,000 that we have.

The policy makers who shift the budgets are doing it not really on the facts of us being safer, but the fact that they have a financial interest in expanding the number of weapons to support their budgets.

So using economic arguments, using energy security arguments, and having the circumstances where the policymakers could be offering that to China and starting a dialogue is the path that I could see being effective.

HEFFNER: Charles, you described that as your philosophical thesis, but it's also just logic, right?

OPPENHEIMER: It's a principle.

I try to do this in writing in that if Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence and Fermi and Compton in August 17th, 1945, wrote down a prediction of what would happen in the arms race.

And every word of that is true eighty years later.

You can say that they, they inscribed some principles, and what they said is making, we would be tempted to go into an arms race.

We would never be able to keep that secret if we did so we would not improve the safety because there will never be a defense against nuclear weapons effective one.

They predicted that in 1945, and we sit here right now in our respective cities, New York and San Francisco, 30 minutes away from destruction from nuclear weapons.

There's no defense against them.

It doesn't matter that we have 5,000 of them, we could die 30 minutes from now.

So that is an actual first principle.

And I just think that institutions having caught up to it.

And you can't- HEFFNER: Still maybe living with the mythology of Star Wars, the idea that you can finance enough to shield yourself.

If you're not talking about investing in the nukes themselves, it's the nuclear defense.

I think we're still kind of living in this fairytale land that the more money we spend, the more shielded we are when we know that at least when it comes to nuclear material, if not non-nuclear, there, there is no bubble that is- OPPENHEIMER: We know that, but it's certainly not generally accepted.

And this is kind of like the left and right divide.

There's many rational libertarians who look at the Cold War and say, that was a good thing.

You know, America was at its best when it went into the Cold War and made a tremendous amount of nuclear weapons.

And look what would've happened if we didn't do that and win the arms race.

So there is a large body of I wouldn't call it philosophy but just like general accepted thought, and that that tends to guide our policy decisions.

Those people are making the decision to spend trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons, not us, right now.

HEFFNER: Two more questions.

I know we technically have one minute, but we'll edit a little bit.

I think they're really important.

So I refer to this idea of stigma.

How do we counteract that, the idea that somehow to be for suspending or downsizing nuclear weaponry is stigmatized.

It's disloyal, it's disreputable, it's un-American, it's unpatriotic.

How can we nip that in the bud?

OPPENHEIMER: The nuclear energy argument I think is good, a method of abundance of a non-zero sum game gain, business profit, all of those things that are kind of traditional, not just like, let's all get along and be perfect piece, but appeal to the interests of the military industrial complex, business people, and the practical side of these arrangements.

I think it has to include primarily that.

Now it's not an easy dialogue, but I think it just has to be had over and over.

And that would be my advice is effectively on the business and nuclear energy side and the non-zero sum side that we can all gain in the world together.

HEFFNER: I appreciate you elucidating that.

Thank you Charles, Charles Oppenheimer, and honor to be with you.

And thank you for the legacy that you carry on.

OPPENHEIMER: Okay, thank you.

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