Richard Rhodes — The making of the atomic bomb

**Richard Rhodes** (0:00)
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.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:10)
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.

**Richard Rhodes** (0:18)
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.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:51)
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?

**Richard Rhodes** (1:22)
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, there have been some terrible depictions of the bomb program. And maybe they'll get this one right.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:42)
You know, it is always great when you get an actor who resembles their role so well. Brian Karansin, for example, played LBJ, and they have the same physical characteristics of the BDIs, 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?

**Richard Rhodes** (3:15)
He had been during the 1930s, but less 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, Jean Tadlock, 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 travel 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 markets, 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.