and keep aware of how they all fit together. and this is apparently what general groves recognized in him. eisenbach: for security purposes, this project needs to happen away from everything. so groves tells oppenheimer to just come up with a place where this would actually work. and it was oppenheimer who suggests the new mexico desert. so they go to scope out a site. it s called los alamos. carr: oppenheimer knew the area well. he had spent a lot of time here. charles oppenheimer: when he left new york as a young man and went to new mexico. .that was a just a really important part of his life. going to new mexico and meeting cowboys
he was kind of a hollow man after that. charles oppenheimer: what we say inside the family is it hurt his feelings. he didn t like it, but he didn t talk about it. he never made one statement about it publicly. he never asked for an apology, and he retreated back into where he came from. bird: he still kept his job at princeton, but he wasn t doing any more physics. these were kind of sad years. murrow: and professor einstein is still here, too, isn t he? oh, yeah. indeed he is. uh, indeed he is. uh. does he ever call you up on the telephone? hmm, sometimes. i think he. he calls me, uh, when he reads in the newspapers something about me that he doesn t like, and he calls me up and-and says, that s all right. that s just right. sherwin: he had lost his fighting spirit.
who are the apostles of a system that attempts to destroy the american way of life? during the second world war, the soviet union was our ally. and that sense of being a communist or associating with communists was not something that was considered that bad. it wasn t until the cold war that all of a sudden, in retrospect, anyone with any kind of legacy of a communist past is now a security threat. if there were no communists in our government, why did we delay, for 18 months, delay our research on the hydrogen bomb? rhodes: it was from attitudes like that that finally led to the government deciding they had to pull oppenheimer s security clearance. charles oppenheimer: he would have to give up his security clearance in 30 days or ask for a hearing
he would have nothing to do with commenting on any of the issues of the day related to nuclear weapons. man: dr. oppenheimer, could you tell us what your thoughts are about what our atomic policy should be? no, i-i can t do that. i m not. not close enough to the facts, and i m not close enough to the thoughts of those who are worrying about it. rhodes: hans bethe told me once that, oppenheimer was smarter than any of the rest of us. he didn t win a nobel prize. how could this man, who evidently outshone some of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, not have been more successful in his line of work physics than he was? charles oppenheimer: you can t talk about oppenheimer when you re not talking about his science. that was the part of his life. when he talks about what he loves,
who are the apostles of a system that attempts to destroy the american way of life? during the second world war, the soviet union was our ally. and that sense of being a communist or associating with communists was not something that was considered that bad. it wasn t until the cold war that all of a sudden, in retrospect, anyone with any kind of legacy of a communist past is now a security threat. if there were no communists in our government, why did we delay, for 18 months, delay our research on the hydrogen bomb? rhodes: it was from attitudes like that that finally led to the government deciding they had to pull oppenheimer s security clearance. charles oppenheimer: he would have to give up his security clearance in 30 days or ask for a hearing