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.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:28 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 0:29 So... (laughs) You can make a pretty high-level nuclear explosion just by taking two subcritical pieces of uranium. And all this business about secret designs and so forth is, 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. Um, let's jump in actually at a current event, which is the fact that there's a mo- new movie about Oppenheimer coming out, which I understand you've been consulted about. What did you think of the trailer? What, 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 this sphere covered with cables of various kinds. (laughs) And, you know, I had watched Peaky Blinders, uh, where the actor who's playing Oppenheimer also appeared, and he looks so much like Oppenheimer to start with. (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 1:45 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 1:45 Oppenheimer was about six feet tall. He was rail-thin, not, not simply in terms of weight, but in terms of structure. They, someone said he could sit in a children's high chair comfortably. So he, but he never weighed more than about 140 pounds.

Dwarkesh Patel 2:02 Wow.

Richard Rhodes 2:03 And, and, and that quality is there in the actor, I think. So who knows? It all depends on, on how the director, uh, 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, uh, we're waiting for the multi-part series that would really tell the, a lot more of the story, not the whole story.

Dwarkesh Patel 2:30 Mm-hmm.

Richard Rhodes 2:31 But it looks exciting. Uh, we'll see. There've been some terrible depictions of Oppenheimer, (laughs) been some terrible depictions of the bomb program, and, uh, maybe they'll get this one right.

Dwarkesh Patel 2:41 Yeah. Yeah, hopefully. You know, it is always great when you get an actor who resembles, resembles their role so well. The, Bryan Cranston, for example, who played LBJ, and they have the same physical characteristics of the beady eyes, the big ears. But it, okay, so in, 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 3:17 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 3:17 But, uh, less for the, for the theory, if you will, than for 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, uh, Jean Tatlock. 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, uh, affi... In fact, he said he read Marx on a train trip, people traveled by train in those days, between Berkeley and, and, uh, Washington one time, and thought it was a bunch of hooey. Just ridiculous. He, I mean, 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, uh, a great deal of money, uh, cornering the market, so to speak, on uniform linings for military uniforms-

Dwarkesh Patel 4:40 Mm-hmm.

Richard Rhodes 4:40 ... 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 doing the war years and before, was somewhere around $100,000 a month. And that's a lot of money in the 1930s.

Dwarkesh Patel 4:58 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 4:58 So he just lived in his head for most of his early, early years, until he got to Berkeley and discovered that prime students of his were l- living on cat food. I mean, you know, cans of god-awful cat food because they couldn't afford anything else. (laughs) And once he understood that there was great suffering in the world, he jumped in on it, as he always did when he became interested in something. So all of those things come together. I do think his brother w- well, there's no question that his brother, Frank, was a member of the party, as was Frank's wife. And the whole question of Oppenheimer's lying to the security people during the Second World War, which he did, about who approached him and who was maybe trying to get him to sign on to some espionage, I think was primarily an effort to cover up his brother's involvement. Not that his brothers gave away any secrets. I don't think he did. But...... but if the s- army security had really understood Frank Oppenheimer's involvement, uh, he probably would have been shipped off to the Aleutians or some other, (laughs) some other distant place for the duration of the war. And Oppenheimer, quite correctly, wanted Frank around. He was someone he trusted.

Dwarkesh Patel 6:22 Let's start talking about, um, the- the making of the bomb. Eh, eh, one question I have is, if World War II doesn't happen, is there any possibility that the bomb just never gets developed and nobody bothers?

Richard Rhodes 6:33 That's really a good question, and I've wondered over the years. But the more I look at the sequence of events, the more I think it would have been essentially inevitable, though perhaps not so such an accelerated program. The bomb was pushed so hard during the Second World War because we thought the Germans had already started working on one. Nuclear fission had been discovered in Nazi Germany, in Berlin in 1938, nine months before the beginning of the Second World War in Europe. So from our perspective, without the kind of elaborate, uh, national security p- programs that we have developed since then, I mean, technological surveillance, none of that was available during the war. The only way you could find out something was to send in a spy or have a mole or something human, and we didn't have that, uh, evidently. So we didn't know where the Germans were, but we knew the bomb had, uh... Not the bomb, but the- the- the basic physics reaction that would, could lead to a bomb had been discovered there e- a year or more before anybody else in the West got started thinking about it. So there was that most of all to push the urgency, and there would not have, of course, have been that in your hypothetical. However, as soon as good physicists thought about the reaction that leads to nuclear fission, where a slow neutron, room temperature neutron, very little energy, uh, bumps into the- the- the nucleus of a uranium-235 atom... Isidor Rabi, one of the great physicists of this era, said, "It would have been like the moon struck the Earth." (laughs) That kind of massive response, so uh, very little energy in and a huge amount of energy out. The reaction was, as we say, fiercely exothermic, meaning it puts out a lot more energy than you have to use to- to get it- to get it started. Once they did the numbers on that, and once they figured out how much uranium you would need to have in one place to make a bomb, or to make f- fission get going, and once they were sure that there would be a chain reaction, meaning a couple of neutrons would come out of the reaction from one atom and those two or three would go on and bump into other uranium atoms, which would then fission them, and you've- get, uh, a geometric, uh, exponential. You get one, two, four, eight, 16, 32, and off from there. So in about 80 generations, for most of our bombs today I'm sure, the initial fission leads to, in 80 generations, to a city-busting explosion. And then they had to figure out how much material they would need, and that's something the Germans never really (laughs) figured out, fortunately for the rest of us. They were still working in the idea that somehow a- a reactor would be what you would build. Uh, when- when Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist, escaped from Denmark in 1943 when the Germans invaded, and came to first England and then the United States, he brought with him a sort of a rough sketch that Werner Heisenberg, the leader of sci- the leading scientist in the German program, had handed him in the course of trying to find out what Bohr knew about what America was doing. And he showed it to the guys at Los Alamos and Hans Bethe, one of the great Nobel Laureate physicists in the group, said, "Are the Germans trying to throw a reactor down on us?"

Dwarkesh Patel 10:32 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 10:32 Well, I mean, you can make a reactor blow up. We saw that at Chernobyl. But it's not a nuclear explosion on the scale that we're talking about with the bomb.

Dwarkesh Patel 10:40 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 10:40 So when a couple of these émigré Jewish physicists from Nazi Germany were whiling away their time in England after they escaped, because they were still technically enemy aliens and therefore could not be introduced to top secret discussions, one of them asked the other, "Well, how much would we need of pure uranium-235, this rare isotope of uranium that chain reacts, how much would we need to make a bomb?" And they did the numbers and they came up with one pound, (laughs) which was startling to them. Of course, it is more than that. It's about 125 pounds, but that's just a softball. That's not that much material.

Dwarkesh Patel 11:26 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 11:26 And then they did the numbers about what it would cost to build a factory to- to pull this one rare isotope of uranium out of the natural metal, which has several isotopes mixed together. And they figured it wouldn't cost more than it would cost to build a battleship, which is not that much money for a country at war. Certainly, the British had plenty of (laughs) battleships at that point in time. So they put all this together and they wrote a report, which they handed through, uh, their superior physicist at Manchester University where they were based, who quickly realized how important this was.... the United States lagged behind because we were not yet at war, but the British were. They were, London was being bombed in the Blitz, so they saw the urgency, first of all of beating Germany to the punch, second of all of the possibility of building a bomb. In this report, these two scientists wrote that there would be no physical structure that w- they could think of, that you could build that would protect you against a bomb of such ferocious explosive power. So they said in this report from 1940, understand this is long before even the Manhattan Project had started, they said in this report, "The only way we could think of to protect you against a bomb would be to have a bomb of similar destructive force that could be threatened for use if the other side attacked you." That's deterrence. That's a concept that was developed even before the b- war began in the United States. You put all those pieces together and you have a situation where you have to build a bomb because whoever builds the first bomb theoretically could, uh, prevent you from building more or prevent you, another country from building any and could dominate the world. And the notion in particular of Adolf Hitler dominating the world, the Third Reich, with nuclear weapons was horrifying. So put all that together and I think the answer is every country, this is the case actually, every country that had the technological infrastructure to even remotely have the possibility of building everything you'd have to build to get the material for a bomb started work on thinking about it as soon as nuclear fusion was announced to the world. France, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the United States, even Japan.

Dwarkesh Patel 14:05 Yep.

Richard Rhodes 14:06 So I think it would have happened, but maybe not so quickly.

Dwarkesh Patel 14:09 Yeah. I- I think you talk in the book that for some reason, the Germans thought that the critical mass was something like 10 tons. They had done some miscalculation.

Richard Rhodes 14:18 Of reactor?

Dwarkesh Patel 14:19 Right. Um-

Richard Rhodes 14:19 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 14:20 ... you also have some interesting stories in the book about how different countries found out the Americans were working on the bomb. For example, the Russians saw that all these physicists and chemists and metallurgists who were at the top of their field were no longer publishing. They had just like gone offline and so they figured, "Well, something must be going on." I'm not sure if you're aware, by the way, the subject of the making of the atomic bomb in and of itself is incredibly fascinating, but also this book has become a- a cult classic in AI. Are you not familiar, uh, with this?

Richard Rhodes 14:53 No.

Dwarkesh Patel 14:53 The people who are working on AI right now, they are huge fans of yours. They're the ones who initially recommended the book to me because the way they see the progress in the field is exactly like when they start reading this book-

Richard Rhodes 15:06 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 15:06 ... is like you start off with these initial scientific hints that w- with deep learning, for example, here is something that can teach itself any function similar to Slizard noticing the nuclear chain reaction. You progress to somebody figuring out in AI, um, there's these scaling laws that say that if you make the model this much big- bigger, it gets this much better at, you know, reasoning, at predicting text and so on. And then you can extrapolate this curve and you can see, huh, we get two more orders of magnitude and we get to something that looks like human level intelligence. Anyway, so the- a lot of the people who are working in AI have become huge fans of your book (laughs) because of this reason.

Richard Rhodes 15:48 (laughs) Oh, wonderful.

Dwarkesh Patel 15:48 They see a lot of analogies, um, uh, in the next few years, uh, from, I- m- they must be like page 400 in their minds where the Manhattan Project was.

Richard Rhodes 15:57 (laughs) We, uh, we must later on talk about unintended consequences.

Dwarkesh Patel 16:02 Yes.

Richard Rhodes 16:02 I find the subject absolutely fascinating.

Dwarkesh Patel 16:05 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 16:05 I think my next book might be called Unintended Consequences.

Dwarkesh Patel 16:09 So you- you mentioned that a big reason why many of the scientists were, uh, wanted to work on the bomb, especially the Jewish emigres was because they were worried about Hitler getting it first. Now, at some point, as you mentioned, it was becoming obvious, maybe I- I don't know what the exact year would be, 1943, '44, that Hitler, the Nazis were not close to the bomb. And I believe that almost none of the scientists quit after they found out that the Nazis weren't close. So why didn't more of them say, "Oh, I guess we were wrong. The Nazis aren't gonna get it. We don't need to be working on it"?

Richard Rhodes 16:44 Uh, there was only one, Joseph Rotblat.

Dwarkesh Patel 16:46 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 16:47 When he heard that Germany had been defeated in May of 1945, he packed up and left. General Groves, the imperious Army Corps of En- Engineers general who ran the entire Manhattan Project, was really upset. He was afraid he'd spill the beans, so he threatened to have him arrested and put in jail but Rotblat was quite determined not to stay any longer. He was not interested in building bombs for, uh, to aggrandize the national power of the United States of America which is perfectly understandable but why was no one else?

Dwarkesh Patel 17:26 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 17:27 By then...

Dwarkesh Patel 17:29 Oh

Richard Rhodes 17:29 Let me tell it in terms of Victor Weisskopf. Victor Weisskopf was an Austrian theoretical physicist who like the others escaped, uh, when the Germans, then the Nazis took over Germany and then Austria, uh, and ended up at Los Alamos. Weisskopf wrote later, "There we were at Los Alamos," he said, "In the midst of the darkest part of our science." We had been, he said, he meant they were working on a weapon of mass destruction. Certainly that's pretty dark.... he said before, it had almost seemed like a spiritual quest, and it's really interesting how different physics was considered before and after the Second World War. Before the war, one of the physicists in America, named Luis Alvarez, told me when he got his PhD in physics at Berkeley in 1937 or so and went to cocktail parties, people would say, "What's your degree in?" He would tell them, "Chemistry." (laughs) I said, "Luis, why?" He said, "Because I didn't have to explain what physics was." (laughs) That's how little-known, if you will, this kind of science was at that time. There were only about a thousand physicists in the whole world in 1900. Uh, by the mid-30s there were a lot more, of course. There'd been a lot of nuclear physics and other kinds of physics done by then. But it was still arcane, and they didn't feel as if they were doing anything mean or dirty or warlike at all. They were just pure science. Then nuclear fission came along. It was publicized worldwide. People, I think, who've been born since after the Second World War don't realize, it was not a secret at first. The news was published first in a German chemistry journal, Naturwissenschaften, and then in, and then in the British journal Nature, and then in American journals and there were headlines in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, in the Chicago Tribune, all over the world. Here at last was... People had been reading about and thinking about how to get energy out of the atomic nucleus for a long time. It was clear there was a lot there. All you had to do was get a piece of radium and see that it glowed in the dark. You didn't plug it into a wall. It just sat there, a chunk of this material, and if you held it in your hand, it would burn you. (laughs) So, where's that energy come from? Well, the physicists realized it all came from the, the nucleus of the atom which is a very small part of the whole thing. 1/100,000, the diameter of the whole atom is the nucleus. Someone in England described it as about the size of a fly in a cathedral. (laughs) Most of the energy in- that's involved, all of the energy that's involved in chemical reactions comes from the electron cloud that's around the nucleus. But the nucleus was the center of powerful forces. This was clear. But the question was, how do you get them out? The only way that the nucleus had been studied up to 1938 was by bombarding it with protons which have the same electric charge as the nucleus' positive charge, which means they're repelled by it. So you had to accelerate them to high speeds with various versions of the big machines that we've all come a- become aware of since then. The cyclotron most obviously, built in the '30s, but there were others as well. And even then, at best you could chip a little piece off. You could change an atom one step up or one step down the periodic table. This was the classic transmutation of medieval alchemy, to be sure. But it wasn't much. You didn't get much out. So everyone came to think of the nucleus of the atom as like a little rock, that you really had to hammer it hard to get anything to happen with it because it was so small and dense. That's why nuclear fission, with this slow neutron drifting in (laughs) and then going, uh, sort of floating into it and then the whole thing just goes bam, was so, so startling to everybody. So startling that when it happened, most of the physicists who would later work on the bomb, and others as well, realized that they had missed a reaction that was something they could have staged on a lab bench with the equipment on the shelf. Didn't have to invent anything new, didn't have... Just, and, and they, Luis Alvarez again, this physicist at Berkeley, told me, he said, "I was getting my hair cut when I read the news (laughs) in the newspaper. I pulled off the robe and half with my haircut, ran to my lab, pulled some equipment off the shelf, set it up, and there it was." So he said, "I discovered nuclear fission, but it was two days too late." (laughs) So... (laughs) And that happened all over. People were just- Sure. ... hitting themselves in the head and saying what, well, Niels Bohr said, "What fools we've all been." So this is a good example, by the way, in science, if- if your model is wrong, the one you're working with in your head, well, it doesn't lead you down the right path. There was only one physicist who really was thinking the right way about the uranium atom and that was Niels Bohr. He realized somewhere in the '30s that the nucleus of the uranium atom, the last natural element in the periodic table. Why is it the last one? What is different about the others that would come later? Well, he visualized it as a liquid drop. I always like to say visualize it as a water-filled balloon. It's wobbly. It's not very stable. The proton in the nucleus are held together by something called the strong force, but they still have the repellent, uh, positive electric charge that's trying to push them apart. When you get enough of them into a nucleus, it's- it's almost a standoff between the strong force and all the electrical charge. So it is like a wobbly balloon of water. And then you see why a n- a neutron just-... falling in to the nucleus, would set it to wobbling around and in one of its configurations it might take a dumbbell shape, and then you'd have basically two charged atoms just barely connected, trying to push each other apart. And, and often enough, they went the whole way. When they did that, these two new elements, half the weight of uranium, uh, way down the periodic table, would reconfigure themselves into two separate nu- nuclei, and in doing so, they would release some energy. That was the energy that came out of the reaction and it was a lot of energy. So Bohr thought about the model in the right way. The chemists who actually discovered nuclear fission didn't know what they were gonna get. They were just bombarding a solution of uranium nitrate with neutrons thinking, "Well, maybe we could make a new element. Maybe a first man-made element will come out of our work." So when they found these, as they, they, uh, analyzed the, the solution they had after they bombarded it, they found these elements like... I never can remember the names of the elements, but they're halfway down the periodic table. They're, they shouldn't have been there, and they were totally baffled. "What is this doing here? Did we contaminate our solution?" No. They had been working with a physicist named Lise Meitner who was a theoretical physicist, an Austrian Jew. She had gotten out of Nazi Germany not long before, but they were still in correspondence with her so they wrote her a letter. I held that letter in my hand when I visited Berlin and I was in tears. You know, you don't hold history of this scale in your hands very often. And it said, in German, it said basically, "We've, we've found this strange reaction in our solution. What are these elements doing there that don't belong there?" And she went for a walk in a little village in western Sweden with her nephew, Otto Frisch, who was also a nuclear physicist, and they thought about it for a while and they remembered Bohr's model, this wobbly-

Dwarkesh Patel 26:19 Mm.

Richard Rhodes 26:19 ... water-filled balloon, and they suddenly saw what could happen. And that's then where the news came from, the physics news as opposed to the chemistry news from the guys in Germany that was published in all the western journals and all the newspapers. And, you know, everybody had been talking about what you couldn't do for years before if you had that kind of energy. "A glass of this material would drive the Queen Mary back and forth from New York to London 20 times," and so forth. Just, "Your automobile could run for months." No. (laughs) But you see, people were kind of getting a, the, getting... thinking about what would be possible if you had that much avail- available energy. And of course people had thought about reactors. Oh, and again, when the news reached Berkeley, while Luis Alvarez was running over to, to run the experiment, Robert Oppenheimer, who was a professor there, one of his students told me, his response was, within a week, he said Robert had a drawing on the blackboard, he said a rather bad drawing, of both a reactor and a bomb.

Dwarkesh Patel 27:31 Mm.

Richard Rhodes 27:31 So again, because the energy was so great, the physics was pretty obvious. Whether it would actually happen depended on some other things like could you make it chain-react?

Dwarkesh Patel 27:44 Mm.

Richard Rhodes 27:45 But fundamentally, the idea was all there at the very beginning, and everybody jumped on it.

Dwarkesh Patel 27:53 H- how do you think about the spectrum of damage caused by the different weapons that had become available and very available at the time? So first of all, it is actually the best history of World War II I've ever read.

Richard Rhodes 28:07 Oh. (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 28:07 Which is, um, I mean, it's about the atomic bomb, but it's interspersed with the events that are happening in World War II which, you know, motivate the creation of the bomb, or the, you know, the release of it. Like, why it had to be dropped on Japan given the Japanese response. Anyways, but the first third is about the scientific roots, uh, the physics, um... And it's, so, uh, uh, it, is it also, it's also the best book I've read about the history of science in the early 20th century, and the organization of it. I mean, th- there's some really interesting stuff in there about... For example, there's a passage where you talk about how there was a real, real master-apprentice model in early science where if you wanted to, like, learn to do this kind of experimentation you would go to Amsterdam where the master of it is residing.

Richard Rhodes 28:55 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 28:55 It's much more individual-focused.

Richard Rhodes 28:58 Yeah, the whole European model of graduate study, which is basically the wandering scholar.

Dwarkesh Patel 29:03 Right.

Richard Rhodes 29:04 You could go wherever you wanted to and-

Dwarkesh Patel 29:06 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 29:06 ... sign up with whoever was willing to have you sign up.

Dwarkesh Patel 29:09 But,

Dwarkesh Patel 29:10 so the, the question I wanted to ask regarding the, um, history you made of, you know, World War II in general is, there's one way you can think about the atom bomb is that it is completely different from any sort of weaponry that has been developed before it. Another way you can think of it is, is there's this, like, spectrum, where on one end you have the thermonuclear bomb, in the middle you have the atom bomb, and on this end you have, you know, the firebombing of cities like Hamburg and Dresden and Tokyo. Do you think of these as completely different categories or does it seem like a sort of escalating gradient to you?

Richard Rhodes 29:47 I think until you get to the hydrogen bomb, it's really an escalating gradient. The hydrogen bomb, which can be made arbitrarily large... The biggest one ever tested was 56 million tons of TNT equivalent, 56 megatons. The Soviets tested that. That had a fireball more than five miles in diameter, just the fireball-So that's really an order of magnitude change.

Dwarkesh Patel 30:13 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 30:13 But the other ones, no. And in fact, I think one of the real problems, this has not been much discussed, and it should be. When American officials went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war, well, one of them said later, "I got on a plane in Tokyo. We flew down the long green archipelago of- of the Japanese home island. When I left Tokyo, it was all gray broken roof tiles from the firebombing and the other bombings, and then all this greenery. And then when we flew over Hiroshima, it was just gray broken roof tiles again." So the scale of the bombing with one bomb, in the case, let's say, of Hiroshima, was not that different from the scale of the firebombings that had preceded it with tens of thousands of bombs. The difference was it was just one plane. (laughs) In fact, the- the people in Hiroshima didn't even bother to go into their bomb shelters because one plane had always just been a weather plane coming over to check the weather before the bombers took off.

Dwarkesh Patel 31:29 Mm-hmm.

Richard Rhodes 31:29 So they didn't see any reason to hide or protect themselves, which was one of the reasons so many people were killed. The guys at Los Alamos had planned on the Japanese being in their bomb shelters.

Dwarkesh Patel 31:42 Mm-hmm.

Richard Rhodes 31:42 They did everything they could think of to make the bomb as- as much like ordinary bombing as they could. For example, it was exploded high enough above ground, 1,800 yards, I believe, roughly, that the fireball that would form from this really very small nuclear weapon, tactical scale by modern standards, 15 kilotons, 15,000 tons of TNT equivalent, uh, that the fireball wouldn't touch the ground and stir up dirt and irradiate it and cause massive radioactive fallout. It never did that. They weren't sure there would be any fallout. They didn't think that, they thought the plutonium in the bomb over Nagasaki now would just kind of turn into a gas and blow away. That's not exactly what happened. But people don't seem to realize, and it's never been emphasized enough, these first bombs, like all nuclear weapons, were firebombs. Their job was to start mass fires, just exactly like all the six-pound incendiaries that had been destroying every major city in Japan by then. Every major city above 50,000 population had already been burned out. The only reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were around to be atomic bombed is because they'd been set aside from the target list.

Dwarkesh Patel 33:06 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 33:06 Because General Groves wanted to know what the damage effects would be, and the only way that he could study that... Obviously, the bomb that was tested in the desert didn't tell you anything. Killed a lot of rabbits, knocked down a lot of cactus, melted some sand. But- but you couldn't see its effect on buildings and on people. So the bomb was deliberately intended to be as much not like poison gas, for example, as... Because we didn't want the reputation for being people like the war in Europe during the First World War, where people were killing each other with horrible gases. We just wanted people to think this was another bombing. So in that sense, it was. Of course there was radioactivity, and of course some people were killed by it. But they calculated that the people who would be killed by the irradiation, the prompt neutron radiation from the original fireball, would be close enough to the epicenter of the explosion that they would be killed by the blast or the- the flash of light which was 10,000 degrees, the world's worst sunburn. You know, you've seen stories of people walking around with their skin hanging off their arms. I've had sunburns almost that bad, but not over my whole body obviously, (laughs) uh, you know, where the skin actually peel, blisters and peels off. That was a sunburn from a 10,000-degree artificial sun.

Dwarkesh Patel 34:29 So that- that's not the heat, that's just the light?

Richard Rhodes 34:31 That's the light.

Dwarkesh Patel 34:32 Wow.

Richard Rhodes 34:32 Yeah. Well, light and heat, 10,000 degrees.

Dwarkesh Patel 34:35 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Richard Rhodes 34:35 Radiant light, radiant heat.

Dwarkesh Patel 34:37 Mm-hmm.

Richard Rhodes 34:38 The... But the blast itself only extended out a certain distance. It was fire. And all the nuclear weapons have, that have ever been designed are basically firebombs.

Dwarkesh Patel 34:51 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 34:51 That's important, because the military in the United States after the war, probably everywhere, not being able to figure out how to calculate the effects of this weapon in a reliable way that- that matched their previous experience, would calculate only the blast effects of a nuclear weapon when they figured their targets. That's why we had what came to be called overkill, really. I mean, we wanted redundancy, of course, a stockpile. But I mean, 60 nuclear weapons on Moscow was way beyond (laughs) what would be necessary to destroy even that big a city, because they were only calculating the blast. But in fact, if you exploded a 300-kiloton nuclear warhead over the Pentagon at 3,000 feet, it would blast all the way out to the Capitol, which isn't all that far. But if you counted the fire, it would start a mass fire that would reach all the way out to the Beltway-

Dwarkesh Patel 35:54 Mm-hmm.

Richard Rhodes 35:54 ... and burn everything between the epicenter of the weapon and the Beltway. All organic matter would be totally burned out, leaving-

Dwarkesh Patel 36:03 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 36:03 ... leaving nothing but-but-but, uh, mineral matter basically.

Dwarkesh Patel 36:08 I- I want to emphasize two things you said because...... they really hit me in reading the book, and I'm, I'm not sure if the audience has fully integrated them. The first is, in the book, they t- the military planners in Groves, they talk about needing to use the bomb sooner rather than later because they were running out of cities in Japan where there were enough buildings left that it would be worth bombing in the first place.

Richard Rhodes 36:30 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 36:31 It, it, which is insane. Like, an entire city's already... Oh, sorry. An entire country is almost al- already destroyed from firebombing alone. And the second thing about the category difference between thermonuclear and atomic bombs, I f- I forget his name, but the nuclear planner who wrote The Doomsday Machine, one of his pa- in one of his passages, he talks about, you know, people don't understand that the atom bomb, in the case of a hydrogen bomb, the atom bomb which we... The pictures we see of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, that is simply the detonator (laughs) of a modern nuclear bomb, um, w- you know, which is an insane to, thing to think about. So, you know, for example, uh, uh, 10 and 15 kilotons is the Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the Tsar Bomba, uh, which was 50 m- megatons. So, you know, more than (laughs) a thousand times as much, and that wasn't even as big as they could make it, right?

Richard Rhodes 37:19 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 37:19 They, they kept the uranium-

Richard Rhodes 37:21 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 37:21 ... tamper off because they didn't wanna, like, destroy all of Siberia (laughs) -

Richard Rhodes 37:25 (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 37:25 But, um, th- so you could get, like, over 100 ma- m- more than, like, 10,000 times as powerful.

Richard Rhodes 37:30 When, uh, you know, Teller, Edward Teller, one of the dark forces in this story, Teller was the co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb. And later on when he was consulting with our military, just f- for his own sake he sat down and calculated how big could you make a hydrogen bomb. He came up with 1,000 megatons.

Dwarkesh Patel 37:54 Jesus.

Richard Rhodes 37:54 And then, he looked at the effects. 1,000 megatons would be a fireball 10 miles in diameter and the atmosphere is only 10 miles deep. So, he figured that it would just be a waste of energy because it would all blow out into space (laughs) . It wouldn't... Some of it would go laterally, of course, but most of it would just go out into space. So, he figured that a bomb more than 100 megatons would just be totally a waste of time. Of course, 100 megaton bomb is also a total waste because there's no target on Earth big enough to justify that from a military point of view. Robert Oppenheimer, when he had his security clearance questioned and then, of course, lifted when he was being punished for having, uh, resisted the development of the hydrogen bomb, was asked by the interrogator at this security hearing, "Well, Dr. Oppenheimer, if you'd had a hydrogen bomb for Hiroshima, well, wouldn't you have used it?" And Oppenheimer said, "No" (laughs) . And the interrogator said, "Why is that?" He said, "Because the target was too small." (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 39:01 (laughs) Right.

Richard Rhodes 39:02 So, I hope that scene is in the film. I'm sure it will be. So, after the war, when our bomb planners and some of our scientists went into Hiroshima and Nagasaki just about as soon as the surrender was, was signed, what they were interested in was the scale of destruction, of course. And the cities, those two cities didn't look that different from the other cities that had been firebombed with small incendiaries and ordinary high explosives. They went home to Washington, the, the policymakers, with the thought that, "Ah, these bombs are not so destructive after all." They had been touted as city busters basically-

Dwarkesh Patel 39:51 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 39:51 ... and they weren't. They didn't completely burn out cities. They were not certainly more destructive than the firebombing campaign when everything of more than 50,000 population had already been destroyed. That, in turn, influenced the judgment about what we needed to do vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. When the Soviets got the bomb in 1949, there was a general sense that, one, you could fight a war with nuclear weapons, deterrents or not. Uh, two, you would need quite a few of them to do it right. And the Air Force, once it realized that it, that it could aggrandize its own share of the federal budget by (laughs) cornering the market, if you will, on delivering nuclear weapons, very quickly decided that they needed... That, that they would only look at the blast effect and not the fire effect.

Dwarkesh Patel 40:49 Mm-hmm.

Richard Rhodes 40:49 It's like tying one hand behind your back.

Dwarkesh Patel 40:52 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 40:52 Most of it was the fire effect. So, that's where they came up with numbers like, "We need 60 of these to take out Moscow." And the more bombs... This is what the Air Force figured out by the late 1940s. The more bombs... The more targets, the more bombs. The more bombs, the more planes. The more planes, the biggest share of the budget.

Dwarkesh Patel 41:19 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 41:19 So, by the mid-1950s, the Air Force commanded 47% of the federal defense budget. And the other branches of services, which had not gone nuclear particularly by then, woke up and said, "Oh, we'd better find some use for these weapons in our branches of service." So, the Army discovered that it needed nuclear weapons, uh, tactical weapons for field use, fired out of cannons. There was even one that was fired out of a shoulder-mounted rifle. Uh, there was a satchel charge that you two men could carry, it weighed about 150 pounds, that would be used to dig a ditch so that Soviet tanks couldn't cross into Germany. All sorts of wonderful... And of course, the Navy by then had been working hard with General Rickover on building a nuclear submarine that could carry ballistic missiles underwater in, in total security. No way anybody could trace those submarines once they were quiet enough. And a nuclear reactor is very quiet. It just sits there with neutrons running around (laughs) making heat. So-... the other services jumped in, and this famous triad. You know, we must have these three different kinds of nuclear weapons. Baloney. (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 42:39 Interesting, interesting.

Richard Rhodes 42:40 We would be perfectly safe if we only had our nuclear submarines.

Dwarkesh Patel 42:45 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 42:45 And only one or two of those. One nuclear submarine can take out all of Europe or all of the Soviet Union.

Dwarkesh Patel 42:50 Because it has multiple nukes on it?

Richard Rhodes 42:52 Because they have 16-

Dwarkesh Patel 42:55 Ah.

Richard Rhodes 42:55 ... intercontinental ballistic missiles with MIRVed warheads, at least three per missile.

Dwarkesh Patel 43:00 Wow.

Richard Rhodes 43:01 (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 43:01 I had, a, a former guest, Richard Hanania, has a book about foreign policy where he points out that our model of thinking about why countries do the things they do, especially in foreign affairs, is wrong because we think of them as these rational actors, individual rational actors, when in fact it's these, like, competing factions within the government. And in fact you see this especially in the case of Japan in World War II where the, I forgot the name of the book. There's a great book of Japan leading up to World War II where they talk about how... I mean, it was basically the, you know, I forget which branch of the Japanese military. They needed, you know, more oil to continue their campaign in Manchuria.

Richard Rhodes 43:42 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 43:42 And so they forced these other branches to escalate. But yeah. That, that, I, that, that's so interesting. That's why we have so many nukes is that the different branches are competing for funding.

Richard Rhodes 43:49 Well, you know, the Air Force dream ever since the First World War, ever since, uh, uh, what's his name, Due, an Italian, uh, theorist of, of air power. He had been in the trenches in the First World War. This one somebody called the trenches of the si- First World War the long grave already dug because millions of men were killed and the trenches never moved a foot this way, a foot that way-

Dwarkesh Patel 44:16 Wow.

Richard Rhodes 44:16 ... all this horror. And Due came up with the idea that if you could fly over the battlefield to the homeland of the enemy and destroy his capacity to make war then the people of that country, he theorized, would rise up in rebellion and throw out their, their leaders and sue for peace. And this became the dream of all the air forces of the world, but particularly ours. W- until around 1943 it was called the US Army Air Force and the dream (laughs) of every guy in the Air Force who, every officer was to get out from under the Army not just be something that uses, delivers ground support or air support to the Army as it advances, but a power that could actually win wars.

Dwarkesh Patel 45:05 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 45:05 And the missing piece had always been the scale of the weaponry they carried. So when the bomb came along, you can see why Curtis LeMay, who really ran the Strategic Air Command during the prime years of that force, was pushing for bigger and bigger bombs.

Dwarkesh Patel 45:22 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 45:22 Because if a plane got shot down but the one behind it had a hydrogen bomb then it would be just almost as effective as, as the two planes together.

Dwarkesh Patel 45:31 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 45:32 So they wanted big bombs and, uh, they went after Oppenheimer because he thought that was a terrible way to go, that there was really no military use for these huge weapons. Furthermore, that the United States had more cities than Russia did, than the Soviet Union did, and we were making ourselves a better target basically by introducing a weapon that could destroy a whole state. I used to live in Connecticut and I once calculated, I saw a map that showed the air pollution that blew up from New York City to Boston and I thought, "Well, now if that was fallout-"

Dwarkesh Patel 46:06 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 46:06 "... we'd be dead-"

Dwarkesh Patel 46:07 Right.

Richard Rhodes 46:08 "... up here in green, lovely Connecticut." And it would have been. I mean, that was the scale that it was going to be with these big new weapons. So on the one hand you had some of the important leaders in the government thinking that these weapons were not the, the war-winning weapons that the Air Force wanted them and realized they could be, and on the other hand you had the Air Force cornering the market on, on, on nuclear solutions to, to battles, if you will, all because some guy in a trench in World War I was sufficiently horrified and sufficiently theoretical about what, what was possible with air power.I mean, remember, they were still flying biplanes-

Dwarkesh Patel 46:52 Mm-hmm.

Richard Rhodes 46:52 ... when, uh, H.G. Wells wrote his novel The World Set Free in 1913 predicting an atomic war, uh, that would lead to world government. He had air forces delivering atomic bombs but (laughs) he forgot to update his planes. They were, the guys in this back seat, the bombardiers, were sitting in a biplane open cockpit and when the pilot said, "Drop the bomb," they would reach down and pick up their-

Dwarkesh Patel 47:23 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 47:23 ... H.G. Wells' idea of an atomic bomb and throw it over the side. (laughs) So, which, which is kind of what was happening in Washington after the war. And it led us to, to a really, I think, terribly misleading and unfortunate perspective on how many weapons we needed which in turn fomented the arms race with the Soviets uh, and, and just chased off... In the Soviet Union they had a practical perspective on factories. Every factory was supposed to produce 120% of its target every year. That was considered good Soviet realism (laughs) and they did that with their nuclear war weapons. So by, by the height of the Cold War they had 75,000 nuclear weapons which would have been a... Nobody had heard yet of nuclear winter. So if, if both sides had set off this string of mousetraps that we had in our arsenals it would have been the end of the human world without question.

Dwarkesh Patel 48:25 Yeah. You know, that actually, it raises an interesting question. If the military planners thought-... that the, the conventional nuclear weapon was like the firebombing. Would it have been the case that if there wasn't a thermonuclear weapon, that there actually would've been a nuclear war by now because people wouldn't have been thinking of it as this hard red line?

Richard Rhodes 48:47 Uh, I don't think so because, I mean, we're talking about one bomb versus 400, and one plane versus 400 planes and thousands of bombs. That scale was clear. Uh, I think deterrence was the more important business.

Dwarkesh Patel 49:03 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 49:03 Everyone seemed to understand. Even the spies that the Soviets had connected up to were wholesaling (laughs) information back to the Soviet Union.

Dwarkesh Patel 49:12 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 49:13 There's this comic moment when Truman is sitting with Joseph Stalin at Potsdam and he tells Stalin, "We have a powerful new weapon," and that's as much as he's ready to say about it. And Stalin looks at him and says, "Good. I hope you put it to good use with the Japanese."

Dwarkesh Patel 49:30 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 49:30 Stalin knows exactly what he's talking about.

Dwarkesh Patel 49:33 Sure.

Richard Rhodes 49:33 He's seen the design of the Fat Man-type Nagasaki plutonium bomb. He's held it in his hands (laughs) because they had spies all over the place.

Dwarkesh Patel 49:43 Well,

Dwarkesh Patel 49:44 how, how much longer would it have taken the Soviets to develop the bomb if they didn't have any spies?

Richard Rhodes 49:49 Probably not any longer.

Dwarkesh Patel 49:50 Really? You don't-

Richard Rhodes 49:51 When the, when the Soviet Union collapsed in the winter of '92, I ran over there as quickly as I could get over there because the scientists in this limbo between, uh, forming a new kind of government and some other countries pulling out and becoming independent and so forth, all of a sudden their nuclear scientists, the ones who'd worked on their bombs, were free to talk. And I found that out through, uh, uh, Yelena Bonner, uh, Andrei Sakharov's widow, who was connected s- t- to people I knew and she said, "Yeah, come on over." And her secretary, who was a geologist, about 35 years old, Sakha, became my guide around the country. And we went to various apartments where retired guys from the bomb program were living on, as far as I could tell, it was sack of potatoes and some salt.

Dwarkesh Patel 50:48 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 50:48 They really, you know, they had government pensions and the money was worthless all of a sudden.

Dwarkesh Patel 50:52 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 50:53 I, I was buying photographs from them partly because they needed the photographs and partly because I thought... I mean, 20 bucks was two months' income at that point so it was easy for me and it helped them. And in turn, they told me about by 1947, they had first-class physicists in Soviet Union they do in Russia today. So by 1947, they had a design for a bomb that they said was half the weight and twice the yield of the Fat Man bomb. Fat Man bomb was the plutonium implosion, right, and so forth, and it weighed about, I don't know, 9,000 pounds. So they had a much smaller and much more deliverable, therefore, bomb with a mi- with a yield of about 44 kilotons.

Dwarkesh Patel 51:41 Why, why, why was Soviet physics so, so good? I mean, you know, you would think that there's like a core society with communists.

Richard Rhodes 51:49 I don't know. The, the Russian mind? I don't know.

Dwarkesh Patel 51:51 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 51:51 You know, they learned all their technology from the French in the 19th century which is why there are so many French words in Russian. So they got good teachers. The French are superb technicians. They aren't so good at building things, but they're very good (laughs) at designing things. There's something about Russia, I don't know if it's the language or the education. They do have good education. They did. But, but I mean, I remember asking them when they were working, I said, "On the hydrogen bomb, you didn't have any computers yet." We only had really early primitive computers to do the complicated calculations of the hydrodynamics of, uh, that explosion. I said, "What did you do?" They said, "Oh, we just used nuclear theore- we just used theoretical physicists." (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 52:37 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 52:38 Which is what we did in Los Alamos.

Dwarkesh Patel 52:39 Right.

Richard Rhodes 52:40 (laughs) We had guys come in who really knew their math, and they would sit there and work it out by hand.

Dwarkesh Patel 52:45 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 52:45 And women with old Marchant calculators running numbers. So they basically, they were just good scientists, and they had this new design and they... Kurchatov, who ran the program, took it to Lavrentiy Beria, this monster of the... He ran the NKVD, who was put in charge of the program, and said, "Look, we can build you a better bomb. Do you really wanna waste the time to make that much more uranium and plutonium?" And Beria said, "Comrade, I want the American bomb. Give me the American bomb or you and all your families will be camp dust," he said.

Dwarkesh Patel 53:23 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 53:23 So, and I talked to one of the leading scientists in the group and he said, "So we valued our lives. We valued our families. We gave them a copy of the plutonium implosion bomb," which it was.

Dwarkesh Patel 53:37 It strikes me, now that you, uh, explain this, that when the Soviet Union fell, if I was like North Korea or Iran on some- or something, why did not- why didn't they- or did they, you know, let's send a few people to the fallen Soviet Union, get- recruit a few of these scientists to start their own program, buy off their stockpiles or something?

Richard Rhodes 53:58 There was some effort by countries in the Middle East-

Dwarkesh Patel 54:02 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 54:02 ... to get hold of the enriched uranium-

Dwarkesh Patel 54:05 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 54:06 ... which they wouldn't sell them. They were... These were responsible scientists. I mean, they told me, "Look, we worked on the bomb. Of course you had it." We didn't want there to be a monopoly on the part of any country in the world. So patriotically, even though Stalin was in charge of our country and he was a monster, we still felt... And even, uh, uh, Sakharov felt that way. He felt very much that it was his responsibility to work on these things. They all did. So there was a great rush at the end of the Second World War to get hold of German scientists.

Dwarkesh Patel 54:42 Oh.

Richard Rhodes 54:42 And about, I think, an equal number were grabbed by the Soviets. All of the leading German scientists like-... uh, Heisenberg and Hahn and others (laughs) went west as fast as they could.

Dwarkesh Patel 54:55 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 54:55 They didn't want to be captured by the Soviets.

Dwarkesh Patel 54:58 Sure.

Richard Rhodes 54:58 But, but there were some who were, and they helped them work... You know, people have the idea that Los Alamos was where the bomb happened, and it's true that at Los Alamos we had the team that, that designed, developed, and built the first actual weapons. But the truth is, the important material for weapons is the uranium or plutonium. One of the scientists in the Manhattan Project told me years later, he said, "You know, you can make a pretty high-level nuclear explosion just by taking two critic, sub-critical pieces of uranium, putting one on the floor and dropping the other by hand from a height of about six feet." If that's true, then all this business about secret designs and so forth is, is hogwash. All you... What you really need for a weapon is the critical mass of plutonium or uranium-235, or highly enriched uranium, 90% U-235. If you've got that, there are lots of different ways to make the bomb. We had two totally different ways that we used. You know, the gun on the one hand for uranium, and then because plutonium was so reactive that if you fired up the barrel of a cannon (laughs) at 3,000 feet per second, it would still melt down before the two pieces made it up. So, for that reason, they had to invent an entirely new technology, which was a amazing piece of work. From the Soviet point of view, and I think this is something people don't know either, but it puts the Russian experience into a better context. All the way back in the '30s since the beginning of the Soviet Union after the First World War, they had been sending over espionage agents connected up to Americans who were willing to, to work for them to collect together industrial technology. They didn't have it when the, when they began their country. It was very much an agricultural country. And in that regard, you know, people still talk about, "Oh, those damn spies stealing our secrets." We did the same thing with the British back in (laughs) colonial days.

Dwarkesh Patel 57:17 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 57:17 We didn't know how to make a canal that wouldn't drain out through the soil. The British had a certain kind of clay that they would line their canals with, and there were canals all over England in the 18th century, uh, that was impervious to, to the flow of water. And, and we bought a British engineer, brought him over at great expense to teach us how to make the lining for the canals that opened up the, the Middle West and then the West. So, they were doing the same thing. And one of those spies was a guy named Harry Gold, who was tr- working all the time for them. He gave them some of the basic technology of Kodak filmmaking, for example, and so forth. Harry Gold was the connection between David Greenglass (laughs) and one of the American spies at Los Alamos and the Soviet Union. So, it was not different. So, the model was never give us something that someone dreamed up that hasn't been tested and you know works. So, it would actually be blueprints for factories, not just a patent. And therefore, when Beria, after the war, said, "Give us the bomb," he meant, "Give me the American bomb because we know that works. I don't trust you guys. Who knows what you'll do? You're probably too stupid anyway." He was that kind of man.

Dwarkesh Patel 58:43 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 58:44 So, for all of those reasons, they built... The second bomb they tested was twice the yield and half the weight of the first bomb. In other words, it was their, their new design. And so was ours, because the technology was something that we knew during the war, but it was too, it was too s- too, uh, theoretical still to use. You just had to put the core and have a little air gap between the core and the explosives so that the blast wave would have a chance to accelerate through, through an open gap. And therefore... Alvarez told me, he said it's... He couldn't tell me what (laughs) it was, so he said, "Well, look, uh, you can get a lot more destructive force with a hammer if you hit something with it, rather than if you put the head on the hammer and push." And it took me several years before I figured out (laughs) what he meant, but I finally understood he was talking about what's called levitation.

Dwarkesh Patel 59:41 On the topic of the fact that the major difficulty in developing a bomb is the, either the refinement of y- uranium into U-235 or its transmutation into plutonium, you- I was actually talking to a physicist in preparation for this conversation. And you know, he explained the same thing, that if you get two sub-critical masses of uranium together, you wouldn't have the full bomb because you would, um, it would start to tear itself apart without the tamper, but it would still have, like, uh, more than a one megawatt, uh, megaton, um-

Richard Rhodes 1:00:12 Well, me- more... It would be a few kilotons.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:14 Oh, sorry, kilo- kiloton.

Richard Rhodes 1:00:15 Alvarez's model would be a few kilotons, but that's a lot. (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:18 Yeah, I mean, kilo- Um, but you know, he claimed... Sorry, I meant kiloton. Um, he claimed that one of the reasons why we talk so much about Los Alamos is that at the time, the government didn't want other countries to know that if you refine uranium, you've got it. And so they were like, "Oh, the... We did all this fancy physics work in Los Alamos that you're not gonna get to, so don't even worry about it." The, um... I don't know what you make of that theory, that basically all y- uh, it was like a sort of a PSYOP to, uh, c- convince people that the Los Alamos was important.

Richard Rhodes 1:00:49 You know, again, I think all the physics had been checked out by a lot of different countries by then.... it was pretty clear to everybody what, what you needed to do to get to a bomb. That it was a fast fusion reaction, not a slow fusion reaction-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:02 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:01:03 ... like a reactor. They'd worked that out. So, I, I don't think that's really the problem. Bu- bu- but to this day, no one ever talks about the fact that the pr- that the real problem isn't the design of the weapon. (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:16 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:01:16 You could make one with wooden boxes if you wanted to. (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:20 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 1:01:20 So, the design...

Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:21 All right.

Richard Rhodes 1:01:21 The problem is getting the material, and that's good because it's damned hard to make that stuff. And it's, it's something you can protect.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:30 And I, I, I... We also have gotten very lucky. I mean, if lucky is the word you wanna use. I think you mentioned this in the book at some point. But the laws of physics could have been such that, you know, you, you unrefined uranium ore was enough to build a nuclear weapon, right?

Richard Rhodes 1:01:46 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:46 Um, in some sense, we got lucky that it takes a nation state level actor to really refine and produce, uh, the, the raw substance.

Richard Rhodes 1:01:55 Yeah. No, I was thinking about that this morning on the way over. (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:59 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 1:01:59 And you know, eh, all the uranium in the world would already have destroyed itself.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:02:03 Oh.

Richard Rhodes 1:02:04 Most people have never heard of the living reactors that, uh, developed on their own in a bed of uranium ore in Africa about two billion years ago.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:02:16 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:02:17 Right? When there was more U-235 in a mass of uranium ore than there is today, because it decays like all radioactive elements. And the French discovered it when they were mining the ore and found this bed that had a totally different set of (laughs) nuclear characteristics. Uh, they were like, "What happened?" But there, there were natural reactors in Gabon once upon a time, and they started up because some water... A moderator for the, to make the neutrons slow down washed its way down through a bed of much more highly enriched uranium ore than we still have today.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:02:57 Mm-hmm.

Richard Rhodes 1:02:57 Maybe 5%, 10% instead of 3.5% or 1.5%, whatever it now is. Uh, and they ran for about 100,000 years and then shut themselves down, uh, because they had accumulated enough fusion products that, uh, it had been used, the U-235 had been used up. Interestingly, eh, it never migrated. This material never migrated out of the bed of ore. People today who are anti-nuclear say, "Well, what are we gonna do about the waste? Where are we gonna put all that waste?" (laughs) And it's just, it's silly. You know?

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:35 Shove it in a hole.

Richard Rhodes 1:03:36 Yeah, basically.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:37 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 1:03:37 That's exactly what we're planning to do.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:40 Yeah, yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:03:40 Holes that are deep enough and in beds of material that will hold them long enough for everything to gape- decay back to the original ore.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:47 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:03:48 It's not a big problem, except politically because nobody wants it in their backyard.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:53 On, on the topic of the Soviets, one question I had when reading the book was, listen, we, um, renegotiate with Stalin at Yalta and we surrender a large part of Eastern Europe to him under his sphere of influence, and we know, I mean, obviously we saw, you know, 50 years of immiseration there as a result. And then at the time, only we had the bomb. Would it have been possible given the fact that, you know, we had the bomb e- a- that we could've just like knocked out the Soviet Union or at least prevented so much of the world from succumbing to communism in the aftermath of World War II if you just kept it going? Is that a possibility?

Richard Rhodes 1:04:30 When we say we had the bomb, we had a few partly assembled, handmade bombs. It took almost as long to assemble one as the battery life of the batteries that would drive the original charge that would set off the explosion. It was kind of a big bluff. You know, when the, when they closed Berlin in 1948 and we had to supply Berlin by air with coal and food for a whole winter, we moved some B-29s to, to England, the B-29 being the bomber that had carried the bombs. They were not, uh, f- outfitted for nuclear weapons. They didn't have the same kind of bomb bay structure. Uh, the, the weapons that were dropped in Japan had a single hook that held the entire bomb, so when the bay opened and the hook was released, the thing dropped. That's very different from dropping whole rows of... You've seen the photographs and the film footage of small bombs. So, it was a big bluff on our part. We, we took some time after the war inevitably to pull everything together. It was a brand new technology, it was a brand new weapon. Uh, who was gonna be in charge of it? There was a battle between... The military wanted control. Truman wasn't about to give the military (laughs) control. He'd been an artillery officer in the First World War. He used to say, "No damned artillery officer, captain is gonna start World War III when I'm president."

Dwarkesh Patel 1:06:04 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 1:06:04 So, (laughs) I, he... I grew up in the same town he lived in.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:06:08 All right.

Richard Rhodes 1:06:08 So I know his accent.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:06:09 He's from Missouri?

Richard Rhodes 1:06:10 Independence, Missouri.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:06:11 Oh.

Richard Rhodes 1:06:11 Yeah. Used to see him at- on his front steps taking pictures with tourists after he... Well, he was still president actually.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:06:19 Huh.

Richard Rhodes 1:06:19 So, (laughs) used to step out on the porch and let the tourists take photographs.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:06:23 Huh.

Richard Rhodes 1:06:24 About a half a block from my Methodist church where I went to church.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:06:27 Oh, wow. (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 1:06:28 (laughs) So it was interesting. Interestingly, his, his wife was considered much more socially acceptable than he was. She was from old family Independence, Missouri people and he was some farmer from way out in Grandview, Missouri south of Kansas City.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:06:45 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 1:06:46 So, values.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:06:47 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 1:06:47 Anyway. At the end of the war, there was a great rush from the Soviet side of what was already a zone-... right? There was a Soviet zone, a French zone, British zone, and American zone. Germany was divided up into those zones, uh, to grab what's left of the uranium ore that the Germans had stockpiled. And there was evidence that there were several... a number of barrels of the stuff in a warehouse somewhere in the middle of all this. And there's a very funny story about the Russians ran in and grabbed off one site full of uranium ore, this yellow-black stuff in, in, in what were basically wine barrels. And, and we, at the same night, just before the, the wall came down, as it were, between the zones, were running in from the other side, grabbing some other ore (laughs) and then taking it back to our side. But there was also a good deal of, of, of requisitioning of German scientists. And the ones who had gotten away early came West, but there were others who didn't-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:07:53 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:07:53 ... and ended up helping the Soviets. And they were told, "Look, you helped us build the bomb. You help us... Actually, you help us build the reactors and the uranium separation, uh, systems that we need, and we'll let you go home and back to your family." Which they did. Early '50s by then, the, the Se- the Russian- the German scientists who had, had helped the Russians went home. And I think, I think our people stayed here and brought their families over. I don't know.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:08:24 Was there, was there an opportunity after the end of World War II for the US, before the Soviets developed the bomb, for the US to do something where either it somehow enforced, uh, a monopoly on having the bomb or, if that wasn't possible, make some sort of credible gesture that, you know, "We're eliminating this technology. You guys don't work on this. We're all just gonna step back, uh, from this"?

Richard Rhodes 1:08:49 We tried both. Before the war ended, General Groves, who had the mistaken impression that there was a limited amount of high-grade uranium ore in the world, put together a company that, uh, tried to corner the market on all the available supply. For some reason, he didn't realize that a country the size of the Soviet Union is going to have some uranium ore somewhere. And of course, it did, in Kazakhstan. Rich uranium ore, enough for all the bombs they wanted to build. But he didn't know that, and I, I frankly don't know why he didn't know that, but I guess uranium's use before the Second World War (laughs) was basically as a glazing agent for pottery. All that famous yellow pottery and orange pottery that people owned in the 1930s, those colors came from uranium. And they're sufficiently radioactive, even to this day, that if you wave a Geiger counter over them, you get some clicks. In fact, there have been places where they've gone in and, with masks and suits on, and grabbed the, grabbed the Mexican pottery and taken it out in a lead-lined case. People have been so worried about it. But, but that was the only use, really, for uranium and to make a particular kind of glass. So once it became clear that the- there was another use for uranium, a much more important one, uh, Groves tried to corner the world market, and he thought he had. So that was one effort to limit wh- what the Soviet Union could do. Another was to negotiate some kind of agreement between the parties. That was something that, that d- really never got off the ground because Truman's secretary of state, uh, was, uh, s- an old Southern politician. He didn't trust the Soviets. He went to the first meeting, uh, where was it, Geneva, I think, in the, in '45 after the war was over, and kind of strutted around and said, "Well, I got the bomb in my pocket, uh, so let's sit down and talk here." And the Soviets basically said, "Screw you. We don't care. We're not worried about your bomb. Go home." So that didn't work. Then there was the effort to get the United Nations to start to, to develop some program of international control. And the program th- was proposed originally by a committee put together by our State Department that was, that included Robert Oppenheimer. Regally so, because the other members of the committee were industrialists, engineers, uh, government officials, people with various kinds of expertise around the very complicated problems of technology and the science and, of course, the politics, the diplomacy. Oppenheimer taught them, in a couple of weeks, taught them the basics of the nuclear physics involved and taught them what he knew about bomb design, which was (laughs) , which was everything actually, since he'd run Los Alamos during the war. And they came up with a plan, and people have scoffed ever since at what came to be called the Acheson–Lilienthal plan, named after the State Department people.... then if one country tried clandestinely to begin to build bombs, you would know about it at the time of the next inspection. And then you could try diplomacy. If that didn't work, you could try conventional war. If that wasn't sufficient, then you could start building your bombs too. And at the end of this sequence, which would be long enough, assuming that there were no bombs existent in the world and the ore was stored in a warehouse somewhere, six months maybe, maybe a year, it would be time for everyone to scale up to deterrents with weapons rather than deterrents without weapons, with only the knowledge. That, to me, is the answer to the whole thing and it might have worked, but there were two big problems. One, no country is going to allow a monopoly on a nuclear weapon, at least no major power.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:14:01 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:14:02 So the Russians were not willing to sign on from the beginning. They just couldn't. How could they? We would not have. Uh, two, Truman assigned a kind of a loudmouth, w- wise old Wall Street guy (laughs) to present this program to the United Nations. And he sat down with Oppenheimer after he and his people had studied it and said, "Where's your army? Somebody starts working on a bomb over there, you got to go in and take that out, don't you?" What would, what... He said, "What would, what happened if one c- what would happen if one country started building a bomb?" And Oppenheimer said, "Well, that would be an act of war." Meaning then the other countries could begin to escalate as they needed to, to protect themselves against one power trying to overwhelm the rest. Well, Baruch never, Bernard Baruch was the name of the man, he didn't get it. So when he presented his revised version of the Acheson-Lilienthal plan, which was called the Baruch Plan, to the United Nations, uh, he pro- he included his army. (laughs) And, and he insisted that the United States would not give up its nuclear monopoly until everyone else had signed on. So of course, who's gonna sign onto that deal?

Dwarkesh Patel 1:15:23 I, I feel like he has kind of a point in the sense that, listen, World War II took five years or more. You know, if like, if we fi- find that the Soviets are starting to develop a bomb, it's not like within the six months or a year or whatever it would take them to start refining the ore. And to the point we found out that they've, they'd been refining ore to when we start a war and engage in it and doing all this diplomacy, by that point, they might already have the bomb, and, and so, you know, we're behind because we dismantle our weapons, we are, we are only starting to develop our weapons once we've exhausted these other avenues. Uh-

Richard Rhodes 1:16:00 Not to develop. Presumably, we would have developed.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:16:04 Ah.

Richard Rhodes 1:16:04 And everybody would have developed anyway.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:16:07 Okay.

Richard Rhodes 1:16:07 But rather to not have... I mean, I think of this, another way to think of this is, is as delayed delivery times.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:16:17 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:16:17 It takes about 30 minutes to get an ICBM from, from central Missouri (laughs) to, to Moscow. That's the, that's the, um, time window for doing anything other than starting a nuclear war. So take the warhead off those missiles and move it down the road 10 miles. So then it takes three hours, you got to put the warhead back on the missiles. If the other side is willing to do this too and you both can watch and see. We require openness, a word Bohr introduced, to, to this whole thing. In order to make this happen, you can't have secrets. You have to absolutely have, and of course as time passed on, we developed elaborate surveillance from space-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:17:01 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:17:02 ... surveillance from, from planes and so forth. It would not have worked in 1946 for sure. There wasn't the, uh, the surveillance th- but, but w- that, whe- that system, by the way, is in place today. The International Atomic Energy Agency has detected systems in air, in space, underwater. They can detect 50 pounds of dynamite exploded in England from Australia with the systems that we have in place.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:17:32 Mm.

Richard Rhodes 1:17:32 So we have a system in place to exactly... Uh, it's technical rather than human resources, but it's there, so it's theoretically possible today to get started on such a program. Except, of course, now, unlike 1950, the world is awash in nuclear weapons. Despite the, the reductions that have occurred since the end of the Cold War, there's still 30, 40,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Way too many.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:01 Yeah. That, that, that's really interesting. What percentage of warheads do you think are accounted for by this organization? Like if, if there's 30,000 warheads, what percentage are-

Richard Rhodes 1:18:09 All.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:10 Really? Okay. The, the, North Korea doesn't have a secret?

Richard Rhodes 1:18:13 They're allowed to, they're allowed to inspect anywhere without having to ask the government for permission.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:17 But not, presumably not like North Korea or something, right?

Richard Rhodes 1:18:21 North Korea's an exception.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:22 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:18:22 But we keep pretty good track of North Korea, (laughs) needless to say.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:27 Are you surprised with how successful, uh, non-proliferation has been? The, the, the number of countries with nuclear weapons has not gone up for decades. Given the fact, as you were talking about earlier, it's, it's simply a matter of refining or transmuting uranium. I- i- is it surprising that, that there are not more countries that have it?

Richard Rhodes 1:18:44 You know, that's, that's really an interesting part. Again, a part of the story that most people, I think, have never really heard, in the '50s, before the, uh, development and, and, uh, signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was I think 1968 and it took effect in 1970-... a lot of countries that you would never have imagined were (laughs) working on nuclear weapons. Sweden, Norway, Japan, South Korea. A lot of countries. Th- They had the technology. They just didn't have the materials. And it was kinda dicey about what you should do. But I interviewed some of the Swedish scientists who worked on their bomb and they said, "Well, look. We weren't talking about... We were just talking about making some tactical nukes that would slow down a- a Russian tank advance on our country long enough for us to mount a defense." I said, "So, why did you give it up?" And they said, "Well, when the Soviets developed hydrogen bombs, it would only take two to destroy (laughs) Sweden-" (laughs) . "... so we didn't see much point. And we signed then the Non-Proliferation Treaty," they said. "And our knowledge," they said, these scientists, "of how to build nuclear weapons helped us deal with countries like South Africa," which did build a few bombs in the late 1980s. Six World War II-type, uh, gun bombs fueled with enriched uranium because South Africa is awash (laughs) in uranium ore and, and makes a lot of uranium for various purposes. So, so efforts were starting up and that's where John Kennedy got the numbers then in a famous speech he delivered where he said, "I lose sleep at night over the real prospect of there being 10 countries with nuclear weapons by 1970, and, and 30 by 1980." And of course, that would've been a nightmare world because the risk of somebody using them would've gone up accordingly. But we offered after the Cuban Missile Crisis, we and the Soviet Union basically said, "We gotta, we gotta slow this thing down for us and for others as well." And the treaty that was then put together and negotiated offered a good deal. It said if you don't build nuclear weapons, we will give you the knowledge to build nuclear energy technology that will allow you to forge ahead very successfully with that. And these countries had not... You know, there was a belief in the early years of nuclear weapons that as soon as the technology was learned by a country, they would immediately proceed to build the bomb. And I... You know, no one really thought it through. It seemed sort of self-evident, but it wasn't self-evident. There are dangers to building a nuclear weapon and having an arsenal. If you're a little country and you have a nuclear arsenal, you have the potential to destroy a large country, or at least disable a large country because you have these terribly destructive weapons. That makes you a target. Right. That means that large country is gonna look at you and worry about you, which they never would have before. That kind of logic, uh, dawned on everybody at that point, and they were getting a good deal. And the other part of the deal was the part that the nuclear powers never kept to this day, which was an agreement that, that we would work seriously and vigorously toward nuclear disarmament. Mm-hmm. We didn't do that. We just told them we would, and then kind of snuck around on the sides. So much so that by w- this treaty... Because no one was quite trusting of the whole deal. Treaties are usually signed and they ex- they exist in per- perpetuity. They don't have any end date. They go on until somebody breaks the rules. But this treaty was given a 25-year review period, which would have been 1995. At which point, if the countries had chosen to abrogate the treaty, it would have been set aside and everybody could've gone back to making nuclear weapons. Now, it almost came to that for the very reason that the main nuclear powers had not fulfilled their agreement to start reducing arsenals. You know, we didn't start reducing our nuclear arsenal till the end of the Cold War, till the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's when we began cutting back, as did the former Soviet Union. A, a diplomat who's a friend of mine, Tom Graham, was assigned the task by our State Department of going around to the countries that were going to be voting on this renewal or not of the treaty and convincing their leaderships around the world that it wasn't in their best interest to abrogate the treaty at that point. Tom spent two years on the road. The only place he thought he should go is not the UN where there's a second-level diplomat he could have talked to, but back to the home countries. And he convinced enough countries around the world. I mean, he's another hero who's never been properly (laughs) celebrated. He convinced enough countries around the world that, that they did agree to extend the treaty in perpetuity with the proviso that the goddamn nine nuclear powers get busy, uh, eliminating their nukes. And of course, George H.W. Bush, bless him, I didn't like his politics otherwise, but he stepped forward and split the nuclear arsenal in half right away. We dropped our numbers way, way lower than we had been he. He pulled them out of South Korea, which was a great bugaboo for both the Soviets and the North Koreans and China, uh, and did a lot of good work toward moving toward a real reduction in nuclear arsenals. And the, the, the Russians agreed at that time. It was before Putin took power. So there was a change for the better, but it... There's still too many around, unfortunately.... so that's why there are only nine nuclear powers to this day.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:25:15 H- how worried are you about a proxy war between great powers turning nuclear? For example, you know, people have been worried about the Ukraine conflict for this reason. In the future, if we're facing an invasion of Taiwan by China, that- that's another thing to worry about. Um, I- I had a friend who understands these things really well, and he was... We were arguing, because I thought, "Listen, if there's like a war, if there's a risk of nuclear war, let them take Taiwan, you know? We'll build semiconductor factories in Arkansas, who cares, right?" And he explains, "No, you don't understand, because if- if Tai- if we don't protect Taiwan, then Japan and South Korea, uh, decide to go nuclear because they're like, 'America won't protect us,' and if they go nuclear, then the risk of nuclear actually goes up, not down."

Richard Rhodes 1:26:02 Or to- or they just decide to align with China-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:26:05 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:26:05 ... because we didn't p- protect them with our nuclear umbrella the way we promised we would.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:26:09 Right. Oh, I guess we haven't promised Taiwan that, but it's implied, I guess. Um...

Richard Rhodes 1:26:13 I think it's implied.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:26:14 Yeah. (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 1:26:15 (laughs) If we said we're going to help defend them, that's what that means.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:26:18 Yeah. But anyway, so the question was, how worried are you about proxy wars turning in nuclear?

Richard Rhodes 1:26:26 I think the best evidence... And there's been a lot of argument about whether nuclear deterrence actually works or not. The best evidence is that the United States fought a number of wars on the periphery, beginning with Korea and then Vietnam and so forth, and some other smaller things in between, where we were willing to accept defeat. We accepted defeat in Vietnam for sure, rather than use our nuclear arsenal. Always because behind those- those peripheral countries, if you will, was a major nuclear power. China, Soviet Union, whatever. And we didn't want to risk a nuclear war. So at that level, deterrence really seemed to work for a long time. But there's been a change lately, and it's kind of terrifying, I find it, at least. And the first manifestation was when India and Pakistan, which both went nuclear full scale in the late 1990s. India had tested one bomb in 1974, which they claimed was a peaceful explosion-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:27:37 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 1:27:37 ... whatever that is. But they hadn't proceeded anywhere from there. And Pakistan had not tested... Well, they tested their first bomb in China when they got it from A.Q. Khan, the same guy who was trying to proliferate to Iran a little later, and Iraq. But they didn't build a lot of warheads either. And then their conflict, or the personalities involved and the governments, got sideways with each other and both sides tested a- a quick flurry of four or five bombs each around 1997 or 8, I think. So there they were, now they were full-fledged nuclear powers on the r- on the scale of two regional countries. But then in 1999, there was a border conflict between the two countries and Pakistan came up with a whole new argument about nuclear deterrence. Not only could you prevent a nuclear escalation, but if you kept your deterrent in place, you could have a conventional war with the other side not willing to escalate to nuclear because you still had your nuclear arsenal. And that, which came very close to a nuclear exchange, we jumped in with both feet, believe me, and were all over both countries about, "Don't do this. Don't go this far." And they backed off. But Putin, or someone in the Russian complex, picked up on that new approach and it's the one Putin is using now. He's basically saying, "I'm having a conventional war here and don't you dare introduce nuclear weapons or I will. In fact, if you defeat me, I may introduce nuclear weapons. Screw you. I'm gonna use my nukes as a backup." That's new and it's terrifying because it's a totally different kind of deterrence-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:29:40 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:29:40 ... that risks going too far too fast to be able to know what's going on.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:29:46 And in some sense, he is calling our bluff in that... Or at least I hope he is because I hope the government... Uh, I mean, obviously they- you shouldn't say this, but hopefully the government would not respond to a tactical nuke used in Ukraine by annihila- you know, uh, getting the US annihilated in return.

Richard Rhodes 1:30:03 I don't think we would respond to it with a full-scale nuclear attack-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:30:07 Right.

Richard Rhodes 1:30:08 ... but I do think we would respond with some level of possibly nuclear exchange with Russia.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:30:18 Wow.

Richard Rhodes 1:30:18 And I think, or maybe just with that part of Russia, I don't know. We've long had a policy called decapitation.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:30:25 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:30:26 We long ago target- targeted the individual apartments and dachas of this Russian leadership with individual warheads. I mean, in-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:30:36 (laughs)

Richard Rhodes 1:30:37 ... in the window at high noon because they were- they were very accurate now and they're totally stealthy, if you're thinking about uh- uh- cruise missiles.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:30:48 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:30:49 We can put one in someone's window and it's a nuclear warhead and not just a high explosive. So they've known that for a long time. That doesn't give anybody time to get into the bomb shelter. I mean, this has gotten really very hairy.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:31:03 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:31:03 Used to be pretty straightforward. Don't bomb us and we'll bomb you. Attack on some peripheral country and we won't bomb you because you might bomb us.... we'll lose that little war, but we'll come in somewhere else. All of these things, that's complicated enough. But now we're talking about this other level.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:31:23 So in some sense, this idea that we can backstop, uh, conventional power with... You know, the Soviets had millions of men in their army after the... after World War II stationed in Eastern Europe. What was it, like three million people in the Red Army or something?

Richard Rhodes 1:31:40 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:31:40 And we said... We didn't have the troops remaining in, um, Western Europe, but we said, "Listen, if you invade Western Europe, we'll respond with a nuclear attack." And so, I mean, I guess that worked. It, it does seem-

Richard Rhodes 1:31:51 That worked until August 1949 when the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:31:57 Right.

Richard Rhodes 1:31:58 And that's when panic hit Washington. And the whole debate went on about, "Do we build hydrogen bombs?" And ultimately, the military prevailed and Truman signed on and, and Klaus Fuchs was outed and there was this whole knowledge that the Russians knew a lot, because Fuchs knew our early work on hydrogen weapons-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:32:18 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:32:18 ... before the end of the war. We were exploring the possibility. All of that came together to- with a kind of a, a terrible moment when, when the, the Teller side prevailed and we said, "Let's build bigger bombs," as if that would somehow... But there had been a balance of forces, you're quite right.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:32:38 Yeah.

Richard Rhodes 1:32:38 They had two million men on the ground in Europe, we had the bomb. And then the balance