EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,068 words- 0:00 – 6:22
Oppenheimer movie
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(laughs)
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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?
- RRRichard Rhodes
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)
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(laughs)
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Wow.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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?
- RRRichard Rhodes
He had been during the 1930s.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- RRRichard Rhodes
... 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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- 6:22 – 29:10
Was the bomb inevitable?
- RRRichard Rhodes
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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?
- RRRichard Rhodes
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?"
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(laughs)
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yep.
- RRRichard Rhodes
So I think it would have happened, but maybe not so quickly.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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.
- RRRichard Rhodes
Of reactor?
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right. Um-
- RRRichard Rhodes
Yeah.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
... 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?
- RRRichard Rhodes
No.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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-
- RRRichard Rhodes
Yeah.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
... 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.
- RRRichard Rhodes
(laughs) Oh, wonderful.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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.
- RRRichard Rhodes
(laughs) We, uh, we must later on talk about unintended consequences.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yes.
- RRRichard Rhodes
I find the subject absolutely fascinating.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
I think my next book might be called Unintended Consequences.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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"?
- RRRichard Rhodes
Uh, there was only one, Joseph Rotblat.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- 29:10 – 49:44
Firebombing vs nuclear vs hydrogen bombs
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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?
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
So that- that's not the heat, that's just the light?
- RRRichard Rhodes
That's the light.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Wow.
- RRRichard Rhodes
Yeah. Well, light and heat, 10,000 degrees.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
Radiant light, radiant heat.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- RRRichard Rhodes
... and burn everything between the epicenter of the weapon and the Beltway. All organic matter would be totally burned out, leaving-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
... leaving nothing but-but-but, uh, mineral matter basically.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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.
- RRRichard Rhodes
Right.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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?
- RRRichard Rhodes
Right.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
They, they kept the uranium-
- RRRichard Rhodes
Right.
- 49:44 – 1:08:24
Stalin & the Soviet program
- DPDwarkesh Patel
how, how much longer would it have taken the Soviets to develop the bomb if they didn't have any spies?
- RRRichard Rhodes
Probably not any longer.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Really? You don't-
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(laughs)
- RRRichard Rhodes
They really, you know, they had government pensions and the money was worthless all of a sudden.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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.
- RRRichard Rhodes
I don't know. The, the Russian mind? I don't know.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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)
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(laughs)
- RRRichard Rhodes
Which is what we did in Los Alamos.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right.
- RRRichard Rhodes
(laughs) We had guys come in who really knew their math, and they would sit there and work it out by hand.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(laughs)
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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?
- RRRichard Rhodes
There was some effort by countries in the Middle East-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
... to get hold of the enriched uranium-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
... 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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Oh.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(laughs)
- RRRichard Rhodes
They didn't want to be captured by the Soviets.
- 1:08:24 – 1:33:12
Deterrence, disarmament, North Korea, Taiwan
- RRRichard Rhodes
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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"?
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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?
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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-
- RRRichard Rhodes
Not to develop. Presumably, we would have developed.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Ah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
And everybody would have developed anyway.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Okay.
- RRRichard Rhodes
But rather to not have... I mean, I think of this, another way to think of this is, is as delayed delivery times.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
... 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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm.
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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-
- RRRichard Rhodes
All.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Really? Okay. The, the, North Korea doesn't have a secret?
- RRRichard Rhodes
They're allowed to, they're allowed to inspect anywhere without having to ask the government for permission.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
But not, presumably not like North Korea or something, right?
- RRRichard Rhodes
North Korea's an exception.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- RRRichard Rhodes
But we keep pretty good track of North Korea, (laughs) needless to say.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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?
- RRRichard Rhodes
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.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
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."
- RRRichard Rhodes
Or to- or they just decide to align with China-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
Episode duration: 2:37:36
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