Hacker Cinema
The Day After Trinity
1980 · Film · documentary · 89 min
Directed by Jon Else
Through interviews with Manhattan Project scientists and newly declassified archival footage, this documentary examines the life of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his leadership of the Manhattan Project. The film traces the development and testing of the first atomic bomb and follows Oppenheimer’s later opposition to nuclear proliferation during the early years of the Cold War.
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9 comments on Hacker News
There is also an excellent documentary called The Day After Trinity. It is IMO well balanced and has interviews with a lot of the physicists who actually worked with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, and a few who went to Japan after the blasts to document the aftermath.
It is on the Archive: https://archive.org/details/thedayaftertrinity/thedayaftertrinityreel1.mov
Also worth mentioning is the BBC podcast The Bomb:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08llv8n/episodes/downloads
I took my own advice. The credits for the film The Day After Trinity (1981) mention NBC which my fuzzy memory told me was the original interviewer. Further digging led me to this source:
https://www.historyvshollywood.com/video/robert-oppenheimer-atomic-bomb-quote/
which claims the interview was aired on NBC television in 1965.
I don't have a definitive answer, but for a clue, my fuzzy memory seems to recall that it was recorded in an interview in the 50's, sometime after Oppenheimer lost his clearance. The clip appears in the film The Day After Trinity, so there may be some indication in the credits about the source or when that clip was filmed.
> Sure, Oppenheimer was a great physicist. But was he as good as, e.g. Teller, Fermi, Feynman, Szilard, Von Neumann, etc? No, he was not.
In the documentary The Day After Trinity there’s an interview with physicist Hans Albrecht Bethe who worked on the Manhattan project and later won a Nobel prize. Oppenheimer’s cognitive abilities are briefly discussed, and Bethe says something like “It quickly became obvious that he was intellectually superior to us.”
It’s also noteworthy that Oppenheimer learnt Sanskrit, just so that he could read Bhagavad Gita in the original language.
So I think he could hold his own, even against those other geniuses.
For anyone looking for a documentary on the Manhattan Project, I'd highly highly recommend The Day After Trinity, a documentary by Jon Else with a bunch of interviews of the original participants (it was made in 1980). Really fantastic look at the personalities behind all the science.
Related: the excellent 1981 documentary The Day After Trinity has interviews with many of these scientists.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm5fCxXnK7Y
"Day After Trinity" is also a fantastic documentary in this area! It spends a lot of time on Oppenheimer's character and has interviews with a bunch of his former colleagues.
> Does anyone know any other documentaries about this topic? It's a fascinating event to study.
"The Day After Trinity" (1981) is a really, really good documentary on the Manhattan Project. I like that it goes in depth about the characters involved, too -- Oppenheimer was a fascinating person.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080594/
Pardon the longer quote, but I want to comment on this -
Rather than trying to understand both sides of the issue and make the “right” decision, Hellman said that in the heat of the controversy, he listened to his ego instead.
It was not until Hellman watched Day After Trinity, a documentary about the development of the atomic bomb, that he realized how dangerous his decision- making process had been. The moment in the film that troubled him most, he recalled, was when the Manhattan Project scientists tried to explain why they continued to work on the bomb after Hitler had been defeated and the threat of a German atom bomb had disappeared. The scientists “had figured out what they wanted to do and had then come up with a rationalization for doing it, rather than figuring out the right thing to do and doing it whether or not it was what they wanted to do."
This attitude - screw the consequences, let's just scratch my curiosity itch - is extremely common in tech circles. Cryptonomicon did a good job presenting this issue in a highly digested form - that is when the Avi character is setting up a data haven for all the good reasons and the only people that show up for the (funding) presentation are the criminals and rogue government agents. I was messing with anonymous private p2p systems at the time when the book came out and it was frankly a shock to read, because somehow it was an obvious angle that I never considered at all. I was just engineering stuff because it was really interesting, but never did I consider the consequences of actual application. Realizing that there's an ethical component to every technical project was quite an eye-opener and it had profound effect on how was viewing projects ever since. Perhaps it's obvious to some or a non-issue to others, but then perhaps there are those here who can relate...