In episode 39, we talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist Kai Bird about the Christopher Nolan film OPPENHEIMER, based on the 2005 biography "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" co-authored by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. The conversation focuses on the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's formation and struggles before, during and after the top-secret Manhattan Project. In 1943, Oppenheimer assembled the greatest scientific minds of the time in Los Alamos, New Mexico to create the first atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project achieved that goal with the successful detonation of the atomic bomb, known as the Trinity Test. That success would change the course of history and humanity for all time.
CONTENT NOTE (LANGUAGE): at 53:15, the speaker quotes from President Harry Truman's 1945 handwritten diary (discovered by historians in the 1970s) where Truman writes about a cable from the "Jap Emperor."
TIME STAMPS
0:08 Podcast Intro
1:18 Oppenheimer Film and American Prometheus Biography
4:38 Kia Bird Biography and Books
6:15 Kia Bird reacts to OPPENHEIMER
8:28 A film faithful to the book
12:16 OPPENHEIMER as boost to American Prometheus
14:04 Bird and Sherwin Writing American Prometheus: A Great Collaboration
23:28 Synthesizing Quantum Physics OR Oppenheimer, "Not A Nerdy Scientist"
28:45 BREAK
29:22 Ethical Culture School: Philosophy and Science
32:53 Ethics of atomic bomb development for WW2
42:57 Decision to drop atomic bomb on Japan
50:20 Atomic bomb impacts on Los Alamos communities
52:36 Women, Science, and Oppenheimer
57:25 Oppenheimer as Mirror of the Present: Nuclear Weapons, McCarthyism, Arguing History
1:02:00 Lightning Round: Figuring Out My Own Time
1:05:16 Where to find OPPENHEIMER film and American Prometheus
1:06: 38 Subscribe, Share, Like Historical Drama w/The Boston Sisters
1:107:10 Disclaimer
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Download the TRANSCRIPT for Episode 39
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