From the archives: Robert Oppenheimer in 1965 on if the bomb was necessary

looking back now do you think that our country's use of the bomb was necessary I believe that the view which I learned from many but above all from General Marshall and from Colonel Stimson the Secretary of War The View that they had that we would have to fight our way to the main islands and that it would involve a Slaughter of Americans and Japanese on a massive scale was arrived at by then in good faith with regret and on the best evidence that they then had to that alternative I think the bomb was an enormous relief the ward started in 39. that seemed the death of tens of Millions that seen brutality and degradation which had no place in the middle of the 20th century and the ending of the war by this means certainly cruel was not undertaken lightly but I am not as of today confident that a better course was then open I have not a very good answer to this Dr Oppenheimer nevertheless with all the rationalization with all the inevitability of the decision that history demonstrates to us you and many like you who brought the bomb into being still seemed to suffer may I say from a bad conscience about it is that true sir uh well I don't want to speak for others because we're all different uh I I think when you play a meaningful part and bringing about the death of over a hundred thousand people and the injury of a comparable number you naturally don't think of that as with ease I believe we had a great cause to do this but I do not think that our consciences should be entirely easy at stepping out of the part of studying nature learning the truth about it to change the course of human history long ago I said once that in a crude sense which you know vulgarity and no humor could quite erase the physicists had known sin and I didn't mean by that the deaths that were caused as the result of our work I meant that we had known the sin of pride we had turned to effect in what proved to be a major way the course of man's history we had the pride of thinking we knew what was good for man and I do think it is left to mark on many of those who were responsibly engaged this is not the natural business of a scientist you know in the first days after Hiroshima you pointed out that the scientists who built the bomb had nurtured The Hope really the nuclear weapons as you put would lead to new patterns of behavior well why is that hope failed of realization well look I I think I may have said that then I think I wrote it recently I said two things new patterns of behavior and new institutions I think that when you remember the Manifest causes of conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States which have bedeviled us for 20 years and which are by no means in any conventional sense solved when you remember the ideological ferocity that animated the post-war communist Communists and that we see now in the Chinese unmuted form you think of the anti-communist ferocity with which we met this the notion that there is a telephone communication between the White House and the Kremlin to make sure that the rental misunderstandings is a damn new pattern of behavior I think it's something that almost without precedent uh in Wars which in conflicts which have such a total character as that between the Communists and the Free World has tended to have I think the the notion that the United States should be fixing up its its power to fight limited engagements on the ground and in the air with old-fashioned weapons that we hope were a little better than they used to be not as a step in conquering the world but as a step in giving a chance to think to pause to argue and to persuade before a holocaust that's a pattern that I believe is not familiar either when you think that for years the intellectuals of Russia were interested in France and the United Kingdom and the United States have gotten together to talk to each other about the problems of armament and the problems the application of Science and the problems of maintaining the peace this also is not quite something that is familiar the institutions are not there the patterns are faulty frail very vulnerable but there is a wind blowing Dr Oppenheimer from all that you have said it seems that when you contemplate the future it is more with hope than with pessimism uh well I or is that an oversimplification yes I've tried to talk about the hopeful things the unhopeful ones jump to everyone's mind will the Chinese change their views of human Destiny and of the relations between them and us before or after they have the power to make major nuclear war it's anybody's guess will the detonk between the Russians and the West survive the strains of this time will they survive what's going on in Asia today we don't know there are a hundred reasons for seeing no hope at all and I take it for granted that everybody can think of them without being reminded it's harder to think of anything on the other side than I have tried to say that however frail and however tentative and however limited they do exist and they look to me like a Bridgehead to a livable future but not without work

Channel: CBS News

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Id: AdtLxlttrHg

Length: 8min 13sec (493 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2023