"The Manhattan project" was 6,000 or 7,000 people
living in this really peculiar city,
in the middle of a desert, who had no idea what
the purpose of the city was. The greatest long shot gamble
in the history of science. The race to build the world's
first atomic weapon. The most destructive weapon
- ever conceived by humankind. - You used to be able
to make a mistake, and 5,000 people could die.
Now, you can make a mistake, and you can destroy the planet.
There were broken marriages. There were affairs.
- There were security lapses. - It's really a story
about secrets and secrecy, and what secrets do
to a marriage, what secrets do to families,
to friendships.
Germany was probably better poised than any
other country in the world to build a nuclear weapon.
That's a horrifying thought.
Einstein and a couple
of other scientists
wrote a letter to Roosevelt,
saying, "the germane have
"the capability to do this."
"The Manhattan project"
was the American effort
to build an atomic bomb,
as quickly as possible,
during World War II.
They built it in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
You had this secret place in the middle of nowhere,
and brought all of these physicists
- from around the world. - Where is everybody goin'?
- P.O. box 1663. - But what's the place called?
It ain't. No name, no street signs.
Welcome to nowhere.
They were getting the best
minds available to them and,
often, not telling them what
they were coming here to do.
It really was
an international project.
We had many scientists here
who were continental refugees
that had been forced to
leave their homes because
of what the germane were doing.
Germany did have spies.
The Soviets did have spies.
That was why Los Alamos
was sited, uh,
in northern New Mexico.
It was to keep it
physically isolated,
to protect the secret
that we were working on
the atomic bomb.
My father was a chemist.
He's an expert
on high explosives.
One of the things you never
knew at Los Alamos, exactly,
was what your father did.
The scientists, it seems,
were told not to
tell their wives.
Whatever it is, Frank, you can tell me.
- I can't. - Because the women didn't
know what their husbands were building, their husbands
couldn't go to them for emotional support.
It's really a story about secrets and secrecy,
and, uh, what secrets do to a marriage,
what secrets do to families, in a democracy.
It's just almost impossible
to fathom that there was
a moment in the recent
life of this country
when a secret of this scale
was kept from the populous.
I mean, it was a $2 billion
project, at a time when
a billion dollars meant something very different
from what it means right now, and the vice president of
the United States of America had no idea that it existed.
We believe a member of your group is stealing secrets.
- Get out. - Dr. Winter, G-2 has
- credible intelligence. - They haven't even told you
what you're doing here, have they?
Do you have any idea what you are looking at?
Sir, we're not here to debate science.
That's not science. Our work is so classified,
the vice president doesn't know we exist.
As far as he's concerned, "the Manhattan project's"
a leaky tunnel on the I.R.T. And yet, you're gonna
stand there, sergeant first class,
with your J-3 security clearance,
and you're gonna talk to me about protocol?
You could be court-martialed for just opening that file.
The stakes of the mission for these physicists
who were working in this place and their families, who were
making huge sacrifices, uh, to be there, um,
they couldn't possibly have been higher.
The fate of Western civilization hung in the balance.
We need to make this.
This has to get done.
This can stop the war.
This can stop whatever
the body count per day was.
American soldiers, Japanese soldiers,
civilians, germans. I mean, the-the bodies
were just piling up. A hundred American kids
have been buried since the last time
we walked through that gate. By tomorrow morning,
there'll be 100 more. And you want me to slow down?
We've all experienced
the death of a loved one,
a family member, a friend.
Uh, a million deaths
is a statistic.
There's no way to understand what that's like.
Yet, that's what the leaders of the allies and the axis,
for that matter, were experiencing
on a regular basis when they were fighting
World War II. And really,
fundamental to all that, was a question of freedom.
It was a-a war for freedom. The scientists and their
families traded away a huge amount of freedom,
in order to live in this place and participate in this project.
I mean, they basically consented to move to a prison camp,
in the middle of a desert. I mean, they were surrounded
by barbed wire fences. They were policed by
armed military patrols. Uh, they weren't able to vote.
They had no telephones in their houses.
The children have head lice. They are reading our mail.
He's, uh, three years old. He couldn't barely
- read his name. - I mailed this yesterday.
A private letter from me to my father, and they
- made notes in the margins. - Who did?
I don't know who. Spies, the army... I don't know.
- Abigail? - This place, these people,
they are all crazy. We cannot-I will not stay here!
In a lot of ways, all of the freedoms that
we consider to be essential to American life
were kind of surrendered, in order for them
- to participate in the project. - Whoa... hey, whoa!
You can't just waltz into Oppenheimer's office
with some chicken scratches on a cocktail napkin.
Robert Oppenheimer is generally considered
the father of the atomic bomb. Robert Oppenheimer was born
around the turn of the century, in New York City,
and he was born into a fairly affluent family.
Fairly wealthy. You can imagine what
turn of the century New York was like... crowded, polluted.
And Oppenheimer was never a particularly strong young man.
And so, his family had the means to send him out
to the American west, where it's just the opposite.
Wide, open spaces, clean air, uh, beautiful terrain.
And so, he was familiar with Los Alamos,
and he was actually the one who suggested it
as a potential location for the laboratory,
to general groves. Oppenheimer said he wanted
the men to be happy, so he insisted that
they bring their families. My first memory
is Lamy train station. My mother and I
arrived in 1943. I was 18 months old.
And I was so frightened of the train or something,
and I was h-hugging my mother,
and I was frightened.
And then I saw my father,
who I hadn't seen
in three months,
and I was hugging him
with the other arm,
and I wouldn't let go
of either one of them.
My first job was to drive
a, uh, government car.
I met, uh, daily trains,
in Lamy,
and picked up the people that
were arriving for employment.
The interesting thing was
that it was all so secret,
that I couldn't meet these guys
by their real name.
They were given a code name, and those guys
couldn't remember it. (Chuckling)
You could not tell people exactly where you were.
Uh, you could tell them you were in New Mexico.
Um, your letters to and from, say, parents or grandparents,
uh, or-or husbands and wives, if they didn't live here,
uh, were censored. Uh, there was a P.O. box
that we used, and so everybody was at a P.O. box.
I had the sense, even as a young child,
of being rather confined. But they kept on having
tea parties and square dancing. The paradox at Los Alamos
was that it was here for one reason...
To build an atomic bomb. And so, the science
was very well funded. There really wasn't
any piece of equipment, uh, any person, uh, literally,
that could not be brought here on a moment's notice,
to fulfill the science part of the laboratory's mission.
Uh, living here, the-the actual day-to-day life,
buying groceries, uh, was a bit of a mixed bag.
The housing was inadequate. No streets were paved.
They hated the stoves, almost universally.
Everyone hated their stove. They ran out of water.
The water went out again. They better fix it
before tomorrow... July 4th. Frank, half the hill's
gonna be here, and you know how they like to drink.
They do this for free? You don't even
have to tip them? You could invite one of them
in for a glass of lemonade. I drive in circles
on palarita road just to get the car dirty again.
There's this talk of just everyone was having babies,
left and right. What else was there to do,
you know? Uh, the husbands were
trying not to think about what they were doing,
and everyone was just doin' it all over the place.
There were so many babies. Take off your nightgown.
- Charlie. - Joey's out cold.
He won't hear us.
General groves
had to basically say...
"Hand out condoms and go,
stop it."
"We-we don't have the facility
"to have this many babies being
"born in this environment."
And so, they had to conceal
what was actually going on
in here.
So, the birth certificates
for children born in Los Alamos during World War II don't say,
"place of birth: 'Los Alamos, New Mexico.'
They say, "place of birth: "P. O. Box 1663, Santa Fe,
"New Mexico," instead. So they had a security problem.
The other thing is, if you've got kids,
you need schools. And, of course,
you've got hundreds of the world's best scientists here.
You think that they're going to accept
- anything less than the best? - There are a lot of
native American women who, uh, were given to families
to help with children and chores, and, uh,
the Indian maids, you know, we referred to them as.
Um, but I don't think there were enough.
Especially since the families, at the time, grew so rapidly.
Indian families lived in the pueblos,
and they brought the maids up.
And the maids were...
They were darling.
Of course, they had never
seen a washing machine,
or running water, you know?
It was like they were
great babysitters.
They were wonderful.
The women formed clubs.
They helped each other.
I think there was a very
strong sense of community that,
we're here,
we're in it together,
and we're gonna figure it out.
Does it get any easier?
My father always said
that everything easy was hard,
first.
For most of these scientists,
whether it was
driven by patriotism,
driven by ego,
driven by just the idea that
I get to be part of this group,
it was a pretty
intoxicating environment.
For most of these scientists, whether it was
driven by patriotism, driven by ego,
driven by just the idea that I get to be part of this group,
it was a pretty intoxicating environment.
Unlimited amount of money. What they asked for, they got.
You're lookin' at the best-equipped lab
in the country. We've got two Van de Graaff
accelerators, and the finest computers money can buy.
Computers, this is the youngest buck who ever
won the Forbes prize. Say "hello" to Charlie Isaacs.
- Hi, Charlie. - Science is not science
without a free exchange of ideas between fellow scientists.
That is why Oppenheimer insisted on not militarizing
any of the scientists. Like, you will never see one
of the physicists in uniform. As soon as you rank us,
then you're putting us against each other.
That being said, there was enormous ego
and-and competition involved in this extraordinary
hotbed of-of invention, and I think people are
looking at each other saying, "okay, who's ahead of me?
"Who's got information " that I don't,
and how can I beat them?" "Oh, those guys came up
with this discovery." "Now, we gotta stay up
all night to have..." "Make our breakthrough."
Good, good, good. (Indistinct chatter)
I came upon the project
because we got Sam Shaw's
script as a writing sample.
Tommy wound up reading it,
and, uh, we sat down, and, uh,
I kinda fell in love
with the project,
and it's been this really
fantastic professional marriage
ever since.
I've stolen, borrowed, very liberally, from the lives
of physicists and their wives at Los Alamos.
Frank is the protagonist for our show.
He is an incredibly brilliant and also burdened guy.
- Nothing to worry about. - My character,
Dr. Frank Winter, theoretical nuclear physicist,
is based on two or three real life people.
Frank's mission
is to end the war.
He doesn't sleep.
He barely eats.
He never sees his family.
We need the bomb built yesterday.
I'm the father of this ragtag team of physicists,
in a race to build a stronger, faster, more efficient bomb.
Three months of work for the chance that we can
save the army one week. Somewhere in Germany,
Hitler's got a town just like this one.
Full of scientists hungrier than you.
That week we save, could be the week that matters.
He's still trying his best to hold on to this idea that,
the way he thinks the bomb should be built is not
the way that everybody else in this environment
is thinking the bomb should be made.
This was really cutting edge science.
Few people in the world really understood
the potential ramifications.
Fission is, essentially,
the-the splitting of an atom
and, in that process, uh,
tremendous amounts of energy
are released.
Both plutonium and uranium would be suitable
fissionable materials. It's gonna take a year
to produce enough plutonium to make Akley's bomb.
I don't think a lot of people realized
that there wasn't simply one, but there were two
entirely different types of nuclear weapons that were
developed here at Los Alamos. The first was
a gun-assembled device. You basically have one piece
of fissionable material. You fire it at another piece
of fissionable material to produce the chain reaction
and an atomic explosion. The experiments
in the spring of 1944 revealed that plutonium
would not work. So, this was a crisis
because they had spent hundreds of millions of dollars
trying to produce the material, and that is really
one of the lost stories of "the Manhattan project."
The real challenge is producing enough material.
So, give us the plutonium, if we can prove that
our design will work. It's the most valuable
substance on the planet. Behold, gentlemen,
one hundred and fifty micrograms of plutonium-239.
And so, the orders from Washington,
from general groves, were, basically, "look,
you find a way to make the plutonium work."
And so, they did, and they considered
a second type of assembly, which become known as implosion.
In an implosion-assembled device, you have this sphere,
a single piece of plutonium, surrounded by high explosives.
Son of a bitch. The high explosives detonate,
compress the material, and that's what makes
- the bomb go off. - We'll make a housewife
out of you yet, Liza Winter. Well, I look forward
- to that, rose. - Where's your husband?
I'm afraid that's above my security clearance.
I have to keep what I do secret from my wife.
Do you remember when I presented that paper
on the purple orchid? It can survive almost anywhere,
but it can't survive alone. Its got a partner.
If you cut off that communication,
the orchid just shuts down. Liza Winter is my wife,
played by just the most amazing actress,
Olivia Williams. I was so excited to
be able to work with her. Liza Winter is
the wife of Frank Winter, who's one of the leading
physicists in-in the story, and she is a doctor of botany.
While she is at Los Alamos,
she's not allowed to practice
her own, uh, her own work.
So, she's a slightly frustrated
wife and mother of Callie,
who is an extremely
recalcitrant 17-year-old.
So, I'm just supposed to
stay here in this prison camp?
Get knocked up by
one of the guards?
Oh, don't be vulgar.
They have a relationship
and a marriage that we don't
associate with the 1940's.
We don't associate
with the past.
They were very dedicated,
those women.
They were smart.
They were going to do
whatever it took.
(Explosion)
What was that?
You're gonna love it here.
Really.
I was excited about
playing Abby because,
during the war,
the roles of women
changed really drastically.
They were given jobs
and-and, uh-uh,
became a lot more important.
And I think the modern woman you see today,
- I think it really started here. - Think anyone heard
- of Galileo in 1590? - I bet Galileo knew
- how to read a roadmap. - Charlie and Abby Isaacs
are this young couple we find in this moment,
where they have this great, sexy, energetic dynamic.
We're about to take them on a ride.
Their marriage is gonna be subjected to a lot of tests.
Your husband told you something.
- Oh... - Well, don't hold out.
Every day, moral questions
get put aside
and get further away from you,
based on what you need
to protect your family,
and that's incredibly difficult.
The goal was not,
let's recreate Los Alamos.
We were trying to get
the emotional truth of what
it must've felt like
to be in this world.
These people were
in an environment
that they couldn't leave.
It felt temporary to them.
Everyone was a fish
out of water.
So, some people,
it was the time of their lives,
and some people, it wasn't.
My father told me
they were building a bomb.
I thought that was not
a very good idea because
bombs had been invented.
So I thought they might be on the wrong track,
and I was gonna help them find something scarier.
I thought maybe, like, you know, what we would say now,
Godzilla... a lizard that would grow big,
- or something really scary. - These women who came here,
who were little children here, we were walking around
the neighborhood and the tech area, and I was,
like... kept qualifying. You know, "we're not try"...
And they were like, "No. It feels exactly
what it felt like. It smells and feels like it."
And that's what we were really going for.
The set is
incredibly accurate.
The set is... I walked into
one of the little houses
when I came the first time.
Wow! When I see these green cabinets,
it reminds me of the time I walked into my parents'
kitchen at age four, and my mother was sobbing
with her friend. And I'd never seen
my mother cry, and I said... And Roosevelt had died,
so that was 1945. I was four.
And when I walked in and saw those green cabinets,
it was like, I was right back there
as a four-year-old. And here I am, you know, 72.
So, it's a long time ago, but it was as if
- no time had passed. - It's very hard for us,
from this point of view, looking back,
to understand how horrible that war was for people,
for the Jewish people, who had really seen
what Hitler was doing. And for just the whole country,
where your father, your brother, your husband,
your sweetheart were killed, in either Europe
or in the pacific. And there was a whole different
mindset than anything that, you know, we-we now have.
The overall feeling was, we went to war,
and it was a just war, and we all need to make
sacrifices for that war, and we'll do it.
That's something that... even my generation,
but certainly a generation younger than me,
that's a very hard concept. You know, the wars we've known,
whether it's Vietnam, or the Iraq war, or the...
You know, there's always been dissent.
And so, it's very hard to, sort of, put yourself
into that place.
Every day, moral questions
get put aside
and get further away from you,
based on what you need
to protect your family,
or protect, um, your nation, and that's incredibly difficult.
A bomb like that, um, gadget... the burn radius would be...
Miles wide. The gamma rays alone
- would be impossible to... - Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.
You can grow old and die writing white papers
on field quantization, a hundred savants
will read your work, maybe ten will understand it,
or you can join my team, and you can watch
the apple fall with Newton.
One weekend in July,
the women noticed that
a lot of husbands are
going away for the weekend,
and they're asking things like,
"pack me a couple sack lunches,
and I'll be back on Sunday."
A large number of wives
and other people managed to
go to the highest mountains
around here and be looking south
at exactly the same time
as the bomb went off.
The Trinity test was planned for the very early morning
hours of July 16th. One of the reasons that
the Trinity site was selected is because it never rains there.
"We won't have to worry about a storm."
Well, there was a tremendous thunderstorm
the morning of the Trinity test and they considered delaying it,
but the tensions were so high. Nobody had slept.
They decided that they really needed to try and conduct
the test, which they did.
My father was the only person
invited to see the Trinity test
who refused to go.
He was the only person,
in other words,
who had an invitation, who said,
"No, I don't wanna see it."
And I think it was because he had very mixed feelings.
At one time, he had been asked to do a calculation
about the likelihood that the first atomic explosion
would actually ignite the atmosphere,
and that would be the end of everything,
if that had happened. And he had done his thesis
on probability, uh, and he calculated that
it was one in ten-thousand. And that's not nothin',
you know? He didn't really think
that was gonna happen, but he had very mixed feelings
- about it. - This is, uh,
the-the only color picture on record of the Trinity shot.
I was wearing welder's goggles, and-and it had a crack in it,
and I saw that crack for a long time after.
Richard Rhodes said, uh, the historian, said,
"the atomic bombs" didn't win the war,
"but they ended it." And I think that, perhaps,
is the best justification I can think for using
atomic bombs is, they brought World War II
- to an end. - Many people were quite ill,
not so much at the Trinity test, but when the bomb
was dropped on Hiroshima. Many of the scientists
were physically ill at Los Alamos.
It was a-a-a very strong psychosomatic reaction.
They saw the bomb as something that we needed to develop
in case Hitler developed it. Ironically, Hitler never did
develop it, and it was used on Japan,
not on Germany. So, there was a lot of, sort of,
"Why did I come here?" "This isn't what I came for."
And I think the debate and the dialogue went on
for decades afterwards. I mean, I can remember
many conversations in my parents' living room
- with people who had been here. - They didn't find out 'til
after the bomb was dropped, and she said her mother
was just sick. Literally, was vomiting,
like, just sick for weeks, because they'd been there
for so long and had no idea. Um, and then to find out
that this whole thing... could you ever trust
- anyone again? - My mother never
reconciled herself to the purpose of this place.
We knew the world
would not be the same.
A few people laughed.
A few people cried. Most people were silent.
I remembered the line from the hindu scripture,
the "Bhagavad Gita."
Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that
he should do his duty. And, to impress him,
takes on his multi-armed form and says,
"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
It's very hard for us, while we're doing the show,
not to keep stepping out and saying, "you realize
what you're doing?" So, a character like Charlie,
who's a new character, can have that feeling.
But, I think what will be fascinating with the show,
which is what happens to all of us,
you start to realize, uh, how slowly we all
- can get contaminated. - This is, uh,
a moment in American life, uh, where questions
of military force, the ethics of the use
of military force, how we reckon with
weapons of mass destruction as a culture, uh,
how we reckon with secrets in a democracy.
You hear any of these words, you're gonna press this button,
and security will hop on the line.
It's fascinating. How quickly do you
get absorbed in it? How quickly do you forget
your moral barometer? That we all do.
What about the next war? What happens when
Stalin's got one? China?
- Shah of Iran? - The science is awe-inspiring
and history is really riveting, but what's exciting to me
about "Manhattan" is that, I think it has
a lot of light to shed on this particular moment
we're living in right now.
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