Then, when the math proved it feasible, he dropped his resistance, admitting that it was too “technically sweet” not to develop. Oppenheimer opposed the H-bomb project, but not entirely for moral reasons. But many military officers and some scientists, foreseeing a possible war with Russia, pushed to build a hydrogen bomb, which would be 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II. Oppenheimer fell into a funk after the war, perhaps as a result of viewing footage of the atrocities that his bombs inflicted on tens of thousands of civilians. It points out, as well, that Oppenheimer served on the official commission that selected the bomb’s targets. (The debate over this question is still unsettled.) The film is clear on all of this. Oppenheimer urged his colleagues not to sign Szilard’s letter, saying such matters should be left to political leaders and endorsing the official view that if we didn’t drop the bomb, thousands of American soldiers would die in an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Some of the Manhattan Project’s scientists-including Szilard-petitioned Truman to drop the bomb on an unpopulated island as a demonstration of its power, giving the Japanese a chance to surrender before it was unleashed on their cities. But Japan fought on, so Truman-who became president after FDR died-shifted the plans to drop the bomb on Japan. As it happened, the Allied armies defeated the Nazis in the spring of 1945, before the German scientists succeeded.
Roosevelt instigated the Manhattan Project in 1942, after Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, two of the most prominent physicists of the day, wrote him a letter warning that German scientists had figured out how to split an atom, that they could turn this discovery into a very powerful bomb, and that we needed to beat them to it or risk losing the war.
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