that you could and I think that it's also important that we highlight some of the potential of humanity.So I did put in the movie you know this connectedness that's led to the atomic bomb and all this news, but we didn't blow ourselves up and we could've.And I ultimately believe in the human species.I believe we're moving the needle forward.The fact that I'ma woman director up here right now means that women's rights happened that meant so many things had to happen for me to be sitting here.I'm a Jew, my family almost died, you
I had never, ever created a work of this size or pages at the rate that were now required. the atomic bomb became the norm.
them and certainly not the people um we're born of the Manhattan project of the atomic bomb before them then they perhaps had a different name but they really didn't exist because this idea of secrecy came into being um with the Manhattan Project and the interesting
In August '39, Einstein would write his famous, letter together with Leo Szilard, asking President Roosevelt to develop the atomic bomb . And the Manhattan Project basically got underway in October '39.
to 20 integer variables. If you can't solve atomic bomb problems with 20 integer variables, you're not good enough to program the ENIAC. OK. That's a little overstated, but you kind of get the idea.
This is ironic because nowadays many people associate Einstein with the atomic bomb . The real guy behind the atomic bomb is this guy that essentially nobody knows. Szilard spent all the final years of his life fighting for pacifism in the world.
And so we have a physicist at UCLA named David Saltzburg, who is incredible, and there's a nuclear historian named Alex Wellerstein, who writes exclusively about issues of secrecy and the atomic bomb , and does it really brilliantly. So he helps keep us honest, too.
dullest scientific instruments ever invented but it's also perhaps the most important, because it allowed scientists to study matter on a, on an atomic level. So, it analyzed, they used it in developing the atomic bomb they isolated isotopes, and all that fun stuff. But food companies really took to it after the war because it was a fantastic way for them to look at, one good example was Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is always very sort of jealously
And obviously, there are a lot of things that are very different from the 1960s to now. Also, because the atomic bomb really does mark a fissure in what science is known to be capable of and how people in society think about science.
you're like I just figured out how I should have done the scene that I just shot like that's the feeling that I get with a World War I where the Germans have the atomic bomb and Lex Luther is the Secretary of State and out of that I
When Szilard and Teller came to visit Einstein in Princeton, and they told him chain reaction, atomic bomb , his answer was, ah, I had never thought about this. This is ironic because nowadays many people associate Einstein with the atomic bomb . The real guy behind the atomic bomb is this guy that essentially nobody knows.
force in the universe, right? They had just figured out how to make an atomic bomb . Nobody even knew that that research was going on, and then suddenly they did it.
efforts that I showed the funding levels for. The moonshot, the atomic bomb , and the Joint Strike Fighter. And it's certainly clear that there are some problems that government has to solve, if they're
Well, "Right of Boom" is about what happens after a bomb goes off. And the kind of bomb that my book is focused on is an atomic bomb . The book is fundamentally about a question.
And I wonder if the North Korean officials that made the decision to provide this kind of assistance before 2007 believed at that time that they would be held accountable if their actions resulted in the proliferation of the atomic bomb , and even to a non-state actor. I also wonder about less direct forms of assistance, say the failure of a government official in a friendly country like France or Japan, to allocate sufficient funding
And the people of England and the world did not know that he helped to win World War II. In America, we celebrated the people at Alamogordo that built the atomic bomb . But in England, Alan Turing was a complete unknown.
covered with Jackson Pollocks. If you can imagine that, it was like walking into an atomic bomb . It was so unbelievably powerful.
Compare that three suns' worth of mass with about a gram converted into energy for the first atomic bomb , five pounds
So by 1945, '46 people began knowing who Einstein was because of the atomic bomb .
All he was getting was a series of rejections, one after the other. And people are going around saying, this is more important than the atomic bomb .
So I would love to know-- this is to Sam. What made you go, I want to make a show about making the atomic bomb . First off, thanks for having us.
For example, when the decision was made to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, scientists wondered whether or not they should have it explode when it hit the ground.
Because if you look at, for example, the atomic bomb , a lot of things that they've been reproached to Oppenheimer is the fact that he
He's working at the Sandia National Laboratory, which is a place where originally the atomic bomb was created.
And so we've gone from a world of three no's-- Graham Allison's framework-- to three yes's. And when thinking about the three yes's, it's worth keeping in mind that the atomic bomb is 1940s technology. And there are real limits to what can be done to prevent the proliferation of 1940s technology.
- Exactly, so ,of course, Oppenheimer, now known as the father of the atomic bomb , he talks about destroyers of worlds,
and human nature. Like, a main focus of the novel is the race to create the atomic bomb , a 20th-century technology that changed our world forever.
But at the time, there wasn't many of us that had read that whole big book and were thinking about what that had really meant for science. And I think it's really unhelpful that a lot of people in AI talk about AI and the atomic bomb in the same space.
Heat generation, leakage will kill Silicon Valley. So Richard Feynman, after World War II-- he was one of the people who helped to build the atomic bomb -- said, we have to go beyond digital computers. Mother Nature does not use digital.
It's a patch in the desert in New Mexico, where on July 16, 1945, at 5:30 AM local time, the first atomic bomb was tested.
Can one have too much light, as with the biggest flash of all, that of the atomic bomb ?
There is a famous letter which Einstein sent to Roosevelt, which was the start, but the letter actually was written-- the draft was written by Szilard. When Szilard and Teller came to visit Einstein in Princeton, and they told him chain reaction, atomic bomb , his answer was, ah, I had never thought about this. This is ironic because nowadays many people associate Einstein with the atomic bomb .
He does it very well. He does. How do you strike a balance between incorporating the obviously real world events and characters-- like you can't have a show about the atomic bomb without Oppenheimer. How do you strike a balance between that and then exploring this universe that you guys have also created, because it's a fictionalization of the history
lost in the fog of the work, and I think that was very much the experience of a lot of people who worked on the bomb. So the thing to me that is most exciting about this second season, besides the fact that we've talked about an atomic bomb for a while and we might actually get to see one this year, is the journey that Frank-- that John Benjamin Hickey takes Frank on over the course of the season, which