Richard Rhodes: commitment

Transcript context

…Speaking of elder statesmen, by the way. Who, since the development of the nuclear bomb, has been the wisest political leader, not necessarily the U.S. and not even necessarily as a leader of state, but contributed most to the stability and peace? It depends on what period you're talking about. There's no question that Oppenheimer's advice to the government after the war was really good. I don't think anyone except the Oppenheimer committee, the Acheson-Lilienthal Committee, has ever found a better way of thinking about eliminating nuclear weapons in a world that understands how to build them. And that really was Oppenheimer. I don't mean he deluded anybody. He just led them straight down the path. All these engineers and industrialists who were on the committee with him, skeptical men, men who wouldn't have been easily convinced of anything, but he convinced them this was the right way to go. So he, up until he was forced out of government because he made the mistake of not supporting the Air Force's favorite bomb, and they found a way to destroy him basically, and they did destroy him. I talked to one of the scientists who was his closest friend, and he said Robert was never the same after the security hearing in 1954. He was one of [unclear]’s smiling public men after that. It really devastated him. That basic insecurity he had as a Jew in America all the way from childhood, haunted him, and he became the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, and he wrote a lot of nice essays. But I don't know. The leader that I've fallen into more and more is Niels Bohr. He tried to figure out a way to bring the openness of science into a world without nuclear weapons. He and Robbie taught Oppenheimer the ideas that ended up in the Acheson-Lilienthal plan, and he and Robbie later, were the ones who started up the scientific laboratory in Geneva that is now CERN where they built these new giant colliders. With the idea in mind that at the very least if the scientists have devastated Europe, we remember what things were like for the former Soviet Union. People were living on crusts of bread and bags of old potatoes. They really were. And particularly people who worked for the government because their pensions weren't worth anything. That's what I saw when I went back there in the spring of ‘92 after the place collapsed. The money wasn't worth anything. Their salaries weren't being paid. In the midst of all of that, Europe needed something to sustain it. And of course, there was the Marshall Plan, and that was absolutely amazing. And the help it gave to Europe when it needed it most. But Bohr wanted to make sure, and Robbie wanted to make sure, that the scientists of Europe were tapped to go off somewhere and build nuclear weapons. And they invented this international laboratory in Geneva, which is still a thriving enterprise, where they could do basic physics and where they'd be paid for their work and could do the kind of exciting thing that good science is without having to drift over into the dark side of the whole thing. Let's face it, it more or less worked. The French had to have the bomb, you know, because they're French. They need their lovers, they need their bombs.…

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