Episode Details

Robert Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, then watched it destroy two Japanese cities and spent the rest of his life haunted by what he had created. When he opposed the hydrogen bomb on moral grounds, the government that had made him the most famous scientist in America stripped him of his security clearance in a humiliating public hearing.

This episode traces Oppenheimer from his privileged New York upbringing through the scientific triumph at Los Alamos, the moral crisis that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the McCarthyist security hearing that destroyed his career and broke his spirit.

• Oppenheimer's intellectual brilliance and the charisma that made him the leader of Los Alamos
• The Trinity test, Hiroshima, and the famous "I am become death" moment
• His opposition to the hydrogen bomb and the political enemies it created
• The 1954 security hearing that stripped his clearance and the belated 2022 exoneration