In the weeks following the explosion of the first atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, profound questions were raised in Washington, in scientific communities, and in the media about a highly dangerous future in the new Nuclear Era. Was the use of the first bombs over heavily populated cities justified? Should the US build more powerful weapons, risking a nuclear arms race with the Soviets, or seek international controls? Would years of nuclear testing, and the most extreme secrecy measures in our history, be worth it? Was there any defense against a nuclear attack?
The stakes were indeed high. How the American public and policymakers answered those questions, or failed to, might establish a risky, costly, and unnerving path for future generations.
When Rand was assigned to Top Secret by Wallis (best known for producing Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon), she outlined her concept for the film at her home in the San Fernando Valley. She called it “a tribute to free enterprise.” The most significant aspect of the film was to shatter the image of a government-directed Manhattan Project, overseen by socialistic President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Instead, she would place individual volunteers and high achievers (such as Oppenheimer) at the center, along with industries (such as DuPont) that played a critical role. “If we take the greatest invention of man and do not draw from it the lesson it contains—that only free men could have achieved it—we deserve to have an atomic bomb dropped on our heads,” she advised. And “if anyone objects to our saying that, he does not deserve the name of a human being.”
Less than a week later, she would be grilling Oppenheimer.
Now teaching at Cal Tech in Pasadena, Oppenheimer was already raising concerns, publicly and privately, about building more powerful weapons that would spark a nuclear arms race with the Soviets. In an October 1945 meeting at the White House with President Harry S. Truman, who had ordered the bombs to be dropped over Japan, Oppenheimer expressed regrets, claiming he had “blood on [his] hands.” Truman, talking to an associate afterward, called his visitor a “crybaby scientist” and never met with him again.
Approached by MGM producers, Oppenheimer said he didn’t want to be distracted from his work, but for some reason agreed to suffer not one but two visits from Rand. Their second conversation yielded many more notes for her journal, where she wrote simply: “Tormented by something he can’t solve.”