https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lxQoXsFuUTw
What do you think it was that Oppenheimer did wrong, fundamentally? I mean, I characterize his intellect as Luciferian, right? He’s reaching for a power that in principle, I don’t know if it should have been forever off limits. I have no idea how to adjudicate that, but you have a sense that Oppenheimer himself recognized that it wasn’t that he had too much faith in the comprehensiveness of his intellect, that he was too tempted by the power that was offered to him as a consequence of being developer of this immense weapon. Where do you think he went wrong? That’s key to the question of where science itself goes wrong. I should be clear. I haven’t watched the movie, but I read the book American Prometheus. I prefer books to movies. And the book makes it clear that what Oppenheimer got wrong was to flirt with communism. And that was wrong because it was the moment when he set aside his scientific judgment and drank at least some of the snake oil that the Soviet regime was successfully exporting in the 1930s. This was a terrible mistake that ultimately undermined his credibility and limited his power to steer the course of the nuclear race. What he got right was to develop a bomb that could end World War II without the need for a large scale conventional forces invasion of Japan, which would have cost untold numbers of American soldiers’ lives. And I think it’s very important to emphasize that if Oppenheimer had said to himself, I must be humble and resist the temptation to win this race. And of course, a number of physicists did take that view and refused to participate in the Manhattan Project. It might have been disastrous. I constantly try to remind people in the work I’ve done on the Second World War that the Axis powers, the totalitarian powers nearly won that war. And it took tremendous creativity by a whole range of scientists, not only Oppenheimer, but think of Turing, those cryptographers who did such a crucial job of making sure that the allied powers cracked the Axis powers codes. It took a huge effort to win that war. The critical thing, I think, comes from another secular Jewish intellect, Henry Kissinger, whose biography I’ve spent a large part of my career writing. In the 1950s and 60s, Kissinger, before he entered the realm of power, came up with the idea of the problem of conjecture. It’s an extremely important idea that should be communicated to any decision maker, whether they’re in the private sector or the public sector. And the problem of conjecture says that at any given moment when one must take a decision, there is a kind of asymmetry. And asymmetry arises from the fact that if you act, let’s say if you had acted in 1938 to prevent Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia, there would have been a cost. The war would have begun earlier. And even if you had successfully prevented a much larger war, the World War that broke out in 1939, you would have got no real gratitude for that. You get no payoffs for the averted catastrophe. Your preemptive action has a cost and that you’re held responsible for. The tempting thing, particularly in a democratic system, is to do nothing, hope for the best, because that has a low cost. And if disaster nevertheless happens, if you’re unlucky, then you say to yourself, well, anybody in my position would have made the same error. So the cost of preemption’s high and you have to take a decision conjecturally because you can’t know that in acting in 1938, you avert a much larger and more dangerous war. You cannot have that certainty. And there are no data that will tell you. So I think decision-making under uncertainty is the hardest thing of all, but it has to be done. And I think what I’ve learned from Kissinger is that you will be held responsible and judged very harshly for those actions you take. Even if they avert disaster, you won’t get thanked. Nobody ever will thank Henry Kissinger for avoiding World War III. Nobody will, I think, ever thank any statesman for avoiding calamity. They will only blame them for the actions that they took. And here’s the final point that Kissinger makes. Most choices in the realm of power are between evils. You just have to decide which is the greater and which is the lesser. There are very frequently no good options. I think that’s very clear today in the Middle East since we’re talking at a time of fresh disaster in that region. There are no good choices facing the Israeli government or even the government of the United States, but there’s no option to do nothing. I think that must be clear.