i been here in one hundred thirty nine i'm not that old i probably i don't do not believe i would have had more wisdom than einstein einstein was not only a great physicist he was a great man and a very thoughtful social justice and peace activist and he wrote this letter you signed a letter actually drafted by many jews from europe they look to hitler and they were quite alarmed after fission was discovered and you know that history so i won't dwell on it but i personally i just want to tell you  i don't think i would i had more moral vision than he did he regretted it after the war he regretted having written that letter and come to that toward the end of my talk but and then i hope that i would have had the courage of the greatest scientists in the manhattan project and in my lights the greatest scientists in the manhattan project germany did not have a viable bomb project and so there was no threat from hitler and he felt his job was done and he quit but he was the only one and so you don't know whether you have the moral courage but it tells you what i wish for myself all  i don't want to start the story at pearl harbor because normally it does i want to make a bigger argument so i want to get out of this ritual of both for us who want to see nuclear disarmament and i'm completely with you on that and have worked for nuclear disarmament for quite a long time and i also want specially here los alamos scientist to get out of their rituals and the broader society to get out of their ritual so history did not start with pearl harbor so you have to ask was the fleet base there since the u s conquered hawaii what was the u s doing in hawaii and when did the fleet go there it turns out that the fleet went there in one thousand nine hundred forty it was actually based in san diego so that's one sort of pretty big question the anterior question is why did the japanese bombed pearl harbor and did it have a relation to the fleet being there and having been sent there and what were these two powers doing dueling each other they were doing a kind of a complicated dance for fifty years or so after the meiji restoration so a brief history after the meiji restoration in the mid nineteenth century in japan they looked they started looking out to the world and their eyes fell on a fellow island nation half way around the world which had occupied my country where i come from and they thought this is a pretty good deal you can get raw materials and cheap labor from others and like britain actually has more resources or had more resources than japan and britain had quite a lot of coal and they could actually fuel their fleet japan does not have significant raw material and fuel resources and the early project of the japanese imperialists was of course conquest like all imperialists in those days and we captured korea they raise war on russia they won and at that point they were recognised as a global power by the west they were big boys they made an alliance with the british the anglo japanese alliance they were actually allies of the british in world war one some of you may not know that and some of their ambitions were just as violent i was going to show you pictures but they are really too violent i was going to show you pictures of japanese imperial violence of british imperial violence of the nazi violence and the nazi violence was also it was the outgrowth of a pathological state that had lost its imperial colonies and was seeking to reestablish them that's how i understand them and the whole rightward drift of imperialist powers when ill gotten resources the the united states of course had reached the limit of the continental shores in that same period and here's a speech that senator albert alfred beverage made a small excerpt of it i recommend you go to the web and read the whole are ours for ever you know there's just after the us spanish war territory belonging to the united states as the constitution call them and just beyond the philippines are china's illimitable markets we will not renounce our part in the mission of our race trustee under god of the civilization of the world and it goes on you please focus on that last phrase civilization of the world it will come back in the nuclear prompted of course churchill was occupying the britain represented by their very brave prime minister and churchill is a hero rightly to the british for having saved the british from the nazis i completely acknowledge that but he also did a few other things he was the between eight hundred sixty and nineteen twenty there were many many famines in india of course usually there were some meterological causes but india was a major food exporter to any irish americans here so you will understand this best that during these times of shortage british continue to export food and if you see the pictures it will remind you of another holocaust more recent estimated by an american researcher who published the pictures and let me actually use them there on our during world war two and he refused to let his british people who said you have to declare famine and we will do famine relief no he wanted all resources directed to work the british war effort even in india and here's a couple of quotes from somebody who is a legitimate lee he wrote to the british which i know but fortunately not a hero to me i have not become the king's first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the british empire so this will also come back and many atrocities and so on but there were other imperial powers involved in china the united states did not like this they began to put more and more pressure on tensions that already been rising i think the japanese alliance was ended in one thousand nine hundred twenty three you might research my dates before requoting them but i think that correct the nine so they're more and more pressure japan of course completely dependent on foreign resources is by now about a very big war machine it's got a big war on its hands and china it needs fuel it needs rubber it needs raw materials otherwise it cannot sustain this imperial enterprise as the tensions rise the us is pushing us is not yet in the war americans were very much against getting into the war in one thousand nine hundred eighty roosevelt actually did not want to make too much of a point that he really would wanted the americans to get into the war there was already the lend leas program and the sharing of secret technology with the british and so on there was a lot going on they were defacto allies of the british in the roosevelt administration but he ran for election more a and after elections it was more and more pressure on the japanese the fleet was moved to pearl harbor in one thousand nine hundred forty actually i believe it was may or june and the admiral in charge of the fleet admiral kimmel said in february not a quote that he felt this was a very vulnerable position for the u s to meet his opinion was shared by many military people it was not a surprise that pearl harbor should be a target even though the date of the attack might have been a surprise pearl harbor was known to be vulnerable and the fleet was moved despite that so what was the fleet doing there the fleet the pacific ocean for forty years had been a lake of competition between specially between the u s and japan but with britain being a big player because you know the british empire and sun never sets on all that you've heard that the british of course were all the way up to as it was called then malaysia today and the french were eastward of that in in vietnam imposed an oil embargo on japan so now japan the japanese imperialists i should say were stuck either they would have to give up the war or they would have to go conquer someplace that had oil does anybody know what that place would be indonesia you're cheating we've talked about this indonesia now consider indonesia it's very surreal so indonesia at that time was a colony of the dutch and the dutch at that time were occupied by hitler and americans had position the fleet to interdict the japanese from going to get indonesian oil and the japanese wanted indonesian oil did anybody think about the indonesians ok so i'm trying to open up the dialogue we are i'll tell you a personal vignette about ten years ago the international criminal court treaty came into effect i wasn't planning on saying this but  i was in the un on that day when the sixtieth signature was deposited and i was actually in that room and i thought it's a hopeful day when in theory at least still to be given some muscle that the poorest president woman can be equal before a court of law with a sitting president of a country in theory we have the instrument just like nuremberg you know victory for justice in theory we have the precedent good so the japanese did not want japanese imperialists did not want to give up their imperial enterprise and they had no other sure way of getting at japanese  indonesian oil and holding it other than getting the us fleet out of the way now you know a lot more about pearl harbor and what the us fleet was doing there and why the japanese bombed it now it can move  so it was not a sneak attack in the sense that it was not known pearl harbor you know this innocent fleet was sitting there and some kind of crazy militar to irrational violence came and bombed the fleet and killed more than two thousand american sailors and more than two thousand american sailors it was a surprise attack to them they had they did not know it was coming i can go on more there's a lot bigger history i'm not a scholar in it so i won't go on but i can tell you that the us did break the japanese cold and they were in possession of quite a lot of knowledge about what japan was doing who all were in possession of what when this i will let you research because i have finished my research myself and you can let me know anyway so and the war churchill is totally relieved he really really wanted the us to enter the war and roosevelt was with him he also wanted to enter the war you could say this was a good or bad thing you know hitler was a terrible and the japanese so the jap let's be clear the japanese militarists were violent imperialist murders they committed atrocities that killed millions of people we cannot have a discussion about nuclear disarmament if we do not understand world war two because we will never understand hiroshima if we are not courageous enough we cannot be afraid to say i as a nation have absolutely no problem the japanese actually had a little bit of connection with that famine and bang all because they were all the way into burma i won't go into the connection and leave that as a question for you there's a book by i forgot her first name but her last name is mukherjee well church church and secret war abo i'm really wanted american help at that time the soviet union had already been attacked so let me set a little bit more of the stage until the first decision to target union are no longer you know in this non war state at the time of pearl harbor they've already been fighting for six months so the soviet union the united states and britain become allies france is in that position there's some resistance de gaulle i think i don't know when the goal was it was in london but mainly britain u s and soviet union became our allies from that time on now the united states already had a communist posture as did britain they really did not want the soviet union in europe general marshall who was the chairman of the joint chiefs i don't know joint chiefs was called that then anyway he was the head of the us armed forces  he recommended as did most other senior military officials and i believe with them i have some text in that regard that the us should invade europe hundred two i believe that suggested date was september churchill did not like he did he wanted to make sure this was canal was open remember the quote i read to you i promise you this is all connected my wife thinks i go on with stories but she also recognizes after thirty eight years of marriage that it is ok and sometimes it takes longer  so he insisted that the north african campaign be conducted first nineteen forty three it was the same thing meanwhile stalin and the soviet union are fighting the bulk of the war stalin asking for help he went so far as to tell the british that if you can't invade europe from the west at least send some troops you can come and fight on soviet soil he was inviting british troops to go and partly occupy soviet soil to come and fight and churchill said no divisions when the d day landings took place and the germans had eighty one divisions in the west on the western front the soviets were fighting two hundred  fifty divisions of which i believe one hundred eighty odd were german divisions the rest were eastern europe romanian song so that was the situation now the bomb project has started now we can insert the bomb project into this canvas in on october ninth one thousand forty one one of our bush how many have heard of one of our bush this is sad because he is the principal architect of my story he was the head of no relation to the later bush's so far as i know he was the head of the office he came from mit was an engineer electrical engineer i believe and great and a chemist and one of our bush was the head of the office of scientific research and development in roosevelt's white house he was in charge of the development of new technology for the war initially i think he was not very sympathetic to this thing that to that you know that hitler will get the bomb and he had one goal that the pentagon does not have enough scientific resources for the unite this is s should have more military muscle to be present as a dominant power on the world stage this is his goal he felt that i could be academic scientists should be brought into this enterprise academic physicists were nowhere in the military enterprise in this country they had been in britain from the royal society and physicists were very close from the birth of the royal society you can read  money small amount of money i don't remember the sum to do nuclear reactor research after fission was discovered this was in one hundred thirty nine that the money was offered the physicists found is really weird university this is that the government was offering them money and they refused this was not long ago by the end of nineteen forty or forty one i believe i only have fifteen minutes will you give me twenty to finish the story thank you after five minutes you can show me the sign again all right i'm not it will go fast no by nineteen forty or forty one i think half the physicists were already getting money from the office of scientific research and development had a pretty big budget this office bush didn't like the idea of the manhattan project it wasn't called that that because his goal was that academic scientists should not be seen as eggheads dreaming things for the next war but that they should develop things for this war he didn't think that fission bombs would make it he was finally convinced by people that this is serious we cannot let hitler get the bomb first so he signed on but it's my view and this is so less so you can develop your own view i invite you to do so and if you don't agree i would like to know but my view no i can tell you i will tell you where my research is softer than other places because not as widely supported that on october ni hundred forty one when bush this is two almost two months before pearl harbor no we have started them and what became the manhattan project when bush signed onto it the use of the bomb was already decided because his whole goal was that whatever he's going to spend a lot of money on has got to be used in this war fastforward project has started you know many of the details in there are easy to find an executive committee was established for the for the manhattan project do you know that not a single general responsible for world war who was roosevelt's liaison with the joint chiefs of staff with the with the generals in the pentagon and leahy worked in the white house he found out by accident when that's how admirably found out macarthur was informed by memo on july thirtieth i believe nineteen forty what do you think five july thirtieth  forty five that this bombing was going to take place he also had no clue i can the list is pretty long the people on this committee chair was one of our bush he had james caan and the two scientists they didn't let any of the other scientists know anything of what i'm going to tell you so they were supposed to be representing the scientists or sol the scientists may have thought groves of course who was the executive director of the manhattan project effectively and then there was another general was part of the construction side of things like gross general stier and those an admiral who was in charge of the new weapons in the pentagon there wasn't a single general there was no new year's all with what was going on in the war so nuclear weapons already detached from the war effort down on may fifth two thousand and twelve i wrote about it actually the told the mate mate this data better date than it is for you so far may fifth one thousand nine hundred forty three the military policy committee met to discuss review the progress of the project the last paragraph in the minutes relates to targeting and i believe it was the first targeting decision that was ever made here is the last sentence i think in that so they decided to de target germany they decided they were not going to target germany it wasn't because of race race had nothing to do with it so far as i can tell from this and other research race did not enter into the targeting it was a lot of racism against the japanese of course you know that we know that there were there were all the internment camps and so on but race did not the japanese were selected for targeting the court and they would not be so apt to secure knowledge from it in that the it refers to the bomb in case it is a dud so the whole reasoning was what happens if the bomb the japanese would not be so apt to secure knowledge from it as would the germans the germans and heisenberg it was not a racist thing it was a good evaluation good i can do it in fifty groves so from may fifth one hundred forty three to the bombing of japan germany was never targeted it was not there is no evidence to that fact churchill and roosevelt when they hundred forty four actually churchill said something like after mature consideration we might use the bomb against japan churchill did not so far as i know ever raise the question of the bomb being used in europe against germany when truman became president after roosevelt died truman did not as vice president did not know about the manhattan project in fact he has written a threatening letter as a senator that you're spending all this money in one hundred forty four so groves briefs the president in april twenty third i think one hundred forty five and he says tells the president that target is and was always expected to be japan i interview many of the leading scientists so this has been in the fine print so i was in the first to discover this these memos have been declassified he said been written about in the official a history of the war first in the one nine hundred sixty of the manhattan project but i i do think i can claim to be the first to see the significance of this that so i interviewed the scientists in an article i wrote for the bulletin of atomic scientists so i called up roberts or burr who worked with oppenheimer i called the rotblat i was i was privileged to know joe and i called up glen se they all believe the bomb was used in japan because the war was over too soon in germany they were surprised that germany had been d targeted in  rotblat decision assumes a greater significance but i think if you have contributed to the destruction of two cities how much curiosity should you have about what went into the decision this is an important question i would like to ask most all the most scientist so we know the sequence to the bombing of hiroshima now in nineteen forty four the united states is looking to the end of the war you could probably fix it so that everything produced here would be consumed here mark these words that would completely change our constitution our relations  property human liberty our very conception of law and nobody contemplates that therefore you must look to other markets and those markets are abroad there lawrence went there niels bohr went there he's one of the more most colorful characters in american history he told all his stocks in nineteen twenty eight he sold simpson stock for him too and save  his uncle's fortune and later on he bought them up on the cheap so he was a brilliant banker occupied a good bit of europe two hundred thousand to two hundred million people are in that part of europe we're going to lose those markets to socialism so he writes this long memorandum let's compromise with the japanese so that you don't enter the war in the east and occupy china and japan and we lose those markets too and so let's give up unconditional surrender and so let's give the japanese korea you know  throw something nice to the imperialist and give up on unconditional surrender and so the wall street will come out well and by the way i think half a million to a million lives would be saved because american soldiers wouldn't be forced to fight the war to the end so now you know where that number first came from so stimson sent this to general marshall and said give me your view of this general marshall sends it off to his general staff and they give him a view of this general's staff sent back a note saying we don't think we should give up on unconditional surrender and we think that the estimate of half a million lives saved by not invading japan is quote entirely too high ok general marshall forwards stimson policy is maintain come july nine hundred forty five the japanese are at the end of their rope their cities are being gropes cities are being firebomb their supplies are cut off their people are starving you know the  at least the japanese are wanting to surrender but they want their the japanese militarists this is the japanese when i say japanese i mean the japanese ruling class nobody consulted the public the japanese for the japanese ruling class bombings now they said emperor must stay this message was going made by the soviets who were not yet in the war to the americans americans replied unconditional surrender no americans of course at this time also had broken the code of the japanese and they knew all of this the soviets didn't have to tell them that japanese did not know meanwhile the bomb is ready macarthur had been informed and it is used on the first day that the weather permits so this is very important as important to understanding as important as everything else is the fact that the bombs were used as soon as they were ready first august sixth second on august ninth first clear weather date actually the target was not even clear whether for the second nagasaki was kind of picked up as a target it was not on the original prefer target list that already been because it had already been damaged by prior bombing and they wanted there was an experimental aspect to these bombings it was not the main aspect but there was they wanted to know what bombs would do on undamaged cities and some cities had been named as not to be bombed do not soviets entered the war just before the bombing of nine or so what happened in japan on august sixth of course they knew this time is up but so far now i'm not as this debate the next nine days have an immense debate around them the best that i can tell is they knew time was up they knew this is a new weapon americans have said we will use this repeatedly i believe after i think truman said that  the japanese didn't want the emperor to stay they still are not ready for unconditional surrender the soviets enter the war this is a big shock because the japanese are still hoping that the soviets will mediate a surrender with appropriate conditions so yet and to the war truman has said before the bomb test i think in his diary that soviets enter the war japan will surrender that was his view but after the bomb test the u s actually did not want the soviet to enter the war because of what i have told that the idea was we should keep you know the invasion of japan so okinawa has been conquered and things have been stopped at that point because the next step is very big which is the invasion of q shoop the southern main island of the southern island of the main part of japan and this they knew would be a very big deal and so it was not due to start till november one of them or almost three months now with the open ian here's what totally convinced me that the bombings are completely illegitimate now i've told you what i think is because they themselves believed that the soviet entry percipient date the surrender and there is no price for the americans to wait for ten days no price so we have could not have occupied a big area in a day right takes time to move those armies but they decided to use the bombs and the second bomb was used also as soon as in the end the americans apparently covertly agreed to let the emperor stay even so the emperor of japan and the elite of japan even after two atomic bombings did not care enough of their own people  agree to unconditional surrender terms this is a very important thing to know about the japanese militarists so if you think that americans are responsible for that decision and i think they are because it was their bomb and they decided to use it you have to think who was in charge in japan this is very important for us to acknowledge this will start a conversation in the united states and i want a broader conversation to start i have done this in the panhandle of texas in the home of former friends and my former friends in the panhandle of texas said let's go and get rid of nuclear weapons let's get children out of the way of war that's why i'm bringing you this message because i am convinced that this message is more truthful and i see bringing of truth into politics and that's why i regard him as the greatest political person in history and he said process is leads is the central ingredient of the if you want a good result to have a good process we haven't had a good process so far because we have not a good knowledge the truth in the other side all right a couple of other things so i promised you i would bring civilization back into the same picture when stimson briefed truman after he became president april nine hundred forty five here is what he told truman if the problem of the proper use of this weapon can be solved we would then have the opportunity to bring the world into a pattern in which the peace of the world and our civilization can b all right now you must reflect on the character of the civilization and those pictures i did not surely you can come and see them there in my computer  here in los alamos on august sixth richard feynman a great physicist and i believe in one nine hundred eighty became a greater man and he said this the only reaction i remember perhaps i was blinded by my own reaction was a very considerable elation and excitement and there were parties and people got drunk and it would make a tremendously interesting contrast what was going on in los alamos at the same time as what was going on in hiroshima i was involved with this happy thing and also drinking and drunk and playing drums sitting on the hood of  bonnet of a jeep and playing drums with excitement running all over los alamos at the same time as people were dying and struggling in her this was an interview with the b b c i think around  he reflects further with regard to moral questions i do have something i would like to say about it because the original reason to start the project which i had was that the germans were a danger all kinds of attempts to redesign and make it a worse bomb or whatever and so on and all of working and all working all the time to see if we could make it go but what i did immorally i would say was do not remember the reason that i said i was doing it so that when the reason changed when which was that germany was defeated not the singlish thought game to my mind at all about that that bat meant now i would have to reconsider why i am continuing to do this this is the next sentence from one of the most brilliant physicists in repeat this thing about half a million to a million i would bet the vast majority of them have no clue where it came from they also don't know what the general said was something between twenty odd thousand american lives would be lost and forty six thousand i think and they had various scenarios for the war and the worst case scenario did include suicide bombings from aircraft and come because the tactics and all that they knew what they were doing the people who say you know the japanese were vicious militaries which is true i have japanese elites have begun done a calculation are they going to go into the shoes of the military there's actually keeping correspondence after the war when somebody said two hundred thousand i believe that was henry stimson that should we correct the secretary of war because the estimate was tens of thousands and the overall decision was don't get mixed up in it and give the japanese a propaganda advantage and then truman wrote two hundred fifty thousand in the first draft of his buy a memoir and then he felt it wasn't good enough and in the final version which was published he said and i believe this is pretty close to an exact quote general marshall told me that half a million lives would be saved and i have just told you what general marshall for during the war to the president and truman was president in june that contained a slip from the staff evaluation saying that estimate was entirely too high and i don't know what general is supposed to have said i don't know whether he actually said it but i have credited president truman with being the greatest physiologist of the twenty first of the twentieth century because he said that the most sensitive nerve in the human anatomy runs through the pocket book you if you are the wonderful man and and i actually have reflected a lot on this and i think all of us have rerouted who all of us who live in civilization and this is part of the character of civilization every routed our entire sensory systems pocketbooks it of necessity i'm not condemning it i'm saying if you want to extract yourself from the worst moral consequences of the kind of civilization we live in then we must recognize the truth of this i don't think most scientists will listen to me but i hope that they respect richard feynman i would not put richard feynman on the same plane as john wright black who is the only hero scientist in my book well there was leo dillard who started that thing and tried to stop the bombing and went to jimmy burns who was secretary of state and said really don't do this and one of the main reasons for dropping the bomb and i'll stop here was that the expenses on this project needed to be justified groves has said and this is a paraphrase that if the project is seen as a success we will be celebrated if it is seen as a failure congress will investigate nothing else i think even joked that he might have to get an apartment near capitol hill because he'd be testifying all the time was carried out with the idea that the soviets were the enemy it's interesting so many and yet dupont ran hanford where the plutonium was made for the  dupont had been prior to the start of world war two quite close to some of the infamous at least one or two of the infamous companies and that they weren't alone of course or many american companies that had close ties to companies that later became infamous but do you know that groves thought that he didn't have the time to investigate dupont and their fascist connections and that he would trust their patriotism to do it right at a time when they kept the manhattan project secret from all but a handful of members of congress and i do not believe even a handful of the actual leaders who were responsible for the conduct of the war so let me recommend gandhi do you in maybe a new way my way of thinking about gandhi and as you know i called myself a critical gandhian and sometimes very critical you don't know this because you are here and gandhi was india's gift to the world what he was to india is more complicated i am a child of the partition so i have to think that more carefully about what happened in india and what the role of various parties but i will leave you with this that our side wants disarmament has been not everybody had been a little afraid of the truth as a result we have been painted into a corner that the right wing may well call the dump on america crowd you know often called bad and i would say if we reflect on it really honestly you have to say that giving such a one sided view of what happened in world war two let's too many parties off the hook up including the americans because if you don't ask what the fleet was pearl harbor you'll never understand about oil or the indonesians so if we want disarmament we must be bolder and start a more respectful conversation i'm not saying you know all the other things action their planned shouldn't be done what i'm saying is we need we need a better conversation with los alamos and we need a better conversation with the instrument of terror of north korea which is an impoverished state with lots and lots of hungry people it has become an instrument of response of the poor dictators who want to terrorize others instead of the instrument of domination of the rich who want to terrorize others a nuclear weapons were built the whole of air warfare was designed as a warfare of terror talk but please take this away process is very important and we must not forget pearl harbor nor hiroshima we must understand all things and we must bring more of the truth to los alamos and the country than we have because the other side isn't going to do it right you know the nuclear power companies aren't going to rush and say let's have a carbon free nuclear free economy are you seeing them rushing this is a well let's put it all on the table that would be on the table let's have a