Christopher Nolan’s captivating biopic “Oppenheimer,” based on the life and work of theoretical physicist and father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, came away with 13 Academy Award nominations this week, on top of an already successful box office and culturally impactful performance.
There exists, however, the story of another physicist involved at Los Alamos who may have had an equal, if not more important, role in securing the stability of geopolitical affairs in the world. Journalist and filmmaker David Lindorff explores the story of Ted Hall, who, at the age of 18 years old, leaked the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union in an attempt to secure a balance in the world’s most dangerous arms race.
His book, “Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World,” makes the case that due to the courageous work of Hall and fellow Los Alamos scientist Klaus Fuchs, the idea of mutually assured destruction was born and the U.S. lost its monopoly on the deadliest weapon ever made.
“There was no compunction in the US about that level of destruction and what they were doing, that they would have preemptively destroyed the Soviet Union to prevent it from getting a bomb, is not only totally comprehensible to me, knowing the people that were involved and the fact that we did use [the bomb] twice for no good reason except intimidating the Soviet Union.”
Lindorff makes clear the brevity in which Hall makes the decision to deliver the bomb’s secret to the Soviets, seeing that the Germans were already defeated and would not be able to produce their own bomb—the initial motivation for the entire Manhattan Project.
Lindorff said, “[Hall] reached the decision at the tender age of 18, right before his 19th birthday, that the only thing that would work to prevent what he saw as a terrifying catastrophe of the U.S. having a monopoly on the bomb after the war would be for another country to have the bomb that could stop the U.S. from using it.”