Oral Histories

Freeman Dyson is an esteemed mathematician and theoretical physicist at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. In this interview, Dyson discusses his work at England’s Bomber Command in World War II, tracking the position of bomber forces. He explains the importance of scientific innovation in wartime, the effectiveness of strategic bombing campaigns, and why civil defense worked better in Germany than in Britain. Dyson later worked with Manhattan Project veterans Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, and Robert R. Wilson, and recalls how they felt about the project. He discusses Niels Bohr and J. Robert Oppenheimer’s ideas for international control of nuclear weapons, and what methods he thinks would work best to further nonproliferation efforts today. Dyson also remembers visiting Oak Ridge, and explains Oak Ridge’s important role in building innovative nuclear reactors and conducting biological experiments.

In this interview, Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” discusses the selection of the Hanford site and explains DuPont’s important role in the Manhattan Project. Rhodes provides a brief history of the Alsos Mission, detailing the capture of German physicists and their reactions to the news that the United States had created and used an atomic bomb. He also discusses the rationale behind using the bomb, adding how its creation was inevitable due to the principles behind scientific research.