About the Program
Gregg Herken discusses the backgrounds and relationships of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller, the three physicists who were responsible for the creation of the atomic bombs dropped over Japan during WWII. Mr. Herken, a former curator and historian with the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, shows slides of the three scientists and their colleagues during the developmental stages of the atomic bomb and cyclotrons in Berkeley, California. The United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945.