This is Cosmos Quickly, and I'm Lee Billings.

In this episode, we're talking with a nuclear historian about the new Christopher Nolan

blockbuster, Oppenheimer, a film about one of the most complex and tragic figures of the

early atomic age.

I'm very pleased to welcome Alex Wellerstein to Cosmos Quickly.

Alex is a nuclear historian and professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in

Hoboken, New Jersey, and the author of the 2021 book Restricted Data, the history of

nuclear secrecy in the United States.

And Alex, welcome to the program.

Yeah, I'm really glad to be here.

We're going to be talking about Christopher Nolan's new film Oppenheimer, which Alex and

I both saw at a pre-screening event a few days ago, and it blew our socks off in more

ways than one, should be a fun conversation.

Tell us a little more about what you know about Oppenheimer, what your relationship to

Oppenheimer is and how that influenced how you viewed this movie.

I've been sort of thinking about Oppenheimer as a person and his history for about 20 years,

and so it's a little odd to watch a movie about someone you've spent a lot of time reading

their letters, their FBI files, their security hearing transcripts.

I take some credit for essentially finding the unredacted versions of the security hearing

transcript, which have been mislabeled and misfiled by National Archives, and I found them

on a lucky check.

Yeah, I've been thinking about Oppenheimer a long, long, long time and trying to make sense

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