Transcript
Introduction
The partnership between General Leslie Groves and the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the great stories of the Second World War. And it was as unexpected as it was successful. There was little in either man's life before 1942 to suggest that the general and the physicist would ever meet, much less form a close working association to develop an atomic bomb. They came from very different cultural and economic backgrounds.
Their careers alone would have kept them apart, had not the war thrown them together and changed their lives utterly. In Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves found the man to help him achieve fame and success through the creation of a seeker weapon that could end America's greatest war. Oppenheimer did that by recruiting scientists and engineers, inspiring them, and, under Groves' supervision, leading them and creating the new bomb.
In Groves, Robert Oppenheimer found the man who would reinvigorate his career and give direction to his life groves did that by giving him an unimaginably grand scientific and engineering task, along with virtually unlimited resources.
Hundreds of thousands of people in research laboratories and plants across the United States helped to create the atomic bomb. But the successful development of this weapon in record time is in no small part due to the complex, sometimes tense but always productive partnership between Groves and Oppenheimer.
That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The General and the Genius: Groves and Oppenheimer - The Unlikely Partnership That Built the Atom Bomb, and it was written by James Kunetka.