In Steve James’s documentary, A Compassionate Spy, a lesser-known figure from the Manhattan Project is given the spotlight
Nearly 70 years after it rattled the New Mexico desert, the Trinity Test is top of mind for many this summer. Thanks to Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film on the leader of the Manhattan Project, millions have relived the queasy aftermath of the first nuclear bomb detonation in July 1945 – a scientific achievement of terrible power greeted with jubilation at Los Alamos. In a pivotal scene set during post-test celebrations, J Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist played by Cillian Murphy, stokes the flames of triumphalism while seeing the ashes of future destruction.
At Los Alamos that day was a young physicist named Ted Hall, whose concerns outpaced Oppenheimer’s. Peeved by the celebrations and disturbed by the gleeful reaction to a weapon of mass destruction, he isolated himself in the Army barracks. Oppenheimer would go on to hold grave misgivings about the US government’s handling of atomic weapons and the expansion of its nuclear program. But Hall, at all of 19, had already acted. Unsettled by the US government’s refusal to share atomic intelligence with its allies and the prospect of a US monopoly on the bomb, Hall shared aspects of the project at Los Alamos with Soviet intelligence – a secret that went largely unknown for nearly 50 years, and is left out of the hit movie.
