Oppenheimer, Strangelove, Smith

Sixty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kurt Andersen and historian Richard Rhodes talk about how living with the threat of nuclear annihilation changed our culture, and the nature of the nuclear menace today. We’ll explore how Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project’s lead scientist, became an American myth. And we’ll see how popular culture reflects optimism, anxiety, and ambivalence about the nuclear age. Plus, the novelist Zadie Smith stops by to talk about her new novel, On Beauty.