Video: Ultimate Fallout

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OPPENHEIMER PBS, beginning May 11,9p.m. E.D.T.

They thought they could do it. All their calculations told them they could do it. But it was not until 5:30 a.m., Monday, July 16, 1945, that they were sure. Then, in a flash that illuminated the New Mexico desert for miles around, the atomic era began, and J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team of Los Alamos scientists realized that they had pulled off the most astonishing scientific achievement of the century. Only later did they truly comprehend the extent to which they had released an evil genie from its bottle that neither they, nor anyone else, could ever put back.

This saga of science is a compelling story, and the brilliant, arrogant Oppenheimer is a compelling character—a tragic symbol of one of the most triumphant yet melancholy periods in U.S. history. He would have made an ideal subject for an American TV network, but it is just as well that none of them has told his story, for it is hard to find much fault with this seven-part series from the BBC.

The first episode begins in 1938, when "Oppie," as his friends called him, was teaching theoretical physics at the University of California at Berkeley. Only 34, he had brought together perhaps the most brilliant team of young physicists in the world—the Oppenheimers, as they were known on campus. They worshiped their mentor, imitated him and worked endless hours with him exploring the new frontier of atomic physics. One of the significant accomplishments of the series is that it conveys to nonscientists the elusive quality of scientific passion. And one of the accomplishments of Sam Waterston, who plays the lead, is that he captures not only Oppenheimer's arrogance but his mesmerizing appeal.

In 1939, after they read that two German scientists had split the atom, the Oppenheimers knew the possible end of that equation: a bomb of almost incomprehensible destructiveness. A problem remained, however: how to build it. After the U.S. entered the war, Oppie was assigned the chief responsibility of figuring that out. At the secret Los Alamos laboratory, he led—and occasionally pushed and shoved—an extraordinary gathering of the country's top minds in constructing the instrument that exploded atop a tower in the desert. When the test bomb detonated, he silently repeated to himself a line from the Bhagavad-Gita Hindu devotional poem: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."

As the father of the atom bomb, Oppenheimer enjoyed a postwar eminence equaled perhaps by only one other scientist, Einstein himself. But his fall was even swifter than his rise. He was a political innocent who had never read a newspaper or current-affairs magazine until he was in his mid-30s and did not hear, incredibly enough, about the Great Crash of 1929 until long after it had happened. At Berkeley he associated mostly with leftists—his lover and his brother were both Communists—and although he was never a Communist himself, he lent his name to left-wing organizations.