Nearly 80 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.
“What Ted did is what people accused Oppenheimer of doing,” said the documentarian Steve James, whose latest film, A Compassionate Spy, explores Hall’s prescient skepticism, his fraught espionage and his loyal marriage of nearly half a century to his wife, Joan. (Nolan’s film makes a point of Oppenheimer’s later political rivals who twisted his longstanding leftist sympathies into career-ending suspicions of Soviet ties; “I like to think Christopher Nolan copied us – he heard we were doing this, and decided he wanted in on it,” James joked of the film, which has brought the heated debates of Los Alamos to the masses this summer.) It’s part love story, part espionage thriller, part re-contextualization of national PR for the atomic bomb (bullish, sanitized) and the USSR (hailed, then demonized).
Hall was not alone in his concerns over US handling of the nascent nuclear weapons program. Seventy scientists tied to the Manhattan Project signed a petition protesting the use of the bomb on Japan that was never delivered to the president, Harry S Truman (not that it likely would have made a difference). “There were a lot of scientists who began to really question what they were doing and questioning the fact that the Soviet Union was excluded from this effort, and were of course extremely worried about what we were going to do with the bomb,” said James. There were other physicists at Los Alamos who shared intelligence with the Soviet Union, including the German scientist Klaus Fuchs, who merits a mention in Oppenheimer.
But Hall was the youngest to act, and to the most significant degree. “Ted is just this impetuous young 19-year-old who decided he was going to do something,” said James. Not that Hall regarded his potentially life-threatening treason as dire, at least at the time. In archival interviews from the years before his death in 1999 from renal cancer (likely the result of his work with plutonium at Los Alamos), Hall recalls his mindset at 19, freshly recruited from Harvard, as one of idealism aided at least in part by youth. “I was a young person,” he said. “I saw the world, I guess you might say, through rather pinkishly colored glasses.”
“In my mind, this was a question of protecting the Soviet people, as well as all people, from attack,” he said. His fears were not unfounded; shortly after the war ended, Truman reportedly threatened to deploy a nuclear bomb on the USSR, lest they agree to remove troops from occupied Iran.
The actual transmission of information, captured in archival interviews and re-enactments, was careful, though not the work of elite subterfuge. Hall relied on Saville “Savy” Sax, a close friend from Harvard and a devoted Communist, to actually make contact with Soviet representatives; the two communicated via messages encoded in books and letters and in less artfully staged secret meetings – methods Hall later remembered as more “comedy” than thriller. Nevertheless, the two managed to communicate rough plans for the implosion bomb to Soviet intelligence, which likely accelerated Soviet progress on their own weapons – they, too, had a deployable bomb by 1949 – by about five years, estimates the historian Joseph Albright, co-author of a book on Hall.
The arms-driven cold war, and the USSR’s trajectory under Stalin, never sat easily with Hall, according to Joan – the emotional heart of the film and, it’s revealed, the steel behind Hall’s convictions, silence and conscience. James first met Joan, a “dynamo” who was “brilliant in her own right”, in 2019, when she was 91. “She was a woman out of her time, in a way,” he said. An intellectual, a leftist and an activist, she was an organizer for the Communist party until heat from the FBI on Hall’s past forced her to recede from any political work. (She and Hall eventually moved to Cambridge, England, with their three daughters; Joan died this past June, aged 94.) “She had an extraordinary life in her own right, and as much as anything, I wanted to tell her story as much as Ted’s,” said James.
Translating their love story to screen marked a departure for James, a documentarian primarily known for his verité work exploring the fault lines of race and class in his home base of Chicago – the acclaimed film Hoop Dreams, as well as the excellent docuseries America to Me and City So Real. A Compassionate Spy relies on full recreations of Ted’s time at Los Alamos and Ted and Joan’s romance – tussling on the quad at the University of Chicago, revealing his secret while entwined on his office floor, barely dodging the FBI’s intimidation tactics. “I knew there would be no way to visualize [Joan’s stories] unless we did it ourselves,” James said of his decision to stage re-enactments. That, and to bring Ted and Joan’s youth at the time of their consequential decisions to the fore. “I figured it would be easy to forget that when you’re looking at a 91-year-old woman telling you stories, or Ted in the 1990s when he was in his 70s telling these stories, to forget how young they were and how brave they were in doing what they did.”
“He was for his age incredibly knowledgeable and sophisticated in terms of understanding the way the world works,” said James of Hall’s time at Los Alamos, where he was the youngest scientist. “Without having access to classified documents or the president or the decision makers, he gleaned that it [could be] dangerous for the US to have this all to themselves.”
“The film tries to make the case that whether you agree with him ultimately or not, those fears were not out to lunch,” he added. Late in the film, Joan recounts with scorn how the media did not take too kindly to the reveal of Hall’s secret late in his life, regarded by many as a betrayal of his country. A Compassionate Spy serves as a moving rebuke, both personal and sweeping. History may not judge Hall’s distrust of nuclear stewardship quite so harshly.
• This article was amended on 8 August 2023. The Trinity Test rattled the New Mexico desert nearly 80 years ago, not 70 as an earlier version said.
A Compassionate Spy is out now in US cinemas with a UK date to be announced
