A Compassionate Spy

Theodore Hall was a traitor. He was a U. S. soldier who gave atomic weapons secrets to the USSR. But it's important to separate the film from the people it portrays.

The film is a documentary and hence is supposed to be educational. It accomplishes that. If you liked Oppenheimer and want to know more about the creation of the atomic bomb, and your interest in spies, communists and communist sympathisers who worked on The Manhattan Project was piqued. Hall was one of them.

Even though he knew of the crimes of Stalin, and the evils of communism in real life, he held to the ideological principles of Karl Marx. He gave the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviets because he felt an affinity for them. He wasn't the only one. Klaus Fuchs did too.

So if you thought the security precautions taken at Los Alamos were excessive, this movie will give you an appreciation for why they were necessary.

This film gives us a very deep look at why people betray their country's secrets. While some do it for money or ego or because they are compromised, it is obvious that Ted Hall did it for ideological reasons. While working on the atomic bomb for the US, Hall becomes convinced that this weapon is too powerful for one nation to have sole possession of. A communist, he shares crucial secrets with the Soviet Union, our ally during WW2. Much later, as the crimes of Stalin come out and the Rosenbergs are convicted for betraying less important secrets, he wavers but, to protect his family, never does confess to the FBI. He goes on to make vital contributions to cancer treatment and other areas of science while his brother designs the US missles that deliver the nuclear weapons intended to be used against Russia in the Cold War. This documentary not only gives us new insights into the Manhattan Project and subsequent nuclear proliferation but also into a man who substantially changed history by accelerating the Soviets' development of atomic weapons. Hall seems mostly unrepentant and his widow exuberantly so. The viewer is left to decide whether what he did was heroic but misguided or whether it was simply blatant treason. Given the current state of the world, the whole question of whether anyone should have developed a weapon no one should ever use leaves the viewer profoundly disquieted.