Begins with a 60-minute lecture by Hans Bethe on his interpretations of the Farm Hall transcripts of the secretly-recorded conversations among the German scientists captured and detained by the Allies in 1945. He compares the apparent developments in research as well as the political and military situation in Germany with the processes concurrently unfolding in the United States. A second brief lecture by Thomas Powers highlights the contributions of Werner Heisenberg to the German effort to develop an atomic bomb. The second tape (61 min.) is a conversation with Hans Bethe and Robert Wilson moderated by Kurt Gottfried about the people and processes involved in the effort to develop an atomic bomb. They discuss the interaction between the scientists and the U. S. government, the moral dilemmas and disagree on whether the Germans were really trying to build a bomb. The last tape (60 min.) is a conversation with Bethe and Victor Weisskopf about their immigration to the United States from Germany in the 1930s, their experience in the American culture, the students they taught, and attaining U. S. citzenship.