Photo © Universal Pictures
Oppenheimer
There’s a reason the movie of the year in this particular year is a chillingly accurate depiction of one of the most dangerous moments in American history. That was July 6, 1945, when the U.S. secretly detonated the first atomic bomb to “test” whether it would set off a nuclear chain-reaction destroying the world.
That’s because we’re already living with another man-made threat to the world’s survival. This time the danger isn’t that life on earth will end in a blinding flash. The climate crisis is speeding up destruction all around us through record heat waves, extreme rainfalls, hurricanes, droughts, floods and wildfires. July was the hottest month worldwide since the last ice age 125,000 years ago.
It's a bad time for Republicans to be denying the scientific reality of the climate crisis and preventing educational institutions from accurately teaching American history so we can learn from our past mistakes.
Director Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer makes it clear America is still living with the terrible consequences of developing the first nuclear weapons. But it’s not because President Roosevelt didn’t hire the most brilliant scientists under physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer for the job.
Restraint of Politicians?
The problem was those highly intelligent academics overestimated the restraint of politicians with access to such horrific weapons. Some naively thought we might not even use the bomb. Perhaps the mere threat of such a terrible weapon would end World War II and war forever.
Early on, the scientists involved became aware of a possible danger to themselves and everyone else alive at the time. They called the nightmare scenario “atmospheric ignition” from creating such a tremendous fireball it might fuse the cores of nitrogen atoms setting the earth’s atmosphere ablaze.
Scientific theories on paper are only theories until they’re tested. In the film, Oppenheimer tries to assure Army Gen. Leslie Groves the chances that detonating the bomb would destroy the world are “near zero.” He asks Groves, “What do you want from theory alone?” Groves replies: “Zero would be nice.”
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The film also included a scene first reported in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in the 1970s that Groves was angered Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi was taking bets “as zero hour approached” at Los Alamos whether the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, “and, if so, whether it would destroy only New Mexico or the entire world.” Oppenheimer dismissed it as “gallows humor.”
As for whether the U.S. might only threaten to drop the bomb and end the war without widespread death and destruction, President Truman ended that romantic notion a month after the Los Alamos test. Truman dropped the first bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, killing at least 135,000 people and the second bomb on Nagasaki three days later killing at least 64,000 more.
Growing up in the 1950s, I remember seeing Truman in a TV interview years later bragging he’d never felt any qualms about ordering the instant death of 200,000 Japanese civilians and thousands more from radiation because their government had attacked Pearl Harbor.
Nazi Germany with its fascist death camps, one of the primary public reasons for creating the bomb, had already surrendered three months earlier after Hitler’s suicide. Who else could we use it on? I wondered if Truman would have been so cavalier about the deaths of so many innocent civilians if America hadn’t depicted “the Japs” throughout the war as racist, savage, subhuman cartoons.
Guilt for Their Role
One thing is clear, Truman wasn’t moved by the guilt Oppenheimer and many other scientists felt for their role developing the horrific weapon that to this day our democracy remains the only nation ever to use for the mass murder of human beings.
Oppenheimer was almost paralyzed by the revulsion he felt at how quickly his country had used the power science created to end human life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer saw his meeting with Truman in the Oval Office in October of 1945 as an opportunity to make an urgent plea to ban the use of nuclear weapons forever and put them under international control.
When Oppenheimer told Truman: “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands,” the president was personally infuriated by the “crybaby scientist.” “Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have,” Truman told aides. “I don’t ever want to see that son of a bitch in this office again.”
That sounds a lot like another recent president. The one who bragged he had the biggest nuclear button in the world to rain down fire and fury on anyone wanted. That president once proposed dropping a nuclear bomb on a hurricane to put a stop to this global warming once and for all.
In times of global life-and-death crises, political parties need to nominate intelligent grown-ups who understand science and American history.
