A Chain Reaction That Will Destroy The World
"Oppenheimer" isn't just about a bomb, but how decisions change history
Readers, I began my Barbenheimer week with the “serious” movie last night: if you haven’t seen “Oppenheimer” yet, there are spoilers below. But if you saw “Oppenheimer” with a friend over the weekend, please:
The creation of atomic weapons is one of human civilization’s greatest sins. It is surpassed only by the first and only use of these weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or maybe it is all one giant sin. Even though it is the incineration of several hundred thousand Japanese and the lingering death of thousands more. The final death count was around 210,000, and there were several thousand people who were not just incinerated but vaporized by the intense heat of the blast.
Burning people and infrastructure was, by that point in World War II, a recognized tactic for bludgeoning a nation into submission. Adolph Hitler had hoped to shock and humble England into surrender by pounding its cities at night for months between 1940 and 1941, igniting vast fires with incendiary bombs. By 1942, the United States was also capable of killing vast numbers of Germans, and disrupting Nazi war production, in the same way.
So, long before atomic weapons were viable, civilian death by fire became a signature characteristic of modern warfare. It was one that the alliance led by the United States, England, and France embraced and intensified as both Germany and Japan began a long, slow retreat after 1944. From February 13-15, almost 800 British and American bombers pounded the German industrial city of Dresden with incendiary bombs, creating a firestorm that killed an estimated 25,000 people. And on March 9, 1945, a three-hour raid on Tokyo ignited another firestorm that burned as many as 130,000 people to death.
The atomic bombs created at the Los Alamos laboratory under the direction of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer were designed to surpass that terror.
All of this inspires the question: what did Oppenheimer, who pivoted swiftly to the need for nuclear arms control almost as soon as the bombs nicknamed Fat Man and Little Boy left the bomber hatches, think he was doing when he made a new kind of bomb that did the same work with a single device?
I want to stipulate that I have not yet read Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf, 2005), and once I do, I will have a clearer answer to that question. But the genius of Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, which opened over the weekend, is that it refuses to solve this problem for us. Instead, much like the sphere that will be assembled around the explosive material at the core of Oppenheimer’s bombs, we are offered different parts of Oppenheimer that—unlike the weapon—do not fit together neatly.
Oppenheimer begins like a classic “male genius” film (note: there is no such thing as a female genius film.) Samples of the genre are Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2006), about mathematician John Nash, and Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game (2014), about computing pioneer Alan Turing. In fact, right at the beginning of the film, Nolan takes us on a brief, simulated journey of Robert Oppenhimer’s brilliant mind.
Played by Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer sees things that other scientists don’t. Even as a young man, he has ideas about what is possible that the world, and his peers, are not yet prepared to receive in the 1930s. Stuck in a lab in England where he is all thumbs, Oppenheimer gets his big break: he is discovered by the great Nils Bohr when he asks an excellent question at a lecture. Bohr, in turn, invites Oppenheimer to Germany to give his mind free reign as a theoretician in the relatively new field of quantum mechanics. From there, he will be recruited to run his own lab at Berkeley. There, his world is dripping with actual Communists and symps that include his wife, his girlfriend, and his brother.
War, as it is so often in the movies, becomes Oppenheimer’s greatest opportunity since he asked Nils Bohr that great question. In the fall of 1942, General Leslie R. Groves, Director of the Manhattan Project, brings Oppenheimer to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where Groves builds a town devoted to “Project Y:” the designing and building of a nuclear weapon. And unlike many other genius movies, you don’t even have to have taken a good U.S. history course to know that Oppenheimer succeeds: there will be a bomb, it will be used on the Japanese, and the United States will inaugurate an arms race, and a polarized world, that remains with us today.
The one nagging doubt that Oppenheimer cannot dispel is this: what if the chain reaction set off by nuclear fission simply never stops? What if, instead of a bomb with great but finite capabilities, it is instead, as he frames it for Groves, “a chain reaction that will destroy the world?”
So, Oppenheimer knows that what he is doing has a small but real chance of turning the globe into one big fireball. Yet, for a variety of reasons—the Holocaust, the fact that because of Nazi antisemitism the world of European quantum physics has now come to him, and because he can—he builds the damn bomb anyway. And then, having done the “great man” thing and established his position as a national hero and the most famous scientist in the world, Oppenheimer realizes that he has enabled mass murder. At least, we think he realizes this: it’s always hard to tell since Oppenheimer’s favorite mode is abstraction.
Oppenheimer’s sense of self is wrapped up in a paradox. Another reviewer called it an enigma, but I don’t think he is mysterious at all: it’s just that he has all these different parts, and they all pull on him equally. There is his intense, almost existential need to build this weapon to prove his own superior understanding of the science, coupled with the fact that only the crisis of the war will give him the resources to do that. Then, there is Oppenheimer’s conviction once he has succeeded, that he should be allowed to control what happens to it. The genie should, and can, be put back in the bottle. The fact that this has never happened in the history of military technology appears never to have occurred to him.
But Oppenheimer has a plan: for scientists, sharing is caring. The way to put that genie back in the bottle is to return to a pre-war ethic that all science and all knowledge if openly shared, empowers no one by empowering everyone. The United States must, he and others argue, halt further development of nuclear weapons and share the science with the Soviet Union.
It was a deliciously naïve thing to believe: it’s also a really good argument for why scientists should be forced to take lots of humanities, and particularly history, courses. Of course, the movie never articulates that there was another alternative all along: for all those scientists everywhere to say no.
Granted, it is something that most scientists would still not consider. And context matters: even though they understood the horrors of totalitarianism, Oppenheimer, his peers, and a range of garden-variety Soviet symps and peaceniks still deeply believed in a rational world that did not, and would never, exist. Yet they dreamed of a global, political world in which what policymakers learned to call (only a few years after the Oppenheimer loyalty hearings) “mutually assured destruction.”
If that were the case, no nuclear weapons program would be worth developing. Practically speaking, this meant sharing the secret of the bomb with the Soviet Union, who all experts believed to have been so depleted by the war that they would never catch up anyway. Lots of people believed in this strategy. And a subset of these people, unlike Oppenheimer, became Soviet agents even before it became clear that the United States planned to retain a monopoly on nuclear weapons.
Knowing a little American history helps you grasp the futility of the Oppenheimer position since not only was the Soviet government also trying to build a bomb, it was stealing information when none was forthcoming. About a third of the way into the film, as the team of scientists assembles at Los Alamos, a friendly guy walks up to Oppenheimer and introduces himself. “Klaus Fuchs,” he says, extending his hand.
Yup, that’s the guy who starts funneling the information to Josef Stalin’s people between 1942 and 1949. And was I the only one watching last weekend who constantly scanned the various soldiers stationed around the lab, thinking: Okay, which of you guys is David Greenglass?
Greenglass would be the guy who sketched the bomb and sent it off to his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, later saving his own skin by giving the testimony that sent Julius and his sister Ethel to the electric chair. So between Fuchs, a little nudge from Julius Rosenberg, and mostly the German nuclear scientists the Soviets had scooped up at the end of the war, the Russians recreated the Fat Man design and successfully tested it in 1949.
Security was terrible on the Manhattan Project: the place was dripping with people who had links to the Communist Party, whether they had formally joined or not. Oppenheimer didn’t and was disinclined to treason, although not disinclined to break security protocols when he believed he needed to in order to push the work forward.
Nevertheless, Oppenheimer’s post-war desire to halt the production of nuclear weapons revived official interest in his pre-war connections to progressive politics and actual Communist people, with all that insinuated. And his celebrity made his opposition to advancing the production of new, more powerful weapons into a political problem that made it possible to fudge the difference between disagreement and disloyalty. A successful Russian bomb test in 1949 became the catalyst for pushing Oppenheimer out of the Atomic Energy Commission, scapegoating him publicly in a 1954 loyalty hearing, and canceling the security clearance that he needed to do further research in the field.
And this is where the Prometheus part takes on new meaning. Prometheus, you may recall, stole fire from the gods and gave it to human beings. Oppenheimer imagined himself as just such a man: an intermediary whose intelligence allowed him—indeed, compelled him—to bridge divine knowledge and ordinary people. Oppenheimer, too, brings fire to the earth, but he forgets that Prometheus was also punished for his own transgression. Zeus, a top god who was well-known for deviously brilliant eternal punishments, strapped Prometheus to a rock and sentenced him to have his liver eaten by a bird for all eternity.
The national security state is Oppenheimer’s rock. The hearings, which frame the movie, unjust as they are, are only the beginning of the endless punishment to which Oppenheimer must submit because he not only brought fire to the earth, he believed he could control it. In typical McCarthyite style, the government investigator peppers Oppenheimer and his attorney with unanswerable and trick questions, drawing from documents they are not allowed to see because—they are classified.
But Oppenheimer’s real Promethean torture? Even though he regained his reputation, Oppenheimer never did research again. For all eternity, his great mind would spin and spin without ever being able to resolve the new questions it imagined.
But he was right about one thing: the bomb he guided to completion ignited a chain reaction that destroyed one world and ushered in another, defined by a new national security state, born out of war and fire, and defined by secrecy.
And that, too, is Oppenheimer’s legacy.
Interested in the cult of government secrecy?
You may want to listen to “Why Now? Episode 13, “If I Told You, I Would Have To Kill You: A conversation with historian Matthew Connelly about his new book, The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets.” (February 13, 2023)
Short takes:
More weird videos from the Ron DeSantis presidential campaign—this time, it’s one that shows soldiers marching toward a Nazi symbol. According to Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani at The New Republic, “The far-right circular symbol is known as a `sonnenrad,’ a symbol co-opted by Nazis in their attempt to claim an `Aryan heritage.’ Today, it’s often found in white supremacist literature and the manifestos of far-right mass shooters.” It was deleted after a campaign staffer shared it: apparently, the campaign creates these weird, offensive ads and then plants them in fan accounts so they will get to the, ahem, right people. (July 24, 2023)
The above news item makes this question from Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark even more relevant: How much worse does DeSantis have to get before Republican elites abandon him? Last’s main point of entry here is the recent Florida History Standards, which omit any and all aspects of slavery’s violence and brutality, but state (erroneously) that the institution taught terrific skills that prepared African Americans for entrepreneurship. But his main point is that DeSantis is awful, his campaign is worse, and the party has a terrific candidate in Tim Scott. Aside from the fact that I would write in a vote for Santa Claus rather than vote for a Republican, I agree. “Tim Scott is officially viable,” says Last, looking at the latest numbers in key primary states. “So if you’d prefer a non-Orbánist conservative who has not yet attempted a coup d’état, then I’m not sure you have any excuse not to be on #TeamTim.” (July 24, 2023)
At DAME, Allison Hantschel digs deep into the GOP outrage machine that is stoking a moral panic about the supposed threat to children from queer people and, more broadly, any information that might be available to minors about sex and gender. “But posted, memed, re-recorded and TikToked, dishonest right-wing media figures turn these things into calls to arms—they claim that these people are out to corrupt and recruit our children, knowing full well that it isn’t true,” Hantschel writes. “Protest the influencer! Ban the teacher’s book! Smash the store windows and burn the rainbow shirt! These bad actors, funded through Republican think-tanks and donor organizations by billionaires who see anti-gay hate as a way to sway votes, are being well compensated to produce anger.” So why does the mainstream media report on the lies themselves rather than the media consultants who are getting rich by doing it? (July 18, 2023)
Maybe it's a species thing, but it's also a science thing, dating back to Mary Shelley and Dr. Frankenstein. I think both Jules Verne and H.G. Wells also toy with these ideas--to what extent is our desire to know balanced by the consequences of knowing things that are too terrible to contemplate?
Very astute. Thank you.