We should’ve taken Oppenheimer’s advice about bomb
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer tells the tragic story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who, more than any other single person, was responsible for bringing the first nuclear bomb into the world.
Completed in just three years in what was thought to be a race for the bomb against the Nazis, this was an incredible scientific achievement on par with putting the first human on the moon. But even more than the moon landing, the implications of the first atomic weapon went on to define the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, the Cold War and global security in ways that still haunt us today.
As Nolan puts it, “Like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived.”
This movie comes out at a pivotal time. The bomb was a major theme of movies during the Cold War (Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe and War Games being prime examples), but since then, other issues (climate, gender, race) have replaced Armageddon as the key concern that keeps us up at night. But now we have nuclear-armed Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine to remind us the bomb never went away, and it can severely limit U.S. options.
As President Joe Biden has made quite clear, the main reason the West will not supply troops to Ukraine or admit it into NATO is we do not want war, and by extension nuclear war, with Russia. And, why does Russia have the bomb? Because we made it first. Thanks, Oppenheimer.
But one of the lessons of the film is it did not have to be this way. Once the bomb was shown to work at the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, some scientists realized the Soviets would soon get the bomb, too, and a dangerous arms race would ensue. Maybe we should inform Japan we had this weapon and seek their surrender? Or share the technology with the Soviets to avoid an arms race? Neither happened. Instead, the first two bombs were dropped on Japan, without warning, killing up to 200,000 people, mainly civilians, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After the war, Oppenheimer became a leading advocate of atomic diplomacy and arms control. He was a driving force behind President Harry Truman’s 1946 proposal to the United Nations, the Baruch plan, to seek international control of nuclear energy and weapons. This proposal failed, in large part because the bomb was quickly captured by Cold War politics. The Red Scare was on, and if you wanted to be “tough” on the Soviets, you had to be for more nukes. (Comparisons to today’s debate on China are unavoidable.)
Once the Soviets got the bomb in 1949, U.S. attention shifted to the much more powerful “super” hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer, then a key adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission, opposed the H-bomb for being dangerous and potentially genocidal and argued the U.S. should not build it. He and his fellow scientists were overruled by Truman and anti-Soviet politics. Albert Einstein said the decision to build the H-bomb was based on a “disastrous illusion.”
Oppenheimer’s opposition to the H-bomb attracted the wrath of anti-arms control forces in the government. They said his past socialist sympathies made him a security risk and used a rigged Atomic Energy Commission hearing to revoke his clearance in 1954. His days as a key inside adviser were over, and he withdrew into obscurity, dying in 1967. But the real tragedy of Oppenheimer is how his story became a cautionary tale for all scientists who speak truth to power.
Just last December, the Energy Department (formerly the AEC) reversed the ruling, finding the AEC used a “flawed process” that violated the commission’s own regulations.
If only we could reverse other flawed decisions that went against Oppenheimer. For example, if Truman had listened to Oppenheimer on the H-bomb, we might have stopped the nuclear arms race sooner. Instead, the two sides went on to produce 70,000 increasingly deadly weapons. Many of those weapons were dismantled at the end of the Cold War, but now, nuclear budgets are on the rise again. The United States is planning to spend over $1 trillion to rebuild its nuclear arsenal over the next few decades. Russia and China also are building new nukes.
Today, there are some 12,500 nuclear weapons on the globe, controlled by the U.S., Russia, China, United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Looking back, humanity’s best chance to control the bomb was at the very beginning, and Oppenheimer was on the right track with diplomacy and arms control. But rather than listen to him, a broken political system silenced him. We cannot let this happen again. To achieve a safer world, we must now finish Oppenheimer’s work.
Tom Z. Collina is senior policy adviser at Ploughshares Fund, with 30 years of experience in nuclear weapons, missile defense and nonproliferation issues.