Oppenheimer’s dilemma and the bomb’s efficacy

Shelley Walia

Former Professor, Panjab University

FOR more than 70 years, the world has lived under the shadow of a nuclear disaster. The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, set at two minutes to midnight, is ticking. This is the closest it's been to terminal disaster. Understandably, the gravity of the nuclear challenge has direct relevance for the future of humanity. As Noam Chomsky says, “It’s kind of a miracle that we’ve survived in the face of increasing danger” apparent in numerous military conflagrations.

The fear of a nuclear war lurking formidably close resonates in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the film based on American Prometheus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin. It has sparked a furious debate on Oppenheimer’s dilemma and the efficacy of his invention. The great anti-nuclear fervour is back. One wonders why the bomb was used when the war had stopped. Was it to show it as a ‘deterrent’ or was it to bring Japan to its knees? A peaceful conclusion could have been reached if the world leaders had tried to negotiate.

Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, standing in his laboratory at Los Alamos in New Mexico, imagines Vishnu trying to persuade Arjuna to do his duty. Taking on the avatar of a multi-armed form, he says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This, Oppenheimer reflects, was the feeling in all those present on that fateful day of the greatest human tragedy ever. It was a day of misgivings and undying anguish.

Advocating international control on the nuclear bomb, the movie remains faithful to the book but for a few missing details of the real disposition of Oppenheimer as well as the lack of visuals of the dying thousands. Nagasaki, where the real destruction took place with plutonium used as an experiment, is barely revealed. ‘Little Boy’, the sobriquet given to the uranium-based bomb dropped on Hiroshima, did not cause as much anguish to Oppenheimer as the more lethal explosion of ‘Fat Man’ over Nagasaki that finally devastated him emotionally and morally. The movie also fails to counter the official narrative prevalent since 1945 that the bombing was crucial for saving the allied soldiers and the Japanese from a calamitous carnage.

The debate on the real man behind the scientist, his genius as well as his commitment to his country ostensibly remains disregarded in the film. Nolan does show Oppenheimer as a student at Cambridge inoculating potassium cyanide into an apple for his professor who had chastened him once. His spitefully belligerent personality stands out for a moment.

The moral quandaries and historical stakes that Oppenheimer faces are reduced to a few images that do not really underscore the truth. There are more complexities to Oppenheimer and his personality than the movie cares to take up. When he speaks after the attack to his fellow scientists, there seem to be no reservations in him, though he begins to visualise the flashes of destruction and conflagration in the suffering and scalding of victims.

The pull between the serious physicist and the project he was imperceptibly sucked into brings about his existential crisis. In his mind, he never wanted Nazi Germany to win the race to produce the bomb. But he also believed that the bomb, a reliable deterrent, would finally end all future wars. Though deeply averse to the bomb being experimented on living humans, he dubiously never stood up against the official justification. But the idea that a lesson be taught to Germany, Italy and Japan was uppermost in his mind. The brutal decision to drop the bomb into the heart of Hiroshima, therefore, began to seem to be the most effective option.

Apparently, mankind had not envisaged a calamity on such a large scale. Though the nuclear bomb did become a deterrent, it began to be manufactured by enemy countries, leading to the deep-seated panic of the apocalypse. Once the war ended, the production process was accelerated. It became clear to Oppenheimer that he had been compromised as a well-meaning scientist. His pacifism drew anger from President Truman, resulting in the compulsion to ostracise him. He died a shattered, unhappy man at 62.

After more than half a century, Oppenheimer emerged from the ashes to finally get the blot reversed by the overturning of the security clearance denied to him in 1954. He was exonerated on December 18, 2022, and the historical record amended to honour his profound contributions to national defence and scientific enterprise.

Understandably, Oppenheimer was a victim of McCarthyism, a political practice of making accusations of disloyalty or subversion with inadequate concern for evidence. It was political prosecution of left-wing individuals for their alleged hand in Soviet espionage. After taking up a job in Berkeley, he began to lend support to the anti-fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War. The communist label stuck to him and his wholehearted efforts to stop the nuclear race brought him under the scanner. Early leftism and later ideology of non-violence brought a deep emotional upheaval in him.

History now stands rectified, but the role of the man behind the bomb remains contentious. Moreover, this comes as a lesson to future scientists that their true loyalty and well-articulated opinions against military bloodshed would not go unnoticed. His clemency is a step towards the state making amends and bestowing on civil society the freedom to express contrary opinions on the wisdom of official policy decisions.

The Prometheus moment is, therefore, pivotal in world history at a stage when numerous statesmen and scientists have given a cautionary call to the world travelling down the nuclear path. Nolan undoubtedly uses music and visuals to have a profound and instinctual impact on his audience, but he fails in honouring the dead or underscoring the ignominy of the US in going ahead with its ‘experiment’ after the armistice. The haunting image from WH Auden’s poem The Second Coming of the ‘rough beast’ slouching towards Bethlehem to be born portends the human tragedies yet to come when regulatory bodies like the UN have gone moribund. Who knows what the unintended consequence would be of an invention that remains unaddressed by any supreme regulatory body? As Daniel Ellsberg puts it succinctly, “This is not a species to be trusted with nuclear weapons… The fact that no nuclear weapon has been used in combat since August 9, 1945, is the result more of pure chance than of accumulated wisdom.”

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