“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
– J Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad-Gita.
Watching Oppenheimer took me back to my first year physics lectures at the University of Queensland in 1969. Many of the physicists in the film developed theories which were the subject of the Physics curriculum, particularly quantum theory: Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg were the people whose theories I remember from so long ago.
In 1969 the anti-war movement was growing at the University of Queensland because the United States had invaded Vietnam and other states in Indochina. The catch-cry from the Australian government was ‘all the way with LBJ’ who was the US president after Kennedy was shot. The American war in Vietnam was bitterly opposed, mainly by youth, because 19-year-olds were conscripted and sent by the government to fight in Vietnam. At the same time we watched the United States moon landing inside the physics lecture theatre – it seemed that science would conquer all.
The film Oppenheimer claims that the main reason its namesake, Dr Robert Oppenheimer, developed the atomic bomb at Los Alamos was because Nazis were killing his people in Germany. It claims that Oppenheimer wished to use the A-bomb against Germany during World War II. The film claims that Germany was ahead of the United States in developing this weapon of mass destruction because it had better nuclear scientists. The film also claims that Oppenheimer later had a part in the selection of ultimate targets for the A-bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, when President Truman ordered that the bomb be used against the Japanese people at the end of the war.
The film shows tensions between scientists Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer about which bomb to develop: the A-bomb or the hydrogen bomb. In the early 1940s Teller was an advocate for a uranium hydride bomb but this was later rejected in 1944 because it was ‘less efficient’ (at killing people) than a fast neutron bomb supported by Oppenheimer.
Exchanges between Oppenheimer and Teller are shown in the film when they were discussing the properties of deuterium. These conversations were part of flash backs used extensively in the film to divine motivations behind the Manhattan Project. Teller was satirised in the film Dr Strangelove as being a mad fascist who came up with the theory of mutually-assured-destruction. However in this film Teller is portrayed sympathetically as being a supporter of Oppenheimer when he was attacked after World War II by the FBI and Louis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission for having left-wing views. Whatever the truth of the matter, in this Hollywood film Oppenheimer had his security clearance taken from him after he developed the A-bomb. Apparently this was because of suspicion that he had been involved in an exchange of scientific ideas with Moscow.
The film also claims that in the end he was exonerated by LBJ who gave him an award at the White House in the 1960s. This was predicted by Einstein as being an appeasement of the national conscience about the use of nuclear warfare rather than about Washington’s shoddy treatment of Oppenheimer. In this case the innocent civilians were Japanese and the motive for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was claimed to reduce the number of American casualties that may have occurred should the US invade the islands of Japan to effect a surrender.
Like anything from Hollywood I doubt the historical accuracy of the film. Apparently the film is based on a book ‘American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer’ written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. So I cannot blame Hollywood, solely, for the belief that the United States is distinctive, unique, and exemplary compared to other nations.
The director made a pitch for drama with a soundtrack by Ludwig Göransson designed to increase the tension (as if that were necessary given the possibility of a chain reaction turning the entire world into a fireball).
In a bizaare scene Oppenheimer injects cyanide into the apple of one of his teachers at Cambridge because he was told to stay back in class and work on his laboratory skills. According to the film, he later regrets his decision and pulls the poisoned apple from the hand of scientist Niels Bohr, preventing him from eating it. The latter incident appears to have been a dramatic fiction. Niels Bohr later works with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. Did he try to kill his tutor? Well, if he did, his teacher was but one in a long line of people that he killed.
A central theme of the film was that Oppenheimer had second thoughts about the development of nuclear weapons because of the arms race that was developing between the Soviet Union and the United States. Apparently, when Oppenheimer’s loyalty and trustworthiness to the United States came under fire, it was a junior senator for Massachusetts, J.F. Kennedy, who held out in favour of Oppenheimer. If true, this was a strange contradiction because Kennedy, as President, was responsible for taking the United States to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
Both theoretical physicists, Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, are portrayed sympathetically in the film. One of their meetings provides the basis for the jealousy by Louis Strauss that led to an investigation and inquiry into Robert Oppenheimer’s motives. A lawyer told Strauss that perhaps his jealousy was without foundation because “Perhaps they (Einstein and Oppenheimer) were discussing something more important.” As it turns out, they were.
Before the war Einstein wrote a letter dated 2 August 1939 to President Roosevelt urging him to speed up work on a potential bomb because Germany was engaged in similar research and had “stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she (Germany, sic) has taken over.” According to Einstein the US had limited resources of uranium and that the main reserves lay in Canada, Czechoslovakia and the Belgian Congo [possibly unknown to Einstein, Australia is rich in uranium. In his letter to the US President, Einstein explained possible military use of the bomb:
“This new phenomenon (splitting the atom) would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable – though much less certain – that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.”
I find it impossible to trust American democracy (or lack of it) to put a lid on nuclear weapons. The tests in New Mexico led by Oppenheimer were extremely dangerous, not the least because scientists on the project believed that there was a possibility, though slim, of a chain reaction which could engulf the entire planet in a firestorm.
The irony is that it was liberals in the United States that initiated the Manhattan project by saying that the US needed to beat the Nazis to the punch (see Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt). Einstein wrote his letter to Roosevelt (dated 2 August 1939) urging the speeding up the development of the Atomic Bomb long before the US entered the war in Europe (in 1941).
It may have been a Republican president that pulled the trigger but it was liberals like Oppenheimer and Kennedy that brought the world to the brink of mutually-assured-destruction.
Oppenheimer truly did ‘have blood on his hands’.
Ian Curr
5 September 2023