Making war, not peace

The critics are wild about the film Oppenheimer which opened in cinemas abroad on Friday and which I hope we get to see in TT on the big screen. “ Masterpiece”, “magnificent”, "the best ever” are some of the plaudits it already enjoys. It is reportedly a sure-to-win-Oscars-galore thrilling feature film account of the life of one of the most influential and intriguing men of the last century, American theoretical physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, who is portrayed as suffering great intellectual and moral dilemmas over his role in the creation and development of the atomic bomb. He comes unstuck eventually and it all adds up to high drama for the silver screen.

Film buffs are all aware that creatives give themselves artistic licence to alter historical facts to suit the narrative of their novel creations. However, director Christopher Nolan assures us in a New York Times interview that he changed one fact, namely, it was not the genius physicist Albert Einstein who made an important calculation that helped advance the atomic bomb but another scientist whose name would not resonate with the audience, so he changed that detail. That is very reassuring because the story of the making of the atomic bomb and its shocking use in WWII in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are well documented. There is little question that Oppenheimer (1904-1967), sometimes referred to as the father of the atomic bomb, was an enigmatic and complex character and that his role as the director of the wartime Los Alamos Laboratory and later of the Manhattan Project is a story worth telling for its human element. It also teaches us a lot about the intersection between science and politics and forces us to consider whether scientists are “innocent" or not.

In some ways Oppenheimer’s conflict was not unique, many scientists were working on splitting the atom but only in 1939 when fusion was discovered did they realise it could lead to a devastating weapon of mass destruction. It was a time of great moral dilemma for many of them. Prof Joseph Rotblat, the Polish-born physicist who worked on the atomic bomb at the Los Alamos Lab in New Mexico suffered the same moral dilemma as Oppenheimer does in the film. In 1943, he left the Manhattan Project in which the US and Britain were cooperating on the further development and production of nuclear weapons and became a leading figure in the anti-nuclear campaign, Pugwash, which is based in Britain and has worked hard to achieve various nuclear arms treaties. It won Rotblat many accolades, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. It was my great honour to spend time with him in the 1990s and to hear directly from him some details which may or may not be material to the film.

While the war was still on and Russia an ally, the head of Los Alamos military affairs, General Grove, attended a small private dinner where Rotblat was present and surprisingly revealed that the development of the atomic bomb was really to contain Russia, which was expected to emerge as the real post-war enemy. Rotblat became disillusioned. It was clear the bomb was viewed as a potential weapon, rather than a means of containing Germany when she succeeded in making her own bomb. What the allies did not know was that Germany abandoned her failed attempts in 1942 and so the race against time was totally unnecessary.

The bomb was, indeed, not intended to be defensive and the Japanese civilians were the proof of that. Furthermore, Rotblat believed the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945 provoked Russia to build its own and started the nuclear arms race. At first, Rotblat, and allegedly Oppenheimer too, both Jewish, had believed in the atomic bomb as a positive development that could ensure peace, but the scientific fraternity split between pacifists and those like Oppenheimer who continued the race to make more and more of what Rotblat described as useless weapons of mass destruction – you need only one because they are so potent. Rotblat was the only scientist to leave the project on moral grounds and was one of the signatories to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto which advocated nuclear disarmament, while the Manhattan Project scientists forged ahead with still more deadly nuclear arms.

Forget flying meteorites, global warming, devilishly hot summers everywhere and the extremes of weather that threaten mankind, we have enough unusable nuclear weapons stockpiled to eliminate every person on earth. Rotblat posed the question, which the film probably echoes, of the social responsibility of the scientist. He rejected naive notions that scientists are neutral, are merely technical workers, have nothing to do with politics and are not responsible for the application of their science. He believed scientists have a duty to society and that we should hold them to account for the social impact of their science. Scientists can be rather egotistic, as Oppenheimer was, and pursue research simply because they can and because discovery is the holy grail. The eureka moment is a big hit for a scientist but sadly the knowledge, good or bad, can never be reversed or forgotten.