We went to see the movie “Oppenheimer” the other day and I must say, I really didn’t like it. It was fragmented, incoherent, over dramatized, and seemed to lack any substantive message. More importantly, it completely avoided any reference to the real impact his work had on civilization. The success of the Manhattan Project which culminated in the deployment of two atomic bombs on Japan was one of the most significant turning points in human history. Few inventions of mankind have had a greater impact. Whatever one wishes to believe about the man is irrelevant. It is what Oppenheimer succeeded in doing that is of the greatest importance.
The nuclear age, ushered in by the Manhattan Project, initiated a race to build a stockpile of weapons (each capable of destroying entire cities) more than sufficient to completely destroy civilization. At one point in the 1980’s, there were over 60,000 nuclear warheads in the arsenals of the U.S. (23,000) and the Soviet Union (39,000)1. So many, in fact, that U.S. war planners had difficulty in finding targets worthy of their deployment. Over time, a few arms control agreements have reduced the number of nuclear warhead to about 13,000 (about 5,000 in the U.S., 6,000 in Russia, 400 in China, 300 in France, 200 in the U.K., 150 each in Pakistan and India, 100 in Israel and 30 in North Korea)2. What goes unspoken, however, is the fact that the current weapons are many times more powerful than the two that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Each of those weapons were the equivalent of about 20 kilotons (20,000 tons) of TNT, but many of today’s weapons (e.g., B83 bomb) are the equivalent of 1.2 megatons (1,200,000 tons) of TNT or 60 times the explosive power of the earlier weapons. (The largest weapon ever developed, the B41 bomb, was 25 megatons. The B53 bomb was 9 megatons. Both have been retired, but it is suspected they have not been destroyed.)3
Sadly, the world has become so inured to the presence of nuclear weapons and the threat they pose, that that many, if not most, war planners actively encourage their use in their war plans. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of war plans in the Pentagon, few of which do not include at least one nuclear contingency. We have evaded the threat so long that we have forgotten it exists – but it does exist; and the risks are higher today than ever since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. We have become so blind to those risks that we don’t blink at the proposal to spend trillions of dollars “upgrading” our nuclear arsenal.
What is ignored in our oblivion is the human tragedy of the consequences of nuclear warfare. In Hiroshima alone, the estimated number of deaths ranged from 65,000 to 140,0004. The number of injured is estimated to be of the same magnitude. The bomb had multiple effects that killed people, some immediately, some after hours and days of suffering and some after days, weeks and months of radiation poisoning. Because the bomb was dropped in the center of the city, over 90% of its medical facilities and personnel were destroyed, so that medical care for the injured was not available and suffering was prolonged until long afterward when help could arrive from other localities. This is just one “small” bomb in one city. In your mind, multiply that by 13,000 much bigger bombs in cities around the world.
In a Rutgers University study5, a “small scale” nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan (possessing approximately 300 nuclear weapons between them) would result in the deaths of up to 3 billion people. A fraction of those (120 million, possibly more) would be killed by explosion, fire and radiation. Radioactive fallout would poison water and food supplies for humans and livestock. Heat and an estimated 37 million tons of soot injected into the upper atmosphere would blanket much of the earth, blocking the sun and destroying the ionosphere, resulting in loss of sunlight and increased ultraviolet radiation that would destroy food crops in many countries. The result would be mass starvation and deaths from wars fought over the few remaining food supplies. Additional deaths would occur from diseases caused by destruction of waste management systems and unsanitary conditions.
We may delude ourselves thinking that a nuclear war will be limited, but in doing so, we ignore human nature. Once violence has been initiated in human conflict, it tends to escalate until one or both sides are completely exhausted or destroyed. We witnessed that in Vietnam. We witnessed it in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are witnessing it today in the conflict being waged in Ukraine. Each time there are losses on one side, more weapons are supplied in larger numbers and greater lethality. First come the military advisors, then the small arms and munitions, then the mercenary forces, then larger weapons, cannons, tanks, missiles, aircraft and bombs. Will the final stage include nuclear weapons? Under present policies, the war in Ukraine will not stop until the country is destroyed.
Who will be the first to exercise the nuclear option?6 (Bear in mind, U.S. policy makers have never declared that we would not be the first to pull the nuclear trigger. The nuclear option has always been on the table since it was first initiated.) And if one is deployed, what will be the response by the other side – and what will be the counter response to that? And, in the end, what will be the consequences for humanity? This is the dilemma that J. Robert Oppenheimer brought us to. This is the point that was completely missed in the movie “Oppenheimer”.
As an aside, there is a thought provoking article in Consortium News7 called “The Executioner’s Lament” that talks about the people who actually use the weapons. It is almost never the case in weaponry where the inventor is the actual user. While it was Oppenheimer who created the weapon, it was President Truman who ordered its deployment. Then it was Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets who commanded the mission and Major Thomas Ferebee who launched the bomb and were eye witnesses to its destruction. What kinds of people are these? Do they ever have afterthoughts or regrets? Did Truman ever have any regrets? What does it take in a person to order the deaths of thousands or millions of human beings, and what does it take in ordinary people to carry out those kinds of orders? And what does that say about humanity.
1 UN report on nuclear testing
2 Federation of Amercan Scientists
4 Wikipedia, Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
5 “Local Nuclear War, Global Suffering”, Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon, Scientific American, vol. 302, no. 1, Jan. 2010
6 Actually, that is the wrong question. The U.S. was already first to exercise the nuclear option over 75 years ago. So, who will be next?