Even after he was appointed director of Los Alamos in 1943, his security clearance was held up because of these connections.* The project’s military director, Gen. Not only that, his wife, Kitty (played by Emily Blunt), had once been a party member, as had his brother and several of his close friends, and he attended several meetings of the party’s chapter in Berkeley, where he was teaching physics. In the 1930s and early ’40s, he had been a “fellow traveler”-probably not a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, but an active supporter of some of its causes, which in the day included racial integration, a minimum wage, and aiding the anti-fascist soldiers in the Spanish Civil War. (Without a Q security clearance, he could play no role in setting, or even learning about, atomic policy.) Oppenheimer left himself open to attack. They created a tribunal to investigate whether his security clearance should be revoked. But he was not opposed to nuclear weapons in general. He did eventually come to the view, as portrayed in the film, that this mutual vulnerability might deter both sides from using the weapons or even from going to war at all. He argued that H-bombs were too powerful for battlefield targets-they could destroy only big cities-and, if the Russians built them, as they would if we did, a war would devastate American cities, too. (The film does not quote this rather famous line of his.) Still, he remained unenthusiastic, worrying that the H-bomb would divert money from Hiroshima-type A-bombs, which he thought the Army should continue building as weapons to be used on the battlefield if the Soviets invaded Western Europe. Then, when the math proved it feasible, he dropped his resistance, admitting that it was too “technically sweet” not to develop. Oppenheimer opposed the H-bomb project, but not entirely for moral reasons. But many military officers and some scientists, foreseeing a possible war with Russia, pushed to build a hydrogen bomb, which would be 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II. Oppenheimer fell into a funk after the war, perhaps as a result of viewing footage of the atrocities that his bombs inflicted on tens of thousands of civilians. It points out, as well, that Oppenheimer served on the official commission that selected the bomb’s targets. (The debate over this question is still unsettled.) The film is clear on all of this. Oppenheimer urged his colleagues not to sign Szilard’s letter, saying such matters should be left to political leaders and endorsing the official view that if we didn’t drop the bomb, thousands of American soldiers would die in an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Some of the Manhattan Project’s scientists-including Szilard-petitioned Truman to drop the bomb on an unpopulated island as a demonstration of its power, giving the Japanese a chance to surrender before it was unleashed on their cities. But Japan fought on, so Truman-who became president after FDR died-shifted the plans to drop the bomb on Japan. As it happened, the Allied armies defeated the Nazis in the spring of 1945, before the German scientists succeeded. Roosevelt instigated the Manhattan Project in 1942, after Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, two of the most prominent physicists of the day, wrote him a letter warning that German scientists had figured out how to split an atom, that they could turn this discovery into a very powerful bomb, and that we needed to beat them to it or risk losing the war.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |