This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Yes, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, would kill staggering numbers of people and be an eerily (if all too grimly) appropriate ending to the war that started with the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and, by August 1945, had resulted in the saturation bombing of 64 Japanese cities.
The scientist who led the team responsible for creating the bombs that destroyed those two cities (and for the initial nuclear test in New Mexico that, as we only recently learned, spread fallout over 46 states, Canada, and Mexico), the 41-year-old J. Robert Oppenheimer, would later borrow a line from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scriptures, to describe his mood at the time: "Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." And eerily enough, the use of the weapon that would prove to be the second way humanity found to destroy our planet the first, climate change, was already in effect but not yet known would find all too few in the U.S. government hesitant to use it at that time. As historian John Dower would put it in his memorable book Cultures of War,
"The policy makers, scientists, and military officers who had committed themselves to becoming death" never seriously considered not using their devastating new weapon. They did not talk about turning mothers into cinders or irradiating even the unborn. They brushed aside discussion of alternative targets, despite the urging of many lower-echelon scientists that they consider this. They gave little if any serious consideration to whether there should be ample pause after using the first nuclear weapon to give Japan's frazzled leaders time to respond before a second bomb was dropped."
They just did it, twice, and the world changed radically. Almost 80 years later, at a moment when a global leader is once again evidently considering the possible use of what are now called "tactical nuclear weapons" (but can be several times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki), Oppenheimer is having his moment in the sun (or is it a blaze of atomic light?) in a film that, to the surprise of many, has hit the big time in an almost nuclear fashion. And as TomDispatch regular and Pentagon expert William Hartung reminds us while considering that three-hour odyssey of a film, what "Oppie" began then has by now become a full-scale nuclear-industrial complex on a planet where ultimate destruction, it often seems, always lurks just around the corner. Tom
The Profiteers of Armageddon
Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex
Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you're undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher Nolan has released a new film about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the "father of the atomic bomb" for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as part of America's World War II-era Manhattan Project. The film has earned widespread attention, with large numbers of people participating in what's already become known as "Barbieheimer" by seeing Greta Gerwig's hit film Barbie and Nolan's three-hour-long Oppenheimer on the same day.
Nolan's film is a distinctive pop cultural phenomenon because it deals with the American use of nuclear weapons, a genuine rarity since ABC's 1983 airing of The Day After about the consequences of nuclear war. (An earlier exception was Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, his satirical portrayal of the insanity of the Cold War nuclear arms race.)
The film is based on American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Nolan made it in part to break through the shield of antiseptic rhetoric, bloodless philosophizing, and public complacency that has allowed such world-ending weaponry to persist so long after Trinity, the first nuclear bomb test, was conducted in the New Mexico desert 78 years ago this month.
Nolan's impetus was rooted in his early exposure to the nuclear disarmament movement in Europe. As he said recently:
"It's something that's been on my radar for a number of years. I was a teenager in the '80s, the early '80s in England. It was the peak of CND, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Greenham Common [protest]; the threat of nuclear war was when I was 12, 13, 14 it was the biggest fear we all had. I think I first encountered Oppenheimer in" Sting's song about the Russians that came out then and talks about Oppenheimer's 'deadly toys.'"
A feature film on the genesis of nuclear weapons may not strike you as an obvious candidate for box-office blockbuster status. As Nolan's teenage son said when his father told him he was thinking about making such a film, "Well, nobody really worries about nuclear weapons anymore. Are people going to be interested in that?" Nolan responded that, given what's at stake, he worries about complacency and even denial when it comes to the global risks posed by the nuclear arsenals on this planet. "You're normalizing killing tens of thousands of people. You're creating moral equivalences, false equivalences with other types of conflict" [and so] accepting, normalizing" the danger."
These days, unfortunately, you're talking about anything but just tens of thousands of people dying in a nuclear face-off. A 2022 report by Ira Helfand and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimated that a "limited" nuclear war between India and Pakistan that used roughly 3% of the world's 12,000-plus nuclear warheads would kill "hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions" of us. A full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, the study suggests, could kill up to five (yes, five!) billion people within two years, essentially ending life as we know it on this planet in a "nuclear winter."
Obviously, all too many of us don't grasp the stakes involved in a nuclear conflict, thanks in part to "psychic numbing," a concept regularly invoked by Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima in America: A History of Denial (co-authored with Greg Mitchell), among many other books. Lifton describes psychic numbing as "a diminished capacity or inclination to feel" prompted by "the completely unprecedented dimension of this revolution in technological destructiveness."
Given the Nolan film's focus on Oppenheimer's story, some crucial issues related to the world's nuclear dilemma are either dealt with only briefly or omitted altogether.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
