How did a theoretical physicist, humanist and polyglot end up facing a project like the atomic bomb? And how is it possible that after being perceived as a hero he ended up humiliated by his own country? Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin explain it in the American Prometheus biography. The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Debate). If for Bird (Oregon, 1951) it meant an immersion of five years of work, Sherwin (1937-2021) had started working on it twenty years before. The book won them a Pulitzer Prize and has inspired the Oppenheimer film that Christopher Nolan will release this summer and that features performances by Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Kenneth Branagh, Gary Oldman and Rami Malek, among others. Bird attends us telematically to talk about the book and the so-called father of the atomic bomb.
The debate on the nuclear bomb is still on the table, with the war in Ukraine and Putin’s threats.
This is a story of our times, Oppenheimer is the father of the atomic bomb and who brought us into the era of nuclear weapons of destruction that are still with us. We are seeing it with Russian threats to use these weapons of mass destruction, and we don’t know if they will be used again. Remembering his life is still relevant today for Europeans and Americans, who live in a society surrounded by science.
Today we talk about tactical nuclear weapons, as if they had a reduced range…
What is the objective, the target, of an atomic bomb? The smallest of those tactical weapons has a large radius and there would always be a lot of civilian casualties. It is not a military weapon, but for terrorists. Oppenheimer himself, in a marvelous speech already in 1945, says that the nuclear bomb is a weapon for aggressors, a weapon of terror, not a military weapon that can be used in battle, because the target will always be an entire city.
He tasted success and fell out of favor after the war.
In 1945 he was the most recognized American scientist, and after nine years he was humiliated, publicly vilified in a hearing that was a farce and made him an outcast. A person who had been such an authority no longer had a say and was not allowed to speak. This sends a message to scientists around the world: you have to be very careful if you decide to get into the public arena and talk about politics and issues that have to do with war and peace, be careful because it is getting into the terrain of certain powers that are not interested in you speaking no matter how scientific you are. It does not interest ordinary citizens to know certain things, and in the pandemic we have often seen distrust of the scientists who have helped us. Scientists must do science and discover the truth in order for us to understand the physical world around us. There seems to be a disconnect between scientists and the general public.
They humiliated him without any proof.
It’s outrageous, what was done to him. It’s like a Shakespearean tragedy. They dragged him through the mud and he was unable to defend himself, he showed up at that hearing very confused and he was not good at defending himself at all. He was outrageous and unfair, because it was also not a trial as God intended. His lawyer was not even authorized to access key documents that were used against him, and they spread the stories that best suited them to make him look bad, and then they leaked it all to the American press and made him an outcast . I am amazed at the political naivety he had. He was upright, but ambitious.
McCarthyism made him a martyr, a madness reminiscent of the most recalcitrant Trumpism.
If you want to understand Trump and how the United States has been able to go through this entire period with a buffoon in charge, you have to see that we had been through this before, and history repeats itself cyclically. We still pay the price of the witch hunt against the threat of communism. Oppenheimer was a loyal American patriot who was suspected because he was a leftist, but he was not a spy. He was a sensitive man about the political issues of the thirties, with the depression. He built the bomb out of fear that the Germans would build it first and Hitler would end up winning the war and defeat fascism, because he had met German scientists like Heisenberg. That was the motive that prompted him to create the bomb.
You can’t stop science.
That sums up Oppenheimer’s story. He understood that he could not fail to understand what nuclear fission was, that an atomic bomb was going to be discovered anyway, and he wanted to be the first before the Germans. While he was building the bomb, he was painfully aware that it was a horrific and terrifying weapon, but you can’t put limits on science: you can’t not discover what you’ve already discovered. In addition, he defended that the war had to end with the knowledge of what an atomic bomb can achieve, precisely so that the next war would not be fought with atomic weapons.
I was aware that it was going to be used.
Yes. It is very complex. He once went to Tokyo, and Japanese journalists asked him if he had gone to apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he gave one of his ambiguous answers: that he had slept no worse that night than the night before. It did disturb him, and after Hiroshima he fell into a depression with the realization that he had created a marvelous thing that he wanted to build for war purposes and it had used and instantly killed at least 140,000 people. His last secretary at Los Alamos, Anne Wilson, told me that one day, after the successful rehearsal of the first detonation of the bomb, Oppenheimer was shaking his head, whispering: “Poor people, poor people,” as if for the inside of him Wilson asked him, and he replied that they were going to drop it on a Japanese city and the majority of the victims would be children, women and elderly civilians. This happened the same week that he had met with the crews that were going to drop the bomb, to whom he explained how to do it to cause more destruction.
He did not regret it.
No, but after the war he spent the rest of his life asking for these activities to be controlled, that an International Atomic Energy Agency was needed with absolute control, that it prohibit what should be prohibited and that laboratories be inspected… In other words, he predicted what happened in Iran and North Korea, because the nuclear bomb is relatively cheap, and a country that wants to have it will be able to do so if there are no controls. It’s very dangerous.
Quantum physics was born in the twenties of the twentieth century, and it still seems to us the newest…
It is that there are still new discoveries. He started with Bohr, Heisenberg and others, and Oppenheimer was in the right place at the right time to get into this elitist world of scientists studying the smallest world there is. We understand gravity, but gravity does not explain the structure of the atom, it is like a magical world.
Oppenheimer was a peculiar man.
In the end it is the wonderful story of a man whose adolescence was not easy, who has not quite found his place, who does not quite know who he is, but then he grows up and transforms and becomes this fantastic scientist, the quantum physicist. who likes French poetry and learns Sanskrit and quotes the Bhagavad-gita, who gets into Depression-era politics and flirts with communists. He even sided with the Spanish republicans helping to raise money…
He married a Civil War widow…
His wife was widowed by an American who died in Spain during the war, yes. He is a mysterious and complicated character and sweet and difficult at the same time.
He was very humanist.
He loved literature, Proust, Hemingway, Thomas Man, French poetry… Oppenheimer’s life teaches us the importance and influence of history and literature, of culture. A scientist must know everything in order to ask the right questions and do good science.
In science and in life sometimes it doesn’t matter just being the best in a field.
He was a charismatic leader surely because he was able to talk about quantum physics and scientific problems, but in plain language, that could be understood…
Are we selling our souls to technology today?
We are surrounded by technology and we do not stop to think deeply about its consequences. A good example is artificial intelligence and how it is taking control of society, it is gaining ground and we do not know what consequences it will have for human beings. There is little debate.
Catalan version, here
