The tragedy of Robert Oppenheimer

As negotiations with Iran continue over its atomic capability, there is no better time to revisit the story of the man who built the first Bomb: American physicist J Robert Oppenheimer. This week Tom Morton-Smith’s play about the leader of the Manhattan Project transferred from Stratford to the Vaudeville Theatre in London. Oppenheimer is a gripping drama that does well at explaining the physics (so far as I could tell) as well as the complex moral conundrum of building such a destructive weapon. The play is the counterpart to Michael Frayn’s 1998 play Copenhagen, which showed how the German scientist Werner Heisenberg was co-opted—willingly or not, depending on your interpretation—into making a nuclear bomb for the Nazis. If anything, though, this story takes place in an even greyer zone because this awful weapon was created not in the service of evil but in order to defeat it.

Oppenheimer, or Oppie as everyone called him, was well-read in philosophy and literature. (He could quote Proust by heart.) Studying chemistry and physics at Harvard in the 1920s, he wrote short stories and thought about becoming a writer. He was also interested in radical politics. Morton-Smith’s play opens in the late 1930s at a raucous Communist fundraiser for the Republicans fighting the Spanish Civil War. His brother Frank was a paid-up member of the Party, but Oppenheimer, who liked to retain a certain distance from absolutist ideas, never joined up. As the play shows, these associations got him into trouble: partly to protect himself, after he joined the Manhattan Project he stopped talking to his brother and shipped out scientists he suspected of Soviet sympathies.

The Los Alamos project was a scientific enterprise on an unprecedented scale. Using the unlimited resources the US government offered him, Oppenheimer gathered the best minds available: 20 either held or would be awarded a Nobel Prize. Oppie combined scientific genius with a talent for practical leadership. He successfully managed the ego of Edward Teller, the obsessive Hungarian who wanted to build a hydrogen bomb 1,000 times more powerful than a nuclear weapon. (Teller was a model for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove.) Astonishingly, it took just 28 months—from March 1943 to July 1945—from the first conference at Los Alamos to the successful Trinity test bomb.

The scientists’ absorption in their task’s technical challenges kept any moral queasiness mostly at bay. Unlike us they did not know the Nazis would be defeated or that the bomb would be more than a theoretical deterrent. In the play, it is even suggested to Oppenheimer that the German and Japanese ambassadors be invited to watch the test bomb to convince them to surrender. But as Oppenheimer argues, what if the test failed or they thought it was faked? Only a demonstration of the atom’s untrammelled power could end the war. He even went so far as to speculate that the bomb could become “a real instrument in the establishment of peace.” Once its effect was realised, no two nuclear states would ever go to war. The logic of mutually assured destruction has held until now—just. But the theory relies on rational leadership—which is why  the west is so worried about Iran getting the bomb. What guarantee could there be if the regime’s extreme elements got their fingers on a nuclear trigger?

Twenty years after Japan was struck, and at the height of the Cold War, Oppenheimer recalled that after the initial Trinity test he thought of some lines from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am Become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” As Ray Monk writes in his comprehensive biography Inside the Centre (2012), this became one of the “most famous utterances of the 20th century.” There’s little doubt that Oppenheimer had qualms about the use to which he had put his talents. But the context of the phrase is important: Vishnu is trying to persuade someone to do his duty. Oppenheimer and his team had little choice but to turn themselves into world-destroyers. And at the time there was as much elation as regret. The physicist Isidor Rabi said that after the first test, Oppenheimer’s “walk was like High Noon…this kind of strut. He’d done it.” When the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the devastation was indiscriminate: 250,000 dead or wounded, men, women and children. Brutally speaking, though, it worked. In his surrender speech, Emperor Hirohito said America’s “new and most cruel bomb” made fighting pointless. US soldiers preparing a ground invasion of Japan—which would almost certainly have cost more lives than were taken by the bombs—hero-worshipped Oppenheimer. He was invited to meet the man who had given the order, President Truman, at the White House. He told him he felt he had “blood on his hands.” Truman’s response was brusque: “Don’t let that cry-baby in here again.”

For the president it was obvious the US needed to do everything to win. Civilian casualties were the price Japan had to pay for their aggression. Oppenheimer saw the logic. But he could not ignore the horror of those “poor little people”, as he called them, being vaporised into burnt shadows. In the play, General Leslie Groves, the military commander of Los Alamos, chides Oppenheimer for not wearing his military uniform. The uniform enshrines the separation between the man and the solider—and makes clear the burden is collective, not individual.

Most of us will never have to sacrifice our consciences in the way Oppenheimer did. But we all outsource part of our morality to our political leaders. The British military is, right now, attacking IS in northern Iraq, doubtless causing some measure of human suffering for the greater cause of defeating an unmistakable evil. Iranian-backed militias, themselves accused of committing  atrocities, have just liberated the city of Tikrit from IS with the support of US fighter jets. No doubt the current nuclear negotiations with Iran are part of a wider realignment in the region, where the west sees some advantage in getting Iran—not long ago rocked by democratic protests many in the west supported—as a partner in a broad strategic war. One does not have to be a cynic to see that an “ethical” foreign policy is no simple matter. Rather, it requires making deals with people we don’t like, compromising with terrible regimes and calculating the damage done to civilians in the name of saving others. Each intervention must be carefully judged. But we should heed Oppenheimer’s own words about his friend Albert Einstein, written a year before his death in 1967. “He was always a pacifist,” wrote Oppenheimer. “Only as the Nazis came into power in Germany did he have some doubts, as his famous and rather deep exchange of letters with Freud showed, and began to understand with melancholy and without true acceptance that, in addition to understanding, man sometimes has a duty to act.”