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Oppenheimer’s unquestioned leadership also had much to do with the shared psychic numbing of that community in regard to what would happen on the other end of the weapon. As Alice K. Smith (1958), a historian who lived there with her physicist husband, explained:
They all agreed that they were frenetically busy and extremely security conscious and suggest that there was even some half-conscious closing of the mind to anything but the fact that they were trying desperately to produce a device which would end the war.
A large measure of Oppenheimer’s tragedy lay in the depth of his immersion in nuclearism. Oppenheimer had a series of conversations with Niels Bohr, the revered Danish physicist who was a major mentor of his and who made several visits to Los Alamos. Bohr had developed the concept of “complementarity,” the idea that two very different findings in physics can be equally true, depending on the vantage point or the instruments utilized by the observer. For instance, matter could be accurately represented by particles or by waves.
The two men came to believe that they could apply this principle of complementarity to the atomic bomb: If used, it would bring a new dimension of destruction but would also create an equally new dedication to peace. As his biographers note:
The bomb for Bohr and Oppenheimer was a weapon of death that might also end war and redeem mankind.
We may pause here for a moment to note that this bizarre and dangerous version of nuclearism could be embraced by two such intellectual giants and otherwise humane men. It makes a study of these men so perplexing.
There is an interesting interview with Philip Morrison, one of the physicists at Las Alamos, a few years before he died (in 2005). He had become a prominent public figure and antinuclear spokesman. He described riding in a Jeep with Oppenheimer at the plutonium test site, and then 3 weeks later by himself holding the components of the actual Nagasaki bomb in his hand on the island of Tinian, the launching point for the atomic bomb attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was fine.
But everything changed for Morrison when he went to Hiroshima and directly witnessed what the bomb had done there and discovered how:
One bomber could now destroy a city. When you go there you saw what it was actually like - the brutal human effects of the single atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
Morrison’s psychological trajectory with the atomic bomb is not too different from Oppenheimer’s.
Oppenheimer’s earlier nuclearism included a commitment to the bomb’s use, and that deepened his tragedy. When other scientists involved with its creation engaged in a collective effort to urge that it be given a demonstration in an isolated area rather than exploding it on a human population, Oppenheimer had opposed the idea. His biographers note:
He did so with some ambivalence, referring to his own “anxieties” about the bomb and partial receptivity to arguments against its use on human beings. But he ended up on the side of those who “emphasized the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use.” His reasoning was essentially as Bohrian as that of the men who favored a demonstration. He had become convinced that the military use of the bomb in this war might eliminate all wars.
Oppenheimer would later say words to the effect that “I never regretted … having done my part of the job.” He would even add that “I … think that it was a damn good thing that the bomb was developed, that it was recognized as something important and new, and it would have an effect on the course of history.”
Why, then, his seeming about-face in relation to the “Super” hydrogen bomb? A number of people have emphasized, with some truth, that the hydrogen bomb was not “his” bomb and would require a new project of its own. But many suggest another reason, that the hydrogen bomb went too far. That is, Oppenheimer understood that, while an atomic bomb could destroy a city, hydrogen bombs, in tapping the energy of the sun, could destroy the world and eliminate its human inhabitants. Although he did not necessarily use the terminology, it was a sequence from genocide to omnicide. Other scientists and humanists shared his rejection of such a device.
In his case, that rejection was at first only partial, as he had come to accept many of the views of the American establishment, of which he had become, according to his biographers, “a member in good standing.” He had not joined antinuclear activists such as Bertrand Russell, Leo Szilard, Joseph Rotblat, and Albert Einstein in their public statements. Although “still capable of being a critic [he] wanted to stand alone and with far more ambiguity than his fellow scientists.”
As he explained: “If the Russians have the weapon and we don’t, we will be badly off. And if the Russians have the weapon and we do, we will still be badly off.” For him the weapon was (in his biographers’ words) “neither necessary as a deterrent or beneficial to American security.” He did become a consistent advocate of openness in connection with hydrogen bombs and believed strongly in some form of international control.
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