The 3-hour long film Oppenheimer was generally an interesting portrayal of Robert Oppenheimer and the invention of nuclear weaponry. It took the typical Hollywood liberties – tossing in gratuitous nude scenes with Oppenheimer’s lover and lots of silly gee whiz science moments and clever repartee that probably never occurred – but it did a good job of exposing the paranoid idiocy of 1950’s anticommunist hysteria and the moral conundrum that faced the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project.
The McCarthy era and the shameful slander and penalties that it perpetrated on so many Americans has been the topic of several movies and there is not a lot more to say about it. People who pursued social change in good faith through socialist and communist organizations should never have been persecuted unless they had actively advocated or engaged in violent revolution.
But the questions of morality that surrounded the Manhattan Project and subsequent weapons programs are more complex and less easily navigated. In fact, I would argue that war and weapons quickly ascend to a level of moral absurdity that makes any rational conclusion unobtainable.
The Manhattan Project was launched at the instigation of several leading scientists (Einstein being the most notable) who were concerned that the Nazis might develop a nuclear bomb. The conviction that the allies must ‘beat’ the Nazis to the bomb seemed logical to these scientists and to the bureaucrats and military leaders who went on to fund and initiate the project.
But ‘beating the Nazis to the bomb’ implied that it would be used on Germany if the war was ongoing, regardless of whether the Germans were close to having their own bomb or not, to ensure that the Nazis would not be successful in their own pursuit. So, from the very beginning the Manhattan Project was based on the inescapably absurd moral calculus of ‘lesser evil’, a calculation that lies at the heart of every modern war decision.
The ’lesser evil’ proposition justifies an action by the hypothesis that in the long-term fewer people will be killed (and usually that means fewer on ‘our’ side) by undertaking that action than by other tactical activities.
The decision to use a weapon on a civilian population, whether in response to an enemy’s strike or as a strategy to ‘break the will’ of the enemy by killing women and children, is mass murder no matter what the rationale. It may seem logical in time of war, but that is only because wartime has already suspended all morality and put all decision making on an impossibly absurd amoral footing. Comparing one set of deaths with another is a fool’s errand. There is simply no satisfactory answer.
Many of the Manhattan Project scientists protested the use of the bomb on Japan. The argument that fewer lives would be lost by dropping two atomic bombs and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians did not seem morally legitimate even if the calculations made sense. This must have left a bitter aftertaste once the exultation of the successful trinity test faded and the nightmarish news came in from Japan.
It seemed that Oppenheimer, upon confronting this dilemma and the ensuing debates about the development of the hydrogen bomb, became acutely aware of the moral absurdity of their accomplishment and the inevitable arms race that it would engender. The long-term likelihood of a nuclear holocaust, which today once again begins to loom over our bitterly divided world, reminded him of the earlier fear that the fission chain reaction would set off an atmospheric reaction, ending the world.
There is no right and wrong in war, no moral path to seek in the murder of innocents. I think Oppenheimer realized this at the end. He thought and felt too deeply to avoid the doubts or to find solace in rationalizations. And because of that he is all the more sympathetic as a human being.
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