Christopher Nolan’s multiple Oscar nominated film Oppenheimer has swept all the major awards and also grossed over US$ 1 billion - here is a closer look at what the Scientist stood for…THE SIGNIFICANCE OF OPPENHEIMER

Christopher Nolan’s multiple Oscar nominated film Oppenheimer has swept all the major awards and also grossed over US$ 1 billion - here is a closer look at what the Scientist stood for…

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF OPPENHEIMER

Written by Bhuvan Lall

Saturday, 18 February 1967, was a cold day on the East Coast. The winds whipped along the landscape of Princeton and the roofs of entire neighborhoods were encrusted in heavy snow. The residents of the small university town dressed in boots and fur shivered in icy gusts. Across from the Institute of Advance Studies in snow-covered Princeton, was the Director’s residence – the stately Olden Manor. It was an 18-room white colonial house with portions dating back to 1696. This was the home of a great hero of science and a well-known brilliant physicist, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Almost twenty years ago on a warm day in July 1947, Princeton welcomed Oppenheimer, his wife Kitty, and their two young children Peter and Katherine after their relocation from California. The Oppenheimers added a greenhouse at the Olden Manor for their orchids and their children rode the two horses around the small town with just one traffic light. Their neighbors soon included Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, George Placzek, Hideki Yukawa, Henry DeWolf Smyth, and two brilliant mathematicians from India Harish Chandra and Alladi Ramakrishnan. On the morning of 5 November 1949, Jawaharlal Nehru and his entourage motored down from New York to Princeton to attend a reception at the University. The Indian Prime Minister’s one-and-a-half-hour meeting with Einstein and visit to the Nassau Hall and Firestone library was followed by lunch with the Oppenheimers. Though the famous technocrat of the nuclear age never visited India, he was the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Calcutta University in 1957. In addition to the Medal of Merit for his work in Los Alamos, global acclaim continued to add to Oppenheimer’s worldwide prestige. ‘Life’ magazine portrayed the Oppenheimers as a happy family playing with their German Shepherd, Buddy. However, the truth lay elsewhere.

The man who led the inception of the Los Alamos laboratory that produced the atomic bomb lived in Princeton with the knowledge that his most important accomplishment - the Trinity test - could lead to Armageddon. There was strong disapproval of the atomic bomb since the nuclear age started. Nuclear power was viewed as the ultimate evil that could incinerate entire metropolises, obliterate life on the planet, and make our world uninhabitable for generations to come. On 24 January 1946, the United Nations called for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons and set up a commission to address the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. In 1948, India introduced a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly that stressed the need for effective international control of atomic energy. In 1954, India was the first country to stress the need for an end to all nuclear tests. Nearly ten years after Hiroshima, on 8 January 1955 in an NBC documentary, The Decision to Drop the Bomb, Oppenheimer, who served his country at tremendous personal cost famously quoted the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ describing the first detonation of a nuclear weapon as “the destroyer of worlds”. In the same year on 9 July 1955, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and other leading scientists disseminated a manifesto emphasizing the dangers of nuclear war and advised all governments to resolve disputes peacefully. As the Director of the Institute of Advance Studies, Oppenheimer opposed the Hydrogen bomb and continued to struggle with the moral dilemma relating to the development of the atomic bomb. Nearly two decades after Hiroshima in 1965, an increasingly burdened Oppenheimer was asked about the United States and Russia halting the nuclear weapon race and he said: “It’s twenty years too late … it should have been done the day after Trinity.” The mushroom clouds that the Manhattan Project unleashed remain suspended like a Sword of Damocles over humanity’s existence.

Furthermore, Oppenheimer’s humiliation at the farcical security trial of 1954 in the dark and spartan Room 2022 of Building T3 near the Washington Monument in the nation’s capital followed by his banishment from government weighed heavily on the patriot. At that time Richard Nixon found him a completely loyal American and Wernher von Braun the famous rocket scientist said it was tragic that the United States was not using the services of Oppenheimer. He added that Oppenheimer would have been knighted in Britain. With the ever-present smoke wafting above his head, team lead of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer chain smoked four to five packs of cigarettes a day along with a pipe and developed a persistent cough. Over the next decade, the most recognizable physicist on the planet who responded to questions in flawless Latin and Greek and recited Sanskrit scriptures with unheard precision gradually became unrecognizable.

On the icy weekend of 18 February 1967, the newspapers reported US President Lyndon Johnson’s statement on a proposed treaty to bar the spread of nuclear weapons. That night a very frail Oppenheimer who had won the race against time in the 1940s lost his long battle with lung cancer and quietly passed away in his sleep. He was just short of his sixty-third birthday. Two days later his remains were cremated. On the passing of the devoted American, Senator William Fulbright in a speech in the Senate stated, “Let us remember not only what his special genius did for us; let us also remember what we did to him.” TASS, the Soviet news agency in Moscow, reported the death of an “outstanding American physicist” and the Times of London appropriately described him as the quintessential “renaissance man”. Hideki Yukawa, Japan’s first Nobel prize-winning scientist, said “Dr. Oppenheimer was also a symbol of the tragedy of the modern nuclear scientists.” The intellectual and academic elite of America including five Nobel Laureates and the silver-haired and distinguished, Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, former head of the Manhattan Project, arrived at Alexander Hall in Princeton on 25 February for a memorial service to pay their last respects to the scientist who changed the course of human history. Following the memorial service on a brilliant sunset evening, in keeping with Oppenheimer’s beliefs his ashes were scattered off the coast of US Virgin Islands in the azure waters of the Caribbean.

Half a century after Oppenheimer’s departure, on 10 December 2017, a person of Japanese origin, Setsuko Thurlow entered a prominent red brick building in the freezing capital city of Norway. On that Sunday afternoon, the Oslo City Hall was packed with dignitaries, and their Majesties King Harald, Queen Sonja, Crown Prince Haakon, and Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway were in attendance. They had come to attend the presentation of the annual Nobel Peace Prize. Alfred Nobel is said to have endowed the Peace Prize, particularly as a “penance” for having introduced dynamite into the world. Setsuko, a former resident of Hiroshima, had experienced the terror of a far more dangerous weapon than dynamite. As a 13-year-old grade-8 schoolgirl, she witnessed the horrific sight of the blue-white flash outside her window in Hiroshima on an otherwise calm August morning in 1945. This was the detonation of the ‘Little Boy’, the first nuclear bomb used in warfare. Most of the residents of Hiroshima were instantly vaporized. Even members of Setsuko’s own family were incinerated. Just two miles from the ground zero she slowly regained consciousness after the nuclear explosion. Saved by a soldier she jumped over dead bodies to cross her beloved city that had turned into a hellscape. Radiation continued to kill the citizens for decades. On that dreadful day, humanity was shaken. The world changed forever. So did the life of Setsuko. Having witnessed nuclear horrors in her childhood, Thurlow became the hibakusha, the 137,000 survivors of the nuclear attack. As an anti-nuclear activist, she remains the voice of those the world lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during WW2. She joined the global anti-nuclear movement and tirelessly traveled around the world to share the stories of the hibakusha. She spoke to thousands of people at conferences, schools, protest marches, and even on cruise ships about the first-hand story of lifelong grief and warned the world about the existential threat of nuclear weapons.

Setsuko was in Oslo to participate in the formal Nobel Peace award ceremony held every year on the death anniversary of Alfred Nobel. The Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen, reiterated the committee’s decision to award the 2017 Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). In its statement, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said: “The organisation is receiving the award for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.” Berit Reiss-Andersen, then handed over the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize - a Nobel Peace Prize medal and diploma, to Hiroshima nuclear bombing survivor Setsuko and Beatrice Fihn of ICAN. Following the presentation, the Nobel laureate in a moving speech Setsuko appealed to all the nations of the world to prohibit nuclear weapons. She stated, “We were not content to be victims. We refused to wait for an immediate fiery end or the slow poisoning of our world. We refused to sit idly in terror as the so-called great powers took us past nuclear dusk and brought us recklessly close to nuclear midnight. We rose up. We shared our stories of survival. We said: humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist. Today, I want you to feel in this hall the presence of all those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I want you to feel, above and around us, a great cloud of a quarter million souls. Each person had a name. Each person was loved by someone. Let us ensure that their deaths were not in vain…”

Now on 6 August 2023, Hiroshima Day, the world’s nine nuclear-armed states collectively hold some 13,000 warheads. Today nearly half of humanity lives in countries with nuclear weapons. Modern nuclear weapons are up to 80 times more powerful than the device Oppenheimer tested in Los Alamos and those that were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Future generations dealing with the existential peril of climate change will also have to tackle the nuclear threats as a new dimension of global destruction. The Doomsday Clock now sits at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. Our world is still over-armed, and peace is severely underfunded.

Today the task of overcoming the nuclear menace and building our world without such superweapons remains vital. Filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s recent spellbinding and provocative film presents the enigmatic Oppenheimer’s singular achievement at the root of our present nuclear predicament. It states in no uncertain terms that nuclear arms are a weapon of death that could set the world on fire. Nolan’s biopic could raise global awareness to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle for good before nuclear weapons are employed due to mishaps, miscalculations, or madness. Governments can divert billions of dollars from maintaining nuclear stockpiles to investing in education, health care, infrastructure, disaster relief, and other vital services. Consistent with humanity’s moral heritage we can transcend nationality, race, religion, and other differences, value person-to-person relationships, and invent a new world that allows forward-looking dialogue. “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” in Sanskrit translates to the world is one family, and irrespective of where the world stands today, hopefully, our human family would strive towards that ideal in this century. And one day not so far away the world will march out of the dark night of nuclear terror.

The writer is the biographer of Subhas Chandra Bose and Har Dayal and is the author of India on the World Stage. He can be reached at writerlall@gmail.com

Photograph – Actor Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer and Dr. Oppenheimer at Princeton, USA