The bomb was inevitable, but Oppenheimer was right about its future
Conn Carroll
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It is no surprise that a Hollywood filmmaker might exaggerate a bit when promoting his movie, so Christopher Nolan’s recent claim that Robert Oppenheimer is “the most important person who ever lived” is not unexpected.
I do think it is wrong, though, as Nolan’s movie demonstrates that the Nazis began their atomic bomb project within months of the discovery of nuclear fission, and of course, the Russians detonated their own bomb just four years after we did.
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Was Oppenheimer the only person who could have completed the first nuclear bomb as fast as he did? Maybe. But if Gen. Leslie Groves hadn’t picked Oppenheimer for the project, he would have picked someone else. And maybe he or she wouldn’t have completed a working device by July 16, 1945, but the project would have been completed eventually.
And that’s not even considering all the resources the Soviets had and the German scientists at their disposal. Some nation was bound to apply the discovery of nuclear fission on the battlefield, so the only question was who and when.
And we are lucky that it was Americans and not the Nazis or Soviets who discovered it first. However troubled the decision to use the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was, the authors of the Holocaust and the Holodomor would have had no moral qualms about using the bomb over and over and over again.
By demonstrating its power and then quickly ending the war, the United States did ensure possibly the most painless transition from a nonnuclear world to a nuclear one.
As noted throughout the movie, Oppenheimer believed the demonstration of the atomic bomb would end all wars because people would see how awful they were and then never use them again.
Now, the atomic bomb has not ended all wars. But it has ended global conflicts that kill millions of people, so Oppenheimer was right in that sense.
Lasting from 1914 to 1918, World War I killed about 40 million people. Just 20 years later, between 1939 and 1945, another 80 million would die.
The world hasn’t seen anywhere close to that level of death since.
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The first Iraq War killed about 50,000. The second Iraq War killed about 500,000. The Rwandan Civil War killed almost 1 million. These are all tragedies, but they simply are not on the scale of World War I and II.
Of course, the nuclear age isn’t over. As we have for some 75 years, we sit on the edge of nuclear destruction. Hopefully, the insane logic of mutually assured destruction keeps us from destroying ourselves forever. But there is no going back to a nonnuclear world. We can’t put this genie back in the bottle. We just have to live it the best we can and hope the next world-changing invention also is not created in the wrong hands.