The Fat Man’s Father
“I have shown myself to thee as the Destroyer who lays waste the world and whose purpose is destruction. In spite of thy efforts, all these warriors gathered for battle shall not escape death.” This is a passage from the Bhagavad Gita—a holy scripture in Hinduism—Oppenheimer quoted a version of this passage after the successful Trinity test: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered this line from Hindu scripture [. . .] ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” I’m struggling a little with life at the moment, and I’ve decided to “take it easy” for a bit. I have already taken a break this summer, considering I have so many thoughts swirling around in my head, I feel somewhat overwhelmed when trying to write them out (especially in a coherent article). I have some very strong opinions on the dropping of the atomic bombs, and a lot to say on the subject, but I can’t currently muster the energy to write about it, so it’ll have to wait. However… Christopher Nolan’s box-office hit Oppenheimer released whether I was ready for it or not, and so the YouTube algorithm served me a video called: “Oppenheimer was right according to Neil DeGrasse Tyson.” For the sake of my Saturday morning I should have left it alone, but, alas, I suffer weak impulse control. The video was uploaded recently, although its content was recorded in 2010 at Montclair Kimberly Academy. Neil DeGrasse Tyson was interviewed by Stephen Colbert, and Colbert asked a very good philosophical question: “Can knowledge ever be a bad thing?” I mostly agree with Neil’s answer; “I don’t think so.” “What about actions that knowledge takes us to?” Colbert continues, “Do you think that Oppenheimer, when the bomb went off and he said ‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds,’ do you think he perhaps questioned for a moment whether the knowledge they achieved that led to the creation of the bomb perhaps should have been left undiscovered?” Now, this question isn’t that important, scientific advancement made as a side-benefit in the pursuit of death and mass murder will be useful knowledge in the abstract, but it’s ignoring the obvious elephant in the room: the pursuit of death and mass murder. It’s Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s answer that merits criticism; “would you say, ‘Don’t smelt the ore and make iron and make a sword out of it because you could cut yourself’? That’s the counterpart statement from the Iron Age, and if you were around back then, you’d be sitting in this chair saying ‘Don’t make the sword because you’d unleash evil on the world.’” I don’t know if he was, perhaps, speaking merely of the abstract value in scientific knowledge, considering he goes on to say, “I don’t want to blame the knowledge, I want to blame the behavior of people in the presence of the knowledge.” But if this is indeed his view on Oppenheimer, it seems we need a history lesson. J. Robbert Oppenheimer was not only involved in the planning to drop the bombs, he defended the act and lied about the political reasoning up until his death. When reading about the bombs you’ll invariably hear about the “debate” amongst “historians” on whether or not America needed to nuke Japan. Let’s make one thing crystal clear: there is no debate among historians about this issue. This is a “debate” in the same way there is a debate about the validity of climate change, whether vaccines cause autism, or whether the earth is secretly flat. One side has extensive documentation in the form of written correspondence, personal diaries, testimonials, memos, declassified documents, memoirs, and the official military history; and the other side has a simple, baseless, unfounded story about how it was necessary to avoid an even bigger war. This narrative is contradicted by the accounts of the people in charge of the war, including the most senior military officer on active duty during World War II—William D. Leahy—who said that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.” Other high-ranking military officers agreed (including Dwight Eisenhower). In fact, the Japanese had already asked the Soviet Union to broker a peace deal between them and the other Allied powers, and Stalin talked about this during the Potsdam Conference. I lack the willpower to detail the infantile political posturing, squabbling, ratfucking, and backstabbing, but it’s all been documented for posterity if you’re interested. Put simply, no one’s reasoning at the time was taking an invasion of Japan into account, as it had already been ruled out. Japan was already defeated militarily. Besides a desire to avenge Pearl Harbor (and a doubtless racist element), the Americans had already decided to nuke Japan two years prior in 1943, for reasons quite apart from winning the war. The so-called “target committee” had selected civilian targets which the military was ordered to refrain from bombing so that the destructive power of the bomb could be admired from the before-and-after pictures (destroying the lie that these were important military targets, otherwise they would have been attacked earlier). The committee said the goal was “making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon  to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released.” (That is a direct quote from the declassified document.) When asked whether the atomic bomb would be impressive enough, “Dr. Oppenheimer stated that the visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous. It would be accompanied by a brilliant luminescence which would rise to a height of 10,000 to 20,000 feet,” one report enthusiastically stated. For all this excitement though, they were overlooking one key issue: the Imperial Japanese government did not care about their people. The American firebombings of Tokyo killed more people than the two atomic bombs combined, and they didn’t surrender then either. The only effect the nukes had on the war was speeding up the Soviet invasion of Manchuria—because Stalin realized the US was trying to win the war without the Soviets so they didn’t have to share the spoils and bragging rights—which was what ultimately convinced the Japanese emperor, Hirohito, that Stalin would not help him win a negotiated peace, and surrendered. Regardless, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a wanton act of cruelty on an already oppressed population and Oppenheimer knew this. He was on the aforementioned target committee, he knew perfectly well the plan was to bomb an urban city. A group of scientists from the Manhattan Project—who had been working to try and beat Hitler to the bomb—petitioned for the bombs not to be used against civilians. They proposed a demonstration for the Japanese leadership to demonstrate the existence and destructive power of the A-bomb without needing to kill innocent civilians—Oppenheimer opposed the idea of “a controlled test as the culmination of the work of this laboratory.” He wrote, “The laboratory is operating under a directive to produce weapons; this directive has been and will be rigorously adhered to.” (In other words, we didn’t build a nuke for the sake of it, we build it to be used on people.) After the bombings, Harry Truman immediately lied to the American people, saying they had hit a “military target.” Pretty soon afterward, when criticism started mounting, the story began circulating about how it was the only way to prevent a costly and harrowing invasion—that everyone had already ruled out before the Potsdam conference. Oppenheimer, for his part, claimed he was merely a scientist, “we didn’t know beans about the situation in Japan,” he said. Although he continued to defend the use of his invention, he always insisted he was not responsible for how his bomb was used. That passage from the Bhagavad Gita is about a warrior prince, Arjuna, who is reluctant about going to war against his cousin. He asks Vishnu for council, and Vishnu transforms into his true and terrifying form: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” he says. In Hinduism, God is timeless, meaning he creates all and destroys all. “In spite of thy efforts, all these warriors gathered for battle shall not escape death,” Krishna continues. The lesson he is teaching Arjuna is that despite his apprehension, his duty is to carry out God’s will. Regardless of how he feels about it personally, it is not up to him to decide who lives and who dies. This is Oppenheimer’s defense. Just like it is Arjuna’s dharma to obey Krishna, Oppenheimer must unquestioningly obey his master. So if we use Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s analogy of smelting iron to make swords… yes the invention of smelting iron was irrefutably valuable. But if some psychopath with a crown on his head, shows up on your doorstep and says, “Will you invent me a weapon with which my army could murder THOUSANDS of women and children, to secure my reign on the throne by intimidating and crushing my foes in a raging BLOOD BATH!?” And you happily agree to that, you don’t get to hide behind the “just a simple physicist” excuse. I thought we had decided at Nuremberg that “Ich habe nur befehle befolgt” wasn’t an excuse. “Little Boy” exploded in Hiroshima directly above a hospital and in the vicinity of an elementary school, incinerating hundreds of school children. The death toll is difficult to calculate, but on the low end, approximately 70,000 died on impact. By the end of 1949, that number had doubled from the “unlucky” ones who had survived the blast but not the radiation. In Nagasaki, 40,000 died in the blast, and before the end of the year over 30,000 died from radiation. Other studies estimate these numbers to be much higher. This was a massive war crime. And nobody involved gets to wash their hands clean; from Truman, to Oppenheimer, to Leslie Groves, to the individual soldiers who flew the B-29s and actually dropped the damn things. I think they should have been put on trial alongside the Nazis. Sadly, it is the victor who makes the rules and writes the history. A little girl called Kayano Nagai recounted seeing the bomb from a distance, “I saw the atom bomb. I was four then. I remember cicadas chirping. The atom bomb was the last thing that happened in the war and no more bad things have happened since then, but I don’t have my mummy anymore. So even if it isn’t bad anymore, I’m not happy.” When the Trinity test was completed, physicist Kenneth Brainbridge shook hands with Oppenheimer and remarked, “Now we’re all sons of bitches.”
August 6 2023