What are the limits of reality and imagination in the life of Robert Oppenheimer?
With the fireball flash that lit up the sky over the Los Alamos test site in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, Julius Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project to develop the world’s first atomic bomb, became one of the most famous scientists of his generation.
The creation of atomic bombs and their destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945, killed more than 200,000 people, and the start of a new era turned Oppenheimer into a historical icon that the world is now preoccupied with, with great passion, getting to know the scenes of her life, thanks to an American movie that deals with his biography, amid questions about the limits of reality and imagination in the life of the late world.
The Manhattan Project required a massive effort, and thousands of scientists who worked tirelessly throughout the war. But when the time came and when the bomb was completed and successfully tested, Oppenheimer was in a state of turmoil and perhaps remorse, quoting the Hindu phrase: “Now death has become, the destroyer of worlds.” However, he himself, in the same week, was giving the US military the information that would enable it to detonate the bomb over Japan as accurately as possible.
“It’s a story that gives you a sense of the man and his complexity and contradiction in what he was doing,” said Kai Bird, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Oppenheimer’s biography, which was the inspiration for the film’s makers, in an interview with Live Science on July 15.
Oppenheimer achieved what they set out to do, and some of those who worked with him attested that this would not have happened had he not been running the project, according to Baird. “He inspired them to act and put all the effort into solving the engineering problems involved in making the bomb in a timely manner,” he said.
While Stephen Chapin, Franklin Ford Research Professor of the History of Science, informs us of another aspect of the picture, through his interview with The Harvard Gazette published on July 19, saying: “Oppenheimer was actually a completely unlikely choice for scientific management in Los Alamos.
And while Los Alamos scholars believed that Oppenheimer’s thinness was “a model of a religious ascetic, who had almost no flesh, and that he became all mind, all soul, as a result of the state of asceticism that controls him,” Chapin explained that “it is due to his constant preoccupation with work, and partly because of the illness he suffered from, and because of the severe state of anxiety as a result of his sense of responsibility.”
As for Oppenheimer’s motives, they were quite clear. As a young man he studied quantum physics in Germany, and he knew that German scientists were able to understand the physics of the atomic bomb and possess a weapon of mass destruction. From a political perspective, he was a man on the left who feared that German scientists would hand over this weapon to Hitler, who would not hesitate to use it, and as Beard describes it: “This was his worst nightmare.”
Oppenheimer’s handwritten notes on display at the Bradbury Science Museum (AP)
After the war, Oppenheimer became the most outspoken critic of nuclear weapons—he resisted efforts to build a hydrogen bomb, and referred to the US Air Force’s plans for mass strategic bombing with nuclear weapons as genocidal. “We know from letters his wife (Kitty) wrote to her friends that Oppenheimer became depressed shortly after Hiroshima,” says Beard.
Oppenheimer returned to Washington, and he knew that the Japanese were about to surrender in September. He also learned about the Truman administration’s position on the new weapon, and that they wanted to make American national security completely dependent on a huge arsenal of those weapons.
As early as October 1945, Oppenheimer gave a public address in Philadelphia saying that these weapons were the weapons of the aggressors. They are weapons of terror, not weapons of defense, and the United States needs to find a way to build an international monitoring mechanism to prevent their proliferation. This was a direct threat to the War Department and the US Army, Navy and Air Force, who have all demanded larger budgets for more of these weapons.
In late 1953 Oppenheimer became a direct threat to the US government. As a result, he was stripped of his security clearance, brought to trial and publicly humiliated. And about that, Bird says: “They wanted to humiliate him publicly, so that he would be an example to those behind him. They sent a message through him to scholars everywhere: (Do not deviate from your narrow path, and you are not allowed to become a public intellectual, just as you have no right to speak in politics).”
For his part, the physicist, Muhammad Tharwat Hassan, a professor of physics and light at the University of Arizona in the United States, said: “I think Oppenheimer was not forced to do so, but that was his choice, and the scientist should focus on scientific research that has a role in increasing human knowledge and producing useful applications.”
Hassan had posted on his Facebook page that he “does not like or respect Robert Oppenheimer, and that he represents everything he does not like about the personality of the scientist,” saying in an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat: “He knew what to do well and was aware of its danger, and despite that he did it; In search of personal glory, even at the expense of thousands of human lives.
And about Oppenheimer’s retreat and his opposition to nuclear weapons after that, he added: “I think he did not expect the results to be so bad, after he saw what he had done on the ground,” stressing that “there are some scientists who left the project after they were sure that Germany – Hitler – could not make a nuclear bomb.”
Egyptian novelist Ahmed Samir Saad, a teacher in the Department of Anesthesiology at the Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University, believes that the film may have tried to exonerate Oppenheimer, but it never exonerated the US government.
The film linked Oppenheimer and Nobel, the two rushing after the scientific precedent, as the first returned and fought the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb and nuclear armament, and the second made a peace prize. The film tried to separate scientific achievement from its political use.
Saad added, “I do not find much difference in what I read about Oppenheimer and the events shown in the film, except that the film was sympathetic to him, of course. It shed light on his strong psychological impact and his subsequent opposition to nuclear armament until they accused him of treason.”
But were the scientists involved in the project aware of how lethal and destructive the use of the bomb would have been, says Chapin, the Los Alamos scientists: “They weren’t thinking about what to do with this weapon, whether it would be used against Germany or whether the threat of its use would be enough.”
He added: It was a very difficult scientific and technological problem, and they were fully involved in making the project a success. So; The moral and political anguish about the bomb and what to do with it began to surface during a short period at the end of the project, a period in which relatively few people were involved.
Aerial view after the first atomic explosion at the Trinity test site in New Mexico, USA, on July 16, 1945 (AP)
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, some project scientists thought there was no need to drop the bomb on Japan, and that Japan might be told clearly that the bomb existed and what it could do, but Oppenheimer, according to Chapin, did little or nothing to help them. Nor is it clear that Oppenheimer could have done much to influence the use of the bomb. He had scholarly authority but not much political power. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki decisions were both military and political decisions.
Naive politician
Bird tries to paint a panoramic picture of Oppenheimer, saying, “He was multi-talented and was drawn to Hindu mysticism.” He added, “Yes, he was a stupid and naive politician. He had no idea what he was about to get into.” Despite this, Baird commented on Oppenheimer’s position on the spread of nuclear weapons, saying: “This is exactly what we need now. We need more scientists who are willing to talk about the hard truths of how to integrate science with life and make it nondestructive.”
And Baird answered the most important question, which is how people will remember Oppenheimer’s legacy, when he was associated with a horrific and deadly weapon?: It depends on what happens in the future, if there is another nuclear war, of course he will be seen as the scientist responsible for that too.
Oppenheimer was born in 1904 into a wealthy family in New York City, USA, and graduated from Harvard University in 1925, where he majored in chemistry. Two years later, he completed his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Göttingen, Germany, one of the world’s leading institutions for theoretical physics. Although he admitted that he was not interested in politics after his success in inventing the atomic bomb; Oppenheimer publicly endorsed socially progressive ideas. His partner, Kitty Boening, was a left-leaning extremist whose social circle included Communist Party members and activists. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why he was later accused of being sympathetic to communism, before he died at the age of 62 on February 18, 1967.
