Oppenheimer and the threat of nuclear destruction

 

As I left the cinema hall after watching the well-made Oppenheimer, I wondered what the Japanese would think of the Christopher Nolan movie. I particularly wondered how survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would feel.

Upon returning home, I searched the web to see the comments of those Japanese who had watched the movie. There was none. Simply because the movie has yet to be screened there.

I learnt that neither the makers of the movie nor those who bring in films into Japan have announced a release date for the film on the Manhattan Project and its head Robert J Oppenheimer.

I learnt too that the Japanese hardly ever ban any movie and are used to films about the Second World War, including those depicting American gung-ho. Also, I learnt, some movies are screened weeks after their release in the US.

But I could not help wonder if the timing of the movie is the problem.

It was on Aug 6 and Aug 9 respectively that US bombers dropped atomic bombs on the two Japanese cities, killing 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki. They also left a trail of radiation poisoning which had a humungous impact on human health, while also altering DNA in the genes of plants and animals.

No wonder Oppenheimer – in real life and in the movie (well portrayed by Cillian Murphy) – thought as the test bomb was successfully exploded in the American desert “…I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” which he attributed to the Bhagavad Gita (although he mistranslated the Sanskrit verse which actually says: “I am Time, destroyer of the world.” )

I cannot imagine how the surviving victims of the tragedy will feel, especially because the film shows the creation of the atomic bomb being celebrated. It also leaves out the Japanese perspective.

How would Taiji Manda, for instance, feel? In 2014, Taiji, then 77, told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper that he had lost his parents, a sister and two brothers in the Hiroshima bombing.

That fateful day, the nine-year-old and two younger brothers and a sister were out in the street when a sudden powerful blast of hot air blew them away. Taiji suffered some burns to his head but his brothers were badly injured and his sister was “groaning with the skin on her back peeled and hanging down”. She died the following day and his two brothers a few days later.

The report said Taiji needed to take 23 different medications for the eight diseases he had, including cancer.

Although Oppenheimer was – and comes out in the movie – as a rather conflicted and complex personality, he was still celebrated in the US, at least until the vilification he endured in the 1950s for speaking out against the arms race. He has since been vindicated.

He remains, however, the man who effectively managed a group of scientists and technologists and kept the military happy as they produced the atomic bomb. He remains the “father of the atomic bomb”.

I hope Oppenheimer the movie and the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb yesterday will make everyone pause and ponder on the nature of such destructive weapons. I hope political leaders and military strategists will be goaded into eliminating the possibility of a nuclear nightmare.

There are about 13,000 nuclear weapons with nine countries – the US, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea.

The Union of Concerned Scientists says: “While that number is lower than it was during the Cold War — when there were roughly 60,000 weapons worldwide — it does not alter the fundamental threat to humanity these weapons represent.

“For example, the warheads on just one US nuclear-armed submarine have seven times the destructive power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. And the United States usually has ten of those submarines at sea.”

The US arsenal, it says, contains about 5,400 nuclear weapons, 1,744 of which are deployed and ready to be delivered while the Russian arsenal contains 6,000 warheads, 1,584 of which are deployed.

China is believed to have about 350 nuclear warheads, including more than 100 which are assigned to missiles that could reach the US. North Korea, the union says, “has enough nuclear material for 30 to 40 nuclear warheads, and may have assembled 10 to 20 weapons”.

All this is troubling. More so now that a protracted war is raging between Russia and Ukraine, with the US and most Western nations aligned with Ukraine, and tension is escalating between China and the US.

Russian leaders, including President Vladimir Putin, have now and then intimated, since the war began in February 2022, that they may be forced to use nuclear weapons but that they won’t initiate it’s use.

In the latest such threat, on July 30, Reuters reported former Russian president and current deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, Dmitry Medvedev, as saying Russia would be forced to use a nuclear weapon if Ukraine’s counter-offensive, “which is backed by NATO, was a success and they tore off a part of our land”. The problem is that Russia considers the part of Ukraine that it has annexed as a part of its territory while Ukraine is trying to get it back.

War never solves anything, not for long anyway. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings did not end all wars as some had hoped.

If you want to have an idea of the possible impact of a nuclear conflict between Russia and the US, check out the video of a scientifically realistic simulation produced by Max Tegmark, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tegmark says: “As the video illustrates, it doesn’t matter much who starts the war: when one side launches nuclear missiles, the other side detects them and fires back before impact.

“…Each impact creates a fireball about as hot as the core of the sun, followed by a radioactive mushroom cloud. These intense explosions vaporise people nearby and cause fires and blindness further away. The fireball expansion then causes a blast wave that damages buildings, crushing nearby ones.”

He says as the UK and France have nuclear capabilities and are obliged by NATO’s Article 5 to defend the US, Russia will strike them too.

Tegmark says peer-reviewed research suggests that the black carbon smoke from the nuclear firestorms will cause a nuclear winter.

“The Hiroshima atomic bomb caused such a firestorm, but today’s hydrogen bombs are much more powerful. …This black smoke gets heated by sunlight, lofting it like a hot air balloon for up to a decade. High-altitude jet streams are so fast that it takes only a few days for the smoke to spread across much of the northern hemisphere.

“This makes Earth freezing cold even during the summer, with farmland in Kansas cooling by about 20 degrees centigrade (about 40 degrees Fahrenheit), and other regions cooling almost twice as much. A recent scientific paper estimates that over 5 billion people could starve to death, including around 99% of those in the US, Europe, Russia and China – because most black carbon smoke stays in the northern hemisphere where it’s produced, and because temperature drops harm agriculture more at high latitudes.”

Earlier, in 2022, Tegmark estimated that there is a one-in-six chance of a global nuclear war

I hope Malaysians don’t think that we are too far away to be affected. Everyone will be affected; everyone will suffer, including us, in one way or another.

I pray leaders of nations with nuclear capability won’t send the world spiralling into mass death and destruction. We don’t need another Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And we certainly don’t need anything worse than that.

I hope too that scientists involved in the making of weapons of mass destruction have a severe attack of conscience and reconsider the ethics of what they are doing.

They should not, like Oppenheimer, produce a destructive weapon and then, after its use, try to make amends by pushing against an arms race. - FMT

The writer can be contacted at kathirasen@yahoo.com

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT/