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j. robert oppenheimer
Testimony of the Hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: No More Nuclear Weapons
They have been telling their stories for nearly 80 years. It’s about time more of us listen.
Aug 09, 2025
CONTENT WARNING: This article contains descriptions of nuclear weapons effects, including disturbing accounts of the victims.
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, on August 9, the second was dropped on Nagasaki. Both cities were totally destroyed by the bombs, a new type of weapon developed by the United States, infamously through the Manhattan Project. In Hiroshima, over 140,000 were killed. In Nagasaki, over 70,000. In the blink of an eye, humanity witnessed two of the darkest days in history.
This year marks the 80th commemoration of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Each year, scores of Japanese peace organizations, and those from other nations, hold events in the two cities to remember the tragedies and renew passions for continuing the fight for peace.
This year, I had the privilege of being invited to attend one such event: the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, organized by Gensuikyo. It has been a tremendous honor to join as part of a delegation from the United States and as a representative of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security, an organization whose board I sit on.
What I have experienced has moved me powerfully. I learned from testimony from nuclear bomb survivors (Hibakusha), technical descriptions of the events of those days, diplomatic arguments from around the world, and demonstrations of peace movements from Japan and beyond. In the aftermath of such powerful testimony, the natural conclusion is inescapable: Nuclear weapons should be made illegal, never used again, and dismantled. The wealth of resources going toward their production should instead be dedicated to programs that actually create security like education, diplomacy, material security, and cooperative institutions.
I’d like to report back what I experienced and learned for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the details of nuclear weapons control—especially those in the United States. As someone who grew up through U.S. public schools and engages with students in higher education, I can say that we are woefully ignorant of the truth. Let this correct the record and help open more eyes to the truth.
The Reality of the Bombings and their Aftermath
I want to share both the technical details of what happened during nuclear bomb detonation as well as testimony from those who survived the blasts, the Hibakusha. Both are difficult to read. I urge readers to open their minds and hearts and imagine to their greatest ability what those who experienced the bombings felt like as horror unfolded before their very eyes.
At the World Conference, Professor Oya Masato of the Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science shared a scientific account of the bombing of Nagasaki. This second bomb exploded at 11:02 am on August 9, 1945, 503 meters above the town of Matsuyama, about three kilometers north of Nagasaki city center. Instantly, the bomb turned into a fireball of tens of millions of degrees. The surface of the fireball cooled to approximately 7,000°C in 0.1 seconds. The ground temperature at the hypocenter (point of detonation) rose as high as 3,000-4,000°C, and humans in the area were instantly carbonized. The bomb generated a shock wave and blast which traveled at 440 meters per second at the hypocenter and 60 meters per second two kilometers away from the hypocenter. Those shock waves destroyed most of the city, an area of 405 square kilometers, within 10 seconds. Fires emerged and burned an area of 6.7 square kilometers. Thousands were instantly killed, and by the end of 1945, the death toll rose to 74,000.
This scientific description begins to describe the horrors of the bomb. But it can be hard to imagine. What stands out is the sheer power and devastation: a whole city leveled and engulfed in flames within seconds. Devastation on a scale never before seen. Callous destruction, indiscriminate murder.
What truly rends the heart is the testimony of Hibakusha, those who survived the bomb and tell their stories. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum depicts many such stories. It’s nearly unbearable to take in and try to imagine even a sliver of what these horrors would feel like. The stories make clear that the atomic bombs created a literal hell on Earth.
A device that can cause this amount of suffering has no place in human society.
One story, shared by a Hibakusha of Hiroshima, Park Jung-soon, 11 years old at the time, describes her experience. On the morning of the bombing, she and her six family members living together were surprised by a flash like lightning and thunder. The sky lit up. Suddenly, a blast and tremendous sound shook the whole house, lifting the entire structure upward. The house fell back down, collapsed, and crushed the family beneath it. It all happened in seconds. They could not move their bodies and thought they would die.
Imagine the sheer terror of suddenly being launched into the air only to plummet down and be crushed by your home. Imagine your home, something that we hold deep attachment to and a place of safety, comfort, and love, collapsing down on you and your whole family. In moments your safe haven becomes the source of incredible pain. Imagine those you love looking at you with the fear of death in their eyes for a split second before having your gaze ripped away by the force of crushing weight.
Jung-soon opened her eyes and found herself trapped under a thick beam. Her mother desperately pulled her out and helped her crawl out of the collapsed walls. Her head was bleeding heavily, but she rose to her feet and looked around: The house next door had fallen down as well, people were running away, crying, shouting. The village as she knew it was falling apart.
While the family fled, they saw people dead on the ground, or alive but in agony crying or shouting. People were pulling carts carrying wounded or dead neighbors. People were covered in burns and suffering in pain. She describes it as like the hell of a cartoon but in reality.
At the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, there were many such stories and testimonies, as well as photographs and artwork created by Hibakusha attempting to visually depict what they experienced. Details like those in Jung-soon’s story were common. People burned beyond recognition. Structures flattened. The dead littering the city. People walking around with flesh peeling from their bodies, literally melting off, begging and screaming for water. It was, indeed, hell on Earth.
It may be difficult, but I implore you to try to deeply imagine what these words convey. In a world where many of us are constantly exposed to language of indiscriminate violence through news media, it may be easy to simply read this and register it as fact. But try to register it as feeling. What would it feel like to feel your own broken body throb with pain while simultaneously witnessing mass death all around you? Can you imagine a human being burnt beyond recognition? Someone with their flesh melting off? The sounds of screams, crying, wailing, and pure fear were profoundly traumatizing.
The effects of nuclear weapons, the scenes described by the Hibakusha, are things that should never be visited upon this Earth. A device that can cause this amount of suffering has no place in human society.
This does not even describe the effects of the bombing that persisted long after the initial devastation. Hibakusha faced severe effects from radiation poisoning and the physical damage—burns, breakages, disfigurations—they sustained. They were also subject to discrimination for decades, as people feared contamination if they came in contact with Hibakusha. Many kept their stories secret.
These are tragic tales that the Japanese peace movement describes and uplifts for all to learn from. They have been telling their stories for nearly 80 years. It’s about time more of us listen.
Telling the Truth in the United States
In the United States, there is a profound culture of ignorance surrounding nuclear weapons. I experienced this firsthand growing up in U.S. public schools and then in collegiate engineering studies.
When I was in high school, I elected to take the upper-level U.S. history class—one which gives college credit if you do well enough. The course is infamous in American high schools: AP U.S. History, or APUSH for short. Our teacher taught out of a book used in many classrooms across the country, titled The American Pageant: A History of the Republic by Kennedy, Cohen, and Bailey. This book, like many others used in the U.S., describes the atomic bombing as the key to ending the second World War, a tough but necessary decision by President Harry Truman. The argument goes that dropping the bombs eliminated the need for a U.S. ground invasion, which would have cost half a million lives (which Howard Zinn notes in A People’s History of the United States seemed to have “been pulled out of the air to justify the bombings”). It becomes a trolly problem of sorts: Would you end 200,000 lives to save half a million?
That’s as far as we typically get in U.S. depictions of the bombings. We are stuck thinking at a high school level about nuclear weapons—in a country whose high schools are not known for their rigor or nuanced teaching of U.S. history. Now, when I teach at universities and talk with students in engineering, their understanding of the bombings is the same: an unfortunate necessity or political blunder. Even the faculty teaching the course, presumably sharp thinkers with PhDs, repeat the same lines.
Students should not be indoctrinated into a version of the story favorable to the U.S. perspective.
In popular media, the story is no different. 2023’s blockbuster Oppenheimer—which broke box office expectations and was given seven awards at the Oscars—was a shallow depiction of the events. As it told a dramatized version of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s work on the Manhattan Project, it attempted to depict his inner turmoil as he grappled with visions of what must have become of victims. However, the screen time dedicated to his haunting visions does not exceed five minutes in a three-hour film.
Accurate depictions of the horrors of nuclear bombings are nowhere to be found in dominant U.S. education and media. Textbooks do not describe the detailed suffering of victims, the social discrimination they experienced afterward, or the stories of their deeply difficult lives. Films choose not to center the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but rather the perpetrators. It is tragic and laughable to consider the fact that a film like Oppenheimer is praised for its critique of nuclear weapons while it entirely centers the life of the man who was instrumental in their creation rather than the lives of his victims.
Peace organizations across the U.S. are pushing against these narratives, trying to spread the truth, and fighting for nonproliferation. But without countering the widespread ignorance of our own population, we will not get far. In a world increasingly plagued by misinformation and falsehood, we have our work cut out when it comes to effectively spreading the truth about nuclear weapons. We need to dispel the veil of ignorance covering our communities if we are to build a large enough movement to push the U.S. to disarm, re-engage in treaties, and work toward peace under cooperation rather than precarious stability based on fear and threats.
One of the first steps can be to simply tell the truth. Stories matter, and how we tell the history of our own nation matters. Students should not be indoctrinated into a version of the story favorable to the U.S. perspective. Media should accurately describe the horrors. The stories of the Hibakusha should be known by everyone.
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What Can We Learn From the Birth of the Nuclear Era?
The history serves as a reminder that alternative paths were available then and that another world remains possible today.
Jul 18, 2025
In recent months, nuclear weapons have reemerged in global headlines. Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan approached the brink of a full-scale war, a confrontation that could have become an extinction-level event, with the potential to claim up to 2 billion lives worldwide.
The instability of a global order structured on nuclear apartheid has also come into sharp relief in the context of the recent attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States. That system has entrenched a dangerous double standard, creating perverse incentives for the proliferation of world-destroying weaponry, already possessed by nine countries. Many of those nations use their arsenals to exercise imperial impunity, while non-nuclear states increasingly feel compelled to pursue nuclear weapons in the name of national security and survival.
Meanwhile, the largest nuclear powers show not the slightest signs of responsibility or restraint. The United States, Russia, and China are investing heavily in the “modernization” and expansion of their arsenals, fueling a renewed arms race. And that escalation comes amid growing global instability contributing to a Manichean world of antagonistic armed blocs, reminiscent of the Cold War at its worst.
The nuclear threat endangers not only global peace and security but the very continuity of the human species, not to speak of the simple survival of life on Earth. How, you might wonder, could we ever have arrived at such a precarious situation?
The current crisis coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the first detonation of an atomic weapon that would soon obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and so inaugurate the atomic age. So many years later, it’s worth critically reassessing the decisions that conferred on humanity such a power of self-annihilation. After all, we continue to live with the fallout of the choices made (and not made), including those of the scientists who created the bomb. That history also serves as a reminder that alternative paths were available then and that another world remains possible today.
A Tale of Two Laboratories
In the summer of 1945, scientists and technicians at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico worked feverishly to complete the construction of the atomic bomb. Meanwhile, their colleagues at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory mounted a final, ultimately unsuccessful effort to prevent its use.
The alarm spreading in Chicago stemmed from a sobering realization. The Manhattan Project that they had joined on the basis of a belief that they were in an existential arms race with Nazi Germany had, by then, revealed itself to be a distinctly one-sided contest. Until then, the specter of a possible German atomic bomb had conferred a sense of urgency and a veneer of moral legitimacy on what many scientists otherwise recognized as a profoundly unethical undertaking.
Prior to the fall of Berlin, Allied intelligence had already begun to cast serious doubt on Germany’s progress toward developing an atomic weapon. By April 1945, with the Nazi regime in a state of collapse and Japan’s defeat imminent, the threat that served as the original justification for the bomb’s development had all but vanished.
While we cannot know exactly how events would have unfolded had dissent been amplified rather than suppressed, we can raise our own voices now to demand a safer, saner future.
No longer represented as a plausible deterrent, the bomb now stood poised to become what Los Alamos Director J. Robert Oppenheimer would describe shortly after the war as “weapons of terror, of surprise, of aggression… [used] against an essentially defeated enemy.”
By that point, it was evident that the bomb would be used not to deter Germany but to destroy Japan, and not as the final act of World War II but as the opening salvo of what would become the Cold War. The true target of the first atomic bomb wasn’t, in fact, Tokyo, but Moscow, with the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sacrificed on the altar of American global imperial ambition.
For the scientists at Chicago, that new context demanded new thinking. In June 1945, a committee of physicists led by James Franck submitted a report to Secretary of War Henry Stimson warning of the profound political and ethical consequences of employing such a bomb without exhausting all other alternatives. “We believe,” the Franck Report stated, “that the use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan [would be] inadvisable.” The report instead proposed a demonstration before international observers, arguing that such a display could serve as a gesture of goodwill and might avert the need to use the bombs altogether.
One of that report’s signatories, Leo Szilard, who had been among the bomb’s earliest advocates, further sought to prevent what he had come to recognize as the catastrophic potential outcome of their creation. With Germany defeated, he felt a personal responsibility for reversing the course he had helped set in motion. Echoing concerns articulated in the Franck Report, he drafted a petition to be circulated among the scientists. While acknowledging that the bomb might offer short-term military and political advantages against Japan, he warned that its deployment would ultimately prove morally indefensible and strategically self-defeating, a position which would also be held by 6 of the 7 U.S. five-star generals and admirals of that moment.
Szilard emphasized that the atomic bomb wasn’t just a more powerful weapon but a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare, an instrument of annihilation. He already feared Americans might come to regret that their own government had sown the seeds of global destruction by legitimizing the sudden obliteration of Japanese cities, a precedent that would render a heavily industrialized, densely populated country like the United States especially vulnerable.
Moreover, he concluded that using such weapons of unimaginable destructive power without sufficient military justification would severely undermine American credibility in future arms control efforts. He observed that the development of the bomb under conditions of extreme wartime secrecy had created an abjectly anti-democratic situation, one in which the public was denied any opportunity to deliberate on such an irrevocable and consequential decision.
As Eugene Rabinowitch, a co-author of the Franck Report (who would later co-found The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists), would note soon after, the scientists in Chicago were growing increasingly uneasy in the face of escalating secrecy: “Many scientists began to wonder: Against whom was this extreme secrecy directed? What was the sense of keeping our success secret from the Japanese? Would it have helped them to know that we had an atomic bomb ready?”
Rabinowitch concluded that the only “danger” posed by such a disclosure was that the Chicago scientists might be proven right, and Japan might surrender. “Since there was no justifiable reason to hold the bomb secret from the Japanese,” he argued, “many scientists felt that the purpose of deepened secrecy was to keep the knowledge of the bomb… from the American people.”
In other words, officials in Washington were concerned that a successful demonstration might deprive them of the coveted opportunity to use the bomb and assert their newly acquired monopoly (however temporary) on unprecedented power.
The Road to Trinity and the Cult of Oppenheimer
Seventy scientists at Chicago endorsed the Szilard Petition. By then, however, their influence on the project had distinctly diminished. Despite their early contributions, notably the achievement of the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction in December 1942, the project’s center of gravity had shifted to Los Alamos.
Recognizing this, Szilard sought to circulate the petition among his colleagues there, too, hoping to invoke a shared sense of scientific responsibility and awaken their moral conscience in the critical weeks leading up to the first test of the weapon. Why did that effort fail? Why was there so little dissent, debate, or resistance at Los Alamos given the growing scientific opposition, bordering on revolt, that had emerged in Chicago?
One answer lies in Oppenheimer himself. In popular culture and historical scholarship, his legacy is often framed as that of a tragic figure: the reluctant architect of the atomic age, an idealist drawn into the ethically fraught task of creating a weapon of mass destruction compelled by the perceived exigencies of an existential war.
Rather than using his influence to restrain the bomb’s use, he exercised what authority he had to facilitate its most catastrophic outcome, entrusting its consequences to political leaders who soon revealed their recklessness.
Yet the myth of him as a Promethean figure who suffered for unleashing the fundamental forces of nature onto a society unprepared to bear responsibility for it obscures the extent of his complicity. Far from being a passive participant, in the final months of the Manhattan Project, he emerged as a willing collaborator in the coordination of the coming atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When Oppenheimer and physicist Edward Teller (who would come to be known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb”) received Szilard’s petition, neither shared it. While Oppenheimer offered no response, Teller provided a striking explanation: “The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.” He further rejected the idea that he held any authority to influence the bomb’s use. “You may think it is a crime to continue to work,” he conceded, “but I feel that I should do the wrong thing if I tried to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we just helped it escape.”
Teller later claimed to be in “absolute agreement” with the petition, but added that “Szilard asked me to collect signatures… I felt I could not do so without first seeking Oppenheimer’s permission more directly. I did so and Oppenheimer talked me out of it, saying that we as scientists have no business meddling in political pressure of that kind… I am ashamed to say that he managed to talk me out of [it].”
Teller’s explanation was likely self-serving given his later acrimonious rift with Oppenheimer over the hydrogen bomb. Yet further evidence indicates that Oppenheimer actively sought to suppress debate and dissent. Physicist Robert Wilson recalled that upon arriving at Los Alamos in 1943, he raised concerns about the broader implications of their work and the “terrible problems” it might create, particularly given the exclusion of the Soviet Union, then an ally. The Los Alamos director, Wilson remembered, “didn’t want to talk about that sort of thing” and would instead redirect the conversation to technical matters. When Wilson helped organize a meeting to discuss the future trajectory of the project in the wake of Germany’s defeat, Oppenheimer cautioned him against it, warning that “he would get into trouble by calling such a meeting.”
The meeting nonetheless proceeded, with Oppenheimer in attendance, though his presence proved stifling. “He participated very much, dominating the meeting,” Wilson remembered. Oppenheimer pointed to the upcoming San Francisco Conference to establish the United Nations and insisted that political questions would be addressed there by those with greater expertise, implying that scientists had no role to play in such matters and ought to abstain from influencing the applications of their work.
Reflecting on his mindset at the time, Oppenheimer explained, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” In a similar vein, his oft-quoted remark that “the physicists have known sin” was frequently misinterpreted. He was not referring, he insisted, to the “sin” of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but to pride for “intervening explicitly and heavy-handedly in the course of human history.”
When situated within this broader context of a professed commitment to scientific detachment, Oppenheimer’s behavior becomes more intelligible. In practice, however, his stated ideals stood in stark contrast to his conduct. While he claimed to reject political engagement, he ultimately intervened in precisely such a manner, using his position to advocate forcefully for the bomb’s immediate military use against Japan without prior warning. He emerged as a leading opponent of any prospective demonstration, cautioning that it would undermine the psychological impact of the bomb’s use, which could only be realized through a sudden, unannounced detonation on a relatively untouched, non-military target like the city of Hiroshima. This position stood in sharp contrast to that of the Chicago scientists, of whom only 15% supported using the bomb in such a manner.
That climate of deference fostered a culture of complicity, where questions of social responsibility were subordinated to uncritical faith in authority. Reflecting on that dynamic, physicist Rudolf Peierls acknowledged, “I knew that Oppenheimer was on a committee and was briefing with the high-ups. I felt there were two things one could rely on: Oppenheimer to put the reasonable ideas across, and that one could trust people. After all, we are not terrorists at heart or anything… Both these statements might now be somewhat optimistic.”
Ultimately, the only member of Los Alamos to register dissent was Joseph Rotblat, who quietly resigned on ethical grounds after learning in November 1944 that there was no active Nazi atomic bomb program. His departure remained a personal act of conscience, however, rather than an effort to initiate a broader moral reckoning within the scientific community.
“Remember Your Humanity”
The legacy of Oppenheimer, a burden we all now carry, lies in his mistaking proximity to power for power itself. Rather than using his influence to restrain the bomb’s use, he exercised what authority he had to facilitate its most catastrophic outcome, entrusting its consequences to political leaders who soon revealed their recklessness. In doing so, he helped lay the groundwork for what President Dwight D. Eisenhower would, in his farewell address to Congress in 1961, warn against as “the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”
Yet we are not doomed. This history should also remind us that the development and use of nuclear weapons was not inevitable. There were those who spoke out and a different path might well have been possible. While we cannot know exactly how events would have unfolded had dissent been amplified rather than suppressed, we can raise our own voices now to demand a safer, saner future. Our collective survival may well depend on it. How much longer a world armed with nuclear weapons can endure remains uncertain. The only viable path forward lies in renewing a commitment to, as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell urged, “remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” With ever more nations developing increasingly powerful arsenals, one thing remains clear: As the Doomsday Clock moves ever closer to midnight, there is no time to waste.
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The Commemoration of the Criminal Bravo H-Bomb Test Is a Cry for a Nuclear Free World
We will be reminding the world of the Hibakusha truth that “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
Feb 11, 2024
Later this month I will return to Japan for the annual Bikini commemoration and the Gensuikyō, or Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, annual conference. There won’t be a bikini fashion show.
The commemoration of what can only be called the criminal U.S. Bravo H-bomb test on March 1, 1954, is one of two annual anchor events of the Japanese peace movement. Although Covid-19 is still with us, these events will play important roles in revitalizing the Japanese peace movement; one of the most effective in the world.
Over the years, this movement has played a major role in preventing Japan from becoming a nuclear weapons state, and the testimonies of Hibakusha (victims and witnesses of the A-bombings) have played critical roles in inspiring the nuclear disarmament diplomacy and the international negotiations that resulted in the 2017 United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Although I initially met several Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb survivors as early as the 1978 U.N. Second Session of Nuclear Disarmament, it wasn’t until I first traveled to Hiroshima in 1984 that I began what became a 40-year engagement with Hibakusha and the Japanese movement.
Bikini Day will be little remarked here in the United States: Cowboys and Indians all over again, and quite literally a case of nuclear colonialism.
In an effort to compensate for his earlier support for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign and to bring nonexistent jobs bacon to Boston, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and, following him, the Massachusetts congressional delegation and the city’s business establishment were suckered into Reagan-administration planning to transform Boston Harbor into a nuclear weapons base. Knowing the Navy’s record of nuclear weapons accidents, the ways that the base would ratchet up tensions with Moscow and violate the freeze, and with knowledge of better economic and social uses for the waterfront property, several of us organized at the grassroots level to prevent construction of the base. We prevailed, and I was invited to give a brief inspirational speech at the World Conference against A- and H- Bombs. Needless to say, my first trip to Hiroshima was a transformative experience.
Not long thereafter, I returned to Japan for the Bikini Day commemorations and was shocked by what I learned from the testimonies of Rongelap and Japanese survivors of the March 1, 1954, Bravo “test.” Bravo was by far the most devastating of the United States’ nuclear weapons explosions that pulverized Bikini between 1946 and 1958. It was detonated a year after the Soviets tested their first H-bomb and two years before a culturally explosive women’s two-piece swimsuit was first marketed in Paris.
Washington responded to the Soviet Union’s first H-bomb with a bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb that destroyed an entire city, initially killed 100,000 people—almost all civilians—and poisoned survivors, the environment, and future generations. Ninety-eight miles away from the Bikini H-bomb test site, inhabitants of tropical Rongelap Atoll were showered by and played with radioactive ash that they first thought was snow. Just 500 miles from the equator, they had never seen snow. Japanese fishing boats hundreds of miles from Bikini Atoll and fish that comprised a major portion of Japan’s ocean-based food supply were also irradiated.
Before the year was out, natives of Rongelap and Japanese fishermen began to die from radiation diseases and cancer. Still births and numerous birth defects including jellyfish babies (transparent skin and no bones), anencephaly (infants born without portions of their brain or skull), and other mutations followed.
Secrecy was immediately imposed by both the U.S. and Japanese governments. But as word got out following the return of the Lucky Dragon V tuna fishing boat’s sickened crew to Yaizu City, women with memories of Hiroshima launched a petition campaign for the abolition of nuclear weapons. It garnered 25 million Japanese signatures, leading to the convening of the first World Conference against A- and H- Bombs, which attracted delegates from across Japan and around the world.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb victims, many of whom had hidden themselves from the world due to their disfigurements, excruciating physical and emotional pains, and popular fears that their radiation diseases were contagious began to tell their stories. What became the world’s most powerful and long enduring nuclear disarmament social movement was born.
Two years after Bravo, in 1956, the first Godzilla film was released. Unlike the deracinated version shown across the United States, it was not the compelling story of a love triangle. It was a powerful expression of rage against the A-and H- bombs, a cry for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Watching it now, the desperate fear of nuclear weapons in the aftermath of the Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini bombs—fears blunted over the decades—remains palpable.
Race was, of course, a factor. During the Pacific War, The New York Times quoted a U.S. general as saying that he and his troops saw Japanese as “vermin” to be eradicated. The implicit assumption was that Marshallese were darker skinned primitives who could be sacrificed, ostensibly in the pursuit of world peace. In both cases, Japanese Hibakusha and Rongelap claimed that they were used as human “guinea pigs,” monitored by doctors and other scientists but not given medicine.
This outrageous charge was difficult and painful to believe, bringing to mind as it did Dr. Joseph Mengele’s murderous experiments at the Auschwitz death camp. But in 2000, in the course of hosting a “Global Hibakusha delegation” for a conference at the United Nations, several of us met with the senior Department of Energy (DOE) official who was responsible for studies of the impacts of radiation on people. I explained that in Japan I had heard Hibakusha cry out that they had been used as “guinea pigs” in experiments conducted by the Atomic Bomb Causality Commission. I said that I could understand victims thinking the worst of their tormentors, but expressed some doubt and asked if he could say it wasn’t so.
“No,” he responded. The experiments had indeed been conducted. And a Utah downwinder who was with us raged in response that the same was secretly being done across the western United States. She was a woman who had lost her father and father-in-law to uranium mining, her sister and daughter to Nevada test fallout, and who consumed a daily meal of pills simply to stay alive
Some years later I experienced an equally sobering reverberation from the Bikini H-bomb. It came during a lunch break in a well-appointed conference site during another annual Bikini commemoration. A descendant of Rongelap Hibakusha was given a book about the Bikini H-bomb and its devastations. It included a list of the names of each of Rongelap’s inhabitants on that 1954 March 1 morning. One by one this young man placed a check mark next to the name of each person who had died of cancer and other radiation diseases from the Bravo “test.” I watched amidst very painful silence as he methodically checked off the names of nearly every person on the list. Some were women and men I had met along our ways.
This is not simply history. In preparation for the Bikini commemoration, this year I came across two recent articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists written by Robert Alverez, formerly a senior policy adviser at the DOE. Coincident with the release of Oppenheimer, Alvarez reported that Oppie and Lawrence (for whom the Lawrence Livermore lab is named) performed a “vaudeville” on themselves and others. To keep up their teams’ morale, they drank glasses of water with radioactive sodium and in some cases had lower level workers consume plutonium. More than a few, including Oppenheimer—who was also a smoker—subsequently died of cancer.
In his article “Seeking Justice for Radiation Victims of the U.S. Nuclear Program,” Alverez reviewed the campaigns of downwinders and tribal uranium miners for compensation via the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). He reports that, ostensibly to limit federal spending (at the same time that the U.S. has embarked on a nearly $2 trillion nuclear weapons “modernization” campaign) Congress recently refused to extend support for “victims not accounted for in earlier legislation.”
Bikini Day will be little remarked here in the United States: Cowboys and Indians all over again, and quite literally a case of nuclear colonialism. But those who gather in the Marshall Islands and Yaizu City in Japan will not only be marking the 70th anniversary of the devastating Bravo test and honoring those victimized and lost. We will also be reminding the world of the Hibakusha truth that “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
The hands of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock are now set at 90 second to midnight. We face the risks of possible nuclear escalation in Ukraine, the Middle East, and over Taiwan tensions. With the post-Cold War order in free fall, all nine nuclear weapons states are escalating their arms racing, “modernizing” or expanding their nuclear arsenals. In these critical movements the messages from the Marshall Islands, Yaizu City, and nearby Shizuoka will be clear: The U.N. Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons must be universally signed and ratified to make way for a nuclear weapons-free world. And here in the United States, campaigns like Back from the Brink provide paths and hope for human survival.
What must be found is the will!
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We Still Have Far to Go to Put the Brakes on the Nuclear Arms Race
What passes for debate on Capitol Hill is routinely an exercise in green-eyeshade discourse, assessing the most cost-effective outlays to facilitate Armageddon.
Feb 09, 2024
Yes, the Doomsday Clock keeps ticking—it’s now at 90 seconds to midnight, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—but the ultimate time bomb never gets the attention that it deserves. Even as the possibility of nuclear annihilation looms, this century’s many warning signs retain the status of Cassandras.
Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump withdrew the United States from vital pacts between the U.S. and Russia, the two nuclear superpowers, shutting down the Anti-Ballistic Missile, Open Skies, and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties. And despite promising otherwise, Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden did nothing to revive them.
Under the buzzword “modernization,” the American government, a thermonuclear colossus, spent $51 billion last year alone updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that’s set to continue for decades to come. “Modernizing and maintaining current nuclear warheads and infrastructure is estimated to cost $1.7 trillion through Fiscal Year 2046,” the office of Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) pointed out, “while the Congressional Budget Office anticipates that current nuclear modernization would cost $494 billion through Fiscal Year 2028.”
Such bloated sums might prove a good argument against specific weapons systems, but Uncle Sam has incredibly deep pockets for nuclear weaponry and a vast array of other military boondoggles. In fact, compared to the costs of deploying large numbers of troops, nuclear weapons can seem almost frugal. And consider the staggering price of a single aircraft carrier that went into service in 2017, the Gerald R. Ford: $13.3 billion.
Militarism’s overall mega-thievery from humanity has long been extreme, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower made clear in a 1953 speech:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
The Nuclear Complex and “Crackpot Realism”
In the case of budgets for nuclear arms, the huge price tags are—in the most absolute sense imaginable—markers for a sustained, systemic, headlong rush toward omnicide, the destruction of the human species. Meanwhile, what passes for debate on Capitol Hill is routinely an exercise in green-eyeshade discourse, assessing the most cost-effective outlays to facilitate Armageddon, rather than debating the wisdom of maintaining and escalating the nuclear arms race in the first place.
Take, for instance, the recent news on cost overruns for the ballyhooed Sentinel land-based missile system, on the drawing boards to replace the existing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in 400 underground silos located in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Northrop Grumman has already pocketed a $13.3 billion contract to begin moving the project forward. But the costs have been zooming upward so fast as to set off alarm bells in Congress, forcing a reassessment.
“The U.S. Air Force’s new intercontinental ballistic missile program is at risk of blowing past its initial $96 billion cost estimate by so much that the overruns may trigger a review on whether to terminate the project,” Bloomberg News reported in mid-December. Since then, the estimated overruns have only continued to soar. Last month, Northrop Grumman disclosed that the per-missile cost of the program had climbed by “at least 37%,” reaching $162 million—and, as Breaking Defense noted, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would need to “certify the program to stave off its cancellation.”
The re-emerging ICBM controversy is yet another high-stakes example of the kind of gauntlet that disarmament advocates regularly face in official Washington, where presenting an analysis grounded in sanity is almost certain to be viewed as “not realistic.”
At one level, cancellation would vindicate the approach taken by disarmament-oriented groups a couple of years ago when they tried to stop the creation of the Sentinel by arguing that it would be a “money pit missile.” But at a deeper level, the cost argument—while potentially a winner for blocking the Sentinel—is a loser when it comes to reducing the dangers of nuclear war, which ICBMs uniquely boost as the land-based part of this nation’s nuclear triad.
As Daniel Ellsberg and I wrote in The Nation in 2021, “If reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad’s ground-based leg—not modernize it.” Eliminating ICBMs would be a crucial step when it comes to decreasing those dangers, because “unlike the nuclear weapons on submarines or bombers, the land-based missiles are vulnerable to attack and could present the commander in chief with a sudden use-them-or-lose-them choice.” That’s why ICBMs are on hair-trigger alert and why defeating just the Sentinel would be a truly Pyrrhic victory if the purported need for such land-based missiles is reaffirmed in the process.
In theory, blocking the Sentinel by decrying it as too expensive could be a step toward shutting down ICBMs entirely. In practice, unfortunately, the cost argument has routinely led to an insistence that the current Minuteman III ICBMs could simply be upgraded and continue to serve just as well—only reinforcing the assumption that ICBMs are needed in the first place.
The author of the pathbreaking 2022 study “The Real Cost of ICBMs,” Emma Claire Foley, is now a colleague of mine at RootsAction.org, where she coordinates the Defuse Nuclear War coalition’s new campaign to eliminate ICBMs. “News of dramatic cost overruns on the Sentinel program is unsurprising, but I don’t think that in itself should encourage disarmament advocates,” she told me recently. “Cancellation of the Sentinel program does not equal a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons, or the risk of nuclear war. It will take an organized mass movement to make good on this opportunity to meaningfully reduce the risk of nuclear war.”
The re-emerging ICBM controversy is yet another high-stakes example of the kind of gauntlet that disarmament advocates regularly face in official Washington, where presenting an analysis grounded in sanity is almost certain to be viewed as “not realistic.” On the other hand, when it comes to nuclear issues, accommodating to “crackpot realism” is a precondition for being taken seriously by the movers and shakers on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch.
Such accommodation involves adjusting to a magnitude of systemic insanity almost beyond comprehension. Disarmament advocates are often confronted with a tacit choice between seeming unserious to the nuclear priesthood and its adherents or pushing for fairly minor adjustments in what Daniel Ellsberg, in the title of his final landmark book, dubbed all too accurately The Doomsday Machine.
This country’s anti-nuclear and disarmament groups have scant presence in the mainstream media. And the more forthright they are in directly challenging the government’s nonstop nuclear recklessness—with results that could include billions of deaths from “nuclear winter”—the less media access they’re apt to get. When President Biden reneged on his 2020 campaign pledge to adopt a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons, for instance, critical blowback in the media was meager and fleeting. Little news coverage occurred when a small number of members of Congress went out of their way to object.
“Unfortunately,” Markey said in a speech on the Senate floor two years ago, “our American democracy and Russia’s autocracy do share one major thing in common: Both our systems give the United States and Russian presidents the godlike powers known as sole authority to end life on the planet as we know it by ordering a nuclear first strike.”
Nuclear Madness and Psychic Numbing
Any nuclear first strike would likely lead to a full-scale nuclear war. And the science is clear that a “nuclear winter” would indeed follow—in Ellsberg’s words, “killing harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on earth. It probably wouldn’t cause extinction. We’re so adaptable. Maybe 1% of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98% or 99% would not.”
Such a steep plunge in planetary temperatures would exceed the worst prognoses for the effects of climate change, even if in the other direction, temperature-wise. But leaders of the climate movement rarely even mention the capacity of nuclear arsenals to destroy the planet’s climate in a different way from global warming. That omission reflects the ongoing triumph of nuclear madness and the “psychic numbing” that accompanies it.
During the more than three-quarters of a century since August 1945, when the U.S. government dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear genie has escaped from the bottle to eight other countries—Russia, France, the United Kingdom, China, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea—all now brandishing their own ultimate weapons of mass destruction. And the biggest nuclear powers have continuously undermined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Key dynamics have scarcely changed since, in 2006, the Center for International Governance Innovation published a cogent analysis that concluded: “Europe and North America are busy championing nuclear weapons as the ultimate security trump card and the preeminent emblem of political gravitas, thereby building a political/security context that is increasingly hostile to non-proliferation.”
Like Barack Obama before him, Joe Biden promised some much-needed changes in nuclear policies during his successful quest to win the White House, but once in office—as with Obama’s pledges—those encouraging vows turned out to be so much smoke. The administration’s long-awaited Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), issued in October 2022, was largely the usual dose of nuclear madness. “Although Joe Biden during his presidential election campaign spoke strongly in favor of adopting no-first-use and sole-purpose policies, the NPR explicitly rejects both for now,” the Federation of American Scientists lamented. “From an arms control and risk reduction perspective, the NPR is a disappointment. Previous efforts to reduce nuclear arsenals and the role that nuclear weapons play have been subdued by renewed strategic competition abroad and opposition from defense hawks at home.”
Stymied by the Biden administration and Congress, many organizations and activists working on nuclear-weapons issues were heartened by the blockbuster movie Oppenheimer, promoted from the outset as an epic thriller about “J. Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.” For several months before the film’s release last July, activists prepared to use it as a springboard for wider public discussion of nuclear weapons. The film did indeed make a big splash and sparked more public discussion of nukes in the United States than had occurred in perhaps decades. The movie had notably stunning production values. Unfortunately, its human values were less impressive, especially since people on the receiving end of the scientific brilliance at Los Alamos in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and even downwinders in New Mexico) remained off-screen.
Watching the movie, I thought of my visit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory about 60 years after the triumphant Trinity atomic test. During an interview, one of the public relations specialists there explained that the legal entity managing the Los Alamos lab was “a limited liability corporation.” That seemed to sum up our government’s brazen lack of accountability for the nuclearization of our planet.
Six months after Oppenheimer arrived at multiplexes, its political impact appears to be close to zero. The film’s disturbing aspects plowed the ground, but—in the absence of a strong disarmament movement or effective leadership among officials in Washington on nuclear weapons issues—little seeding has taken place.
At the end of January, supporters marked the first anniversary of H. Res. 77, a bill sponsored by Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and cosponsored by 42 other members of the House, “embracing the goals and provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” The nonbinding measure aptly summarizes the world’s nuclear peril and offers valuable recommendations, beginning with a call for the United States to actively pursue and conclude “negotiations on a new, bilateral nuclear arms control and disarmament framework agreement with the Russian Federation” as well as purposeful talks “with China and other nuclear-armed states.”
Specific recommendations in the bill include: “renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first; ending the President’s sole authority to launch a nuclear attack; taking the nuclear weapons of the United States off hair-trigger alert; and canceling the plan to replace the nuclear arsenal of the United States with modernized, enhanced weapons.”
The fact that only 10% of House members have even chosen to sponsor the resolution shows just how far we have to go to begin putting the brakes on a nuclear arms race that threatens to destroy—all too literally—everything.
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Why One 3rd Generation Hiroshima Survivor Won’t Watch Oppenheimer
Yet again in the film we see the erasure of the hibakusha and their experiences, the supremacy of war and national power over the people harmed by that supremacy.
Aug 20, 2023
As we approached August 6 this year, the 78th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, my mind kept going back to the basement of Chugoku Electric Power Company, 800 meters (half a mile) from the hypocenter, where my grandfather was that day. I witness how the force of the nuclear bomb can destroy the human body, how the vacuum of a nuclear explosion can gouge out a child’s eyeballs, how the atomic burns peel the skin, swell and corrode the face in ways humanity had never seen. According to one review, the filmmaker focuses on the face of Oppenheimer rather than showing the carnage of his bomb.
From a few minutes of an interview with the filmmaker, I can see that spectators of his movie will safely assume that the characters have all the possible means to escape to minimize their exposure to radiation. Such a space was never offered to people at ground level in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on those critical days. The mushroom-shaped cloud created by the explosion was depicted over and over again in the trailer for the film. But this is a symbol of ashes to the people of my community. That cloud contained the flesh and bones of our grandparents.
The G7 Summit
This past May, I was in Hiroshima, the city where I was born and raised, and witnessed the G7 summit from ground level. Six Western nations—Italy, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who had survived a murder attempt by a fisherman one month prior, gathered to strengthen their ties. The city was paralyzed. Police from all over Japan were there, schools were closed for five days, and there were so many road closures that people stayed home and watched it on TV.
President Joe Biden entered Japan through Iwakuni, a U.S. military base, while others used Japanese airport/gate of the independent nation. Other leaders also stayed in a Japanese hotel in Ujina near the Setouchi seashore where they had the summit. Biden headed straight to an American-owned hotel (Hilton) in the city center, stopping all the traffic at the center of the city near Ground Zero. Local TV camera persons were trying to capture a presidential aide who carried the “nuclear football,” which is always with the U.S. President and enables him to launch a nuclear strike anywhere in the world.
People watched as Kishida spoke of progress in nuclear disarmament talks. Leaders promised the president of Ukraine to provide weapons, including depleted uranium munitions, “for as long as it takes” said Biden, to win the war. This was said in the city of Hiroshima—where people have shared a common understanding for 78 years that they must never betray the hibakushas (atomic bomb sufferers) who pray for world peace, and live with the fear of radiation illness and dying of cancer with excruciating pain.
“Death didn’t fall from the sky. The death was brought by the United States dropping of the bomb… over human beings.”
During the summit, Biden paid a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, known to locals as Atomic Bomb Park, a memorial to those who experienced the massive force of the atomic explosion. It is a landmark of human tragedy and our entering of the nuclear age. Kazumi Matsui, the Mayor of Hiroshima, visited the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo soon after the summit to sign a Sister Parks Agreement between the Atomic Bomb Park and Pearl Harbor National Memorial Park.
Pearl Harbor Memorial Park commemorates the battle between the United States and Japan that began with the attack by Japanese forces on Pearl Harbor. It commemorates the deaths of over 2,000 U.S. sailors and soldiers, as well as 68 civilians caught in the crossfire. The Sister Park Agreement indicates an official consensus between the City of Hiroshima and the United States that the war began with an (unjustified) attack on Pearl Harbor and ended with the (justified) dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Hiroshima Alliance for Nuclear Weapons Abolition (HANWA) is a local group formed by descendants of hibakushas and allies. They warned citizens of Hiroshima, in the midst of the festive G7 Summit, that agreements like this put the city on the fast track to being transformed beyond recognition, with a narrative that lacks historical accuracy and obliterates the past.
Ms. Haruko Moritaki, a descendant of hibakusha and Executive Director of HANWA facing the final stages of cancer, sat in a HANWA meeting on May 17, 2023. She commented on former President Barack Obama’s remarks during his brief visit to the Atomic Bomb Park in 2016, the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima since the war. Obama delivered a brief speech, saying: “Seventy-one years ago, on a bright, cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed.”
Ms. Moritaki said, “Death didn’t fall from the sky. The death was brought by the United States dropping of the bomb… over human beings.”
President Biden didn’t deliver a speech when he visited the Atomic Bomb Park. He had nothing to say to the people of Hiroshima.
My Role as an Artist
As a visual artist, educator, and a third-generation hibakusha who now lives in the United States, I have visited many nuclear sites in the country over the years to grasp the American nuclear narrative. I have witnessed how development of nuclear technology forever changed the land and continues to divide communities and oppress the vulnerable.
As an artist in the year 2023, I am part of a community asked constantly to address ethical questions regarding what is at stake in a work of art: Who is telling the story? Who is silenced in the process? Who is assumed to be the viewer in a given context? I wonder, was the filmmaker asked, or did he ask himself these same questions?
We have heard enough from those benefiting from the current power structure who can relate to the man responsible for leveling two cities but not to the more than 200,000 people who were killed, along with the rest of the city’s inhabitants who were left injured, facing slow and horrible deaths from radiation exposure.
So again, I ask: What is the framework around the production of a film that constitutes historical suffering? How do you address the issue while being respectful of the difficult and often painful feelings triggered by the film? It is a filmmaker’s moral duty to decide how these images are purveyed without reinstating trauma.
In Solidarity With Those Not Pictured
In an article titled “The Racial Underpinnings of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings,” Elaine Scarry notes that on September 18, 1944, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met at Roosevelt’s Hudson Valley estate. A written recording reveals that Japan had been designated as the target for the bombings nearly seven months before Germany surrendered on May 7,1945. The training taking place in the Pacific for the mission to drop the bomb on Japan was initiated in that same month, which further supports the content of the meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill. The historical records indicate yet again the way nuclear development prevents white nations from becoming victims of nuclear atrocities.
Scarry quotes Langston Hughes, who commented in 1953: (Until racial injustice ceases in the United States), “it is going to be very hard for some Americans not to think the easiest way to settle the problems of Asia is simply dropping an atom bomb on colored heads there.”
Scarry goes on:
The cruelty daily inflicted on people of color in our own city streets acts as a mental rehearsal for carrying out large-scale slayings abroad. It keeps our capacity for cruelty limber; it dulls the mind and gives us practice in pronouncing the word “expendable.”
My friend Petuuche Gilbert of Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, who works tirelessly to draw attention to the ongoing contamination of his people from uranium mining, said to me, “I want to see the film acknowledges [sic] the entire story of the nuclear bomb’s impact not only upon its first victims but upon the lives of Indigenous peoples also living with its legacy of development and application. I want the film to mention Indigenous peoples whose land was taken to build and test the bomb. I want it to tell and comprehend the tragedies of the nuclear fuel chain.”
He added “Manifest destiny was necessary to build America and have what it is today—American power and supremacy.”
At the G7, in Obama’s speech, in the Sister Park Agreement, and now yet again in Oppenheimer, we see the erasure of the hibakusha and their experiences, the supremacy of war and national power over the people harmed by that supremacy.
No, I do not need to watch the film and be retraumatized.
My solidarity is with the people not pictured, those who continue to suffer.
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For Oppenheimer, a World Government Was the Only Way to Save Us From Ourselves
Might something like a genuine world republic provide humanity with the tools to get a grip on existential perils like the climate emergency, runaway artificial intelligence, and new weapons of mass extermination?
Aug 14, 2023
Blink and you’ll miss it.
In a scene in the new Oppenheimer film set right after the successful 1949 atomic bomb test by the USSR, there is a brief exchange between the film’s two main antagonists. Lewis Strauss, chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, asks J. Robert Oppenheimer what he thinks should be done now. “International control,” Oppenheimer immediately replies.
“You mean world government?” Strauss fires back.
It sounds like a throwaway line, or one of those accusations routinely hurled at those trying to make global institutions marginally more effective. But in this case, Chairman Strauss’ epithet was spot on.
in his 1948 Foreign Affairs article, Oppenheimer maintained: “If the atomic bomb was to have meaning in the contemporary world, it would have to be in showing that not modern man, not navies, not ground forces, but war itself was obsolete.”
The tremendous destruction of World War II, even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prompted a radical rethinking of the world political order. In particular, the idea of world government as the solution to the problem of war was placed front and center in this country’s foreign policy debate, and argued about passionately in diners, dorm rooms, and dinner parties all across the land. Unfortunately, however, the legions of moviegoers who buy tickets to Christopher Nolan’s otherwise excellent film this summer will have no idea that one of the leading proponents of that singular idea was J. Robert Oppenheimer.
After the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Oppenheimer threw himself into working to control nuclear weapons. Like other atomic scientists, he was fully aware that the Soviet Union would likely develop its own atom bombs in just a few years, and that time was short to prevent an unrestrained nuclear arms race. The movie refers to his activities as working for “international cooperation.” But his actual ideas were much deeper and more radical than those anodyne words imply.
In 1946, Oppenheimer participated in the development of a report for the secretary of state’s Committee on Atomic Energy about what might be done to control nuclear weapons. The report, which became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal report but which was authored chiefly by Oppenheimer himself, proposed an international Atomic Development Agency that would have the sole right to mine and process uranium and to run reactors of any kind. This was a radical proposal, but, as its authors explained, they could see no alternative.
In June 1946, Oppenheimer published an article in The New York Times Magazine explaining the proposal to the public. The article discussed the relationship between peaceful and military uses of atomic energy, evaluated a couple of other ideas for controlling atomic weapons, and then discussed the proposed Atomic Development Agency.
It is here, in a section entitled “Sovereignty,” that we come across a striking passage:
Many have said that without world government there could be no permanent peace, and without peace there would be atomic warfare. I think one must agree with this. Many have said that there could be no outlawry of weapons and no prevention of war unless international law could apply to the citizens of nations, as federal law does to citizens of states, or we have made manifest the fact that international control is not compatible with absolute national sovereignty. I think one must agree with this.
Similarly, in a January 1948 article for Foreign Affairs magazine, Oppenheimer wrote:
It is quite clear that in this field we would like to see patterns established which, if they were more generally extended, would constitute some of the most vital elements of a new international law: patterns not unrelated to the ideals which more generally and eloquently are expressed by the advocates of world government.
From the vantage point of 2023, the remarkable thing about these passages is the apparent assumption that the reader is familiar with the idea of world government, and arguments for and against it, to the point where they can just be mentioned without explanation or elaboration. And for much of the public for much of the 1940s, this was probably true—as remarkable as it might seem to us today, when this notion is entirely absent from the international affairs debate.
Even before the end of the war, world government advocacy had become a prominent feature of the political conversation in America. In 1943, the businessman and Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie published a book called One World. The book sold 1.5 million copies in the four months following its release and played a key role in a blossoming of world federation advocacy—long before virtually anyone had heard of anything like an atomic bomb. To choose but one example, an organization known as the Student Federalists, founded in 1942 by a charismatic 16-year-old boy named Harris Wofford, over the next several years formed 367 chapters on high school and college campuses around the country. (Mr. Wofford went on to become a U.S. senator and a key civil rights aide in the White House of President John F. Kennedy.)
Then in 1945, just a few months before the Trinity test, came Emery Reves’ The Anatomy of Peace. While Willkie’s book was a travelogue describing his voyage around the world, Reves’ was an extended logical argument that only law could create peace and only a world federation—a union of nations with a government taking care of issues that could not be handled at the national level—could create meaningful law that applied to individuals rather than governments. Indeed, Oppenheimer’s passage above could have easily been a summary of Reves’ book.
It wasn’t just books. Beloved children’s book author and New Yorker editor E. B. White devoted a great many of his editorials to the problem of global anarchy. (These were later collected and published in a book called The Wild Flag: Editorials From The New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters.) Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins, upon reading about Hiroshima, wrote a lengthy editorial for his magazine titled “Modern Man is Obsolete,” that passionately argued for immediate democratic world federation. “There is no need to talk of the difficulties in the way of world government,” wrote Cousins. “There is need only to ask if we can afford to do without it.”
In a similar vein Walter Lippmann, a founder of both The New Republic magazine and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a key player later in the Cuban Missile Crisis, wrote in 1946: “There are few in any country who now believe that war can be regulated or outlawed by the ordinary treaties among sovereign states… no one can prove what will be the legislative, executive, and judicial organs of the world state… but there are ideas that shake the world, such as the ideal of the union of mankind under universal law.”
Even General Hap Arnold, the only U.S. Air Force officer ever to hold the rank of five stars and founder of the RAND Corporation, said in 1946: “The greatest need facing the world today is for international control of the human forces that make for war.” The atom bomb, he declared, presents “a tremendous argument for a world organization that will eliminate conflict… We must make an end to all wars for good.”
And before the end of the decade, more than 50,000 Americans had joined the United World Federalists (UWF)—led for three years by a bright young man named Alan Cranston, who went on to serve as a four-term U.S. Senator from California. UWF has continued its operations to this very day and is now known as Citizens for Global Solutions.
A number of physicists also came to support world federation. “Conflicts in interest between great powers can be expected to arise in the future… and there is no world authority in existence that can adjudicate the case and enforce the decision,” said Leo Szilard, who first conceived the nuclear chain reaction. But humanity had at its disposal, he insisted, “the solution of the problem of permanent peace… the issue that we have to face is not whether we can create a world government… (but) whether we can have such a world government without going through a third world war.”
Even Edward Teller, accurately portrayed in the Oppenheimer film as pushing for the development of the immensely more destructive hydrogen bombs and eventually undercutting his colleague at the security hearings, appeared to embrace the idea! In 1948, he discussed the “Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution,” written by a committee of eminent scholars chaired by the chancellor of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and aimed at establishing a “Federal Republic of the World.” And Teller said about this enterprise: “[America’s] present necessary task of opposing Russia should not cause us to forget that in the long run we cannot win by working against something. Instead we must work for something. We must work for World Government.”
But the most prominent and most active proponent of world government among scientists was Albert Einstein himself. He had always opposed nationalism, and supporting world federation was a natural extension. Einstein wrote articles, gave interviews, and helped found the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. The Student Federalists of Princeton, New Jersey, held meetings in his living room. And he served as the founding advisory board chair of the United World Federalists.
The type of world government that Einstein promoted would exclusively have power over security issues and a few internal circumstances that could lead to war. But this kind of limited world government was a must. “A new kind of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels,” he said. “Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive… In light of new knowledge... an eventual world state is not just desirable in the name of brotherhood; it is necessary for survival.”
Oppenheimer’s focus in the post-war years was more near-term. He worked for international control of nuclear matters—both weapons and civilian reactors that could be used to make weapons. But that international control was to take the form of an agency with a strict monopoly on such activities. His 1946 New York Times Magazine piece says about the plan: “It proposes that in the field of atomic energy there be set up a world government. That in this field there be renunciation of national sovereignty. That in this field there be no legal veto power. That in this field there be international law.”
Why would this be significant? In a lengthier article published in 1946 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Oppenheimer wrote, “the problem that we are dealing with,” in seeking to prevent atomic war, “is the problem of the elimination of war.” Proposals for addressing nuclear issues were to be judged on whether they also advanced this goal. The article was titled “The Atom Bomb as a Great Force for Peace”—not because of the simplistic and banal argument that the bomb would make war too horrible to contemplate, but because its control would lay the foundation for a world government that truly could abolish war.
And in his 1948 Foreign Affairs article, again, Oppenheimer maintained: “If the atomic bomb was to have meaning in the contemporary world, it would have to be in showing that not modern man, not navies, not ground forces, but war itself was obsolete.”
At the end of this essay, Oppenheimer returned to the noble aspirations that so many held in the shattering initial weeks after Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. “The aim of those who would work for the establishment of peace,” he insisted, “must be to maintain what was sound in the early hopes, and by all means in their power to look to their eventual realization. It is necessarily denied to us in these days to see at what time, to what immediate ends, in what context, and in what manner of world, we may return again to the great issues touched on by the international control of atomic energy… (But) this is seed we take with us, traveling to a land we cannot see, to plant in new soil.”
Should we consider all this just a mere historical curiosity? Is anything about these conversations eight long decades ago relevant to the challenges of the 21st Century? As politically unlikely as it might now appear, might something like a genuine world republic provide humanity with the kinds of tools it will require to get a grip on existential perils like the climate emergency, runaway artificial intelligence, and who knows what kinds of new weapons of mass extermination that Oppenheimer’s heirs will almost surely invent in the decades and centuries to come?
The best possible answer to that is the same one purportedly given by China’s Premier Zhou Enlai in 1971, when asked by Henry Kissinger what he thought about the consequences of the French Revolution.
Mr. Zhou, the story goes, considered the question for a moment, and then replied: “I think it is too soon to tell.”
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The Scientist Who Walked Away From the Manhattan Project
While the name Sir Joseph Rotblat will probably never be as widely known as that of the other illustrious scientists who worked on the project that ushered in the nuclear age, his example serves as a reminder that we always have a choice.
Aug 08, 2023
Last month saw the release of the highly anticipated blockbuster movie Oppenheimer. Based on a biography of the head of the Manhattan Project, the U.S.’s secret World War II program to develop the atomic bomb, this movie has received positive reviews from critics. Cillian Murphy, the actor who plays the main character in the eponymously titled movie, in particular has been praised for his performance and the stellar job he does in capturing the pathos that haunted the title character after the bomb had been successfully detonated.
Although no doubt deserving of the acclaim he has garnered for his role, enshrouding his character in tragedy and investing the film with melodrama carries the risk of conveying the message that we in our collective humanity are victims who are somehow helpless in the face of this powerful technology.
From here, it becomes relatively easy for the cinemagoer to be overwhelmed with a sense of dread and left with the impression that our nuclear fate is out of our hands. It follows that we should resign ourselves to this fact, for to think otherwise is futile. The more pervasive this attitude becomes, the less likely are ordinary people to feel that they can affect nuclear policy. If so, far better to leave nuclear decision-making to the technocrats and powers that be who decide such things.
Glaringly omitted from the cast of the movie, Rotblat holds the distinction of being the only scientist working on this program to have had the courage to walk away from this project.
Despite the gloomy scenario depicted and the helplessness it could so easily engender, there is always room for individuals to act on their conscience in the belief that doing so could change nuclear destiny. This can be clearly seen in the actions of Oppenheimer’s contemporary and fellow scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project, Sir Joseph Rotblat. Glaringly omitted from the cast of the movie, Rotblat holds the distinction of being the only scientist working on this program to have had the courage to walk away from this project.
He elected to do so in 1944, the year before the war ended, when it became clear to him along with many in the U.S. military and political establishment that Germany, the Allies’ main enemy that intelligence services had gathered was also pursuing nuclear research, was nearing defeat and would not be able to design and deploy a nuclear weapon. Far from cutting a tragic figure in later life, Rotblat’s courageous decision led him down a path that would ultimately lead to his being awarded the highest of honors, including a Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, for the tireless work he did campaigning for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
While his name will probably never be as widely known as that of the other illustrious scientists who worked on the project that ushered in the nuclear age, and even less likely that a major biopic will be made about him, his example serves as a reminder that we always have a choice. It also serves as a challenge to each of us: Do we possess the wisdom to recognize we do and the courage to act as if we can make a difference? For the sake of humanity, let us hope we do. For if we do not, the only ticket that will be punched at this time when global tensions are rising and the Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than it has ever been is a one way ticket to oblivion rather than a ticket to the cineplex.
Fortunately, there are small and simple ways each of us who are unwilling to accept being spectators paralyzed into inaction who are only able to gawk as the end credits roll on humanity could meet this challenge and honor Rotblat’s long-forgotten memory.
As an immediate step, those of us in nuclear weapons states could petition our governments to forswear the option of a nuclear first strike. Concurrently, those of us from countries that have a civilian but not a nuclear weapons program could take a more active role in domestic nuclear watchdog organisations that act to curb the martial instincts of our more bellicose leaders. While those of us from countries that are currently toying with the idea of establishing civilian nuclear programs could push back against the greenwashing of the nuclear industry that lobbyists are engaged in by getting involved in campaigns that aim to educate the public about nuclear power and seeing to it that public oversight mechanisms are firmly in place before our governments embark upon these ventures. All this while working together to reinvigorate the global movement to eliminate nuclear weapons.
The script is unwritten but, no matter where we are, each of us has a key, albeit minor, part to play in this epic that will serve as a fitting tribute to Sir Joseph Rotblat. Are you prepared to audition for a role in this cast?
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A Unique Hiroshima Art Project Centers the Victims of the First Atomic Bombing
Telling their part of the story may be the only thing that can save us from the same cruel fate.
Aug 06, 2023
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer reintroduced the bomb to the world. He rekindled the drama of making and testing it. He examined the politics and personalities. But he didn’t show us what it did to the bombed. It’s a glaring omission in a very long movie. (And not the only one.)
We should not be surprised. The U.S. military officials who occupied Japan at the end of the war did everything they could to bury those images forever. Post-war American films about Hiroshima shied away from depicting the horrific aftermath. Nolan said he wanted to tell a “fascinating story” about the “raw power” of the bomb and “what that means for the people involved.”
How could he assign so little time to those those who suffered the ghastly effects of that power when it was unleashed in a war?
Telling that part of the story may be the only thing that can save us from the same cruel fate.
On this 78th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with Oppenheimer getting so much acclaim and attention, we thought we should focus on this question. What follows is a discussion about how the memory of what happened is being preserved, and who is doing it. It is an interview with a student artist, Kyoka Mochida, and her teacher, Ms. Fukumoto, from Motomachi High School in Hiroshima, conducted at the school on July 25. The interview took place in Japanese and was facilitated by Natsuko Arai from Hiroshima University, who provided the English translation.
The questions are about an art project that has produced over 200 paintings that depict the events after the bomb fell on August 6, 1945, through the eyes of people who survived it. They are known in Japan as “Hibakusha”; literally “the bombed.”
When I thought about the fact that war was happening in the time in which I was living, and that a similar situation was about to happen, I felt that I should do something, and I thought of painting as my weapon.
Natsuko Arai: Could you tell us about how the project got started, the goals of the project, and how it works?
Teacher Fukumoto: The “Picture of the Atomic Bomb” project was not initiated by Motomachi High School, but is an activity in which Motomachi High School participates as a production volunteer in a project of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum called “Picture of the Atomic Bomb: Drawing with the Next Generation.” There are Hibakusha who give their testimonies at the Peace Memorial Museum, and they express their experiences to various people, such as students on a school trip and people from overseas. At that time, they explain their experiences by showing various materials such as maps and photos, but they also use pictures of scenes that have not been preserved in words or photographs, so that their testimonies can be more easily understood by the audience.First, the museum will call for Hibakusha who are working at the museum who would like to have paintings drawn for their testimonies. The Peace Memorial Museum then sends the list to Motomachi High School. We tell the students how many pictures Hibakusha would like to have painted this year. The students who want to do the project raise their hands, and we choose the scene they want to write about by reading the description of the scene, and creating a combination of a Hibakusha and a student who will be the painter. Then we have our first meeting in October or so and start the production from there.
At the first meeting in October, the students listen to the testimonies directly from the Hibakusha, and ask questions to the Hibakusha. At first, they make sketches with pencils. Then, after making a simple sketch of the composition, characters, and scene, we asked the Hibakusha several times how they like the sketches.
After deciding on the composition, the students would begin to draw on a canvas (size F15). The exhibition of the completed work will be held at Motomachi High School in July, so they will draw the work until then, and then have the Hibakusha look at the work to confirm what the students don’t understand, and repeat the process of drawing and revising to complete it.
Sometimes, when they are not able to complete the work in time, some students take the work home and draw it at home, but basically, the work is done at the school, on weekends or when the students have no club activities. There is a room where they work, and there are about 10 students in the room, so they line up and work as a team.
Natsuko Arai: What is the significance of artwork as a medium to convey the Hibakusha’s stories?
Kyoka Mochida: I think the importance of expressing the tragedy of the atomic bombing in pictures is to depict scenes that are difficult to visualize in words alone. For example, here is a scene of a half-burnt corpse. If you only hear the words, you would not understand what a half-burnt corpse looks like, but people like us who want to convey the atomic bombing to the public can finally make it into a picture by studying from reading materials, testimonies, and other information.
Pictures can be conveyed to children, the deaf, and people overseas who speak different languages. In this sense, I think that the art of conveying the A-bomb experience through pictures plays a very important role in conveying the atomic bombing to the world.
Natsuko Arai: What have been the impacts of the project? How do the students and survivors feel about it?
Kyoka Mochida: After I had finished my entrance exam and had been accepted to Motomachi High School, the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. Before I entered the school, I had a kind of scary image of “Pictures of the Atomic Bombing,” this project. I thought I would have to draw burnt people or something, so I decided not to participate in the project. However, when I thought about the fact that war was happening in the time in which I was living, and that a similar situation was about to happen, I felt that I should do something, and I thought of painting as my weapon. Sometimes pictures are easier to communicate than words, and I can draw. That’s why I decided to participate in the “Pictures of the Atomic Bomb” project.
I felt that if everyone thinks of August 6 as someone else’s problem, we will never have peace in the world.
Before I heard the testimonies from the Hibakusha, I had an image of August 6 as a very terrible day when the atomic bomb fell, and many people died as a result. But even though I had been taking peace education classes since I was in the first grade of elementary school, I still thought of the atomic bombing as something that happened in a different time, in a different world, and that had nothing related with me. However, hearing the testimony of an actual A-bomb survivor changed my way of thinking. Sometimes when they are testifying, they start crying because of their painful memories. I tried to imagine what it would be like if the same thing had happened to me and I had lost my own family. I felt that if everyone thinks of August 6 as someone else’s problem, we will never have peace in the world.
I felt that I had to think of even the most tragic things as if they were my own personal matter, and that is the influence I received from my participation in this project. When I speak at gallery talks and other events, I think about how I can make my talk easier to convey to others. This project has given me the desire to convey the influence I received from the “Picture of the Atomic Bomb” and the feeling that I need to think about it as if it were my own.
Natsuko Arai: What happens to the artwork after it is completed?
Teacher Fukumoto: The completed paintings will be donated to the Peace Memorial Museum, as they are to be stored in the museum. Normally, the paintings will be kept in the storage room and used by the Hibakusha when they give their testimonies. When they give their testimonies at the museum, they use the paintings as one of the images in their PowerPoint presentations. It would be fine if they testified using the actual paintings, but it is difficult to carry them around, so they are mostly used as data in the form of photos.
Starting from August 6 of this year, we will hold an exhibition called “Hiroshima as depicted by high school students” at the International Conference Hall next to the museum. Twice a year, for two weeks each in summer and winter, Motomachi High School and the Peace Culture Center (the main organization that houses Peace Memorial Museum and the International Conference Center) will sponsor the exhibition, and at that time, we will take 50 or 40 pictures out of the collection and combine new and past paintings, and show them to the public. The number of items on display is determined according to the size of the exhibition space.
Many people want to borrow the actual paintings, but it is a bit difficult to lend the paintings themselves because it is very expensive to transport them far away due to insurance. Instead, the museum has made about 1,000 reproductions of the panels, which are loaned out and exhibited around the country, but we do not know where or how they are being displayed. Since the copyrights are all held by the Peace Culture Foundation, they are all managed and loaned out by the foundation. We sometimes know about exhibitions held in places we know nothing about through TV, or when people from outside the prefecture tell us that they saw an exhibition at a place outside of Hiroshima.
We have received a grant to produce a collection of our works. We made a Japanese version last year and translated it into English so that it could be seen by a wider audience. One hundred and seventy-one paintings from 2007 to 2020 are included in the book. There are various types of Hibakusha: Some Hibakusha request one painting a year, some Hibakusha like Mochida-san’s, request four paintings at one time, some ask for the next year again, some stop after one painting, and some have requested paintings for about 10 years in a row.
I think the most important message that the Hibakusha want to convey to the world is that we must never allow the same thing to happen again, and we really should not create any more nuclear weapons.
The “Picture of the Atomic Bomb” project was not first undertaken by Motomachi High School, but by the art department of Hiroshima City University, and university students had been working for several years. In 2007, the museum asked us to have high school students work on it because it was not going well in the university.
Natsuko Arai: What are some of the messages that the survivors want to communicate to the world about their direct experience with nuclear weapons?
Kyoka Mochida: I think the most important message that the Hibakusha want to convey to the world is that we must never allow the same thing to happen again, and we really should not create any more nuclear weapons.
When I was in the second or third grade of elementary school, I had an opportunity to talk with a Hibakusha as part of my peace education. The Hibakusha I spoke with said something like the following: “If you had nuclear weapons, you would look stronger. It is natural, but if you have a lot of them and appeal to people that your country is strong, such intimidation will not lead to peace. It’s just intimidation, and it only sparks conflict.”
The Hibakusha strongly said that Japan and other countries must not have nuclear weapons and that we must reduce nuclear weapons. I think it is because they are Hibakusha who experienced and felt the horror of the atomic bombing firsthand, they understand that if the same thing happened in this day and age, the damage would be even greater. That’s why the Hibakusha have a real sense of crisis, I believe.
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Can Oppenheimer Help Dismantle the Nuclear-Industrial Complex?
A wide variety of peace, arms-control, health, and public-policy-focused groups are already building on the attention garnered by the film to engage in a public education campaign to control and eventually eliminate the nuclear danger.
Jul 31, 2023
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you’re undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher Nolan has released a new film about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as part of America’s World War II-era Manhattan Project. The film has earned widespread attention, with large numbers of people participating in what’s already become known as “Barbieheimer” by seeing Greta Gerwig’s hit film Barbie and Nolan’s three-hour-long Oppenheimer on the same day.
Nolan’s film is a distinctive pop cultural phenomenon because it deals with the American use of nuclear weapons, a genuine rarity since ABC’s 1983 airing of The Day After about the consequences of nuclear war. (An earlier exception was Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, his satirical portrayal of the insanity of the Cold War nuclear arms race.)
The film is based on American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Nolan made it in part to break through the shield of antiseptic rhetoric, bloodless philosophizing, and public complacency that has allowed such world-ending weaponry to persist so long after Trinity, the first nuclear bomb test, was conducted in the New Mexico desert 78 years ago this month.
Nolan’s impetus was rooted in his early exposure to the nuclear disarmament movement in Europe. As he said recently:
“It’s something that’s been on my radar for a number of years. I was a teenager in the ‘80s, the early ‘80s in England. It was the peak of CND, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Greenham Common [protest]; the threat of nuclear war was when I was 12, 13, 14—it was the biggest fear we all had. I think I first encountered Oppenheimer in… Sting’s song about the Russians that came out then and talks about Oppenheimer’s ‘deadly toys.’”
A feature film on the genesis of nuclear weapons may not strike you as an obvious candidate for box-office blockbuster status. As Nolan’s teenage son said when his father told him he was thinking about making such a film, “Well, nobody really worries about nuclear weapons anymore. Are people going to be interested in that?” Nolan responded that, given what’s at stake, he worries about complacency and even denial when it comes to the global risks posed by the nuclear arsenals on this planet. “You’re normalizing killing tens of thousands of people. You’re creating moral equivalences, false equivalences with other types of conflict… [and so] accepting, normalizing… the danger.”
These days, unfortunately, you’re talking about anything but just tens of thousands of people dying in a nuclear face-off. A 2022 report by Ira Helfand and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimated that a “limited” nuclear war between India and Pakistan that used roughly 3% of the world’s 12,000-plus nuclear warheads would kill “hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions” of us. A full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, the study suggests, could kill up to five (yes, five!) billion people within two years, essentially ending life as we know it on this planet in a “nuclear winter.”
Obviously, all too many of us don’t grasp the stakes involved in a nuclear conflict, thanks in part to “psychic numbing,” a concept regularly invoked by Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima in America: A History of Denial (co-authored with Greg Mitchell), among many other books. Lifton describes psychic numbing as “a diminished capacity or inclination to feel” prompted by “the completely unprecedented dimension of this revolution in technological destructiveness.”
Given the Nolan film’s focus on Oppenheimer’s story, some crucial issues related to the world’s nuclear dilemma are either dealt with only briefly or omitted altogether.
Neither the film nor the discussion sparked by it has explored one of the most important reasons for the continued existence of nuclear weapons—the profits it yields the participants in America’s massive nuclear-industrial complex.
The staggering devastation caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is suggested only indirectly without any striking visual evidence of the devastating human consequences of the use of those two weapons. Also largely ignored are the critical voices who then argued that there was no need to drop a bomb, no less two of them, on a Japan most of whose cities had already been devastated by U.S. fire-bombing to end the war. General (and later President) Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote that when he was told by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the plan to drop atomic bombs on populated areas in Japan, “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”
The film also fails to address the health impacts of the research, testing, and production of such weaponry, which to this day is still causing disease and death, even without another nuclear weapon ever being used in war. Victims of nuclear weapons development include people who were impacted by the fallout from U.S. nuclear testing in the Western United States and the Marshall Islands in the Western Pacific, uranium miners on Navajo lands, and many others. Speaking of the first nuclear test in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which represents that state’s residents who suffered widespread cancers and high rates of infant mortality caused by radiation from that explosion, said “It’s an inconvenient truth… People just don’t want to reflect on the fact that American citizens were bombed at Trinity.”
Another crucially important issue has received almost no attention. Neither the film nor the discussion sparked by it has explored one of the most important reasons for the continued existence of nuclear weapons—the profits it yields the participants in America’s massive nuclear-industrial complex.
Once Oppenheimer and other concerned scientists and policymakers failed to convince the Truman administration to simply close Los Alamos and place nuclear weapons and the materials needed to develop them under international control—the only way, as they saw it, to head off a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union—the drive to expand the nuclear weapons complex was on. Research and production of nuclear warheads and nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines quickly became a big business, whose beneficiaries have worked doggedly to limit any efforts at the reduction or elimination of nuclear arms.
The Manhattan Project and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex
The Manhattan Project Oppenheimer directed was one of the largest public works efforts ever undertaken in American history. Though the Oppenheimer film focuses on Los Alamos, it quickly came to include far-flung facilities across the United States. At its peak, the project would employ 130,000 workers—as many as in the entire U.S. auto industry at the time.
According to nuclear expert Stephen Schwartz, author of Atomic Audit, the seminal work on the financing of U.S. nuclear weapons programs, through the end of 1945 the Manhattan Project cost nearly $38 billion in today’s dollars, while helping spawn an enterprise that has since cost taxpayers an almost unimaginable $12 trillion for nuclear weapons and related programs. And the costs never end. The Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) reports that the U.S. spent $43.7 billion on nuclear weapons last year alone, and a new Congressional Budget Office report suggests that another $756 billion will go into those deadly armaments in the next decade.
Such beneficiaries of the nuclear weapons industry are far from silent when it comes to debating the future of nuclear spending and policy-making.
Private contractors now run the nuclear warhead complex and build nuclear delivery vehicles. They range from Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin to lesser-known firms like BWX Technologies and Jacobs Engineering, all of which split billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon (for the production of nuclear delivery vehicles) and the Department of Energy (for nuclear warheads). To keep the gravy train running—ideally, in perpetuity—those contractors also spend millions lobbying decision-makers. Even universities have gotten into the act. Both the University of California and Texas A&M are part of the consortium that runs the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory.
The American warhead complex is a vast enterprise with major facilities in California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. And nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, and missiles are produced or based in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, North Dakota, Montana, Virginia, Washington state, and Wyoming. Add in nuclear subcontractors and most states host at least some nuclear-weapons-related activities.
And such beneficiaries of the nuclear weapons industry are far from silent when it comes to debating the future of nuclear spending and policy-making.
Profiteers of Armageddon: The Nuclear Weapons Lobby
The institutions and companies that build nuclear bombs, missiles, aircraft, and submarines, along with their allies in Congress, have played a disproportionate role in shaping U.S. nuclear policy and spending. They have typically opposed the U.S. ratification of a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty; put strict limits on the ability of Congress to reduce either funding for or the deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); and pushed for weaponry like a proposed nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile that even the Pentagon hasn’t requested, while funding think tanks that promote an ever more robust nuclear weapons force.
A case in point is the Senate ICBM Coalition (dubbed part of the “Dr. Strangelove Caucus” by Arms Control Association Director Daryl Kimball and other critics of nuclear arms). The ICBM Coalition consists of senators from states with major ICBM bases or ICBM research, maintenance, and production sites: Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. The sole Democrat in the group, Jon Tester (D-Mont.), is the chair of the powerful appropriations subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, where he can keep an eye on ICBM spending and advocate for it as needed.
The Senate ICBM Coalition is responsible for numerous measures aimed at protecting both the funding and deployment of such deadly missiles. According to former Secretary of Defense William Perry, they are among “the most dangerous weapons we have” because a president, if warned of a possible nuclear attack on this country, would have just minutes to decide to launch them, risking a nuclear conflict based on a false alarm. That Coalition’s efforts are supplemented by persistent lobbying from a series of local coalitions of business and political leaders in those ICBM states. Most of them work closely with Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the new ICBM, dubbed the Sentinel and expected to cost at least $264 billion to develop, build, and maintain over its life span that is expected to exceed 60 years.
Even a relatively small slice of the Pentagon and Department of Energy nuclear budgets could create many more jobs if invested in green energy, sustainable infrastructure, education, or public health–anywhere from 9% to 250% more jobs, depending on the amount spent.
Of course, Northrop Grumman and its 12 major ICBM subcontractors have been busy pushing the Sentinel as well. They spend tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying annually, while employing former members of the government’s nuclear establishment to make their case to Congress and the executive branch. And those are hardly the only organizations or networks devoted to sustaining the nuclear arms race. You would have to include the Air Force Association and the obscurely named Submarine Industrial Base Council, among others.
The biggest point of leverage the nuclear weapons industry and the arms sector more broadly have over Congress is jobs. How strange then that the arms industry has generated diminishing job returns since the end of the Cold War. According to the National Defense Industrial Association, direct employment in the weapons industry has dropped from 3.2 million in the mid-1980s to about 1.1 million today.
Even a relatively small slice of the Pentagon and Department of Energy nuclear budgets could create many more jobs if invested in green energy, sustainable infrastructure, education, or public health–anywhere from 9% to 250% more jobs, depending on the amount spent. Given that the climate crisis is already well underway, such a shift would not only make this country more prosperous but the world safer by slowing the pace of climate-driven catastrophes and offering at least some protection against its worst manifestations.
A New Nuclear Reckoning?
Count on one thing: by itself, a movie focused on the origin of nuclear weapons, no matter how powerful, won’t force a new reckoning with the costs and consequences of America’s continued addiction to them. But a wide variety of peace, arms-control, health, and public-policy-focused groups are already building on the attention garnered by the film to engage in a public education campaign aimed at reviving a movement to control and eventually eliminate the nuclear danger.
Past experience—from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that helped persuade Christopher Nolan to make Oppenheimer to the “Ban the Bomb” and Nuclear Freeze campaigns that stopped above-ground nuclear testing and helped turn President Ronald Reagan around on the nuclear issue—suggests that, given concerted public pressure, progress can be made on reining in the nuclear threat. The public education effort surrounding the Oppenheimer film is being taken up by groups like The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Council for a Livable World that were founded, at least in part, by Manhattan Project scientists who devoted their lives to trying to roll back the nuclear arms race; professional groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility; anti-war groups like Peace Action and Win Without War; the Nobel Peace prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons; nuclear policy groups like Global Zero and the Arms Control Association; advocates for Marshall Islanders, “downwinders,” and other victims of the nuclear complex; and faith-based groups like the Friends Committee on National Legislation. The Native American-led organization Tewa Women United has even created a website, “Oppenheimer—and the Other Side of the Story,” that focuses on “the Indigenous and land-based peoples who were displaced from our homelands, the poisoning and contamination of sacred lands and waters that continues to this day, and the ongoing devastating impact of nuclear colonization on our lives and livelihoods.”
On the global level, the 2021 entry into force of a nuclear ban treaty—officially known as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—is a sign of hope, even if the nuclear weapons states have yet to join. The very existence of such a treaty does at least help delegitimize nuclear weaponry. It has even prompted dozens of major financial institutions to stop investing in the nuclear weapons industry, under pressure from campaigns like Don’t Bank on the Bomb.
In truth, the situation couldn’t be simpler: we need to abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us. Hopefully, Oppenheimer will help prepare the ground for progress in that all too essential undertaking, beginning with a frank discussion of what’s now at stake.
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Oppenheimer: the Movie and the Moment to Prevent the Next Nuclear War
Unless this Hollywood film sparks a second nuclear-freeze movement, Congress and the White House will raid the treasury to expand our nuclear arsenal.
Jul 26, 2023
This piece contains spoilers for the movie Oppenheimer directed by Christopher Nolan.
The ground-breaking movie
Oppenheimer, despite its unsympathetic protagonist, packs a powerful anti-nuclear punch that makes it hard, if not impossible, to sleep after watching the film.
For this reason alone, the movie should be shown on the floor of Congress and in the White House as required viewing by all in D.C. bent on spending $1.7 trillion over the next decades to build new nuclear weapons to kill us all.
Only those with a global death wish or on the payroll of Northrop Grumman, the military contractor with the nuclear “modernization” contract, could watch this film and still root for U.S. nuclear rearmament, a horror show now underway with the blessings of D.C. politicians. Unless people rise up in fury, unless this Hollywood movie sparks a second nuclear-freeze movement, a repeat on steroids of the 80s nuclear weapons freeze, Congress and the White House will raid the treasury to expand our nuclear arsenal.
The White House and a majority of Congress want to rush us, a sleepwalking populace, into WWIII with Russia, a nation of 143 million people, 195 different ethnicities, and 6,000 nuclear weapons.
On the agenda is a new sea-launched nuclear cruise missile, a gravity bomb with two-stage radiation implosion, a long range strike bomber, and the replacement of 400 underground nuclear missiles in the Midwest with 600 new Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMS). These new ICBMS—The Sentinel—could each carry up to three warheads 20 times more powerful than the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to incinerate 200,000 people in a span of three days.
Irish actor Cillian Murphy plays the role of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a hand-wringing scientist, an unfaithful lackluster womanizer, a man with few convictions but lots of demons, who traverses an emotional landscape of ambition, doubt, remorse, and surrender.
Oppenheimer oversees the Manhattan Project, the team of scientists hunkering down in the beautiful desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, to build the hideous atomic bomb before the Germans or Russians crack the code.
In a scene reminiscent of the absurd 1950s, when pig-tailed school children scrambled under desks in mock nuclear drills, scientists don sunscreen and goggles to protect themselves during the blinding Trinity Test. This was the first atomic test conducted with no warning to the downwinders—the nearby Indigenous people of the Southwest who developed cancer as a result of radioactive fall out. This was the test before President Harry Truman ordered a 9,000 pound uranium bomb named “Little Boy” loaded onto a B-29 bomber. This was the trial performance before the same president, depicted in the movie as unctuous and arrogant, orders “Fat Boy,” a second plutonium bomb—prototype for today’s nuclear weapon—dropped on Nagasaki.
Though the movie can be slow, a three-hour endurance test, its historical insights and gut-churning imagery compensate for its lack of likable characters, save for Lt. General Leslie Groves, played by a fun-to-watch Matt Damon as Oppenheimer’s Pentagon handler.
One of the most haunting moments juxtaposes in living color celebrations of the bombings, applause and accolades for Oppenheimer standing at the podium, with the guilt-consumed scientist’s black and white visions of irradiated souls, skeletal remains, flesh turned to ash—all amid a cacophony of explosions and pounding feet, the death march.
Even more disturbing are the questions that tug at the moviegoer, who wonders, “Where are the Japanese victims in this film? Why are they missing from this picture? Why are they never shown writhing in pain, their lives and cities destroyed?” Instead, the human targets are seen only through the lens of Oppenheimer who imagines faceless x-rayed ghosts torn asunder in the burning wreckage, their skin, their flesh falling off their bones, their bodies disappearing into nothingness.
The omission of the real victims in the interest of maintaining a consistent point of view may make sense from a filmmaker’s perspective, but not from the standpoint of historians and truth tellers. Writer-director Christopher Nolan could have shown us photos, authentic aerial footage of the Japanese, blinded and burned, before the final credits rolled to remind us the horror is real, not just a Hollywood movie bound for several Oscar nominations.
In the name of truth the movie does, however, smash the persistent myth that the U.S. had no other choice but to drop the atomic bombs to end WWII. Through dialogue, we learn Japan was about to surrender, the Emperor simply needed to save face; the point of irradiating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, targeting civilians in far off cities, was not to save the world but to show the Soviets the U.S. possessed the technology to destroy the world, so better not cross the aspiring empire.
In closed door sessions, all filmed in black and white, we watch as crusading anti-communist politicians—determined to stop Oppenheimer from advocating for arms control talks with the Soviets—crucify their atomic hero for his association with members of the Communist Party, leftist trade unions, and a long ago anti-capitalist lover who threw his bourgeois flowers in the trash.
When the McCarthyites strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance, it’s a big “who cares” shrug for a movie audience weary of Oppenheimer’s internal conflicts over whether science can be divorced from politics, from the consequences of a scientist’s research. How can anyone with a heart want to continue this line of work? To hell with the security clearance.
The movie Oppenheimer is compelling and powerful in its timeliness, though one can’t help but think it would have been exponentially more powerful had it been told from a different point of view, from the point of view of a scientist who opposed the death-march mission.
We see glimpses of a pond-staring, fate-warning Albert Einstein, who in real life lobbied to fund the atomic bomb research only to later oppose the project. It could have been his story—or the story of one of the 70 scientists who signed a “Truman, don’t drop the bomb” petition that Oppenheimer squelched, persuading Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb” not to present Truman with the petition drafted by Leo Szilard, the chief physicist at the Manhattan Project’s Chicago laboratory. The movie’s reference to the petition was so fast, so quiet, so mumbled, the audience could have missed it.
If we are not careful, more mindful, more awake, we might miss our moment to avert another nuclear holocaust, this one a far worse nightmare in which 5 billion of the Earth’s 8 billion people perish, either immediately from radiation burns and fire or in the months that follow during a famine in which soot blocks the sun.
The White House and a majority of Congress want to rush us, a sleepwalking populace, into WWIII with Russia, a nation of 143 million people, 195 different ethnicities, and 6,000 nuclear weapons. For those, like the shameful editors of The Washington Post, who insist we continue to forever fund the proxy war, for those in high places who refuse calls for a ceasefire, this movie reminds us of the existential danger we confront in a sea of denial, complicity, and exceptionalism.
Despite campaigning on a platform of no first use of nuclear weapons, President Joe Biden’s Nuclear Posture Review echoes his predecessor Donald Trump’s approval of first use should our allies’ interests be threatened.
CODEPINK activists are distributing flyers outside showings of Oppenheimer to invite stunned movie goers leaving the theater in a daze to take action; to join our organization; and to amplify our peace-building campaigns to ground the nuclear-capable F-35, to declare China is Not our Enemy, and to partner with the Peace in Ukraine Coalition.
This is the movie, this is the moment, this is the time to challenge the euphemistic nuclear modernization program, to expose the madness of militarism that abandons urgent needs at home to line the pockets of military contractors gorging at the Pentagon trough.This is the time to demand a ceasefire and peace talks to end the war in Ukraine, to stop preparations for war with China, to finally pass legislation to ban first use, to take our ICBM’s off hair trigger alert, to abide by our disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and to campaign for the U.S. to become a signatory to the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
Opposed by NATO—a huckster for nuclear proliferation—the TPNW has been signed by 95 state parties wishing to outlaw the development, deployment, and use of nuclear weapons.
Unlike Oppenheimer, we can make the right choice; the choice that saves the human race from immediate extinction.
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