Oops! by David P. Barash

Author:David P. Barash [Barash, David P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510776616
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2023-07-25T22:00:00+00:00

5.3. When Physicists Sinned, and We’re All Screwed

The Manhattan Project was initiated and then carried out for many reasons: concern that Nazi Germany might develop atomic weapons before the Allies, the scientific appeal of working on problems that are “technically sweet,” simple pride, ambition, patriotism, and income. The inventors of nuclear weapons must have foreseen the real-world consequences of their work, although it appears that the more thoughtful ones were genuinely shocked and even apologetic about what they had done. “Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state,” wrote J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, “physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. . . . In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”2

In short, the invention of nuclear weapons was a real-life case of uncorking a dangerous genie. During a BBC interview some years after witnessing the first atomic bomb test, at Alamogordo, New Mexico, Oppenheimer reflected that, “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita . . . ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’”3

Some maintain, of course, that whatever the dangers, we should be grateful for nuclear weapons; rather than an oops, nuclear weapons are a godsend, albeit not from a Hindu god of destruction. They have kept us safe and have ushered in peace. And so, nuclear enthusiasts maintain that nuclear weapons are a modern miracle, one that eluded Christ: ushering in peace on earth without goodwill toward men.

Let’s see.

A frequent claim by those who refuse to see nuclear weapons as a huge, dangerous mistake is that they prevented war between the United States and the former Soviet Union. But there are many credible reasons why the United States and the USSR avoided destroying each other, most notably because neither side wanted to go to war in the first place. True, the two didn’t go to war after nuclear weapons arrived on the international scene; but then, they didn’t go to war before that either.

Singling nukes out as the reason the Cold War never became hot is like saying a junkyard car, without an engine or wheels, never sped off the lot because no one turned the key. There are lots of other reasons. There is no way, moreover, to demonstrate logically that nuclear weapons kept the peace during the Cold War, or that they do so now. By contrast, there is plenty of historical evidence of narrowly avoided disaster by mistake, malfunction, or miscalculation. And there have been—and still are—many conventional wars as well.

In ancient China, it was widely believed that solar eclipses were caused by a dragon swallowing the sun, so people responded

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