This is the first in a three-episode series about “Oppenheimer” and the historical issues raised by the blockbuster film.
On Nov. 16, 1945, three months after the Japanese surrender, Robert Oppenheimer delivered an address to the American Philosophical Society about the changed world ushered in by a “most terrible weapon.”
The father of the atomic bomb cautioned his audience at the University of Pennsylvania that international cooperation was necessary to avoid future use of hundreds, if not thousands, of bombs as weapons of aggression.
“As a further matter requiring international consideration, like all other matters that so require it, it is not unique. But as a vast threat and a new one, to all the peoples of the earth, that’s novelty, it’s terror, its strangely Promethean quality, it has become in the eyes of many of us, a unique opportunity,” said the director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos lab.
But Oppenheimer did not express regret – neither in 1945 nor for the rest of his life – about leading the A-bomb project to its successful completion. Yet he was haunted by its use against “an essentially defeated enemy.”
The complicated scientist was brought to life on the big screen by actor Cillian Murphy in director Christopher Nolan’s movie “Oppenheimer.” In this episode of History As It Happens, national security analyst and arms control expert Joe Cirincione discusses the enduring consequences of the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 and the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction capable of destroying human life.
“He was one of the great scientists of the 20th century and did a great service to the nation in leading the Manhattan Project. They were right to begin the project and see it through. The problem was that they grossly overestimated their ability to influence government policy once they had created it,” said Mr. Cirincione, the author of the “Strategy & History” newsletter on Substack.
The atomic bomb was a new weapon, but it also inaugurated a new age of international relations and ethical dilemmas for the world’s scientists.
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