Tag: Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer, Other Physicists, and Ethical Responsibilities of Scientists

Professor A. Ravi Prakash Rau, a distinguished atomic physicist from Louisiana State University, shares insights on the ethical dilemmas faced by scientists. He also reflects on the attitudes of prominent physicists towards nuclear weapons .

The interview is based upon an email exchange with professor A. Ravi Prakash Rau, professor of physics at Louisiana State University in the United States. Professor Rau is a renowned atomic physicist, who has recently completed 50 years on the LSU faculty. His deep knowledge of the history of physics is one of his many accomplishments. He is also a frequent visitor to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Raman Research Institute. His most recent book, The Beauty of Physics: Patterns, Principles, and Perspectives, was published by Oxford University Press in 2014.

Below is a transcription of the interview, lightly edited for style and clarity, by Vijay Poduri.

Even though you belong to a later generation of physicists, did you have associations with the Manhattan Project scientists?

Robert Wilson was a close associate of Oppenheimer and was the person who climbed up the gantry to prime the first bomb the night of the first July 1945 test. Along with Leo Szilard and others, he later became the nucleus of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who advocated against military use in the waning days of the Manhattan Project. He was a very interesting guy, an artist as well, who personally designed the main building and layout of Fermilab. He was one of the five on my PhD Committee at the University of Chicago, having just joined the faculty (from Cornell) in 1966 as I entered the PhD programme when he came to build that high energy physics accelerator lab near Chicago.

He was a good friend of my advisor Ugo Fano, and when I asked him to be on my committee, he agreed. But within weeks, he had realised the magnitude of the job he had taken on to build that lab and so begged off classroom teaching and other duties. Three years down the line, he told me that mine was the only PhD Committee he was on, felt that having said yes, he would honour it to the end, but did not take on any others.

What do you think were the ethical responsibilities of the Manhattan Project physicists?

I have thought quite a bit about this question. First, I feel that after digesting all the arguments for its use, it was unjust and unnecessary to have dropped the two bombs on Japan. I think it was driven more by Truman and the US military and political high brass as the first shots of the confrontation with the USSR that was already clear by war’s end.

The USSR was about to declare war against Japan (had already announced it) and, as on the European front where it was mainly the Red Army’s grinding down of the Nazis that defeated them, they would have then claimed a big voice in the shape of post-war Japan/Pacific just as they did in Europe, something the US did not want to share. The two Japanese cities became pawns in this. Another was of course for the US government to justify to its own public the enormous investment in the A-bomb project besides the US military’s interest in being the sole (could not, and did not last long) possessors of these weapons.

It is on that last that I feel the scientists should not have abandoned all say in use of the weapon they had developed. In part, because of the logic of the terrible war they were in the midst of, the President and military were ceded sole authority on this. I am not sure how in a democracy any alternative precedents could have been established but it would have been good, given the unprecedented qualitative nature of these weapons of mass destruction, that it was not simply left to top elected leaders to assume that authority but find some mechanism of civilian and science voices at the war table along with Presidents and Generals to decide on whether and where to drop such bombs.

I do not know how true and rigorous in practice it is but I read a big book on India’s bomb which says that the physicists of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, such as Raja Ramanna, retained some say with the Indian military on these matters, and did not simply hand over the technology into their hands. Apparently, the pattern continues of DAE and DRDO, civilian agencies, controlling fissile material and bomb assembly while the military controls delivery, whether by aircraft or missile.

At least some voice for such civilian involvement should have been insisted on by the Manhattan Project physicists. There was a committee consisting of five men, including Enrico Fermi, that opposed the use against Japan, but it seems to have yielded easily, and in fact, wartime secrecy kept even that from widespread knowledge within the larger scientific community or public.

There was another unfortunate wrinkle that unlike a few US-born physicists – Oppenheimer, Wilson, Serber, Feynman, etc. – many key Manhattan Project scientists such as Fermi, Bethe, Wigner, Kistiakowsky, etc. were recent emigres fleeing Europe because of the Nazis and the war. They probably felt constrained from speaking up strongly on moral or other practical grounds arguing against military use. Oppenheimer, as head of the project, could also not join Szilard and Wilson openly, but clearly allowed that dissent to develop at Los Alamos.

Effects of bombing in Hiroshima. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Effects of bombing in Hiroshima. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

What are some other examples of science and technology research where you see scientists having ethical responsibilities?

In our own time, an issue with some parallels is in biology, when the first genetic tampering became evident a couple of decades ago. There was even some concern about completely catastrophic consequences and some top persons like Paul Berg called for a worldwide pause on certain research developments, in an Asilomar, CA, conference. Of course, the moratorium did not last long, that particular work was later seen as an unnecessary concern, but it was at least an example of scientists themselves worrying about such grave issues in their headlong pursuit of “the sweetness of the research” itself.

Perhaps today’s AI use in weather modification or military use pose similar parallels but, unfortunately, too often people give in too facilely to the default of continuing the development. There are always arguments to do so, it is the easier route. In January 2020, just before COVID, I was at an international  workshop at the Raman Research Institute on quantum technologies. As in the US, the spectre of China has been used by some Indian scientists also to push for satellite-based quantum cryptography (a boondoggle, apart from anything else, since conventional cryptographies will adapt) and, because of where the money is, they have made alliances with the Indian military and its budget.

The Chinese contingent of Pan and his group (Mincius satellite) were there in full force. They are very impressive, also in their very reassuring insistence on the benign nature of these advances, good for the public, and such. But, questions of Orwellian control through broad surveillance by governments of their peoples and, of course, inevitable consequences of tie-ins with militaries for these rockets and satellites, were nowhere in the picture. I got up in one discussion session to raise this and how all international scientists involved in these future cryptographies should be having such discussions at least privately and how to retain some control on uses as Manhattan Project physicists should have insisted on (as I say, a few did have such concerns, but proved ineffective). Except for a response from one colleague later, it just fell flat.

Also read: The Many Sides and Dilemmas of ‘Oppenheimer’, Father of the Atomic Bomb

There was quite a bit of variation in the attitudes of various scientists to nuclear weapons. Can you elaborate on that?

Going back to the 1940s, Edward Teller was, of course, a true believer in having these weapons and unconstrained Hydrogen bombs, something others such as Fermi, Oppenheimer, Bethe, and Feynman were against, that very unconstrained nature making them morally reprehensible. But Teller and John von Neumann, also emigres, took no heed of any of this, even running roughshod over fellow physicists like Oppenheimer.

My advisor, Ugo Fano, who was not in the Manhattan Project, like Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (who did work on the US military’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds), kept his relationships with all of them and told me how nearly everyone else ostracised Teller and would cross the street to avoid shaking hands, even much later when he came on visits to the University of Chicago.

On Heisenberg and his “collaboration” with the Nazis, there are more nuanced considerations. He did stay on in Germany (as did a few others such as Max Planck), in part to have a bona fide claim to take care of German science post-war. He did head one of their bomb projects. There was another independent project in Berlin and part of his self-defence of participation is that he wanted to keep control and have a say. Others will dispute, and have, that he was slow-walking the German project but he seems to have put the energies into a working controlled fission-reactor. At least as a working first step, that also makes sense, just as Fermi and others built the first Pile in 1942 before the bomb project.

Chicago Pile One scientists at the University of Chicago on December 2, 1946. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Incidentally, I have visited Heisenberg’s set-up inside a cave in a small village called Haigerloch near Tuebingen. It was a very small affair, unlikely to have ever achieved criticality, and was captured along with Heisenberg and his team in the last days of April 1945 by a team led by physicist Sam Goudsmit.

My own assessment is that Heisenberg was brilliant enough to know that achieving a weapon in a couple of years to be relevant to the war would have required the kind of multi-billion investment Germany could not make, only the US could and did. The brilliant and very clever play by Michael Frayn, Copenhagen, based on the famous visit by Heisenberg to Bohr during the war, touches on some of these aspects.

Many people think highly of the well-known physicists of the 20th century, but given their ethical blind spots, they were not necessarily admirable people. Your thoughts on this?

I did not meet Fermi or Heisenberg, but Fano knew both very well. He had spent six months in Fermi’s Rome group and three years as Heisenberg’s postdoctoral researcher in Leipzig. And Chandrasekhar had been a colleague and close friend of Fermi at the University of Chicago. In some of my conversations with him, he was critical of most of these top physicists as human beings (even Bohr) but spoke well of Heisenberg as a man.

You have avoided expressing opinions about the physicists we mentioned as human beings because you did not know them personally. But since these physicists are historical figures, shouldn’t we develop judgements about them as we do for other historical figures, based on their public actions?

I completely agree that many great scientists fall woefully short in many aspects. In part, this is also why we cannot simply say that scientists should decide because it could easily be a Teller or Von Neumann, both great physicists but complete extremists on using nuclear weapons.

What are your views on including scientists in societal decision-making?

There are two related matters that I feel strongly about. One is about deferring to expertise, in every area. This is where the current US discourse has gone completely off the tracks, whether on COVID vaccines or climate change, with social media influencers and politicians from Trump onwards, or even Supreme Court justices substituting their pronouncements for expert knowledge and advice.

I have also looked askance at how our societies are structured in that we let courts and lawyers and ultimately a few justices decide on major issues for the entire population. Even if all justices were all-wise Solomons and Solominas, leave alone the petty partisans many are, why should other expert advice not be part of these decisions? Courts seek expert advice but I mean more, that they be dominant in those domains of even the final decisions. I do not know how societies can design for this but, certainly, what we have now is ridiculous.

Going back to nuclear weapons, a Martian viewing from the outside would find incomprehensible that a single Trump-Kim [Jong-]Un pair can unleash hundreds of warheads that could destroy all 8 billion humans, billions of other life forms and leave a radioactively saturated atmosphere and soil of a planet in nuclear winter. That we have structured things with no others, scientists among them, even at the table, just Presidents and Generals, is what is absurd, similar to the primacy given to lawyers and judges in our societies and nations.

The second important thing is humility. This is the one thing I would emphasise most, also why I stress having several voices at the table, a simple substitution of Generals and politicians by some “top” scientists is also not the solution. In fact, I have always regarded The Copernican Principle in its broadest form as one of the most fundamental of all philosophy. We have no special status, not just Earth in the Solar System, or that System in our Galaxy, or that Galaxy…. This is why claims of “End of History” (Fukuyama), “End of Science,” “Theory of Everything” (even if held by many top physicists) all seem to me vacuous concepts. They only show a lack of humility, instead hubris, that somehow, in our limited 100 years in time and occupying a small insignificant part of the Universe, we will get to any of these. Humility, coupled with “many heads are better than one” argue for several, and varied, voices to decide consequential matters.

Also read: Homi Bhabha, Jawaharlal Nehru and the Bomb

What were your thoughts on seeing the movie Oppenheimer?

I have now seen Frayn’s Copenhagen  (both play and movie), the opera Doctor Atomic, and movie Oppenheimer, all with the major theme of the bomb but with different items of emphasis. The first was on one encounter, that between Heisenberg and Bohr when the former visited occupied Denmark, and what might have transpired in their discussions that they remembered very differently later. Through several “revisits,” Frayn very cleverly plays on alternative representations, uncertainty, etc., and how difficult it is to penetrate to what “really” happened. This is, of course, now immortalised as one of our central metaphors in Kurosawa’s famous Rashomon.

My own reading is that Heisenberg, at great risk for being hauled up for treason by the Nazi authorities, nevertheless with his great regard and affection for Bohr who had become a father figure and looking ahead to implications of such a weapon (of course he did not want one dropped on Germany), made the trip and was trying to signal that physicists on both sides slow-walk the development of the A-bomb during that war, that Bohr might be able to use his great influence, including moral, on the Allied side. Bohr seems to have taken it amiss, also not surprising given Denmark’s brutal occupation and ongoing Nazi atrocities throughout Europe.

The 2005 John Adams opera Doctor Atomic, based partly on Durrenmatt’s play The Physicists, features only four characters, Oppenheimer, Bob Wilson, Kitty Oppenheimer, and Teller, and while telling some of the story of assembling that “Trinity gadget,” brings out the moral struggles the first two have on what they have wrought. It also features centrally the famous Oppenheimer quote from the Gita.

In a movie, Nolan can feature more characters and present broader pictures and perspectives. In many of them, the movie does this very well. The main lines of Oppenheimer’s life, his unhappiness with Blackett and Cambridge, his tortured relations with several women, his unique ability to juggle many topics and brilliant people while driving a mammoth project to success, his cavalier handling of some around him and destroying their lives (Bohm who had to go to Brazil, Haakon Chevalier, and Bernard Peters who had to leave the US and joined TIFR where he became an associate of ECG Sudarshan) but also deep moral scruples on the use of these weapons, are all as we read in many books and some from what I heard from people who knew him. The main concentration of Nolan, even while showing the Los Alamos project’s development, is on what ensued and the tussle with Lewis Strauss. That was tied up with the war’s aftermath of a drive to bigger H-bombs and rivalry with the Soviets in controlling the post-war world and he himself being shunted aside by the opposition within the US government.

Many physicists have very brief cameo appearances – Fermi, Bethe, Bohr, Heisenberg, Feynman reduced to being shown with bongo drums – but a few have more substantial roles. Isidor Rabi was always firmly on Oppenheimer’s side, but had reservations from the start on moral grounds. Unlike many of the others he did not move full-time to Los Alamos. Despite his reservations, he did later become a consultant and continued to be influential in the Atomic Energy Commission. In the security hearings, he speaks firmly for Oppenheimer. Edward Teller is, of course, shown as being relentless from the beginning on the “Super.” In the hearings, he does not question Oppenheimer being loyal to the US but adds those famous back-handed slap of words of wanting the nation’s security in other hands.

Even Groves (mutual respect of the two very different men is well shown), while acknowledging that the later AEC rules would have meant denying his security clearance, adds that his loyalty is unquestioned and that most others would not have also qualified for clearance. He could have added that there would then have been no Project/Bomb. In spite of the hearings being stacked by Strauss and others, the three person board finds no disloyalty but splits 2-1 to deny security clearance.

The movie also shows how Strauss too comes to a fall, his vaunted ambition to become a cabinet secretary finally denied him. Some justice in that. This was true, a crucial vote being Sen John Kennedy of Massachusetts, who later as President wanted to make amends by giving Oppenheimer the Fermi Award of the AEC though fate intervened through his own assassination and LBJ is shown handing the prize in 1964. As an aside, years later, I attended the function where Fano got the Fermi Award.

I was thinking of how these things seem to work when matters at high levels play out, the final verdict always “splitting the difference.” There seems to be some kind of internal logic to it, being compelled not to give a clean, unambiguous exoneration or denunciation. So, Oppenheimer is deemed loyal but security clearance taken away (2-1) which of course removes him from being able to influence decisions on bomb development and use, but Strauss is also denied his prize. It is a bit like Comey vindicating Hilary Clinton on her email server but with uncalled for comments on irresponsible handling, or the recent replay of this by Robert Hur with gratuitous pronouncements on Biden’s memory that was not in the purview of his investigation instead of just concluding that no criminal charges apply.

Strauss’s vendetta apparently went back to his feeling of public humiliation when Oppenheimer in Congressional hearings ridiculed his opposition to shipping medical isotopes abroad, saying that they could not be used as weapons. That too reminds me of in our own times that Trump was furious about Obama’s ribbing of him at a White House correspondents dinner and that deciding him to run against Obama’s policies and overturn them.

The two encounters with Einstein were completely fictitious, Nolan making them up for dramatic effect. Teller’s calculations on whether the atmosphere may be ignited were not taken to Einstein but to Compton to verify and then the consensus was that it was very unlikely. Nolan said this was one of the items that struck him and drove him to make such a movie, that even a slight chance of something of that enormity did not stop the relentless project once begun.

As an aside, when it was not yet clear that a bomb would be possible, Fermi had advanced the idea of using radioactive isotopes to poison Germany’s food, part of the debate becoming whether it could cross some threshold of a million casualties! Sounds shocking to us today.

The other thing of the Einstein encounter is used to end the movie, conflating Oppenheimer’s quote from the Gita (“I am become Death, destroyer/shatterer of worlds,” actually said said upon witnessing Trinity), that although it did not ignite the atmosphere on July 16, 1945, with today’s missiles and thousands of warheads, coupled with the refusal to stop worse and worse weapons, perhaps it marks the end of the world. Even as a totally irrational use of resources, the US is spending a trillion dollars to modernize its nuclear arsenal.

I found personally interesting the scene when Oppenheimer meets Fermi in Chicago and there is a brief shot of a big pile of graphite bricks under the football field, that graphite both outer shield and moderator inside to slow neutrons in that first 1942 demonstration. Some of that must have been stored away in the attic because, as I wrote, when I did my Grad Lab experiment on 14 MeV neutrons (there was a small accelerator producing them from deuteron+triton reactions), I used some of those bricks to shield what I was building for my measurements.

Szilard is shown as leading a group at Los Alamos after July 1945 to work against dropping the bomb on Japan. There were also groups elsewhere such as at the University of Chicago, one of the physicists being David Hill, who exposed Strauss at a congressional hearing.

Coming to Heisenberg, first an interesting story, touched on also in the movie, that in spite of the secrecy of the Manhattan Project, all physicists knew of the possibility once Fermi established that neutron-induced fission releases more neutrons. Leo Szilard, who got Einstein to write the letter to FDR that started the project, had already in the early 1930s patented the chain reaction should this turn out to be true. Fano told me of a meeting one evening over cocktails in a Chicago faculty house (Fermi’s or Compton’s?) where he and many physicists were present. So was Heisenberg, who was visiting the US in 1939 just before the declaration of war. There were whispers, pointing to Fermi and Heisenberg standing at one corner, that a war was coming and the two men would be on opposite sides and trying to make nuclear bombs.

Heisenberg’s motives are disputed, but as I noted, I saw his reactor experiment at Haigerloch and it was on much too small a scale to work and was using heavy water as moderator, something shown being mocked by a couple of physicists in the movie. As with Fermi, a reactor was the first step to show feasibility. I liked very much several times in the movie the words that experiment decides, otherwise theory is sterile, one of my own favourite lines over the years.

Whether Heisenberg saw early that a huge effort would be needed and deliberately slow-walked the project, knowing Germany could not put such an effort during that war, is disputed by some. But, after the war, in arguing against Germany developing the weapon (as France and the UK did), he was part of the Goettingen Manifesto in 1957, in which several West German nuclear scientists refused to work on nuclear weapons. A central paragraph of that Manifesto is unequivocal: “Our profession, that is, pure science and its application, through which we bring many young people into our fold, leaves us with the responsibility for the potential effects of these actions. Therefore, we cannot remain silent to all political issues.”

The Dangerous Salesman of Science 

Oppenheimer tells himself a lie, says my scholar friend. ‘That the bomb has a moral end.’

In his 1987 Nobel lecture, Joseph Brodsky said, anthropologically speaking, a human being is primarily a creature of aesthetics, and only after, an ethical one. 

This assertion sounds true in the case of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The scientific leaps in the field of quantum physics fascinated Oppenheimer. He was driven to follow the path of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Returning from Cambridge to expand his research in Berkeley, he fell into the arms of the American state and became part of the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. 

It is comic irony that Lewis Strauss, who secretly plotted against Oppenheimer, was forced to work as a shoe salesman during the recession, while Oppenheimer achieved the distinction of Edward Teller calling him, “the great salesman of science.” This explains the moral turn in the life of Oppenheimer. Christopher Nolan likened his character to the titan Prometheus, though midway he seemed to metamorphose into Frankenstein. The hamartia of Oppenheimer’s life, Aristotle’s term for the Greek tragic hero’s fatal flaw, turned into a modern horror story.

The poet Joseph Brodsky’s distinction becomes relevant at this point: Oppenheimer abandoned the moral for the aesthetic. My scholar friend (who wishes to remain unnamed) shared the opinion that Oppenheimer, initially lost in the beauty of pure theory, transforms that aesthetic obsession into a monstrous one. She added the sharp insight: “Oppenheimer tells himself a lie. That the bomb has a moral end.” The act of lying to oneself produced a psychic wound within Oppenheimer. He lost sight of the moral aspect within his aesthetic pursuit. The lie made the transformation possible. The sublime beauty of studying quantum physics was ruined the moment Oppenheimer decided to use his expertise for a detrimental cause.

A still from the film ‘Oppenheimer’.

The sale of his scientific skills to the American state for making the bomb had a clear political objective for Oppenheimer: to finish off Hitler. This logic led him to overcome the moral dilemma behind his job. Any force that can destroy evil is legitimate. The destructive power of science was a seductive option to nullify the power of fascism. The Jewish Oppenheimer did not have his revenge over the Nazis (who were already defeated when the bomb was ready). The American state used it against a weakened Japan to declare its omnipotence.   

Young Oppenheimer’s interest in T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ and the Gita has a deep connection: Eliot’s poem ends by evoking the Upanishad, “Shantih shantih shantih”, a peace of the grave that fell upon a world torn apart by the end of World War I and the flu epidemic. Oppenheimer’s translation of the line from the Gita, “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds” was what Krishna said about his divinity being time itself that destroys the world at will. It was meant to exhort a weak-kneed Arjuna (who did not want to kill his cousins, seniors and kinsmen), reminding him of his duty as a warrior to prepare him for battle. The figure of divine incarnation and warrior-prince got fused into the scientist who invented a weapon that could kill millions.

Oppenheimer’s interest in the evocative moments in the two texts shows a certain death wish he carried within himself. When you are hell-bent to destroy the enemy, you are also out to kill a part of yourself through the act of retributive justice. 

Oppenheimer was not able to distinguish between the ethical difference between annihilating a system of power and annihilating people. This failure, however, is an intimate part of the modern West’s history. It produced ideas of the state – fascism, communism and imperial democracies – where the other within and outside one’s ideological fold was demonised as the absolute enemy and was meant to be exterminated. Making the bomb to be used for war, Oppenheimer not just used science as a tool for destruction, but created an ideology of science as divine power that could kill uncountable numbers of people as much as it could heal the world. 

It has been acknowledged that Nolan did not glorify war by not showing the bomb being dropped on the two Japanese cities. Still, as my scholar friend pointed out, Nolan could not prevent himself from indulging in Hollywood’s fetish for spectacle. There was a clear lack of self-restraint. The slow-motion explosion of the bomb that filled the screen numbed the audience, and engulfed it into the terror of its silence.

Contrast it with Abbas Kiarostami, who did not display the earthquakes that rocked Iran in Koker Trilogy in order to portray its psycho-social repercussion on the lives of residents who suffered its impact. Kiarostami’s art of filmmaking is deeply informed by his ethical hesitation.

A still from Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘And Life Goes on’.

Nolan had more reasons to hold back from depicting the technological grandeur of an instrument of death. The temptation to recreate the spectacle is not simply an aesthetic flaw. 

The euphoria of the scientific feat was viscerally exhibited by bodies of people stomping the floor of the hall celebrating Oppenheimer. It announced the coming of a new crowd in world history that took nationalist pride in mass destruction of other people. Oppenheimer looked conflicted, remorseful and eaten by guilt. But there were no indications to suggest he completely regretted his success. Truman, embodying the masculine pragmatism of the American state, lampooned Oppenheimer as “crybaby”. No one cared about the real babies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such is the moral indifference of war. It causes deafness of the soul.  

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is an author. His latest book is Nehru and the Spirit of India.

‘Barbie’, ‘Oppenheimer’, and Why We Shouldn’t Avert Our Eyes from Hiroshima

Yoshito Matsushige was a photographer for the local newspaper and his are the only photographs from the city that day. He remembered asking them for forgiveness, wiping away his tears, and saying “I just took a picture of you as you are suffering, but this is my duty.”

Today, August 6, marks the 78th anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima by an atomic bomb dropped on the city by the United States during the Second World War.

Tokyo: America’s pathologies are, in my experience, more apparent (though no less troubling) from afar. The simultaneous release of the films Barbie and Oppenheimer resulting in the distasteful but hardly surprising “Barbenheimer” meme is a case in point: America’s twin obsessions of how it looks in the mirror and how it’s remembered in the history books have collided head on, leaving a twisted mess of wreckage – however harmless at this point – revealing more about our culture and ourselves than we care to admit.

As someone who has yet to see either film, I’ll withhold judgment on the filmmakers’ vision and their success or failure in realising it on the big screen. Like last year, I’m happy to report that I’m spending much of this summer in Japan visiting family, meaning my 11-year-old son’s grandparents and a whole host of welcoming uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces, and neighbours.

These, it should be said, are exactly the kind of ordinary Japanese folks that director Christopher Nolan chose to leave out of his film about the “mastermind” of the atomic bomb, and precisely the people who suffered and died in the hundreds of thousands when the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I respect Nolan as a filmmaker and, once again, will withhold judgment until I see the film. Being in Japan – which has yet to set a release date for Oppenheimer, but is expected to later this year after the August 6 and August 9 anniversaries of the 1945 atomic bombings – I haven’t had the opportunity to see his film, which I certainly will see. I have, however, had the opportunity to visit Hiroshima on a number of occasions, first as a young journalist nearly 30 years ago, and last summer with my wife and son.

On that first visit in 1995, not long before the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I had the great honour of interviewing Yoshito Matsushige – a photographer for the local newspaper who was just 2.7 kilometres from the hypocentre when the blast occurred at 8:15 that August morning.

As I wrote last August in Hiroshima’s Message, “His immediate reaction was to grab his camera and head toward the fire. But when he saw ‘the hellish state of things’ he couldn’t bring himself to take pictures. ‘It was great weather that morning,’ he said, ‘without a single cloud. But under that blue sky, people were exposed directly to heat rays. They were burned all over, on the face, back, arms, legs—their skin burst, hanging. There were people lying on the asphalt, their burnt bodies sticking to it, people squatting down, their faces burnt and blackened. I struggled to push the shutter button.’”

After what seemed like an eternity, Matsushige said, he finally brought himself to take two pictures of people, suffering horribly, who had gathered on Miyuki Bridge, about 2.3 kilometres from the hypocenter. Many were middle-school children, their bodies terribly burned. Someone was applying cooking oil to their wounds. He remembered asking them for forgiveness, wiping away his tears, and saying “I just took a picture of you as you are suffering, but this is my duty.”

In all, Matsushige snapped his shutter just seven times – the only photos taken in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, that survive to this day. He died in 2005, at the age of 92, a dedicated peace activist who shared his story with people around the globe, including before the UN General Assembly.

West end of Miyuki Bridge in Hiroshima, morning of Aug. 6, 1945. This was taken moving in closer after the photo above, explained Yoshito Matsushige. That evening the injured were taken by truck to Ujina and Ninoshima Island. Photo: Yoshito Matsushige, Chugoku Shimbun.

Christopher Nolan has said his film – which was inspired by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus – is focused more on the moral dilemmas facing the scientist tasked with making a bomb that could end World War II than on making a war “documentary.”

“He [Oppenheimer] learned about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the radio—the same as the rest of the world,” Nolan told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. “That, to me, was a shock… Everything is his experience, or my interpretation of his experience. Because as I keep reminding everyone, it’s not a documentary. It is an interpretation. That’s my job.”

Fair enough. But I can’t help thinking of the photographer Matsushige and what he told me over a quarter-century ago, while taking pictures of children whose clothes and skin were charred and hanging from their bodies when only a few moments prior they were walking to school on a clear August morning: “I just took a picture of you as you are suffering, but this is my duty.”

Below is an interview, also from 1995, with the then-mayor of Hiroshima, Takashi Hiraoka, who, coincidentally, was a journalist before entering politics and worked for the same newspaper as Matsushige, the Chugoku Shimbun. I remember him as a true gentleman in his mid-60s, at ease with his role in local politics and passionate about sharing Hiroshima’s “Never Again” message with the world.

Now 95, Hiraoka served eight years as mayor of Hiroshima before retiring in 1998. Since our interview, two more countries – Pakistan and North Korea – have joined the nine-member “nuclear club.” According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the US, the UK, Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea have among them nearly 16,000 nuclear weapons, all of which are many times more powerful than the two bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945.

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Excerpts from the 1995  interview of the then-mayor of Hiroshima, Takashi Hiraoka, as published by The Japan Times Weekly, August 5, 1995. Used with the author’s permission

MJ: As mayor of Hiroshima, what is your message to the world on the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing?

TH: The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked not only the end of World War II but the beginning of the nuclear age. In this respect, the bombings were a tragedy for all of humanity. The people of Hiroshima have chosen to see their experience as a lesson for humanity. The 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is an excellent opportunity for us to look back on our past and think about our future.

Our message has always been that the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should never be repeated. Now that we have reached the half-century landmark, this message should be re-emphasized, together with the call for nuclear disarmament. I see the 50th anniversary as an opportunity to come together with the people of the world so that we can work toward the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Japan does not consider the use of nuclear weapons to be against international law. What is Hiroshima’s official stance on the deployment of nuclear weapons ?

As the first city to have experienced a nuclear attack, we firmly believe that the use of nuclear weapons violates international law. We believe this for two main reasons. The first is the indiscriminate nature of nuclear weapons. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to restrict the destructive power of nuclear weapons. The second reason is the extraordinary cruelty of nuclear weapons. What I mean by this is that there are still many hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) suffering the effects of radiation exposure.

International law prohibits the deployment of weapons that inflict unnecessary suffering on human beings such as “dumdum” bullets and chemical weapons. The United Nations General Assembly has passed a number of resolutions prohibiting the use of nuclear weapons for the very same reason.

The Japanese government has three non-nuclear principles: not to produce, possess, or harbour nuclear weapons. We must continue to push the government to uphold these three principles. Unfortunately, the Japanese government does not have a strong stance toward U.S. foreign policy because it wants to maintain good U.S.-Japan relations. But I think the Japanese government should have a stronger stance toward the United States, particularly in regard to its nuclear-weapons policy.

In what ways does the city of Hiroshima influence the governments of other nations? How do you get your message across to the world?

Whenever a foreign country conducts a nuclear-weapons test, we immediately send a telegram protesting the test and calling for an end to further nuclear-weapons testing. We also have a program called the International Conference of Mayors for Peace Through Inter-city Solidarity. Currently, 404 cities in 97 countries are a part of the program and support our call for the total abolition of nuclear weapons. The purpose of the program is to contribute to lasting world peace by strengthening the ties between the cities of the world…

Hiroshima and Nagasaki have long been calling for the total abolition of nuclear weapons. How can this goal be attained when many countries—Iran and North Korea, for example—see having a nuclear-weapons program as the key to gaining respect on the world stage?

This is a very difficult problem, and one the whole world will have to work on together to solve. We must continue to tell the citizens and leaders of the world that possessing nuclear weapons will never be a positive thing. Governments justify their nuclear arsenals with language like “national security.” But what about global security?

Not only does nuclear war mean the annihilation of humans, but every time a nuclear weapon is tested, the environment is irreparably damaged. What we have to do is raise public awareness of the dangers. We can push for the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as soon as the negotiations are completed next year…

[Apart from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty] … we must also enact a law or treaty that ensures nations which possess nuclear weapons will never use them against nations that do not. Such a treaty will ease the concern of nations that do not have nuclear weapons and, hopefully, lessen the incentive to initiate a nuclear-weapons program.

We must also have strict control over the materials required to produce nuclear weapons. Those countries currently trying to develop nuclear weapons feel they are not given equal consideration in international politics. So, on the one hand, we need strict control over nuclear materials, and on the other we have to address the needs and concerns of all the nations of the world in equal measure.

In the United States and Japan, there was a great deal of controversy over a commemorative stamp that was to be issued by the U.S. Postal Service. The stamp, which was never issued, featured a painting of an atomic mushroom cloud accompanied by the caption “Atomic bombs hasten war’s end, August 1945.” What kind of message do you think it sends the people around the world?

I have many reasons to believe that the statement “Atomic bombs hasten war’s end” is simply not true. By August 1945, Japan had neither the ability nor the will to continue waging war. The Japanese government was trying to find a path to peace as early as the spring of 1945. I believe the U.S. government was aware of this when it decided to drop the atomic bomb.

If the United States had wanted only to end the war, it did not have to use nuclear weapons. The United States possessed more than enough conventional weapons to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to end the war. There are many different opinions as to why the U.S. government decided to drop atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I would like to leave the answer to the scholars, but I do have a question. In 1945, President Harry Truman said that dropping the atomic bombs saved 250,000 to 500,000 lives. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan said dropping the atomic bombs saved one million American soldiers’ lives. In 1991, President George Bush said that several million lives were saved as a result of the atomic bombings. I wonder what this change means? I understand that the U.S. government uses these figures to justify the bombings, and that once a government has committed itself to a certain policy or decision, it does not want to change its stand.

But why do the numbers keep rising? Before the atomic bombs were dropped, many U.S. officials, including military personnel, argued that the bombings were not needed to end the war.

What is your reaction to the Smithsonian Institution’s decision to scale back its controversial Enola Gay exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.?

A couple of years ago the Smithsonian Institution had an extensive exhibition on World War II that included an exhibit on the plight of the Japanese Americans who were interned during the war. Due in part to this exhibit, the U.S. government admitted that its policy was a mistake and compensated the surviving Japanese Americans who had been interned. This led me to believe that the people at the Smithsonian Institution were committed to historical accuracy.

Now, the Smithsonian has yielded to political pressure and has missed an opportunity to thoroughly examine the history surrounding the bombings. I am disappointed with the Smithsonian’s decision, as are many people of conscience in this world. We could spend hours talking about whether the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justifiable or not, but such discussion is futile—it happened 50 years ago. What we have to do now is learn from the experience and make sure it never happens again. We are not asking for an apology.

Some Americans say that we are trying to make ourselves look like innocent victims, that we are indulging in our grief in an attempt to diminish the atrocities committed by the Japanese military during the war.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As the mayor of Hiroshima I acknowledge that the Japanese military carried out a war of aggression and committed many atrocities. I have personally done a lot of soul-searching on this subject and have publicly apologized to those who suffered at the hands of the Japanese military. I would also like to add that if nuclear weapons are not abolished, the horrors that Hiroshima and Nagasaki experienced will be experienced by others. The question is not if but when it will happen. The nuclear weapons that exist today are tens of thousands of times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Obviously, a tragedy brought about by a nuclear war today would be far greater than the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Why do you think the Smithsonian Institution decided against displaying photographs of and items belonging to the victims of the bombings?

It seems many Americans are not willing to face the reality of what happened after the bomb was released, but for humanity that is where the lesson begins. Hiroshima’s mission is to let the people of the world know what happened on the ground—what happened to the people of our city. I first came to Hiroshima in September 1945, so I remember very well the devastation and the initial rebuilding of the city. What moved me most was the strength of the survivors. That strength has evolved into a determination to prevent others from experiencing the horrors of nuclear war.

They feel it is their duty to make a constant appeal for world peace and nuclear disarmament. This is their mission, and with this mission they have overcome their tragedy. They do not harbor any hatred toward the American people. Instead, they have chosen to work for peace. The people of Hiroshima have come to understand what peace means for the world. And as the mayor of Hiroshima, I am very proud of them.

A version of this article was originally published on the author’s Substack newsletter, ‘The First Person’.

 

 

Oppenheimer Did Not Stop at Building a Nuclear Bomb. He Also Pushed for its Use in Japan.

Christopher Nolan’s movie is skilfully made, but its effect is to place a glossy veneer on the ugly reality of the US imperial project and the complicity of those who contribute to it.

Today, August 6, marks the 78th anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima by an atomic bomb dropped on the city by the United States during the Second World War.

Oppenheimer is a well-made movie. It portrays Oppenheimer’s personal struggles, and draws attention to the dangers of a nuclear arms race. However, the movie fails to emphasise that during the Second World War, Oppenheimer did not restrict himself to the problem of building a nuclear bomb. He advocated for its use in Japan, over other possible options, and played a role in planning its delivery so that it would take as many lives as possible.

In May 1945, just days after Germany’s surrender, a committee comprising a number of scientists and some military officials convened to discuss possible targets for the bomb. The movie alludes to Oppenheimer’s involvement with this process but, contrary to what is suggested there, Oppenheimer was not a marginal participant; the committee met in his office and he was the one who set out the agenda. The meeting’s summary reveals how the committee calmly considered the most effective possible destruction of various cities.

Kyoto was placed on top of the list and ranked as an “AA target”. The committee noted that it had “a population of 1,000,000 … and many people and industries are now being moved there as other areas are being destroyed”. It emphasised that “Kyoto has the advantage of the people being more highly intelligent and hence better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon.” Even by Orientalist standards, this argument was extraordinary: did the committee seriously believe that those in other parts of Japan were too dull to feel the terror of a nuclear bomb?

As the movie notes, Kyoto was spared because of the intervention of the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson. Next on the target committee’s list was Hiroshima, which was also rated as an “AA target”. The committee observed that “it is such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged. There are adjacent hills, which are likely to produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage.”

A month later, a group of scientists led by James Franck, and including the physicist Leo Szilard, compiled a prescient report that analysed the dangers of an arms race, and the possibility of an international agreement to control nuclear weapons. It advised the US government not to “be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind”. Instead it recommended that “nuclear bombs…[be]…first revealed to the world by a demonstration in an appropriately selected uninhabited area”.

In a few days, the scientific advisory panel to the “interim committee” — the apex wartime body on nuclear issues — dismissed the Franck report stating that “we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use”. Oppenheimer signed the memo, titled “recommendations on the immediate use of nuclear weapons”, on behalf of the four-member scientific panel.

Szilard then drafted a petition to the US president. The petition urged the president “to rule that the United States shall not resort to the use of atomic bombs in this war unless the terms which will be imposed upon Japan have been made public in detail” and consider “all the other moral responsibilities which are involved”. This was so reasonable that even the hawkish physicist Edward Teller agreed with it. Oppenheimer not only refused to sign the petition — as a scene in the movie shows — he prevailed on others at Los Alamos, including Teller, to withhold their signature.

Soon after the war, in 1949, Oppenheimer testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. This was separate from his later hearings before the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) that provide the setting for the movie. In 1949, the committee was deferential to Oppenheimer and he, in turn, freely denounced a number of his associates, including his former student Bernard Peters. Peters was eventually forced from the United States, and spent several years in Mumbai at  the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research before moving to Denmark.

Oppenheimer did argue for a more rational nuclear policy after the war. His perspective was not rooted in a principled opposition to US hegemony or in a desire for a more equitable world order. His argument was simpler: “looking ten years ahead, it is likely to be small comfort that the Soviet Union is four years behind us” in developing an atomic arsenal. “Our twenty-thousandth bomb…will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two-thousandth”. Even this was unacceptable to sections of the US establishment and eventually led to his political downfall.

The AEC’s decision to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 1954 meant that he ceased to be a formal government advisor. But Oppenheimer remained the director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a privileged member of US society.

Although this author is not an expert on Oppenheimer’s life, it is clear that he possessed a complex personality. Perhaps Oppenheimer’s actions should be viewed within the framework of the “banality of evil”. As an ambitious individual seeking advancement within the US system, he made repeated compromises and lost sight of the true nature of the US military establishment.

For this reason, the movie’s most problematic aspect is not that it is overly sympathetic to Oppenheimer. Rather, by  glorifying the Manhattan project and the US victory in the technical race to build the bomb, it obscures the enormity of the crime committed by the Truman administration when it bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

The bombs killed hundreds of thousands of people, the vast majority of whom were innocent civilians. A grim indicator of how many children lost their lives is that when scientists sought to estimate the toll of the bombings, they relied on school records to calculate a statistical mortality rate in the general population.

US apologists have consistently sought to justify these acts by arguing that a land invasion of Japan might have been even more brutal. Some historians have questioned the veracity of such claims. But this is a false dichotomy since these were not the only two options before the US government. And accepting these terms of discourse leads to a blind alley where one is forced to a debate a counterfactual scenario and rely on internal US military sources that are not neutral.

A simpler question can be used to form an ethical judgment: “Did the Truman administration do everything possible to save lives and seek less violent alternatives to the atomic bomb?” Even the limited discussion presented above, which forms a small part of the voluminous historical record, shows that the answer is negative.

A different perspective is provided by Szilard’s recollection of his meeting with James Byrnes, who was Truman’s secretary of state at the time of the bombings. When Szilard tried to caution Byrnes against using the bomb, Byrnes explained that “Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might, and that a demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia”. This implies that the bomb was used by the United States, not out of necessity, but to establish its geopolitical dominance.

An examination of postwar US policy bolsters this view, since it shows how readily the US government is prepared to use violence and terror in pursuit of its strategic objectives. When the United States attacked Southeast Asia, it dropped millions of tons of bombs and this intervention led to the loss of millions of lives. The invasion of Iraq began with a “shock-and-awe” campaign that explicitly sought to achieve the “non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese”. This invasion led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.

Hollywood is well known for glorifying US wars. Oppenheimer is directed more skilfully than most movies, and its message is more subtle. But, ultimately, its effect is to place a glossy veneer on the ugly reality of the US imperial project and the complicity of those who contribute to it.

Suvrat Raju is a theoretical physicist with the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (Bengaluru). The views expressed are personal and do not reflect those of his institution.

The article provides links to and details of online and offline resources, wherever possible, and the author encourages readers to follow them. 

 

The Trinity Site From ‘Oppenheimer’ is a Reminder of the Horror of Nuclear Weapons

The test left behind only fragments of an otherwise vaporised tower that held the Trinity bomb. Viewing the tower’s remains at this remote, rigorously guarded site is a bewildering and sobering experience.

Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer is a biopic about the theoretical physicist behind the atomic bomb. After watching the film, I was inspired to write about my visit to the actual Trinity site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated.

As part of my research on nuclear weapons and civil defence, I visited the Trinity site in 2015. Located in the desert in the southwest United States, the Trinity site is isolated, peculiar and disconcertingly mundane.

The tower that held the bomb is featured prominently in the Oppenheimer film. A small fragment of it exists today, as the rest of it was vaporised. It was deeply unnerving being near the remainder of the vaporised tower.

Arriving at the site

The Trinity site is open to the public for only a few hours twice a year, by permission of the U.S. Army. The predicted popularity of Oppenheimer’s release will possibly overcrowd the next open house on Oct. 21.

When I visited the site, I first had to make my way to a very remote area of the New Mexico desert. Arrival had to be well before sunrise to have any chance of being in the small group of persons granted entry.

Then, after waiting for hours at the secluded gate of an active missile and munitions testing range, I had to pass the rigour of a screening at an army checkpoint and closely adhere to a given set of rules and regulations verbatim. Our convoy, escorted by military police, then went to a more remote interior location of the missile testing range.

We stopped at a barren plain in the Jornada del Muerto – “dead man’s journey” – desert.

I then walked a half kilometre along a dirt path leading to the crater. A chain-link fence distinguishes the area surrounding the crater from the rest of the desert. The blast crater is flatter than it is concave. The fence is demarcated with black and yellow signs reading “Caution Radioactive Materials.”

Visiting the site

The main attraction at the Trinity site is a simple obelisk made of volcanic rocks marking Ground Zero. It was erected in 1965.

Adjacent to the obelisk, small fragments of the tower remained. In the distance, a low white structure shielded portions of the crater. Green glassy radioactive rocks, known as Trinitite litter the ground.

There are very few elements of interpretive information like what one would see at a museum. Military personnel dragged out a replica of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. It served to occupy the attention of most visitors, who perhaps anticipated more to see and do.

Vaporised tower

The most significant observation I made at the Trinity site was a small fragment of metal in the ground. It was a fragment of the tower, and proof of physicist Albert Einstein’s theory that mass is just a concentrated form of energy. And mass can turn to energy under the conditions of an atom bomb detonation.

Einstein’s famous equation E = mc² explains the energy released in an atomic bomb, but did not explain how to build one. Einstein and Oppenheimer were colleagues, and the task of developing the atomic bomb was designated to Oppenheimer and his crew.

The Trinity test demonstrated that humankind could tap the essence of the sun. The bomb worked, creating temperatures hotter than the sun’s 15 million degrees Celsius core. Hot gas radiated its energy in the form of x-rays, which heated the surrounding air, annihilating everything in their path. The phenomenon created a nuclear fireball.

The tower that held the bomb last existed at 5:28 a.m. on July 16, 1945. It was no longer in existence at 5:29 a.m., at the time the Trinity test commenced. The test vaporised the experimental structure, leaving behind a crater about 1.4 metres deep and 80 metres wide.

An obelisk marks the site of Ground Zero. Photo: Samat Jain/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Entertainment from horror

Oppenheimer is the latest film that explores the history of the atomic bomb. Other films go beyond this summer’s blockbuster to depict the full horror of what Oppenheimer created.

Jon Else’s 1981 documentary, The Day After Trinity, shows the real history behind Nolan’s Oppenheimer. The 1983 made-for-TV movie, The Day After, dared to show the uncomfortable images of nuclear Armageddon to American audiences. And Mick Jackson’s 1984 British television show Threads is one of the scariest depictions of nuclear war.

Watching the fake tower at the set of the Trinity site being vaporised in the Oppenheimer film’s version of the first atom bomb explosion is stunning. Especially in 70-millimetre IMAX screenings of the film.

Seeing the fragments of the real vaporised tower in the midst of a radioactive crater strewn with green glass rocks at the real Trinity site was a bewildering and sobering experience.

Jack L. Rozdilsky, Associate Professor of Disaster and Emergency Management, York University, Canada.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Anurag Thakur’s Fuming Reaction to Oppenheimer Is Simply Absurd

Self-proclaimed saviours of Hinduism are unclear about what they are fighting against. Just loudly proclaiming ‘insult’ is vague and, indeed, self-defeating.

Did Julius Oppenheimer quote from the Bhagavad Gita while having sex? And if he did, is that an ‘insult’ to Hindus? And if it indeed is, should the Central Board of Film Certification, which has passed the film as fit to be screened, cut those scenes after it is in the theatres? These are the vexed questions on which some trolls and a few persons in high positions have given their considered views which can be summed up simply as Yes, yes and yes.

Among these personages is Anurag Thakur, minister for information and broadcasting, under whom the CBFC functions. The minister surely knows that once the censor, as the CBFC is called, has permitted the screening of the films, he should stay away. Instead, he is threatening this organisation with stringent action. He hasn’t explained, however, what exact action he will take ― perhaps he will have the ‘traitors’ shot? Whatever the case is, he is out of order here.

While the trolls and Thakur say this scene is anti-Hindu, they have not explained the reasons. What exactly is it that they find objectionable? Is it the fact of sex, that Oppenheimer and his lover Jean Tatlock are in bed and soon proceed to make love? Which, by the way, has not been shown. Is it that he reads from the Gita? Or that he actually picks up the book while they are in bed, which is somehow sacrilegious?

Because, that would raise further questions – is the Gita (or indeed Hinduism) anti-sex? Is the act of sex dirty and impure? Or is the conjunction of the two somehow anti-Hinduism?

This, then, is the problem. All these self-proclaimed saviours of Hinduism are unclear about what they are fighting against. Just loudly proclaiming ‘insult’ is vague and, indeed, self-defeating. Laughable, really. To any sensible person, it shows a perverse mind at work, which finds anything to do with sex filthy.

This is not just a problem with those who have objected to Oppenhemier. The producers have already blacked out scenes in the film which are remotely nude and ‘sexual’ to secure a release here. Our own censors have added that ridiculous disclaimer about smoking. Plus, our government is actively considering censoring films and shows on OTT platforms of ‘vulgar’ content. Why this prudishness, at a time when everyone has access to all kinds of stuff on the Internet? Unless there is a plan to censor that, too.

That Oppenheimer had studied Sanskrit and had read the Gita deeply is well documented. One would have thought that the Hindutva types, who never resist an opportunity to proclaim from the rooftops that India (i.e., Hindu India) was superior to all other religions, would have been overjoyed at this. Add to that the fact that he invented the atom bomb (though it was first made in India several centuries ago), a destructive device, would have fed right into their masculinist and militaristic fantasies. They would have then rushed to see the film in large numbers. Instead, they are carping about the use of the Gita in a sex scene?

Those interested in good cinema are heading to theatres to see this film and coming back impressed — at the scale, the story and most of all, the lessons the film holds. That the father of the most destructive weapon created till then, which killed lakhs of Japanese, is filled with doubt about his invention. Nuclear devices were supposed to create peace for all time — they didn’t, as we have seen in the war-filled decades since then.

Oppenheimer’s self-doubts turned him into an object of suspicion in the American security establishment. He was suspected of being a communist, the worst crime in their eyes in the years just before the Cold War began — the FBI kept tabs on him and his top security Q clearance as the man working on the bomb was revoked in 1954; the decision was nullified only in 2022, long after he had died.

The so-called insult has not caused any comment from sensible viewers, but only a handful of trolls who seem to have nothing better to do have got hot and bothered. A bit of advice to Thakur et al ― go and see the film, take in the spectacle that Christopher Nolan has created, see how well everyone has acted, and think deeply about the message of the film, instead of trying to burnish your Hindutva credentials by threatening a statutory body like the CBFC. It just makes you look absurd and silly.

Anurag Thakur Raps Censor Board Officials for ‘Oppenheimer’ Clearance: Reports

There has also been social media commentary on the Board purportedly having added black CGI clothing on Florence Pugh’s body in a scene where he is allegedly naked in the original film.

New Delhi: Several news outlets have reported quoting sources that Union information and broadcasting minister Anurag Thakur has rapped censor board officials over clearance granted to Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, which has been the subject of criticism from certain quarters over an intimate scene involving a character reading out a Sanskrit text.

Thakur has, according to reports, sought an explanation from the Central Board of Film Certification – commonly referred to as the ‘censor board’ – as to why it allowed the film to be shown in its current form.

Indian Express quoted unnamed sources as having said that Thakur has even asked Board officials to get that scene removed. Action could even be taken against those who cleared the film.

The scene involves actors, Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh, playing the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ J. Robert Oppenheimer and his lover Jean Tatlock, respectively. At a point, Tatlock’s character is shown to hold up a book with Sanskrit writing in it, and Oppenheimer is shown to read from it in an intimate scene. The book is purportedly the Bhagvad Gita, although this is not mentioned in the film.

There has also been social media commentary on the Board purportedly having added black CGI clothing on Florence Pugh’s body in a scene where she is allegedly naked in the original film.

Oppenheimer is one of the most hyped releases in Indian and global theatres this year and is reported to have raked in upwards of Rs 50 crores in the country already.

Among those who have raised public objections against the depiction are Chief Information Commissioner Uday Mahurkar and Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi.

Mahurkar wrote an open letter to Nolan on behalf of his ‘Save Culture, Save India’ Foundation, in which he wrote, “We do not know the motivation and logic behind this unnecessary scene on life of a scientist. But this is a direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus, rather it amounts to waging a war on the Hindu community and almost appears to be part of a larger conspiracy by anti-Hindu forces.”

Singhvi said the scene could be violative of the Indian Penal Code.

“Believe in free speech but a scene in #Oppenheimer concerning #BhagwatGita is just ignorance esp with there being no historical evidence of it, maybe violative of IPC. Find Anurag Thakur’s concern funny as he should ask how it passed CBFC in the 1st place,” Singhvi had tweeted yesterday.

 

 

The Many Sides and Dilemmas of ‘Oppenheimer’, Father of the Atomic Bomb

Director Christopher Nolan’s thoughtful film is full of familiar stars, but it is Cillian Murphy as the protagonist who gives it depth.

That Oppenheimer is director Christopher Nolan’s most ‘grown-up’ work in years is something we sense from the opening scene, when the protagonist – an astoundingly good Cillian Murphy – stares at ripples in a puddle. The ‘father of the atomic bomb’ is probably thinking about legacy. And yet, nothing quite prepares us for a scene when an unclothed Oppenheimer is slinkily seated on a sofa with his legs crossed, across from his lover Jean (Florence Pugh) in a hotel room.

It’s a flashback linked to a hearing, where the pioneer scientist is being grilled about his past ‘transgressions’ while being vetted for security clearance. Oppenheimer was married to Kitty (Emily Blunt) at the time, and Jean was known to be a card-carrying communist, especially on the brink of the Cold War. The hearing seems determined to discredit the man behind the Manhattan Project.

Seated at the hearing wearing a crisp suit, the camera slowly pans from behind a character and we see stark-naked Oppenheimer in front of the committee. We soon realise we’re watching the scene from Kitty’s point-of-view, who is seeing her husband stripped of all dignity. She imagines Jean seated on his lap, staring directly at her. It’s an ingenious and confident swing by a director who hasn’t filmed a sex scene or nudity in nearly two decades.

Nolan – one of the most hotly-debated filmmakers among cinephiles – revered for his big canvas ideas and, simultaneously reviled for writing himself into corners, is on solid ground in the biopic of one of the most important figures of the 20th century. Adapted from Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin’s Pulitzer-winner, American Prometheus: The Triumph & Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer – this is arguably Nolan at his most socially conscious. Like most of his heroes, obsessive men each of them, Nolan mines Oppenheimer for a haunted guy, long before he manifested the power for humans to become destroyers of the world. When he’s asked about his time studying amongst the world’s greatest scientific minds in Europe, he testifies to being homesick, terrible in the laboratory, and unable to sleep because of visions of ‘another world’. Nolan’s filmmaking is dynamic in this part – filling the screen with wondrous images.

He tells the story of Oppenheimer primarily through two sets of hearings – one where the scientist is asked about his alleged links to the Communist party, while his colleagues and friends are being made to testify about patriotism for America. Another is a congressional hearing of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) being vetted for a Cabinet position and asked about his dynamic with Oppenheimer over the years. Nolan differentiates the two timelines by showing Oppenheimer’s hearing and flashbacks in radiant colour, while Strauss’ flashbacks and hearing appear in sharp black-and-white. It’s an efficient way to distinguish, prompting a rhythm for the visuals.

Oppenheimer is a busy film with familiar faces in abundance. Downey Jr, who spent the better part of the last decade playing the smartest man in most films, plays a slimy politician with a chip on his shoulder. Matt Damon, who had a sensational special appearance in Interstellar (2014), gets a sizable role in this one as Lt. General Groves – who recruits Oppenheimer to be the director of the Manhattan project. Damon’s portly physique and self-assured tone is nicely at odds with Cillian Murphy’s frail build, but high-powered rebuttals. As Jean, Florence Pugh burns bright like a shooting star, for the few minutes she is on screen. Emily Blunt as Kitty is ferociously no-nonsense, which reminded me of Claire Foy’s turn as Janet Armstrong in First Man (2018). Casey Affleck is chilling in a cameo as Boris Pash – in-charge of security of the Manhattan project – sneaking up on his subjects with his boyish, unassuming manner, before quietly trapping them.

The film, however, belongs to Cillian Murphy showcasing the many sides to Oppenheimer’s personality. A brilliant scientist, he’s also equally immersed in social justice. We’re told he contributes a portion of his paycheck to help German colleagues escape the Nazi regime. He’s the “mayor” and “sheriff” of the town built around the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico but sobs like a teenager after being delivered bad news about a loved one. He’s curious and ambitious about accomplishing something dangerous – because he says it’s better he discovers it, as opposed to fascists in Germany or Russia. However, he’s also equally torn about where this game of one-upmanship stops. A colleague accuses him of having become a ‘politician, who has left science far behind’, while trying to convince him to be their voice in the ears of the bigwig politicians in D.C, who haven’t fully grasped the direction they’re taking the world in.

As much as Oppenheimer is a showcase for its lead actor and director, the film also benefits tremendously from Ludwig Gorranson’s terrific score and Richard King’s excellent sound design. Especially, in three of the biggest scenes that Nolan sets up – the Trinity tests, the scene in which Kitty is summoned to testify about her husband’s character, and the ‘victory’ speech that Oppenheimer has to find his way through after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are announced as a ‘success’. Gorranson’s score is equal parts delicate and muscular, creeping up on the visuals or otherwise enhancing them in every which way. King’s impeccably designed silence fills up our senses about the magnitude of the Trinity test, without having us hear it.

It’s probably for the best that Nolan fell out with long-time producers, Warner Bros, after the botched-up experience of releasing Tenet (2020) in theatres. It obviously resulted in every major studio and streaming service lining up outside the writer/director’s house for Oppenheimer. This has resulted in Nolan’s most unambiguously personal film in a long time, where he takes the life of a scientist – treated like a prophet during a World War, and later demoted to a mortal as soon as he began casting doubts on his own breakthrough. Gary Oldman as president Harry Truman – is outstanding in the one scene, becoming the face of an establishment that winces at Oppenheimer’s “cry-baby” attitude, when he asks them to scale down on nuclear weapons.

One of the most stirring things about this excellently dense and jumpy biopic is that Nolan never tries to reconcile his subjects’ contradictions. If anything, he realises the futility of trying to know the unknowable. Who was J. Robert Oppenheimer? A film can make an educated guess based on recorded actions and anecdotes. There will always be gaps, and Nolan doesn’t pretend otherwise. Instead, choosing to grapple with a larger question – what does Oppenheimer’s predicament mean for the generation today? Only our lives depend on it.