Anti-Nuclear Action

Editorial Comments, Tom Unterrainer

As we have reported on and argued for some time, the risk of nuclear use is posed more sharply now that at any time since the opening of the atomic age in 1945 and certainly since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. During this second event diplomacy, negotiation and the intervention of international figures such as Bertrand Russell succeeded in averting the worst possible outcome. In 2023 the Global South has spearheaded attempts to bring about a cessation of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Efforts at negotiation and diplomacy not only seem absent from the agenda of the major Western powers but, as the record shows, they have set themselves in opposition to all such efforts to date. The peace movements are working to change this.

Christopher Nolan’s film, Oppenheimer, came to the screen in this period of acute nuclear tension. Part of the films narrative relates Oppenheimer’s opposition to the development of the Hydrogen Bomb in contrast to his commitment to developing the Atomic Bomb. Nolan’s rendering of this important aspect of the story moves from interactions between Oppenheimer and Edward Teller – the major proponent of the Hydrogen Bomb – to stark contrasts between the two personalities. The scene in the film that covers the Trinity Test shows Oppenheimer ‘up close and bunkered down’ to this first detonation of an Atomic Bomb. We see him peeking through a small viewing apparatus and our ears are engulfed with the murderous rumble of the detonation. The experience is very disturbing both mentally and physically, given the volume and intensity of the sound in a cinema setting. In contrast, Teller views the detonation from a safe distance: he sits in a deckchair, sun lotion slavered over his face and dark glasses in place. The two experiences are starkly different and speak to starkly different attitudes towards what had been created. Teller dreamed of ever-greater destructive power. Oppenheimer imagined that the Atomic Bomb would open the way to peace.

In Chapter V of his Has Man a Future? (Spokesman), Bertrand Russell writes of ‘Scientists and the H-Bomb’. He notes of Oppenheimer:

When the American Government first proposed to set to work constructing the H-bomb, Oppenheimer, who had been the main agent in the construction of the A-bomb, opposed the new project. The authorities were outraged ...

There are those who may think that there was an inconsistency in being willing to make the A-bomb, but unwilling to make the H-bomb. The A-bomb was made in time of war when it was supposed (mistakenly, though with good reason) that Hitler was on the verge of discovering how to make it. The making of the H-bomb was undertaken in time of peace, when it was certain that, if the project were proceeded with, the USSR would have it about as soon as the United States, and that it could not be a means of victory to either side.

Unlike the Atomic Bomb, the Hydrogen Bomb has not been detonated in wartime (which is not the same as claiming that it has “never been used” - see Daniel Ellsberg, Spokesman 155). Oppenheimer’s opposition to the Hydrogen Bomb and the consequences of his admirable actions in this respect resonate with another scene in the film where, just before he is to meet with President Truman (the “don’t bring this cry baby in here again” scene), Oppenheimer is accosted in the hotel lobby by Leo Szilard.

Szilard conceived of the nuclear chain reaction in 1933 and assisted Einstein in writing the infamous 1939 letter to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt that kick-started the Manhattan Project that Oppenheimer was to run. It is worth knowing that Edward Teller was consulted on the contents of this letter. The Einstein-Szilard letter suggested the possibility of constructing an Atomic Bomb and indicated that Nazi Germany was already working on such a device. Fast-forward six years and Nazi Germany is defeated and no such bombs are in evidence. What could Szilard do but attempt to take action against the monster he helped to produce?

Szilard accosting Oppenheimer in the film only hints at the lengths that the former went to in order to prevent the use of the Atomic Bomb. Together with other ‘Atomic Scientists’, Szilard petitioned Truman to commit to not bombing Japan (see Spokesman 154). The petition was ignored. Szilard spent the remainder of his life engaged in action against nuclear weapons.

How and why Szilard and others drew different conclusions to Oppenheimer over the Atomic Bomb is a matter of psychological speculation. Whatever their differences on this question, both were haunted by the knowledge of what they unleashed with Szilard’s 1949 short story My Trial As A War Criminal and similar stories demonstrating the depth of feeling on the matter.

This byway into the question of ‘Anti-Nuclear Action’ might make sense – if only in a clumsy sense – by thinking about the views and actions of Teller, Oppenheimer and Szilard in the specific circumstances 1945. Might Edward Teller represent that extreme section of current opinion (and influence) that actively promotes the role of nuclear weapon developments, the threat of nuclear use and the centrality of such threats to maintaining political and military dominance?

Would the Oppenheimer of 1945 be a sensible analogy for those who recognise the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction to the future of humanity but who imagine, for whatever reason or combination of reasons, that they are in some way essential for what is termed ‘security’ or as a ‘deterrent’ to an evil enemy?

Could Szilard stand for those who see the heart of the matter and who take action against nuclear weapons and attempt to make our ‘Oppenheimers’ see sense?

Or is it the case that the reality of the nuclear threat today and the world-ending consequences of a nuclear war – in contrast to the detonation of two atomic bombs – are so extreme that the examples of Teller, Oppenheimer and Szilard are inadequate for our purposes? It might be speculated that of the three, only Teller could see in 1945 the future he helped create. He steered a steady course throughout all these developments and up to his death in 2003 at the age of 95, happy – in all likelihood – with the results. Russell was certainly not a fan of Teller, with whom he appeared on a televised debate in 1960. Recalling the debate in his Autobiography, Russell writes:

I was inhibited by my intense dislike of Teller and what I felt to be disingenuous flattery. I came away from the BBC studio feeling that I had let down all those who agreed with my point of view ...

In the same way that the stark and evident risks of climate catastrophe pose existential threats, today’s sharp nuclear tensions and the consequences of nuclear use also pose existential threats of a type probably unimaginable to Oppenheimer and Szilard in 1945. In his recent work, Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation (Routledge, 2023), Émile P. Torres charts the development of how thinkers understood the implications of the atomic bomb. He writes:

There was, in the years following WWII, almost no explicit talk of what Russell would later, in 1954, call “universal death,” i.e. total annihilation.

By 1961 Russell was writing on the ‘Long-term Conditions of Human Survival” (Has Man a Future?, Chapter XI, Spokesman). Russell argued that we cannot ‘un-invent’ nuclear weapons but that the risks of such weaponry and the ‘innovations’ that modern science make possible – such as the invention of a ‘Doomsday Machine’ that could kill all life within days – necessitates decisive political action on a world scale to put such weapons out of use: effective abolition (though he did not use this phrase). In the same way that climate activists understand the need for such global action and link their efforts at direct action to this goal, anti-nuclear activists must begin to do the same. We have no Szilard’s or Russell’s to come to our aid and only the wide-spread combination of people, groups and movements can link global concerns to local action and vice versa. ‘Anti-Nuclear Action’ should be back on our agenda.