Illuminating legend and doubt
Robert Oppenheimer's tortured personality has given rise to several misunderstandings that have led to him becoming a legendary figure, as evidenced by Christopher Nolan's recent film. I try to demystify three of them, based on the analyses of my recent book, The War That Must Not Occur », Stanford University Press, 2023.
- The work on the U.S. bomb justified by the hypothetical future Nazi bomb
It is undeniable that, as early as 1939 at least, the need to outpace Hitler played an important role in the decision to set up the Manhattan Project. After all, it was a German, Otto Hahn, who, in January 1939, succeeded for the first time in achieving the fission of the uranium atom by bombarding it with neutrons.
However, by the end of 1942, there was no Nazi bomb on the horizon anymore. Led by Werner Heisenberg, the German project had been on the wrong track from the start, and it was better suited to building a uranium pile capable of releasing energy than a bomb intended to explode and destroy nations. This failure can be explained in part by the fact that many of Central Europe's most prominent scientists, being Jews, had fled to America, and some of the greatest had joined the Manhattan Project! Heisenberg’s late admission that he didn’t really want to make a bomb remains a moot point.
Did the Americans become aware of this German failure before the end of the war? This too is a controversial question. One can at least conjecture that serious doubts were raised when Niels Bohr, fleeing Denmark, joined Oppenheimer at Los Alamos at the end of 1943[1].
Had Oppenheimer really been the “high-minded martyr of personal conscience that his legend would have us believe,[2]” he would have faced a momentous ethical problem: why keep on designing and building the atomic bomb? The film prefers to gloss over this inconvenient question and broach a much larger issue.
- The unbelievable power of the Bomb means that there will never be war again.
This belief would be the justification that Oppenheimer had in mind for continuing to do everything possible to succeed in making the Bomb.
I submit that this belief, which is often mistaken for deterrence, is false and even absurd.
Nuclear deterrence is a policy, not just a state of affairs (the Bomb is outlandishly powerful). It takes the form of a speech act of the type: if the enemy crosses a line, often unspecified, that leads him to threaten the "vital interests" of a nuclear power, then the latter implements "immeasurable" retaliation that can lead both adversaries to extremes and mutual annihilation. Several conditions must be met, the most important being that the first strike will not annihilate the enemy: he will retain a second-strike capability. Deterrence is a threat of disproportionate retaliation.
Most theorists of deterrence consider deterrence to be ineffective in principle, since it assumes that if the enemy ignores the threat and attacks first, making good on the threat will cause one’s own annihilation no less than that of the enemy. The threat is not credible.
The brilliant and crazy idea that came to the rescue of deterrence was to say: the best way to show the other nation that we are not going to attack them first is to show them that we are not defending ourselves,for example by means of a shield made of anti-missile missiles. Because if we attacked the enemy first, the latter retaining by construction a second-strike capability, would implement it and easily annihilate us since we don't defend ourselves. This idea was embodied in an important treaty, the so-called ABM ( Anti-Ballistic Missile) treaty, signed in 1972 in Moscow by Nixon and Brezhnev. It governed relations between the two nuclear superpowers until the 2000s, when the United States began working in earnest to build such shields.
Renouncing defense was a little too much for the general staffs, who were trained in the principled idea that the legitimacy of military force rests on the defense of a nation. According to the late Daniel Ellsberg[3], nuclear policy has often sacrificed deterrence to "pre-emption", i.e., striking first under the pretext of responding to aggression that has not yet taken place – a kind of anticipatory retaliation. At one point, Oppenheimer was very close to endorsing preemption.
If deterrence boils down to affirming that the disproportionate destructive power of the Bomb is such that no decision-maker, except in madness, can think of detonating it on populations, how can we explain that the nuclear hyperpowers have thought of implementing a policy of deterrence in the technical sense of the term, an infinitely costly and risky policy as we have just seen? In other words, if the Bomb by its very existence ensures "peace", how can we explain that the nuclear hyperpowers have been so violently prey to the fear of being victims of a first strike that they have been reduced to resorting to policies that flirt with madness? It doesn't add up. The belief attributed to Oppenheimer is unfounded.
History, of course, has decided. The existence of nuclear weapons has in no way prevented so-called conventional wars: cf. the current war in Ukraine. Certainly, there was no nuclear war. But consider the baroque nature of the claim: it is thanks to the invention of nuclear weapons that there was no nuclear war. Of course, once the atomic bomb is invented, the question is posed differently: it could be that the atomic bomb is the best bulwark against the atomic bomb. It takes me a good half of my book to prove that this is a legend.
- Oppenheimer Plagued by Moral Doubt
Was "Oppie," as his friends called him, a tragic character, torn between pride in a job well done and the realization that he had opened Pandora's urn and that everything had to be done to prevent a headlong rush toward increasingly destructive weaponry, or was he the "crybaby" that President Truman dismissed with so little consideration?
Remarkably, the word "deterrence" appears only once in the biography by Bird and Sherwin that served as the basis for the film[4]. The passage in which it is found is important because it summarizes what Oppenheimer's nuclear doctrine was. It is based on the clear distinction between strategic and tactical weapons. The former have only one goal: to deter the Soviet Union from attacking first. Increasing their numbers, as Truman proposed, would have no effect on deterrence. In contrast, Oppenheimer believed that multiplying tactical nuclear weapons was necessary to prevail over the Soviets. The year was 1950, at the time of the Korean War. Nuclear tactical weapons are defined less by the medium and short ranges of the missiles that carry them and their "low" explosive power, than by their destination: they are meant to be used on the battlefield in the same way as "conventional" weapons.
Let me quote from the foreword to my book (p. 4):
Why should the unprecedented power of the atomic bomb not be a sufficient reason to dissuade anyone from even thinking of using it? Isn’t the principle of deterrence entailed, as a matter of practical reason, by its immeasurable destructiveness? Who could possibly have an interest in escalating a conflict to the point that there are no winners, only losers? These questions have been with us since 1945, and they remain no less perplexing today. Attempts were made during the Cold War to reduce both the power of atomic weapons and the range of the missiles that carry them in the hope of bringing the devastation produced by a nuclear conflict nearer to that which a traditional war is capable of producing. Eventually it became clear, however, that these so-called tactical weapons and missiles must be banned. Their relatively small explosive force6 encourages military planners to use them on the battlefield, as in the case of conventional weapons, with the risk of getting caught up in a nuclear spiral whose inevitable tendency, as can be shown by a priori reasoning, is to spin out of control and lead to mutual annihilation. Just as the explosion of an atomic bomb triggers the thermonuclear reaction within a hydrogen bomb, so too the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield is the surest way for intercontinental ballistic missiles to be brought out from their silos, notwithstanding that these missiles are supposed, by virtue of their passive existence alone, to assure nuclear peace.
Oppenheimer's vain efforts to bring back into the lamp the wicked genius whom he had been imprudent enough to bring out? The doubts he expressed on several occasions and paid for with the humiliation of having his clearance revoked? Allow me to express my own doubts about this too beautiful legend.
Start reading The War That Must Not Occur »
Notes
[1] On all this, see Jeremy Bernstein (ed.), Hitler’s Uranium Club, Copernicus Books, Springer-Verlag New York, 2001.
[2] Martin Filler, “Oppie’s Problem”, The New York Review of Books, July 21, 2023.
[3] The Doomsday Machine. Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Bloomsbury, New York, 2017.
[4] American Prometheus, New York, Arthur Knopf, p. 442.
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