Why Oppenheimer’s moral dilemma is as significant as the atom bomb

Can our good deeds compensate for our wrongdoing? This is a perennially difficult question. In Oppenheimer’s life, this question took a monstrous form. For what was intended as a good deed inflicted ghastly suffering and created the risk of annihilation on a global scale.

This is the crux of why Oppenheimer will stand out in history as a tragic figure. But for the moment it is his transition from an American war hero to a suspected communist that is likely to dominate the public imagination. The plot of the just-released biopic, Oppenheimer, pivots on intrigues during the McCarthy era which undermined the “Father of the Atom Bomb” and led to him being stripped of his security clearance. Perhaps, filmmaking on an epic scale demands a nemesis versus hero dynamic. In Christopher Nolan’s film, the villain is narrowed down to one person — Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission.

It is indeed essential to remind every generation about the excesses of the McCarthy era. It is even more important to recognise the pervasive and lingering malice that corrodes any society in which fear of some “other” is systematically spread. But this tragic phase of Oppenheimer’s life pales in comparison to the everlasting significance of the moral dilemma which led him to quote that verse from the Gita about good deeds defending a man.

Oppenheimer, or “Oppie” as his friends called him, discovered the Gita early in his life when he learnt Sanskrit. So, when he was chosen to head the bomb project, Oppenheimer was already acutely aware of Arjun’s anguish on the battlefield of Kurukshetra.

The historian James A Hijiya has written that from the very beginning of the work at the Los Alamos lab, Oppenheimer could look beyond the current war and he was dispirited by the prospect of continued development of nuclear weapons after the war. “In this time of uncertainty Oppenheimer revisited one of his favourite books, the Bhagavad Gita, and from it drew encouragement that steadied him in his work,” wrote Hijiya.

Oppenheimer’s “good deed” was to do his duty as a scientist and ensure that the Nazis did not beat the Allies in the race to split the atom. It was unthinkable that Hitler’s expansionist fascist regime should get the advantage of a weapon of mass destruction. The Los Alamos lab was in the final stages of making the atom bomb when the Allies marched into Berlin and defeated the Nazis. Many of the scientists working on the project felt that the bomb was no longer required.

When they discovered that the American government was planning to use the bomb against the Japanese, some scientists, led by Leo Szilard, appealed to the US government not to do so. It has been argued that Oppenheimer did not sufficiently lend the force of his position to this dissenting voice.

Like many scientists at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was convinced that because the bomb was so terrible it would not be used again, after being dropped on Hiroshima. The American decision to drop a second bomb on Nagasaki shook him. On August 9, 1945, the day the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, an FBI informant reported that Oppenheimer was a nervous wreck.

Later, Oppenheimer spoke about having blood on his hands. President Harry Truman firmly told Oppenheimer that he had nothing to do with the dropping of the bombs. It was a presidential decision. Oppenheimer was clear that the atom bomb is an aggressor’s weapon, and that the elements of surprise and terror are intrinsic to it. He could also see that in military terms, nuclear weapons are an exercise in futility. Within days of the Nagasaki bombing, as head of a scientific panel, he wrote to Secretary of War Henry Stimson: “We are not only unable to outline a programme that would assure to this nation, for the next decades, hegemony in the field of atomic weapons; we are equally unable to insure that such hegemony, if achieved, could protect us from the most terrible destruction. …We believe that the safety of this nation — as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power – cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible.”

The absurdity to which nuclear weapons have reduced humans is indeed stark. In the book American Prometheus, his biographers quote Oppenheimer as asking: “What are we to make of a civilisation which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life [but] which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?”

Oppenheimer remains important primarily as a symbol of those who voice this disquiet and dare to insist that human beings can make future wars impossible. How well or how poorly Oppenheimer processed both this disquiet and this hope — in his private and public life — is now only of academic interest. What matters is for every generation to reaffirm the importance of having the moral dilemma at all.

It takes an ethical base for the individual to have the awareness that there is a moral dilemma and then the courage to face it, to attempt to address it. This truism is applicable in all areas of life — not just science and technology. To what extent do people in decision-making positions feel compelled to “just get the job done” and not ask distracting moral questions? This approach got the bomb built “on time” and it also enabled the death camps in Nazi Germany to operate “smoothly”.

Yes, it matters that the bomb builders felt they were defending freedom and those running the concentration camps were driven by delusions of racial superiority. But this distinction was utterly irrelevant for the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Oppenheimer found at great cost to himself — the good we actually do may not make up for the destruction wrought by our good intentions.

The writer is the founder of the Youtube channel Ahimsa Conversations