The Human Mind Responds to Stories Not Issues
Good for money making but not for dealing with apocalyptic threats
Christopher Nolan, director of Oppenheimer, did an interview with John Mecklin, the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Asked why he chose to make this movie, Nolan answered:
My goal when making the film—I don't make films to send a message, I made it because it's a fascinating story. But part of that storytelling is getting back to basics about the bomb, stripping away policy statements, philosophy, the geopolitical situation and just looking at raw power that's about to be unleashed and what that means for the people involved and means for all of us.
Jonathan Schell in his 1982The Fate of the Earth,observed:
As long as politics fail to take up the nuclear issue in a determined way, it lives closer than any other activity to the lie that we have all come to live: the pretense that life lived on top of a nuclear stockpile can last.
Humans love drama, but they suffer from serious, possibly terminal shortsightedness. As a result, the race is to Nolan not to Schell. Indeed, Oppenheimer is a riveting drama, but there are many more things in neutron physics, geopolitics, and security of the people than are dreamt of in this movie. Riding its wave may be a rare opportunity to boost Schell's important message. If that fails, blame evolution not Nolan.
Curtis LeMay, who went on to head the U.S. Strategic Air Command, led the bombings on Japan. They were raw, chemical and nuclear fire-raising power used to destroy cities and indiscriminately kill people. In Germany, the U.S. and British air force had used fire bombings to devastate Dresden and Hamburg, causing close to 100,000 civilian deaths. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, after first having endorsed the attacks, called them “acts of terror and wanton destruction.” Estimates of the number of people killed in Germany vary significantly. The same is true in the case for the fire bombings of Japan. Those killed about 400,000 Japanese people, roughly half of those in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all under the command of LeMay.
In The Fog of War, a 2003 documentary, Robert McNamara, Secretary of War in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, quotes LeMay:
If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.
McNamara agreed. In hisNuremberg Diary,G. M. Gilbert, prison psychologist at the Nazi war criminals trial, described his conversations with the Nazis indicted by the International Military Tribunal. Gilbert quotes Hermann Göring's response to the indictment. Göring , who had been the commander-in-chief of the Nazi air force, said:
The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused.
The terror experts agree. But there is another, very different side to to humanity's fascination with personalized drama and history's tendency to ignore large-scale, silent, incremental death. An African proverb sums up the mechanism:
Until lions have their historians, tales of hunt shall always glorify the hunters.
Creating unlivable conditions should be recognized as murder
Friedrich Engels accused the English ruling class of what he called “social murder.” He held them responsible for the living and working conditions that sent many of the working class prematurely to their grave.
Does history ever report social murder? Rarely. Does the International Criminal Court ever put anyone on trial for social murder? Please remind me. I do know of a current U.S. example of policy murder. Poverty is responsible for 800 daily deaths in the U.S. In fact, poverty is the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S.:
If 800 people die every day and if that rate gradually built up from zero—probably too rosy a scenario—the cumulative total over the course of four decades is six million corpses. That amounts to six million stories untold by the hunters. No gripping pictures, no finger prints, and no easily identifiable policy murderers. In short, social murder is not the stuff that has the draw of Hollywood's Oppenheimer drama.
That lack of attention also applies to the raw power of thermonuclear bombs. Those are a thousand times as destructive as the “primitive”atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Daniel Ellsberg in his "The Doomsday Machine—Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" describes a high-level briefing about a newly updated revision of the Single Integrated Operational Plan that was the U.S. nuclear war plan from 1961 to 2003. Ellsberg mentions an exchange among the U.S. national security planners present at the briefing. The estimate was that this incomprehensible plan would kill three hundred million of the six hundred million Chinese. That would be the total anticipated fatality count once the radioactive fallout would haven taken its toll. Note that the presentation took place before nuclear winter was understood, the result of a major nuclear war, years without summer and fatal global famine. In other words, three hundred million dead was a vast underestimate. To top it off, the three hundred million dead Chinese were expected even if this was not a war with China.
One of the attendees at the presentation commented:
All I can say is any plan that murders three hundred million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan. That is not the American way.
Unfortunately, it seems to be exactly the American way. These days maybe we would call it the international rules-based order, but only a few cynics would understand what that means. Ellsberg also mentions how General Curtis LeMay justified the bloody-mindedness of the military:
In a lengthy interview with historian Michael Sherry, he [LeMay] said, “There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn't bother me so much to be killing the innocent bystanders.
LeMay was brutal and brutally honest. This was the American way during World War II. This was the American way during the Cold war. There is no reason whatsoever to assume that today the American way is any different. Of course, the Soviets built their own MAD—mutual assured destruction—doomsday device, Dead Hand. I don't know the details, maybe because the Soviet Ellsberg fell out of some window or was summarily shot at Lubyanka.
Rotblat revisited
After my previous post, I found out—from a footnote in a biography of Joseph Rotblat—that General Leslie Groves supported Rotblat's explanation of what had prompted his departure from the Manhattan Project at the end of 1944. (Also see this article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.) Groves was the military officer who oversaw the Manhattan Project. At the Oppenheimer hearing, in sworn testimony before the Personnel Security Board of the U.S Atomic Energy Commission, Groves said:
I think it is also important to state—I think it is well known—that there was never from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this project any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy and that the project was conducted on that basis. I didn't go along with the attitude of the country as a whole that Russia was a gallant ally. I always had suspicions and the project was conducted on that basis. Of course. that was so reported to the President.
(Follow this link for the recently released, full, unredacted transcript of the hearing.)
Not the stuff that makes for fascinating stories
From a geopolitical perspective, this Groves testimony is as relevant today as it was in 1954. It's not part of the Oppenheimer movie. Information like this distracts from the tragedy of the main character. Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin do mention Groves' testimony in their The American Prometheus, the book that inspired the movie. In fact, there is a massive amount of important information in that 1000+ page book and the vast literature on the start and development of the nuclear war. It's relevant not just for communities affected by nuclear weapon tests, but also for the very survival of human civilization.
Here is another detail that failed to pass through the storytelling sieve. It reflects on Oppenheimer's nuclear bomb ambivalence and refers to people deeply involved in the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs that started in 1957 ten years before Oppenheimer's death and continues to this day. The Pugwash Conferences were a follow up on the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, originally released at a press conference in July of 1955.
That same spring, Oppenheimer turned down an invitation from Bertrand Russell to attend the inaugural session of the Pugwash Conference, a gathering of international scientists organized by the industrialist Cyrus Eaton, Russell, Leo Szilard and Joseph Rotblat, the Polish-born physicist who had left Los Alamos in the autumn of 1944. Oppenheimer wrote Russell that he was “somewhat troubled when I look at the proposed agenda.... Above all, I think that the terms of reference ‘the hazards arising from the continuous development of nuclear weapons’ prejudges where the greatest hazards lie....” Nonplussed, Russell replied, “I can't think that you would deny that there are hazards associated with the continued development of nuclear weapons.”
Daniel Ellsberg has a dedication his Doomsday Machine:
To those who struggle for a human future
So be it! His mottos in the book are:
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.—Albert Einstein, 1946
Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.—Friedrich Nietzsche
Nolan's Oppenheimer may be a blockbuster, but it does not do justice to these truisms, nor was it intended to. As mentioned, that's not Nolan's fault. It's a flaw of evolution. I'm not impressed by this “ intelligent design,” not impressed at all.
Downwinders revisited
To bring this to a close, yet another update to my previous post. Just last week, the U.S. Senate approved an amendment to the yearly war industry corporate welfare bonanza known as the National “Defense” Authorization Act. The amendment—possibly positive fallout of Oppenheimer—extends the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act which provides health benefits to downwind victims of radiation exposure. Serious, and in many cases lethal, health problems were caused by the Trinity test of July 16, 1945 and the subsequent nuclear and thermonuclear tests.
Also included in the amendment for compensation are people whose health was destroyed by the mining and milling of uranium. That extreme extraction enterprise, once again, disproportionately victimized Indigenous People, as documented, for instance, in Broken Rainbow. Of course, these victims make up just a small part of the 800 daily poverty deaths and the persistent policy murder in the U.S.
The yearly war economy bill, more bloated than ever, still has to go through reconciliation of the U.S. House and Senate versions of the pending legislation. As USNews reported:
Advocates also have been trying for years to bring awareness to the lingering effects of radiation exposure on the Navajo Nation, where millions of tons of uranium ore were extracted over decades to support U.S. nuclear activities.
Stay tuned.