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Nuclear Weapons and Our Future [1]

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Date: 2024-03-16  

The film “Oppenheimer” certainly did well at the Oscars this year, with actor Cillian Murphy winning the award for best actor.

In addition to all the praise, Director Chris Nolan’s movie certainly opened a dialog about nuclear weapons in our country and in our world. After leading the effort to develop the atomic bomb, Dr. Oppenheimer was the government’s leading advisor on nuclear weapons policy before losing his security clearance in 1954 due to the issue of Communism, as he was somewhat of a sympathizer in the 1930s, but Oppenheimer wasn’t the only scientist struggling with foreign policy and security issues once the world realized that nuclear explosives could be made, as writer Frank N. von Hippel stated in his story “Not Just Oppenheimer.”

Niels Bohr was 60 in 1945 and second only to Einstein in fame among 20th-century physicists for explaining the energy levels of electrons in atoms, creating the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen to which young physicists flocked from all over Europe to develop the new quantum mechanics, and then explaining nuclear fission. After Bohr escaped from Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943, he was invited to visit Los Alamos, where he learned that the United States was well on its way to making fission bombs.

In the summer of 1944, admirers obtained meetings for Bohr with both Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In a memo written for Roosevelt, Bohr summarized his proposal: “The terrifying prospect of a future competition between nations about a weapon of such formidable character can only be avoided through a universal agreement in true confidence [and] will therefore demand such concessions regarding exchange of information and openness about industrial efforts, including military preparations, as would hardly be conceivable unless all partners were assured of a compensating guarantee of common security against dangers of unprecedented acuteness… Personal connections between scientists of different nations might … offer means of establishing preliminary and unofficial contact.”

In the summer of 1945, as the decision to use nuclear bombs on Japan was being finalized, Arthur Compton, director of the Met Lab, allowed James Franck to organize a study of the “social and political implications” of nuclear bombs. Franck, a German refugee, had been sensitized to the social responsibility of scientists, in part by Bohr, after allowing himself to be recruited into Germany’s World War I poison gas program.

The co-authors of the resulting “Franck Report” included Leo Szilard, inventor of the nuclear chain reaction and co-designer with Enrico Fermi of the first nuclear reactor; Franck’s research collaborator, Eugene Rabinowitch, later founding editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; and chemist Glenn Seaborg, 33, co-discoverer of plutonium and other “transuranic” elements (artificial elements heavier than uranium), and later, during the 1960s, chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission. The Franck Report argued for not bombing Japanese cities, assessing that a post-war nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union would be inevitable if the United States were to use nuclear bombs in a surprise attack on Japan.

After the end of World War II, the younger scientists in the different installations of the Manhattan Project organized to educate their fellow citizens about the policy issues that would have to be dealt with now that nuclear weapons had been created. Groups were organized at the University of Chicago’s Met Lab; Los Alamos; Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the US World War II uranium enrichment facilities had been built; and MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, where US wartime radar development was based.

Now that the history lesson is over. Let’s remember that we’re entering what could be a dangerous time in the history of nuclear weapons with a new Cold War between the US and its allies and the China/Russia orbit. Let’s hope the dialog amongst foreign secretaries, ministers, secretaries of state, or head diplomats is rational. However, let’s keep scientists who know their craft by our side and also hope scientists will continue to lend us their knowledge. If we don’t have these things, then our future might not be secure.

Jason Sibert is the Lead Writer of the Peace Economy Project

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