{"id":239512,"date":"2023-07-17T12:00:32","date_gmt":"2023-07-17T11:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=239512"},"modified":"2023-07-17T06:29:22","modified_gmt":"2023-07-17T05:29:22","slug":"listening-to-oppenheimer-seven-decades-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/07\/listening-to-oppenheimer-seven-decades-later\/","title":{"rendered":"Listening to Oppenheimer, Seven Decades Later"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>12 Jul 2023 – <\/em>A mere 55 years after his death, the U.S. government has restored J. Robert Oppenheimer\u2019s security clearance, which the Atomic Energy Commission had taken away from him in 1954, declaring him to be not simply a communist but, in all likelihood, a Soviet spy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oppenheimer, of course, is the father of the atomic bomb. He led the Manhattan Project during World War II, which birthed Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing several hundred thousand people and ending the war. What happened next, however, was the Cold War, and suddenly commies \u2013 our former allies \u2013 were the personification of evil, and they were everywhere. The American government, in its infinite wisdom, knew it had no choice but to continue its nuclear weapons program and, for the sake of peace, put the world on the brink of Armageddon.<\/p>\n

Hello, H-bomb!<\/strong><\/p>\n

War, the building block of the world\u2019s governmental entities for uncounted millennia, had evolved to the brink of human extinction. Official government policy amounted to this: So what?<\/em><\/p>\n

Oppenheimer challenged this official policy and shattered his career. Indeed, he saw immediately, as the newly developed bomb was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, that Planet Earth was in danger. A team of physicists had just exposed its ultimate vulnerability and he famously noted, as he witnessed the mushroom cloud, that words of Hindu scripture from the Bhagavad-Gita<\/a> entered his mind: \u201cNow I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

He had not opposed dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as some of the Manhattan Project scientists, such as Leo Szilard, did, but when the war ended he became deeply committed to eliminating all possibility of future wars. One of the first actions he took, a week after the bombings, was to write a letter<\/a> to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, urging him to embrace common sense regarding further development of nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe believe,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthat the safety of this nation \u2013 as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power \u2013 cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible. It is our unanimous and urgent recommendation to you that, despite the present incomplete exploitation of technical possibilities in this field, all steps be taken, all necessary international arrangements be made, to this one end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Making future wars impossible! What if American political forces had sufficient sanity to listen to Oppenheimer? Several months after writing this letter, he paid a visit to President Truman<\/a>, attempting to discuss the placement of international control over further nuclear development. The president would have none of that. He kicked Oppenheimer out of the Oval Office.<\/p>\n

Oppenheimer maintained his commitment to the transcendence of war, working with the Atomic Energy Commission to control the use of nuclear weapons \u2013 and standing firm in his opposition to the creation of the hydrogen bomb. He continued his opposition even as the bomb\u2019s development progressed and nuclear tests began spreading fallout over \u201cexpendable\u201d parts of the world. But, uh oh. Along came the McCarthy era and the accompanying Red Scare.<\/p>\n

And in 1954, after 19 days of secret hearings, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Oppenheimer\u2019s security clearance. As the New York Times<\/a> noted, this \u201cbrought his career to a humiliating end. Until then a hero of American science, he lived out his life a broken man.\u201d He died at age 62 in 1967.<\/p>\n

\u201cA key element in the case against Oppenheimer,\u201d the Times reported, \u201cwas derived from his resistance to early work on the hydrogen bomb, which could explode with 1,000 times the force of an atomic bomb. The physicist Edward Teller had long advocated a crash program to devise such a weapon, and told the 1954 hearing that he mistrusted Oppenheimer\u2019s judgment. \u2018I would feel personally more secure,\u2019 he testified, \u2018if public matters would rest in other hands.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

But of course the \u201cblack mark of shame\u201d that remained stuck to Oppenheimer for the rest of his life was that he was a commie, and maybe a spy \u2013 in other words, totally anti-American. This was the basic lie used against those who challenged the tenets of the Cold War. The commission\u2019s secret hearings remained classified for sixty years. After they were declassified in 2014, historians expressed amazement that they contained virtually no damning evidence of any sort against Oppenheimer, and lots of testimony sympathetic to him. The revelations here seem primarily to expose the government\u2019s interest in covering its own lies.<\/p>\n

It was this past December that Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, chairman of the department that the Atomic Energy Commission had morphed into, nullified the revocation of Oppenheimer\u2019s security clearance, declaring the 1954 hearing a \u201cflawed process.\u201d Getting the government to undo its wrong was a long, arduous process<\/a>, embarked on by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the authors of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer<\/em>. It took them about sixteen years. They finally succeeded in clearing his name.<\/p>\n

And while I applaud their enormous effort and its result, I also note it isn\u2019t finished yet. This is more than simply a personal matter: the righting of a bureaucratic wrong done to one man. The future of humanity remains at stake. The U.S. government has spent multi-trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons<\/a> development over the years, conducted a thousand-plus nuclear tests, and is currently in possession of 5,244 nuclear warheads, out of an insane global total of some 12,500. Perhaps it\u2019s time to start listening to \u2013 and hearing \u2013 Oppenheimer\u2019s words.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/span><\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound<\/span> (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at <\/span><\/em>koehlercw@gmail.com<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

12 Jul 2023 – A mere 55 years after his death, the U.S. government has restored J. Robert Oppenheimer\u2019s security clearance, which the Atomic Energy Commission had taken away from him in 1954, declaring him to be not simply a communist but, in all likelihood, a Soviet spy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[853,902,3097,2045,450,112,70],"class_list":["post-239512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism","tag-atomic-weapons","tag-bhagavad-gita","tag-j-robert-oppenheimer","tag-manhattan-project","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-pentagon","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239512"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239513,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239512\/revisions\/239513"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}