When I examine my conscience I ask myself not just what I did, but how bad were the consequences of my negative actions? Sometimes the immediate results are right there, a shattered relationship, a broken dish. I am not aware of any personal actions that have the possible consequences of splitting the atom, but if I were to examine the conscience of the Manhattan Project, how bad were the results, including the ones that became obvious only after Little Boy and Fat Man obliterated two cities? Worse, much worse than we could have possibly imagined.
We are sitting in a theater 68 years after the fact. Although Christopher Nolan begins Oppenheimer’s story much earlier than those eventful days, telling a story backwards is always difficult. From the storyteller's point of view, looking in the rearview mirror he or she can see how things played out in ways no one could not have imagined. But where is it in his or her job description that writers have to be omniscient? And to be honest about telling the story as it happened, how much of what we’ve learned after the fact can be scripted into the narrative before it becomes nothing more than a moralistic fable meant to instruct about the consequences of bad decisions?
There is a role for telling stories of good versus evil. God knows there are more than enough of them to claim our attention and compete for our vote. One of the problems in trying to focus humanity on taking the right steps in combating climate change is that alarmist tales where the payoffs still give cash and prizes hinder accurate telling. How can we possibly disconnect from burning fossil fuels when our lives and livelihood will be disrupted? It is a situation that can only be solved when the threat of human kind’s survival is an in our face life or death situation, or at least that is how it is portrayed in the accompanying story line. Humankind will take no action until we survey the wreckage, but then, like Hiroshima, it may be too late.
The men, and they were all men, who made the decisions that lead to humanity’s total dependence on burning fossil fuels to foster the industrial revolution, followed the time honored rules of self-enrichment; they just grabbed what was at hand and sold it for a profit. Did they see the ice sheet of Antarctica melting and the water in Florida becoming as hot as the hot tub in a beachfront condo? The answer is clearly no, they did not. They could not. Do Germans who bought into Hitler’s Third Reich after the economic disaster of the Weimar Republic share blame for the Holocaust? They claim that they are really decent people motivated by giving a new strong leader the chance of improving a defeated Germany’s economic condition and lost status in the world. The murder of millions was unforeseen. They claim ignorance and to some degree they are right. The horror of the camps was not broadcast. Did Oppenheimer and the other Los Alamos scientists foresee the insidious arms race that would stoke the economy for generations as well as the lethal consequences of unleashing the power of nuclear fission and fusion? Obviously they could not, or at least not in the way that it appears to us now. They were attempting something that they did not know could be done. It had never been done before. We have the wisdom of hindsight. Looking back, researching carefully, we might find evidence that was overlooked, neglected, even willfully hidden because it would have stopped the development of the weapon that military planners pinned their hopes on. In the Manhattan Project, there is evidence of fear in the hearts of some scientists that humankind was stepping into the unknown and that the powers about to be unleashed were of a scale that had never been seen in the history of the world, but these were suppressed by chain of command.
In each of these imagined scenarios, the protagonists could be straw men in a tale of right and wrong with far reaching consequences. But in storytelling, describing the reality of the moment when the event actually happened is very difficult and easy to botch with a lot of judgment and well intentioned afterthoughts. I will not argue that this lets us off the hook, but I will point out that if the narrator or writer or singer does not capture that immediacy, they have failed.
The story telling in “Oppenheimer” was masterful. I have some familiarity with the subject so in a sense it was a retelling for me. If I were the writer, there were a few details that I might have outlined more clearly, especially the role of Lewis Strauss in the post war campaign to destroy Oppenheimer’s reputation when he became an advocate against the disastrous arms race that has left the world with the ever present threat of mutual mass destruction, but I can imagine Oppy as the leader of the brainy team that won the race to detonate the Atomic bomb. His struggles were real, and as far as my reading of history, accurate. He studies the Bhagavad Gita, even during sex, and the famous quote “Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds” when he witnessed the first detonation stayed in the script.
A German friend says she was shocked when at the celebration at Los Alamos after the bomb was dropped in Hiroshima, Oppenheimer says, “too bad we didn’t get it done in time to drop on Germany.” I think that this is from an actual report. What shocked me more was when Truman says to his chief of staff after Oppenheimer’s visit to the oval office, “I don’t want to see that cry baby ever again.” That statement was definitely not recorded, but had the ring of truth. Truman’s attitude is so contrary to what I was taught. I came from a very politically conservative and activist Republican family; I thought that I had heard every suspicious utterance out of Harry’s mouth.
Oppenheimer is not a glorification of war or the dropping of the bomb. If it were just a moral tale, there could have been cuts to the mass destruction of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, somehow hinting at the epidemic of cancers that started to appear in the tribal people who were unwittingly exposed to the radiation, but the film maker, Christopher Nolan, was disciplined. He kept focused on telling the story as accurately as he could about what actually happened when it happened. That was its strength. It was compelling.
There is another side to my understanding in the story telling. I just listened to a politician in the US saying that it does not feel particularly good to have been right about the total incompetence of Donald Trump and the serious mess that he wreaked on our democracy. Feeling good or bad about predicting an outcome is not an answer to understanding karma. It is not taking responsibility for our actions or inaction seriously. In this case of Trump, the evidence was pretty clear from the moment he announced his bid for the office, but the story is really not so much about the hard facts of a narcissistic personality disorder as it is the acceptance by so many Americans of a political agenda contrary to our best interests.
Does the ignorance of any story teller, and that includes all of us telling our own stories, leave us off the hook for being responsible for the consequences of our actions? Include both the consequences that we could foresee as well as the ones that appeared over time, in hindsight. I cannot say. I can only make that call for myself.
Is there still room for a moral tale about the dropping of the bomb? Of course. I know one as compelling as “Oppenheimer,” one that doesn’t dilute either by mixing the poison with the antidote. John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic” tells the same story, but opera is meant to be a moral tale. I heard one of the first San Francisco Opera’s performances in October of 2005. Whereas Christopher Nolan used the book by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, “American Prometheus,” to write “Oppenheimer,” Adams could not enlist any of the librettists from previous operas so he and his producer, Peter Sellars, used the declassified transcripts available from Manhattan Project plus some poetry that inspired Oppenheimer. It vacillates between ordinary, even crass speech and the sublime. Adam’s music is also challenging. He does not hesitate to preach.
You hear it just after the curtain goes up. One of the very first arias sung by Edward Teller sets the tone:
“First of all, let me say that I have no hope of clearing my conscience.
The things we are working on are so terrible
that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.”
The chorus sings a very dark stanza from the Bhagavad Gita:
“At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous,
Full of mouths and eyes, feet, thighs and bellies,
Terrible with fangs, O master,
All the worlds are fear-struck, even just as I am.
When I see you, Vishnu, omnipresent,
Shouldering the sky, in hues of rainbow,
With your mouths agape and flame-eyes staring —
All my peace is gone; my heart is troubled.”
Adams introduces a tribal Tiwa woman, Pasqualita, his wife’s maid who sings plaintively after the Trinity test,
“The winter dawned, but the dead did not come back.
News came on the frost, ‘The dead are on the march!’
We danced in prison to a winter music, many we loved began to dream of the dead.
They made no promises, we never dreamed a threat.
And the dreams spread.” (https://booklets.idagio.com/075597930238.pdf)
The hero’s plight is unresolved and leaves us hanging. The music, the dramatic setting aim for a different place in the heart. It is meant to plant a troubling question, one that was not clearly seen during the lead up. It is seen in the rearview mirror.
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Here is the message cloaked in prayer that General Norman Schwarzkopf, USA Commander-in-Chief U.S. Central Command, gave to the military on January 16, 1991 as he ordered the invasion of a Muslim nation. Billy Graham as “America’s Pastor” was at his side to sanction it.
“Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines of the United States Central Command, this morning at 0300, we launched Operation Desert Storm, an offensive campaign that will enforce the United Nation’s resolutions that Iraq must cease its rape and pillage of its weaker neighbor and withdraw its forces from Kuwait. My confidence in you is total. Our cause is just! Now you must be the thunder and lightning of Desert Storm. May God be with you, your loved ones at home, and our Country.”
Father George Zabelka was the priest for the airmen who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He gave them his blessing. Days later he counseled an airman who had flown a low-level reconnaissance flight over the city of Nagasaki shortly after the detonation of “Fat Man.” The man described how thousands of scorched, twisted bodies writhed on the ground in the final throes of death, while those still on their feet wandered aimlessly in shock – flesh seared, melted, and falling off. The crewman’s description raised a stifled cry from the depths of Zabelka’s soul: “My God, what have we done?”
There was no prayer in Los Alamos. There wasn’t even a church or synagogue until 1947, two years after the destruction of the Japanese cities and the end of the war--religion in the role of a mopping up operation, gearing its ministry to assuaging the conscience of the conquerors in the service of its generals.
Father Zabelka by the end of his life came to renounce his role in blessing the airmen and aircraft that carried the bombs. Norman Schwarzkopf was buried with full military honors at West Point. To the victor belong the spoils.
Robert Oppenheimer died on February 18, 1967. There was a service at Princeton attended by 600 people.
A few days before Trinity Oppenheimer quoted Bhartṛhari's Śatakatraya:
In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him.
