What Oppenheimer meant

Barely a week into the release of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian Premier and President, and currently the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, threatened Ukraine with nuclear weapons if Kyiv kept up its counter-offensive against the Russian invasion. “There simply wouldn’t be any other solution,” he said, “Our enemies should pray to our fighters that they do not allow the world to go up in nuclear flames.”

This is not the first time that Russia has raised the spectre of nuclear conflict. Last month, Vladimir Putin said Russia had moved a first batch of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, claiming they were placed there for “deterrence”, while Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko confirmed that in the face of aggression, he would show “no hesitation” in using the Russian tactical nuclear weapons stationed on Belarusian soil.

According to the Federation of American Scientists, Russia has about 4,477 deployed and reserve nuclear warheads, including around 1,900 tactical nuclear weapons. After the August 1991 coup, Russia moved quickly to acquire the assets of the old Soviet Union and to take over the role played by the USSR in international relations.

The dominant assumption within Russia and the West was that Russia would become the sole inheritor of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and would be responsible for its control and maintenance. As the collapse of the Soviet Union sparked fears over securing unsecured bomb-grade materials in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, it was necessary for Russia to co-operate with Ukraine to remove and dismantle its tactical nuclear weapons. Back then, Ukraine perhaps had no idea that Russia would subject it to nuclear blackmail three decades later.

Now that the film Oppenheimer has set in motion all the nuclear talk, it is worthwhile to admit that nuclear disarmament has long ceased to top the agenda of policymaking. The ‘father of the atomic bomb’, lest we forget, was also the author of a radical proposal to place international controls over atomic materials. He vehemently opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb and criticised the US Air Force's plans to fight a nuclear war.

History is witness to the now almost-forgotten hysteria of the early 1950s, when his ideas were anathema to the powerful advocates of a massive nuclear buildup, notably the US Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss, the ‘Superbomb’ advocate Edward Teller, and FBI director J Edgar Hoover, who conspired to have a hearing board find that Robert Oppenheimer could not be trusted with America's nuclear secrets.

Oppenheimer made a valiant effort to lead the world away from the ‘bomb culture’ to contain the nuclear threat he had helped to set loose. However, what must count as a singular model for rationality in the nuclear age was his plan for the international control of atomic energy, known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, conceived and largely written by him.

In the early stages of the nuclear arms race, Albert Einstein did call for a new type of sanity. Now that we have the full knowledge about the consequences of nuclear war, about its size, shape and dimensions, the fact that nuclear weapons development has been tolerated, accepted, and hailed by the public and politicians alike, alongside those who participate in designing and building these weapons, we are complicit as well.

Therefore, feeling overawed by the five permanent members of the UN, we hailed our Pokhran moments both in 1974 and 1998, as part of our deterrence strategy, only to find ourselves in a nuclear race with Pakistan, and now China.

Who is to blame for these nuclear arms races? Was it Nazi Germany, or was it America, under the order of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939, that began developing atomic weapons during World War II, fearing that the Nazis would develop one first?

Harry Truman was sailing home from the Potsdam conference on the USS Augusta when he was given the news of the bombing of Hiroshima. “This is the greatest thing in history,” he is said to have exulted. Three days later, On August 9, 1945, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

In the postwar period, the United States was soon engaged in a nuclear arms race against the Soviet Union, which it feared had strong territorial ambitions in postwar Europe, and potential ideological ambitions to wage war against the United States. By the 1980s, at the height of the nuclear arms race, the US and the Soviet Union were said to have had between them tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.

Should it cause us relief that of the 195 countries in the world today, there are only nine countries – the United States, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea – that possess nuclear weapons? Or the fact that the global nuclear stockpile is down to some 13,000 weapons, much lower than during the Cold War?

That the fundamental threat to humanity that even a few dozen of these weapons represent does not alter with the reduced number of warheads. For instance, just one US nuclear-armed submarine – and the United States usually has 10 of those submarines at sea – has seven times the destructive power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

By the end of 1945, some 145,000 people had died from the bombing of Hiroshima, most of them civilians—children, women and the elderly. Another 75,000 had died in Nagasaki. As Oppenheimer witnessed the first detonation of an atomic weapon on July 16, 1945, he is said to have uttered the line “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” What was perhaps left unsaid was the primal human impulse of self-destruction through self-aggrandisement, or perhaps that was what he meant. 

(The writer is a Kolkata-based commentator on geopolitics, development and culture)