I have a vivid memory from childhood – London 1962: my mother taking me by the hand, aged six, to join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Aldermaston march as it snaked past the end of our road on its way to Marble Arch. My first demo – there would be many more – and my introduction to the horrific idea of nuclear annihilation. A year later the Cuban missile crisis made it all the more real, and, we all thought, imminent, even to a seven-year-old.
Mary Robinson has similar memories. “As a young woman, I marched alongside hundreds of thousands of protesters against `the Bomb’, “she writes in Time about her work on nuclear disarmament with The Elders. “Now a grandmother, I am appalled that my grandchildren still face the same spectre of nuclear war, and I ask myself: `Where are today’s marchers?’”
We were never reassured or comforted by the deterrence doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) which seemed only to emphasise the peril of the age and yet rely implausibly on a rationality we did not see in those in possession of the bomb. Now complacency has set in – that no one has used the bomb since then, somehow making such arguments plausible.
Christopher Nolan explains the making of his powerful film Oppenheimer in much the same terms: “It was a period in which there was an enormous amount of fear ... When I first told one of my teenage sons what I was writing, he said to me `That’s just not something anybody worries about any more’.
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Nolan and the author of Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus on which the film is based, Kai Bird, hope that it “will initiate a national conversation not only about our existential relationship to weapons of mass destruction but also the need in our society for scientists as public intellectuals.”
Its portrayal of Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project and “father” of the atomic bomb, is of a complex, morally ambiguous character, witty, charming, obsessive, and sexually libertine, rived by doubts, the articulation of which would see him face a McCarthyite witch hunt. He was a scientific and organisational genius who cautioned that the weapon he created should be seen not as a means of waging nuclear war but of making it unthinkable. Perhaps always a pious hope, but dangerous talk in the US during the Cold War.
As Bird says: “The witch hunters of that season are the direct ancestors of our current political actors of a certain paranoid style.” Think Trump . The Oppenheimer case, he argues, sent a warning to all scientists not to stand up in the political arena as public intellectuals. “This was the real tragedy of Oppenheimer”.
The persecution was made easier by his leftist sympathies. Though never a Communist Party member, Oppenheimer mixed freely and unapologetically with others who were, and Nolan conveys those pre-red-scare days with a sympathy unusual for Hollywood.
The equal existential threat of climate change is instead engaging the passions of young people
Oppenheimer argued for international regulation – proliferation control – before anyone else, and opposed the development of the even-more-lethal hydrogen bomb on the basis that its existence would encourage others to develop it.
Although he regretted that the bomb came too late to be used on the Nazis, he clearly, though never explicitly, was unhappy about the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, admitting to “terrible moral scruples”. He suggested that the Hiroshima bomb was used “against an essentially defeated enemy”, a far cry from the official narrative that continues to insist the cities’ destruction saved hundreds of thousands of US soldiers’ lives and shortened dramatically a war which Japan was determined to pursue to the end. More than 80 per cent of the at least 110,0000 who died, however, were civilians. Many of the critics of the bombings suggest that US president Truman saw the attacks largely as a warning to the Soviet Union of America’s new power.
Among the film’s most chilling scenes are the matter-of -fact conversations between Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, and Edward Teller about the possibility, which they admit is remote, that they may be about to unleash a chain reaction that could destroy the world. They simply don’t know, but agree cheerily to press ahead.
Vladimir Putin’s implied threats to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine and North Korea’s regular testing of its nukes are stark reminders of the madness of complacency about living with nuclear weapons. At no point since the end of the Cold War has nuclear war felt more plausible. Now, however, the equal existential threat of climate change is instead engaging the passions of young people.
In rehearsing, often at length and fascinatingly, many of the arguments that still resonate in our debates today Oppenheimer is very much a film of the moment. But, as Mary Robinson complains, “where are today’s marchers?”