![]() The world recognized Rotblat’s impact, but I find few people, physicists or not, have heard his name. The comparison with Oppenheimer’s famous line is stark: two men who both knew the danger of their work yet chose different paths. “Science became identified with death and destruction,” Rotblat said in his Nobel lecture as he described the inception of the atomic age. For this, Rotblat shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize. Disgusted, Rotblat departed the project a few months later and would spend his life working toward atomic nonproliferation. ![]() In March 1944, however, he had dinner with General Leslie Groves, Jr., director of the project, who remarked that its objective was to subdue the Soviet Union. Despite his reservations, he believed that stopping Nazi Germany justified the work. A Polish physicist, Rotblat worked with the British Mission to the Manhattan Project. What astonishes me, however, is the obscurity into which Oppenheimer’s colleague Joseph Rotblat has been cast. History has rehabilitated Oppenheimer as a tragic moral actor, with director Christopher Nolan of Inception and Interstellar fame recently announcing the production of an Oppenheimer biopic. He was publicly humiliated in a security hearing where a colleague testified against him and his security clearance was revoked. Oppenheimer would become an advocate for nuclear peace and oppose the construction of the hydrogen bomb, but not without consequence. After the war, Oppenheimer sat with President Truman to talk about international control of nuclear weapons, telling him: “I feel I have blood on my hands.” Oppenheimer has captivated the American imagination as the brilliant physicist who wrestled with the implications of his creation in the same week that he helped top brass optimize the explosion of the bomb, he was heard muttering “ those poor little people” on his morning walk. To answer that, it’s important to understand Oppenheimer and his colleagues. As a physicist, I have to wonder: how could my predecessors have participated in something used for such violent ends? Did no one think about walking away? To many Americans, the bombings were justified, a necessity for ending the war. There’s the lesser-known fact that about 50,000 Koreans, prisoners of Imperial Japan, died in the attacks. ![]() ![]() Less than a month later, a quarter of a million lives were lost to the technology created by the Manhattan Project: people vaporized, buildings torn to dust, survivors dying in agony weeks or months later. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, recited a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” After the first-ever explosion of an atomic bomb on Jnear Socorro, N.M., J. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |