Oppenheimer: The Dilemma of Scientific Power

Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb

Before the atomic bomb was even an idea, Oppenheimer was making an impact on modern science. After studying quantum physics in Europe as a graduate student, he was central in bringing this novel science back to America. Just before World War II, he published several scientific papers predicting that stars could collapse into such unimaginable density that not even light would escape their gravity. Oppenheimer’s predictions were eventually borne out, and we now know Oppenheimer’s “dark stars” as black holes. (If Oppenheimer had lived long enough to see his predictions substantiated, he might well have won a Nobel Prize for this work.)

But while Oppenheimer was clearly a brilliant scientist, he was even more skilled as a lab director. He continually inspired others to do their best work, pointing them in fruitful directions and helping them work through problems.

These gifts were on full display when Oppenheimer was appointed to lead the Manhattan Project in 1942. Since German scientists successfully split uranium atoms apart in 1938, scientists knew that the enormous energy this nuclear fission released could potentially power a devastating bomb. With the supersecret Manhattan Project, America was determined to race forward and create the first such atomic bomb—before Hitler’s German scientists might get there first.

Oppenheimer’s hope (painfully naive in retrospect) was that the atomic bomb would prove such a terrifyingly powerful weapon that it would end not just World War II, but war itself.

The rest is, of course, history. Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945. (Hitler, it turns out, was never much interested in pursuing atomic bombs; the underlying science was too “Jewish.”) Three months later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and hastening Japan’s surrender.

Oppenheimer’s hope (painfully naive in retrospect) was that the atomic bomb would prove such a terrifyingly powerful weapon that it would end not just World War II, but war itself. It didn’t exactly work out that way. One of Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project scientists, Edward Teller, continued to push the envelope, developing the thermonuclear (or hydrogen) bomb. Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb relied on conventional explosives to trigger a nuclear fission explosion. Teller’s hydrogen bomb, however, used fission to trigger a vastly more powerful nuclear fusion explosion. Far from ending all war, the atom bomb had now birthed a weapon vastly more destructive than the bomb developed in the New Mexico desert.

Scientific Power and Restraint

In the years following World War II, Oppenheimer discouraged the development of the hydrogen bomb and was a leading public voice urging restraint in nuclear armament. It wasn’t a message those in power wanted to hear. After a brief White House meeting where Oppenheimer confessed to feeling that he had blood on his hands, President Harry Truman dismissed Oppenheimer as a “crybaby.” Oppenheimer also had a history of communist sympathies, rooted in a time when American communism brought to mind New Deal-like policies in America, support of democracy over fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and the embrace of Jews like Oppenheimer amid societal antisemitism.

But as the postwar world morphed into a Cold War with the nuclear-armed Soviet Union, Oppenheimer’s past as a “fellow traveler” was viewed with fresh suspicion. Combine that with an emerging McCarthyist politics of fear and petty interpersonal grudges, and Oppenheimer soon saw himself deemed a security threat to his country. If Oppenheimer was genuinely loyal to America, the reasoning seemed to go, then why would he urge nuclear restraint and arms talks with the Soviets? Then as now, we tend to admire power more than restraint, a brilliant mind more than a sensitive conscience. In 1954 Oppenheimer’s security clearance was revoked, and he soon found himself pushed to the margins of the country he loved so dearly.

Ethics for Fallen People

Toward the end of his life in the 1960s, Oppenheimer gradually regained his reputation, delivering a range of public talks on science and our nuclear age. He cared deeply about science popularization, recognizing that shared understanding was essential to a unified society. He knew science was on the cusp of tremendous discoveries. Yet he argued that the discovery “of greatest import” would be for us to learn “something about ourselves.” That something he referred to is an insight that resonates with the deepest truths of Christianity. Oppenheimer called it “knowledge of the inwardness of evil” that exists within every one of us. Without it, we “project and externalize what we cannot bear to see within us,” seeing evil only in our enemies. This is an uncomfortable truth about human nature that secular societies too often try to ignore. But recognizing the fallenness of our nature makes a profound difference. It’s hard to think of a more powerful motivator for an attitude of humility, caution, and ethical reflection in using the tools of science.