Entering the Age of Nuclear Terror
As much as this year’s 70th anniversary of stopping the Holocaust was a moment to
honor, the anniversaries over the next few weeks will mark the successful test
of Trinity and America’s horrific atomic destructions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
recalls Gary G. Kohls.
By Gary G. Kohls
Seventy years ago, on July 16, 1945, an assortment of scientists, including
refugees who had fled European fascism, succeeded in exploding the first
experimental atomic bomb in the desert outside Alamogordo, New Mexico.
The site of the detonation of this plutonium bomb was to become blasphemously
known as the Trinity Site after Trinity, the code name for the experiment.
Trinity was the final stage of the U.S. Army’s top secret Manhattan Project to
develop atomic bombs with the intent to use them against military targets in
Nazi Germany. That is, until Germany surrendered before any of the bombs were
ready to launch.
Then mission creep entered the picture and a scramble for other targets ensued.
Despite the certainty that Japan was trying to find a way to surrender with
honor, the U.S. military started looking for Japanese targets. The Trinity test
bomb was essentially identical to the one that would destroy Nagasaki a few
weeks later on Aug. 9.
Motivating factors for not just mothballing the massively expensive project
included 1) the huge secret costs that would be difficult to explain to Congress
if the bomb hadn’t been used, 2) the momentum that had been built up was
impossible to stop, 3) the unquenchable desire to achieve retribution against
Japan for its ambush at Pearl Harbor (killing 2,500 soldiers), and 4) the need
to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that the United States had “the bomb” and to
warn Stalin to stay away from the spoils of the already defeated Japan.
The ragtag team of mostly English-as-a-second-language immigrant scientists had
been ably headed by two American citizens, the physicist Dr. J. Robert
Oppenheimer (the first director of the Los Alamos National Laboratories, which
was code-named Project Y) and by U.S. Army Colonel (soon to be promoted to
brigadier general) Leslie R. Groves. Each had been charged with organizing the
hugely diverse number of scientific teams and, in the case of Groves, the
organizations necessary to produce the materials that could complete such a
complex and expensive mission.
The project was called the Manhattan Project because it began in New York City,
started in 1939 and cost $2 billion in 1940s dollars to complete ($26 billion in
today’s dollars). Ninety percent of the money was spent in the manufacturing
processes and only 10 percent in research and development. The project employed
130,000 people over the war years and was slated to end at the successful
conclusion of the war.
But, as is typical for such costly Pentagon endeavors, megacorporations like Dow
Chemical, ICI, Raytheon and assorted investment banks interested in exploiting
the publicly-financed nuclear research kept Los Alamos in business. Indeed,
after the war, the nuclear weapons research, development and production were
accelerated, rather than stopped, and the world became immeasurably more
unstable.
Who Made It Happen
Many of the “alien” scientist leaders in the Manhattan Project were refugees
from Europe and many of them would become Nobel Prize winners for their
achievements in nuclear physics; but at the time of their service, they had come
to America mostly to escape Adolf Hitler’s fascist regime. Significantly,
following the war, the Pentagon, showing its right-wing leanings, not only
purged the leftist Oppenheimer (because of his family’s antifascist/communist/socialist history) but it recruited scores of pro-fascist, exNazi scientists in Project Paperclip.
There was, in fact, a race between the U.S. and the USSR to recruit Hitler’s
scientists. It is uncertain which nation won the race; perhaps both sides lost.
The two American leaders of the Manhattan Project had certain characteristics
that enabled the success of the mission. “Oppie,” as Oppenheimer was
affectionately known, easily acquired loyalty from his co-workers and
subordinates not because he was an authoritarian type like the military man
Groves, but because he was respected and loved and therefore obediently
followed.
Groves also achieved obedience and productivity from his underlings through
classical military discipline that was accomplished, not out of love, but out of
fear of punishment if performance wasn’t up to Groves’s standards. A military
colleague of Groves, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Nichols, considered Groves “the
biggest sonafabitch I’ve ever met.”
That “drill sergeant brutality” approach also works temporarily when K-9 dogs
are tortured in training until they become sufficiently vicious to attack any
victim that is fingered by their trainers. (But trainers are advised to watch
their necks if they ever let down their guard.)
Of course, as occurs in all chain-of-command organizations (like most
corporations, monarchies, fascist organizations, police states and in many
punitive child-rearing families), Groves was motivated to succeed because of his
own fears of punishment or disrespect from his superior officers. Like most of
us, Groves was also motivated to succeed out of fear of demotion or failing to
advance in his career or pay grade.
At the time of his appointment to manage the Manhattan Project, the grossly
obese Groves (estimated to weigh up to 300 pounds, he was a chocolate candy and
sugar addict) had been in charge of constructing the world’s largest office
building, the Pentagon. The appointment to the Manhattan Project was initially
regarded by Groves to be a demotion but being promoted to brigadier general
helped to make the change more palatable.
The Day After Trinity
At the conclusion of the documentary film (nominated in 1980 for the Academy
Award for best documentary film) “The Day After Trinity,” Oppenheimer was filmed
later in life answering a question about Sen. Robert Kennedy’s efforts to
initiate talks to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer replied “It’s
20 years too late. It should have been done the day after Trinity.”
Here are excerpts from some Amazon.com reviews of “The Day After Trinity.” They
express much of what I wanted to say in this essay.
“The Day After Trinity is a haunting journey through the dawn of the nuclear
age, an incisive history of humanity’s most dubious achievement and the man
behind it — J. Robert Oppenheimer, the principal architect of the atomic bomb.
Featuring archival footage and commentary from scientists and soldiers directly
involved with the Manhattan Project, this gripping film is a fascinating look at
the scope and power of the Nuclear Age. (Amazon.com Editorial review)
“’I have become death’,” declared nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer upon
first witnessing the terrible power of the atomic bomb. The Oscar-nominated
documentary The Day After Trinity uses newsreel footage and recently
declassified government film to trace the growth of the Manhattan Project under
Oppenheimer’s guidance. The New Mexico A-bomb tests are shown, as are the
aftermaths of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
“The final scenes detail Oppenheimer’s transformation from the ‘father of the Abomb’ to one of the most tireless opponents of nuclear power. The Day After
Trinity received its widest distribution when it was telecast over PBS on April
29, 1981.
“The Day After Trinity covers both the day after, but more importantly the days
before Trinity as experienced by the scientists who built the atom bomb. The
story of the bomb is usually told from its public debut (at the Trinity test
site), though the story begins long before. Here it is told very well, through
fascinating interviews with the men and women who lived in the strangely utopian
Los Alamos.
“Day After Trinity connects the humanity of the project with the horror of the
result. The destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki make it hard to imagine the
sort of people capable of creating such mass destruction. Perhaps for that
reason, the creators are sometimes written off as mad scientists, or lumped in
under Oppenheimer’s personality. But the people on the screen are brilliant,
insightful, agonized, and funny. It contributes a great deal toward our
understanding of the bomb, without making it any easier.”
(http://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=The_Day_after_Trinity)
Keeping the Peace?
In one of her early songs, “Keeping the Peace,” Duluth’s singer-songwriter Sara
Thomsen wrote:
“Down in New Mexico we were trav’lin’ along. Stopped in Los Alamos, didn’t stay
long, But we wanted to see the scene of the crime Where they made the A-bomb and
then created a shrine.
“Not too far from my own back door Is a trigger that would signal up a nuclear
war It travels down to the ground, across the sea And up from the water comes a
nuclear submarine.
“Walkin’ through the woods with an old Swede saw Are some people who decided to
uphold the law. They said, ‘Keepin’ the peace is a whole lot bigger And they cut
down the pole of that nuclear trigger.’”
Motivated by the same outrage (as expressed in Thomsen’s song) over what
America’s warmongers have been doing to the planet and its creatures, every July
16 since 1990 a group of Catholic Christians have been gathering at the Trinity
Site for a vigil. Similar to the School of the America’s watch efforts, the
gatherings at Trinity have been important parts of the many nonviolent antiwar
resistance efforts that attempt to raise the public’s consciousness about the
diabolical evil that was unleashed at the Trinity Site on July 16, 1945.
Jesus joined many other moral philosophers in saying “as you reap so shall you
sow.” Gandhi said that your means are your ends in embryo. What those sayings
mean is that if one wants to achieve, for example, truth (an end), one cannot
choose lying as the means to attain it. If one uses violence as a means to an
end, one will not achieve peace. If one wants peace, one must choose peaceful
means. In other words, one can predict failure or success of a desired end
result according to the means that were chosen.
So nations that choose violence and war as a tactic in dealing with other
nations and then claim that peace is the desired end, you will know that they
are either deceiving themselves and others or are ethically severely
compromised. And that is why the development and threat to use nuclear (or
other) weapons, will not result in world peace, but rather endless war and
retaliation.
Refusing to think about the long-term consequences of our nation’s militaristic
dominative power strategies (as usual) in the nuclear weapons proliferation that
poisoned and bankrupted the two superpowers after World War Two, the U.S.
military and certain of its civilian and corporate partners in crime have kept
sowing the proverbial wind, and now the rest of us are reaping the whirlwind.
Radiation Exposure
The inevitable lethal consequences of widespread radiation from nuclear weapons
testing and use (ex: depleted-uranium armor-piercing shells) and the huge
unaddressed, impossible problem of widespread radioactive waste from nuclear
power installations keeps coming back to haunt us, again and again, in the form
of uncountable tens of millions of radiation-induced cancers, congenital
deformities, physical and mental disabilities, neurodevelopmental disorders (of
exposed soldiers, as in Gulf War Syndrome), toxic food, toxic habitats (e.g.,
Chernobyl and Fukushima), unaffordable nuclear arms races, permanent cold and
hot wars (many of which were provoked by the Reagan-era escalation of America’s
nuclear weapons industries in the 1980s, provoking similar escalations by
fearful enemies).
Our so-called American ingenuity and blind trust in the moving hand of the holy
market can be so pitifully short-sighted (usually only looking out as far as the
next quarter’s earnings reports), that corrupt crony capitalism can be
rightfully blamed for having produced numerous international war crimes, crimes
against humanity and crimes against the peace.
In his antiwar poem “Armageddon” poet William Dickey identifies one of the major
root causes of war and why our military leaders always seem to do what is best
for the longevity of their military professions. Provoking endless war is good
for the business of the Pentagon and all the industries that profit from war:
“Leonard Woolf said that there would be war
because the generals, having devised their weapons,
and seen them manufactured
would have to try them out, and it is true.
There is no invention of man that has not been used
if it was capable of being used, and these are.
Electric cattle prods defame the soft personal testicles.
But from this Armageddon, the storm’s center,
not even a cry
“There are thieves among us.”
The Decision
As vilified as Harry Truman has been over the decision to drop the bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then claiming to have lost no sleep over those
decisions, he has been quoted as saying “All through history it has been the
nations that have given the most to the generals and the least to the people
that have been the first to fall.”
Truman was a neophyte on the world stage when Franklin Roosevelt died suddenly
right before VE Day, and he was immediately surrounded by overwhelmingly
militaristic types who were all in favor of using the new bomb. Nobody, even the
physicists, fully understood the tremendous lethality of nuclear bombs nor could
they have predicted the condemnation that would be leveled at America for being
the first and only nation to use that weapon.
One civilian opponent of using nuclear weapons against civilian targets was
Oswald Brewster, a Manhattan Project contractor from New York. He wrote a
heartfelt 3,000-word letter to President Truman that said.
“This thing must not be permitted on earth. We must not become the most hated
and feared people on earth, however good our intent may be. I beg of you, sir,
not to pass this (letter) off because I happen to be an unknown, without
influence or name in the public eye. There surely are men in this country to
whom you could turn, asking them to study this problem.”
Truman’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson and his military advisor (and Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) George Marshall were so impressed with the
sentiment and logic of Brewster’s letter that they actually delivered it to
Truman. But nothing could slow down the momentum towards the satanic war crime.
The letter probably wound up in the circular file.
Dr. Kohls writes a weekly column for the Reader Weekly, an alternative
newsweekly magazine that is published in Duluth, Minnesota. Many of his columns
are archived at http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn.