Oppenheimer

The Fauci of the Atomic Age

The Trinity atomic bomb test at Alamogordo July 16, 1945

Destroyer of Worlds. The bio-pic 'Oppenheimer' debuted in Paris on July 21, 2023. Its first weekend grossed $82 million, exceeded only by 'Barbie', at $162 million.

Directed by Christopher Nolan, 'Oppenheimer' is based on Kai Bird's and Martin Sherwin's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography 'American Prometheus'. Oppenheimer would have appreciated the comparison to the Greek wanabe-god who brought fire down from the heavens, hoping only to serve mankind, then persecuted for his hubris. Oppenheimer, a child of wealth and privilege who did not suffer from lack of self-esteem, found divine company compatible with his own self-image. Upon witnessing the first test of a nuclear weapon at Alamagordo New Mexico, he had a quotation from the Bhagavad-Gita ready to hand: 'I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds'.

The film skips lightly over the fruition of the Manhattan Project in the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the instant deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, and the lingering deaths of others from radiation sickness.

Survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast seeking medical care (omitted from the ‘Oppenheimer’ movie)

Nolan focuses instead on Oppenheimer's drive to complete the bomb, a touch of remorse upon becoming aware of the consequences, the ingratitude of politicians exploiting his Communist past for their own ends, and his efforts toward personal redemption by assisting in negotiating limits on first-strike nuclear arsenals. His life had elements of both nobility and tragedy, ideal cinematic material that Nolan makes the most of.

Oppenheimer's life also set the tone of subsequent scientific hubris, of which the most recent manifestation was the three-part experiment conducted by an international consortium of life scientists. Synthesizing a bio-weapon from a bat virus was the first part, injecting billions of people with a purported 'vaccine' for the covid lab-crafted virus was the second part. Seeing how many people would accept this injection was the third part. Before Oppenheimer, the notion of conducting a global-scale experiment on all of humanity did not exist. As the torch of science-assisted mass murder passed from nuclear physicists to life scientists, the latter likewise saw their handiwork taken over by the military.

Prothonotary warbler

The Prothonotary Warbler, a small bird with a big role in American history. Alger Hiss was one of two iconic figures who personified the strains of early postwar America. Hiss was the archetypical blue-blood WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) back when that was an attribute to be envied rather than derided. (How times have changed!) In the heyday of Soviet espionage, Communist agents were thick on the ground in both the British and U.S. diplomatic and spy organizations. In 1950, Hiss was accused -- by an up-and-coming young Congressman named Richard Nixon -- of being one of them, spying for the Soviet Union.

In contrast to the impeccably tailored Hiss, Nixon presented a rumpled appearance even wearing his best suit, and his star witness Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor at Time magazine, looked even more disheveled. Hiss and Chambers had both been members of the Communist Party in the 1930s, when the United Front with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany was official U.S. policy. (The Hitler-Stalin treaty of alliance in 1939 was too much for many American Communists, who quit the Party after that.) The second trial of Hiss in 1950 (the first was inconclusive) hung on whether his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, really knew him when both were members of the Communist Party. Hiss claimed they were never acquainted, neither in the Communist Party nor anywhere else. Chambers said Hiss had stolen State Dept papers, had them re-typed overnight, and conveyed them to the Soviet Union. (How primitive document-copying was in those days!) Some of the papers, secreted in hollowed-out pumpkins on Chambers's Maryland farm, became known as the Pumpkin Papers.

Both Hiss and Chambers were avid bird-watchers. In Congressional testimony, Hiss mentioned his interest in bird-watching. Asked whether he'd ever seen a prothonotary warbler, Hiss answered 'Why yes, I have, right on the Potomac'. Chambers had previously testified that he and Hiss were together at Glen Echo where Hiss was thrilled to have spotted a prothonotary warbler, a rarely seen species. This telling detail convinced everyone that Hiss was lying when he claimed not to have known Chambers. The bird is named after a Byzantine notary who wore golden yellow robes. The statute of limitations on espionage had run out, but Hiss was eventually convicted of perjury, sentenced to five years in prison, and served four years behind bars. Later, Hiss secretly received an award for his services to the Soviet Union. His defenders in America, who had apparently not received the memo on this, continued to proclaim his innocence, denouncing what they regarded as a witch-hunt. Later still the Venona Manuscripts disclosed detailed KGB records of Hiss's spying activity, though Hiss’s defenders continued to dispute the identity of his code-name in those records.

Oppenheimer, another Progressive hero. After the perjury conviction of Alger Hiss, Progressives turned to Robert Oppenheimer as their cause célèbre du jour. But they were not done with the Hiss case. Fifty-seven years later, Hiss defenders Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya were still asserting that Hiss was not the spy named in the decrypted Venona KGB transcripts. 'The Hiss affair', they believe, 'remains a painful metaphor for the marginalization of left-wing New Dealers by anti-Communist crusaders...'.

The same Kai Bird, a contributing editor of The Nation, and Martin Sherwin, wrote the Oppenheimer biography 'American Prometheus' that formed the basis for the 'Oppenheimer' film. Bird also wrote on July 17, 2023, four days before the film's release, that 'Oppenheimer was destroyed by a political movement characterized by rank know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues, the witch-hunters of that season are the direct ancestors of our current political actors of a certain paranoid style'. In case the reference is not clear enough, Bird finds in former President Donald Trump 'a worldview proudly scornful of science'. Bringing common-sense judgment to questions of science is equivalent to being 'anti-science', in the worldview of writers like Bird, an offense deserving suppression rather than reasoned debate. Yet it is hardly unscientific to inquire whether a scientist's Communist political views might influence, say, nuclear proliferation favoring the Soviet Union. Berkeley graduate student and later historian Gordon Griffiths wrote that Oppenheimer and two other faculty members met regularly as part of a secret Communist Party cell. 'Oppenheimer' the movie omits this, but screens several other episodes of possible Communist affiliation, only to brush them aside as informal fellow-traveling rather than active espionage.

Alger Hiss and J Robert Oppenheimer are thus linked by one biased writer's attempt to cast them both as persecuted heroes. These two icons of Progressive beliefs both rose to pinnacles of power only to be brought down by those whom they regarded as lesser mortals. Oppenheimer, famous for never putting up with fools -- a category in which he placed nearly all of humanity except fellow members of the nuclear priesthood -- had a talent for making enemies. He counted on his well-recognized brilliance to bail him out of any trouble and silence anyone who dared to criticize -- an early instance of 'Follow the Science'. These qualities, plus substantial organizational ability, earned him the awesome responsibility of heading up the Manhattan Project. His assignment was to change the course of world history forever by devising a practical means of releasing the enormous energy of the atomic nucleus theorized by Albert Einstein. Einstein himself had sent a letter to FDR in August 1939 urging development of this new weapon to defeat Nazi Germany. Among the scientists recruited by Oppenheimer for the Manhattan Project were many Jewish refugees who had escaped certain death at the hands of the Nazis. For them, for FDR, and for all involved in the WWII effort, the most urgent necessity was to defeat Nazi Germany.

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The missing link in the chain reaction. Thanks to the United Front efforts of both the United States and the Soviet Union, Germany was defeated by conventional means in May 1945. In its surrender, Germany submitted to occupation by the United States, the Soviet Union, France and the United Kingdom. Hardly was the ink dry on the four occupying powers' postwar agreements than the United Front with the Soviet Union fell apart, launching the Cold War. This vastly changed domestic politics in the United States as well as the balance of power in Europe. In June 1945, the atomic bomb was still a work-in-progress. During the days of the United Front, Oppenheimer had become familiar with Soviet progress on bomb development. He learned, from direct consultations or inference from published papers or both, that the design of the detonator had stumped the Russians. An initial explosion was required to generate the critical mass leading to a chain reaction capable of releasing the enormous energy holding the atomic nucleus together. As Oppenheimer revealed in a 1965 interview, one of his key insights was that if there is a ‘good explosion’, the sequel progresses according to the laws of fluid dynamics, not ignition of solids. This of course fundamentally changes the design of the initial explosion chamber.

After the defeat of Nazi Germany, some of the scientists on the Manhattan Project wondered why development of a nuclear weapon widely understood to be targeted at Nazi Germany had to continue. Knowing better than anyone else the horrors such a weapon would inflict on civilians, they privately expressed doubts about continuing bomb development. But only one scientist, Leo Szilard, actively opposed further bomb development efforts in the immediate aftermath of Germany's defeat. Isolated in the New Mexico desert for years, working with an intensity analogous to nuclear energy itself, much more than scientific curiosity was at stake in testing whether their device would actually explode. And to their great relief, their military masters made it clear that actual usage of the weapon was a military and political matter, not a scientific one. Whatever disappointment the scientists may have felt at being treated like hired hands rather than as policy-makers gave way to the stronger desire to witness an explosion of their own making. So neither Oppenheimer nor any of the other nuclear physicists, with the sole exception of Szilard, made a big issue of exactly where the bomb might be targeted if not at Germany.

Shortly before the U.S. nuclear weapon development work was completed, Oppenheimer had written an article expressing his belief that it would not be good for the world for one country to have a nuclear monopoly. He felt this would give too much of an advantage to that one country, which would use it to dominate the world. The one country he had in mind was of course the United States. Foreseeing perhaps the virtues of 'mutual assured destruction (MAD)' in creating a postwar balance of power, he felt that such an arrangement would be more stable than relying on the self-restraint of a single nation. Whether Oppenheimer acted on his beliefs and took it upon himself to share atomic secrets with the Soviet Union has never been properly investigated. Such a question is considered off-limits by both the nuclear priesthood and by those who believe both Hiss and Oppenheimer were unjustly persecuted.

Recall that Oppenheimer knew exactly what the Soviet bomb designers were lacking. He may have been the only person in the world outside the Soviet Union who knew that Soviet scientists had been unable to complete their atomic weapon because they lacked a working detonator. As the Manhattan Project was winding down, one day there appeared on his desk precise blueprints for the detonator capable of setting off a chain reaction. A mechanical engineer with limited or no knowledge of bomb design, Julius Rosenberg, delivered these blueprints to the Soviet bomb designers. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of treasonous espionage and sentenced to death. FBI agents claimed they did not want to carry out the death sentence, but sought merely to use it to extract information from the Rosenbergs about how they had acquired the drawings. The Rosenbergs refused to cooperate, however, and went to their deaths without disclosing what they knew. Whether they were so dedicated to the Communist cause as to sacrifice their lives for it, or were under the spell of the charismatic Oppenheimer, might never be known.

Oppenheimer was never officially accused of this first act of nuclear proliferation. He was, however, stripped of his security clearance by the Atomic Energy Commission -- a symbolic gesture, since it was set to expire only 32 hours later. Other scientists at Los Alamos, particularly British citizen Klaus Fuchs, without question passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. After the war, Fuchs returned to England, was arrested in January 1950, confessed to spying for the Soviet Union, and was convicted of espionage in March 1950. Fuchs was sentenced to 14 years in prison, of which he served nine years. Upon his release, he emigrated to East Germany, where in 1979 he was awarded the Karl Marx Medal of Honor.

A 1944 letter from USSR State Security Commissar Boris Merkulov to KGB head Lavrenty Beria refers specifically to 'Professor Oppenheimer [as] an unlisted (nglastny) member of the apparat of Comrade Browder' since 1942. Oppenheimer, writes Merkulov, 'provided cooperation in access to research for several of our tested sources'. The Soviet Union exploded its own nuclear weapon in 1949, and in the same year Mao's Communists took over China. (Incredibly, diplomats in the U.S. State Department believed Mao Tse-tung would be a more reliable partner than Chiang Kai-Chek would be, a colossal mis-reading.) These unfavorable changes in the global balance of power set off vast repercussions in domestic U.S. politics.

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Roy Cohn's ultimatum to the U.S. Army. Senator Joseph McCarthy was a loose cannon, firing fusillades at anyone in his range whom he deemed a Communist. Ruining the careers of many innocents in the process, he rarely if ever identified any bona fide Communists or spies (Alger Hiss being a rare exception). Next the junior Senator from Wisconsin, egged on by Staff Counsel Roy Cohn, turned his guns on the U.S. Army.

This was the same Army that only 10 years earlier had launched the D-Day invasion that, together with the Russian Army on the eastern front, liberated France and all of Europe from Nazi control. And the General who led the D-Day invasion, Dwight Eisenhower, was now President. What could have prompted McCarthy to take on the U.S. Army? A brilliant, ruthless, and somewhat erratic young lawyer named Roy Cohn, having bested the young Robert Kennedy for the position of Staff Counsel, could be seen on television whispering in McCarthy's ear. Cohn was enamored of David Schine, whom the Army had unaccountably refused to commission as an Officer. Whereupon Cohn issued the following threat, quote:

'Either David Schine is given a commission as a general, not a private, and posted in the penthouse of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York or we — Roy Cohn and Joseph McCarthy — will go after the Army and accuse them of being run by a secret gay, communist cabal.' (From 'Where's My Roy Cohn' a documentary film portraying Cohn as Trump's mentor.)

Cohn, a closet homosexual at a time when open admission of same would have been career-ending, was betting that the double accusation would bend the Army to his will, enabling him to secure the object of his affections. It didn't work.

In the dramatic televised climax of the hearings, opposing counsel Joseph Welch, a folksy type who resembled the angel Clarence in the movie 'What a Wonderful Life', asked McCarthy, 'Have you no shame?' The galleries and the entire hearing chamber burst into thunderous applause, no doubt accompanied by the television audience as well. A great burden of false accusation had been lifted from everyone's shoulders. The inquisitors, unmasked, were instantly discredited. But the play wasn't over. Like all popular television shows, it spawned several sequels.

David Schine went on to marry Miss Universe,

Hillevi Rombin, Miss Sweden and Miss Universe 1955

McCarthy fell into an alcoholic stupor, and Cohn moved on to prosecute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Both the Rosenbergs were executed, though it is likely only Julius actually handed over the secrets. Oppenheimer was never prosecuted. Roy Cohn later carved out a brilliant career in New York as a socialite and as a pitbull-like fixer for many clients, including Donald Trump. In 2022, the United States was represented at the French Embassy's Bastille Day holiday reception by a cross-dressing Admiral with misaligned battle ribbons (for exemplary service in the culture wars?), paired with a turquoise-shod paramour. Roy Cohn's threat to expose a 'gay communist cabal in the military' had been decisively rendered moot.

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J Robert Oppenheimer

Oppie's photogenic angst. In 2023, Hiroshima Day (August 6) and Nagasaki Day (August 9) were observed in Japan with the usual amorphous appeals for world peace. If anyone felt any incongruity between those wishes and Hollywood's celebration of Oppenheimer as a hero, such feelings were not expressed. Nor were they expressed in the movie, which dwelt almost exclusively on Oppenheimer's photogenic angst. The movie and its narrative would have been ruined by any actual atomic bomb victims or vaporized cities. Oppenheimer and his fellow bomb-makers were deeply troubled by something, but that remains vaguely off-stage and off-message. So what is the message, exactly? The message seems to be that America in the 1950s wasn't really infiltrated by Communists, that nobody should feel bad about incinerating hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians (war is war, right?), and that the nuclear geniuses who enabled this should be celebrated.

The nuclear priesthood and its successors. The nuclear priesthood exercised nearly unquestioned authority in its domain, until a series of accidents dented its aura of invincibility. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima showed that nuclear physicists could, and did, make horrible mistakes — and that political, and yes, public review could have prevented them. It does not take any advanced study of nuclear physics to ask the common-sense question 'What could possibly go wrong?' Oppenheimer and his colleagues relied on the mysteries of their profession to extort obedience and stifle debate. But people do not have any obligation to 'follow the science' over a cliff. They actually have an obligation to look out for their own interests, especially where boosters constantly urge 'trust us, you'll never understand the complexities'.

Just as nuclear physics was losing its glow, another cadre of scientists took up its murderous mantle. They too developed weapons of mass death, they too claimed unreviewable authority in their domain, and they too were courted and lavishly financed by politicians purporting to represent the general public. Anthony Fauci and his colleagues in the life sciences followed the template of the nuclear priesthood in anointing themselves the new bearers of death and destruction. Let's stop worshiping mad scientists, and seek answers from our own common-sense, before allowing them or their successors to conduct yet another experiment on humanity.