Existential Threat

This holiday weekend, I watched the movie, Oppenheimer, the biographical story of Dr. J Robert Oppenheimer and his work on the Manhattan Project which built the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan at the end World War 2. The director, Christopher Nolan made some interesting choices in the movie, as he spent more time on Oppenheimer’s communist leanings and affiliations, then on his work to create a history altering weapon. The movie presented so much of Oppenheimer’s communist past that at times, I felt like I was re-watching the 1981 Warren Beatty film, Reds.

As Oppenheimer worked on the project, he wrestled with the moral dilemma of creating a weapon that promised to end World War 2, but was so powerful that it could kill hundreds of thousands of people. He feared what would happen if the weapon fell into the hands of the wrong people. That’s why the United States military was in such a rush to build the bomb. They were trying to beat the Nazis who were working on one themselves and they knew the existential threat it posed if Hitler got his hands on the bomb first. The horror of his creation became real to Oppenheimer after the United States dropped two on Japan, killing over 100 thousand innocent lives.

Ever since, we have been plagued with the question, should we have dropped the bomb on Japan or not? It is hard to justify the killing of 100,000 civilians, but it was believed at the time, that the only way Japan would have surrendered was if we invaded and took over their country. It was estimated that over 500,000 allied soldiers would have been killed and hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens would have died in a total land war. So, it can be argued that the weapon which killed over 100,000 Japanese actually saved many more lives.