Oppenheimer and Future Arms Control
by Jason Sibert
American audiences flocked to see “Oppenheimer” last month in theaters around the country.
The movie features an all-star cast and a huge budget. Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jnr., Matthew Modine, Emily Blunt, Tom Conti, and Gary Oldman are all in the film directed by Chris Nolan. Early reviews were strong, and it gives us much to think about on all sorts of issues – science, arms control, high-technology weapons, and the willingness to stand up for what one believes in regardless of what public opinion says. However, there’s another important point the film should make – the weapons we have now are more lethal than J. Robert Oppenheimer’s 1940’s era atomic bomb. Writers Joan Rohlfing and James McKeon’s addressed this issue in their story “The Threat is Real: Our Weapons are Much More Powerful than Oppenheimer’s Atomic Bomb.”
Nine countries have nuclear weapons with the United States and Russia possessing 90 percent of those. However, China’s nuclear arsenal has increased to around 1,500 warheads. Russia and China are allied in a tense Cold War with the US and its allies. On that thought, diplomatic relations between the US and China and Russia are at an all-time low. Tensions between India and Pakistan – both nuclear-armed countries – and India and China continue to simmer. And North Korea’s nuclear program is advancing.
Public awareness of the challenges we face is not high, and we just might be swept into a nuclear disaster, as stated by Rohlfing and McKeon. J. Robert Oppenheimer played a key role in developing the first nuclear weapons as a part of the Manhattan Project. The two weapons developed at that time were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, obliterating both cities and killing thousands.
After watching the detonation of the first atomic bomb, Oppenheimer quoted Hindu scripture: “Now I have become death, destroyer of worlds.” After World War II, Oppenheimer opposed the creation of the more powerful hydrogen bomb and thought that atomic weaponry ought to be put under international control. Today, nuclear weapons are 80 times as powerful as the bombs used in World War II. Putin’s Russia has plans to deploy even more powerful nuclear weapons soon. Oppenheimer and his colleagues predicted that a strategy of nuclear competition would cause an arms race, and they were right.
What if a nuclear weapon were used in an area not located near to where you, your family, and your friends reside? It wouldn’t be as bad as living in the vicinity of a nuclear war. However, there would be consequences. A limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan would produce fires that would send so much soot into the atmosphere that the sun’s rays would be diminished for years. This would result in reduced global temperatures, which in turn would cause widespread crop failures and worldwide famine, potentially affecting billions of people. For years, scientists have worried about this – called nuclear winter.
The world’s geopolitical tensions have created a thaw in nuclear arms treaties, but we’ve made some progress in reducing nuclear stockpiles. At the peak of the first Cold War, the United States and Soviet Russia had a total of 60,000 nuclear weapons. Today, the US and Russia have 11,000. However, we have a long way to go, as stated in Rohlfing and James McKeon’s story. Political figures from Barack Obama to Henry Kissinger have advocated abolishing nuclear weapons. Rohlfing and McKeon stated the difference between arms control now and in Oppenheimer’s time: “Today, we have the capability to monitor and control nuclear weapons technologies that didn’t yet exist in Oppenheimer’s time. It’s now possible to create the international control system that Oppenheimer and others advocated for in 1945.”
One important step would be raising public consciousness on the issue. Maybe Chris Nolan’s movie will do that.
