I worked a bit for Phillip Morrison. He set the trigger at Trinity.
I have an SB Physics.
I've talked with Paul Tibbets and Chuck Sweeny
I knew about the Holocaust in 1965, age 11
I didn't learn about the horror of slavery in WVa schools. Not until about 1972 on my own reading
A few points:
1. Only knowing the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prevented (so far) World War III. Testing and demonstration never deter. The world detonated 450 Megatons in the air from about 450 nuclear blasts. Obviously, the radiation sickness and health effects were not a deterrent.
2. The Horror of the Holocaust is well known. It is to be taught in the racist Florida curriculum. Torture, death explained. The Horror of the atomic bomb is widely known. And why it was unnecessary to show it in Oppenheimer.
3. Too many white Americans, like Ron DeSantis and the illiterate Moms for Liberty are afraid of the historical truth of Slavery in America. Many adults know that Torture, Rape of women and children, lynching, hound chasing and more were all a vital part of American history. Lincoln estimated the wealth value of slaves in 1858 to be a then $1 billion.
4. There is no reason that Slavery Horror can't be taught along the same model of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
I use this illustration. "The Germans taught the Jews good skills and provided good jobs that benefited them".
Outrageous of course. Like Florida's aversion and misrepresentation of Slavery.
Free articles on the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer from physicists who were actually a part, even Oppy articles, you can read them here:
Both of ny parents were victims of the Holocaust. They lost precious family members. The mental anguish was always present in our house. They didn’t realize that there was a name for the trauma they went through, post-traumatic stress. Africans suffered horribly, the very same way. They too were stripped naked and paraded around like a piece of meat. They were bought and owned by white men. When blacks fight back, they are always pushed to the curb, lynched. Our country’s history is widely tainted. To deny the real history of our nation is cowardly and shameful. Plenty of us did not know the real history of our country because it was whitewashed. For so many years, black and brown people have been begging BEGGING for police reform. It took George Floyd’s videotaped death to wake us up and to finally feel their pain. The only way to victory to fight back by calling out these atrocities, by writing, by calling.
Sadly, many still are largely children. They want fairly-tales, mommy/daddy, and Big Brother. Laying off responsibility to someone else. As day-to-day life becomes more difficult for so many, it seems like an attractive choice. It seldom is.
Unfortunately there are always going to be pieces left out of any history. Not having see Oppenheimer as yet I imagine the context surround the decision to use the atomic bombs on Japan is omitted. That context includes the fire bombing of Tokyo which was far deadlier and widespread. The knowledge that Japan was not about to surrender and the invasion of the Japanese home islands would have resulted in an estimated million casualties...let alone Japanese deaths. The considerations of the Soviets attacking Japan in Manchuria and Korea early than had been agreed upon. But decisions made in the above context are not germane to Dr Oppenheimer and his thinking and experiences. Yes, the damage and death and continued radiation was horrific and cannot be minimized, but was it any worse than firebombing Tokyo? Those issues deserve a movie and narrative of its own.
As for Gov. “Dead Bounce” in FL, the narrative on slavery he wants to tell is a false narrative, that is more than a mere omission, but is downright propaganda and designed to avoid addressing the horrors of slavery, the cruelty and inhumanity. It also tries to erase the horrors of Jim Crow that followed and in the guise of reconstituting Jim Crow in a form that only serves White Christian Nationalists.
The point in the end is we must teach history as it happened, provide the context at the time, and view it and understand it for what it was starting with primary source documents and building from there. Yes, our history is replete with terrible thinking and actions, genocide of native peoples, slavery, robber barons, environmental catastrophe, and so forth. But how can we move on if we cannot know or come to grips with our past both good and bad? We cannot.
Random thoughts that went through my mind while reading this enlightened essay:
A beautiful, funny girl from New Mexico I became friends with while we were attending our freshman year at Arizona State University--nearly 3 decades after Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb was detonated over that state. I looked forward to getting to know her, but she suddenly disappeared. Eventually we found out she had a cancerous brain tumor and was dead within months. Her parents believed it was caused by lingering radiation from the bomb when she was born.
Having worked as a nurse in emergency room settings, it sometimes felt to me like being at war, especially when calamities occurred like extensive
flooding. People carrying paper bags with what they could salvage and a blank, shell-shocked look on their faces poured into the emergency room after being rescued by dump trucks, garbage trucks and fire trucks and dropped off at hospitals. I often wondered what it was like to work in hospitals in
war zones. I couldn’t imagine how they did it.
Then, many years later I found out that not only were there “rules of war” enshrined in treaties, one of the rules is that hospitals are off-limits. Attacking hospitals and medical personnel is considered a war crime. Of course not all rules of war are followed by all who engage in it. When “terrorists” are involved, they engage in warfare outside of the normal (if war can ever be considered ‘normal.”) conventions set forth in treaties. Terrorists are stateless. Treaties
are agreements between countries, but terrorists by definition exist and operate outside of sovereign nations and don’t consider themselves bound by treaties, so conventional rules of war are obsolete
when terrorists are involved.
While reading Steven’s essay I remembered something that was really mind-blowing when I first learned of it. On Christmas Eve 1914, in the foxholes of Belgium during WWI, British soldiers heard German soldiers singing Christmas carols. Some British soldiers began singing the carols too. A German soldier shouted in English, “Come over here!” A British soldier shouted back, “You come half-way, I come half-way.”
One British soldier wrote, “During the early part of the morning the Germans started singing and shouting, all in good English. They shouted out: ‘Are you the Rifle Brigade; have you a spare bottle; if so we will come half way and you come the other half.’”
“And our chaps went out to meet them…I shook hands with some of them, and they gave us cigarettes and cigars. We did not fire that day, and everything was so quiet it seemed like a dream.”
Another British soldier, named John Ferguson, recalled it this way: “Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before, we were trying to kill!” A British soldier set up a makeshift barbershop, charging Germans a few cigarettes each for a haircut.” Other accounts describe vivid scenes of men helping enemy
soldiers collect their dead, of which there was plenty.
A soldier named Ernie Williams later described in an interview his recollection of some makeshift soccer play on what turned out to be an icy pitch: "The ball appeared from somewhere, I don't know where... They made up some goals and one fellow went in goal and then it was just a general kick-about. I should think there were about a couple of hundred taking part.” How they resumed killing each other
after that Christmas Day, is a mystery to me.
I haven’t seen “Oppenheimer” yet. From what I’ve read about it, it portrays a man who became overwhelmed by what he had created, which was the single most destructive man-made object on earth.
I’ve read that dropping the atomic bomb probably saved hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives because it ended the war. Whether or not that’s true
we’ll never know.
I imagine Hitler and Pol Pot of Cambodia are tied in second place for the “Man’s Inhumanity to Man” award. Hitler’s genocide of Jews and Pol Pot’s genocide of his fellow Cambodians are examples of wartime atrocities as yet unmatched--that I’m aware of. But, here’s my point. We have a duty to our fellow
human beings to never, ever elect someone to the arguably, most powerful position on earth-the U.S. Presidency-who is capable of committing atrocities on an unimaginable scale. We must not allow him/her to set foot inside the Oval Office.
There are people in this world who are devoid of humanity. We must somehow find a way to identify them as capable of indifference to human life, but even more important is finding a way to make war obsolete.
Well, movies are just that. They may tell the story of a real person, but they are for entertainment, not facts. That is what documentaries are for. The horror of this weapon is terrible- the people who survived, the people who were inadvertently exposed to extreme radiation with their knowledge or consent is also horrible. For those living then, ending the war in this way was extreme but necessary. I remember our fire drills at school but we also had bomb drills - we’d troop down to the basement, the windows were covered with plywood- like that would have protected us. I realized as I grew up that it was a farce and we’d all be gone in an instant if a nuclear bomb were to be dropped on the US. That is why there are treaties - but of course there are rogue governments such as North Korea, Iran and Russia who threaten to use these weapons of extreme destruction. I of course do not want to die in this manner nor want to see anyone die in this manner. However, we live on a planet with 8 billion people some of whom are still fighting tribal, religious and territorial wars. Eventually, someone is just not going to care and do it - even though they will die as well.
As far as the idiotic reasons for altering education and the truth, making people feel uncomfortable is sometimes necessary. Sugar-coating horrors do not help at all - so the kids won’t feel guilty but the racism goes on. The people like DeSantis who promote this idiocy are really the ones who are awful and racist and can’t be trusted with any sort of power or decision-making.
Though likely this was said upon the advent and use of new weapons throughout history, it is time for sober leaders to reach an understanding of what path we will take forward. I believe the United Nations was established for this purpose. Is it working?
Once again we are on a precipice. Is there an Oppenheimer to warn us now about the threat AI poses? Or are there so many voices we are not hearing them? Is profit the sole objective or some semblance of rational, balanced existence?
Taking responsibility means participating in our political process to the degree we are capable. Above all we must as a society be conscious of understanding this. And acting accordingly, not allowing for the most morally base to get a foothold, let alone have leadership over our future.
Reading this as a companion piece to Lucian Truscott’s piece on warfare and the use of arms. Both you and he pose the same question.
Hola, Steven Beschloss. I posted this earlier today to a comment on a comment about your Oppenheimer article, when I'd intended to attach it to your original article. Whoopsie!
In a nutshell, I wanted to say that, in a time when we are beset by lies on every side, and the bastardization of foundational American history by a presidential candidate with a chokehold on his state's educational apparatus, let's not condemn a good storyteller for the story he didn't tell.
Here's what I wrote elsewhere:
Please bear with me because I have an alternative point of view about the Oppenheimer movie.
I also read the Steven Beschloss article on Oppenheimer, the movie. (Actually, I read everything @Steven Beschloss writes.) I will confess that, although I have not yet seen the film, I have read the book on which it is based, and more than once. I have been interested - some might say “obsessed” - with the Manhattan Project for much of my long life. In fact, I’m several years into the writing of a novel in which the injustices that preceded and followed the Project - the making of “The Gadget, as Oppy called it - figure prominently. I am well-versed in the injustices, displacement, and suffering visited almost exclusively on Hispanic people in Southern New Mexico unto this very day by the testing of the bomb, and on residents of the Pajarito Plateau, where Los Alamos sits, to make room for the Manhattan Project. There is very little in print that I have not read, including John Hersey’s epic “Hiroshima,” with its harrowing contemporary reports of the devastation to the people and places of Japan on which the bomb was dropped.
Several writers have pilloried Christopher Nolan for omitting the tragedies of non-white people - Mexican and Japanese - at both ends of the A-Bomb saga from his story. Before I disagree ever so slightly with this premise, I want to tell you why I have such an intimate and almost lifelong connection to the story.
I was born in Santa Fe just two years after Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, practically in the shadow of Los Alamos. I have been to Los Alamos many, many times. I have stood inside Oppenheimer’s home, now a museum. I have been to Trinity site. My father was in Japan when the bombs were dropped.
The road to Los Alamos in the 1940’s was a treacherous, winding dirt road that did not yet appear on maps. Oppenheimer used to vacation and ride horses in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where he had a ranch. He chose the plateau because of its remoteness and near inaccessibility.
To make way for the Manhattan Project, the Pajarito Plateau had to be cleared of the Los Alamos Ranch School, a “finishing school for boys,” and 34 Mexican land grant homesteads that had been occupied by generations of Mexican farmers and ranchers since the 1880s.
The government, under the direction of General Leslie Groves, bought out the boys school. The farmers they just “displaced,” a genteel word for the brutal destruction of their farms, homes, and livestock. Houses were simply bulldozed. Soldiers came and shot their livestock in place. Lives were erased. It took forty years for their descendants to get so much as a dollar of compensation for what was destroyed. They were easy to characterize, after all, as Mexican squatters, though all were living and working on land granted them by the 1862 Homestead Act. Two of their sons were serving in the Pacific at the very moment that their families were being forced off their land by the country they were defending. This fact still chokes me.
I have vivid memories of the hushed tones in which the adults spoke of Los Alamos when I was a kid in the immediate post-war years and the beginnings of the Red Scare. Paranoia ran in the streets. The joke was that Los Alamos was a secret navy base. People were afraid to talk about it, afraid to be heard talking about it. It was shrouded in secrecy.
My Dad was a New Mexico boy, and a survivor of the Bataan Death March. He spent the succeeding four years in POW camps, the last of which was Camp Fukuoka #7 in Japan, where he was a slave laborer in a coal mine. He was on his back, deep underground when the bomb was dropped. It was an article of faith in my house that his life and the lives of at least a million American GI’s and Japanese civilians had been saved by the bomb, which prevented a planned invasion of the Japanese homeland. He never grappled with the reality of the burned, scarred, disfigured people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who were probably, in his mind if he thought about them at all, collateral damage. It was simply too much to comprehend. Much too much! Years later, when I became a Leftist, a pacifist, a war protester, and a civil rights activist, I still didn’t dare to bring up The Bomb. It simmered between us until he died.
Here’s where I deviate slightly from the outrage that the stories I speak of above don’t figure in the arc of Nolan’s narrative. I can forgive that omission, because I do not think his goal as a storyteller was to tell a comprehensive story in all of its factual and moral dimensions. An exhaustive DOCUMENTARY that left these poor victims out of the story would be trash. But I think that in the telling of any story, in the creation of a dramatic narrative, some pieces inevitably get left on the cutting room floor. The film is, I take it, a movie about Oppenheimer the man - his brilliance, complexity, moral struggles, victimization, and fall from grace. The title of the book on which the movie is based is instructive: “American Prometheus - The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” The tragedy of he who brought fire to humankind, only to be bound to a rock and have his liver devoured by an eagle, day after day.
I don’t fundamentally disagree with either Steven’s point or Morgaan’s. There is a larger story here, one that gets lost or excluded from Nolan’s film. Even the citation of the plight of “New Mexicans around the test site” leaves aside the larger and more purposeful crime committed against the homesteaders, a story not so well-known, I think. Personally, it still shocks me. It feels somehow personal, as if it was done to my neighbors. I want this story told. (And DeSantis won’t let it be told, that’s for goddamn sure!!) But I won’t be nailing Christopher Nolan’s hide to the barn door for not telling it.
History might be the single most important business of civilization. I think the ratio of historians to lawyers in the US Senate should be about 75/25, at minimum. I would nominate the best of them for sainthood. I crush on Heather Cox Richardson and Jill LaPore. I want to go drinking with people who live and work in that space and strive for actual truth and understanding, and to spend all my time at their feet, learning as much as I can in what little time I have left. (Looking at you and your brother here, Steven.)
But Christopher Nolan isn’t a historian, he’s a filmmaker. Pillory him for getting consequential facts wrong if he did, but give him a break for leaving some of them out. He’s telling a story and he chose a focus. Show me a great film that includes just the facts, all the facts, and nothing but the facts and, maybe, only maybe, we're talking about a Ken Burns documentary, not a riveting three-hour epic that raises fundamental questions about the nuclear age and the men and women who birthed it.
Once in my childhood an old friend of my Grandfather’s, a respected elder at Taos Pueblo, instructed me and his own grandson, as we were about to go out to hunt rabbit for the pot, “Don’t look. SEE. Learn to see. Look for the rabbit and you miss the rattler. Don't just look. See it all.” Nolan was looking, not seeing. Perhaps he’s stepped on the rattler. I can forgive him that.
I have written in my own Substack about America's shameful behavior in respect to the Holocaust, and used that story as an indictment of DeSantis's prostitution of history in that swampy appendage that was once a state. Also about the anonymous door on East Palace Avenue in Santa Fe ,to which often bewildered physicists reported before being spirited away to the plateau looming above Bandelier National Monument and San Ildelfonso Pueblo, there to be sequestered for the duration.
I'm going home next month and I'll drive up to Los Alamos while I'm there. I need to go back from time to time to remind myself of who I am and where I come from. I emerged there and will go to earth there when it's time. This might be my farewell tour. I hope not, but one can never tell.
You know what? One cannot fit everything into a movie. I learned so many things I was not aware of from that film and that has inspired me to learn even more. I walked out literally stunned for hours. I agree with you and you brought together points that do "soberly confront our history". We Americans must confront the unknowns and help others to understand the truth. It is the only way we can progress in our nation. Thank you for your thoughtful insight.
I haven't seen it but I'd bet my life he left out the 1000's of people right here in the USA who either died or lived with health issues as a result of being test guinea pigs "to see what would happen" when radioactive iodine was dropped on them in Washington State etc. etc. etc.
Very good. I've stood inside:
The gas chambers at Auschwitz
The bomb bay of Enola Gay
The actual Trinity site
The Ground zeros of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
I worked a bit for Phillip Morrison. He set the trigger at Trinity.
I have an SB Physics.
I've talked with Paul Tibbets and Chuck Sweeny
I knew about the Holocaust in 1965, age 11
I didn't learn about the horror of slavery in WVa schools. Not until about 1972 on my own reading
A few points:
1. Only knowing the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prevented (so far) World War III. Testing and demonstration never deter. The world detonated 450 Megatons in the air from about 450 nuclear blasts. Obviously, the radiation sickness and health effects were not a deterrent.
2. The Horror of the Holocaust is well known. It is to be taught in the racist Florida curriculum. Torture, death explained. The Horror of the atomic bomb is widely known. And why it was unnecessary to show it in Oppenheimer.
3. Too many white Americans, like Ron DeSantis and the illiterate Moms for Liberty are afraid of the historical truth of Slavery in America. Many adults know that Torture, Rape of women and children, lynching, hound chasing and more were all a vital part of American history. Lincoln estimated the wealth value of slaves in 1858 to be a then $1 billion.
4. There is no reason that Slavery Horror can't be taught along the same model of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
I use this illustration. "The Germans taught the Jews good skills and provided good jobs that benefited them".
Outrageous of course. Like Florida's aversion and misrepresentation of Slavery.
Free articles on the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer from physicists who were actually a part, even Oppy articles, you can read them here:
https://thebulletin.org/2023/07/a-manhattan-project-historian-comments-on-oppenheimer
Both of ny parents were victims of the Holocaust. They lost precious family members. The mental anguish was always present in our house. They didn’t realize that there was a name for the trauma they went through, post-traumatic stress. Africans suffered horribly, the very same way. They too were stripped naked and paraded around like a piece of meat. They were bought and owned by white men. When blacks fight back, they are always pushed to the curb, lynched. Our country’s history is widely tainted. To deny the real history of our nation is cowardly and shameful. Plenty of us did not know the real history of our country because it was whitewashed. For so many years, black and brown people have been begging BEGGING for police reform. It took George Floyd’s videotaped death to wake us up and to finally feel their pain. The only way to victory to fight back by calling out these atrocities, by writing, by calling.
Sadly, many still are largely children. They want fairly-tales, mommy/daddy, and Big Brother. Laying off responsibility to someone else. As day-to-day life becomes more difficult for so many, it seems like an attractive choice. It seldom is.
Excellent piece!
Thank you, Karen.
Beautifully written, thank you.
Thank you.
Unfortunately there are always going to be pieces left out of any history. Not having see Oppenheimer as yet I imagine the context surround the decision to use the atomic bombs on Japan is omitted. That context includes the fire bombing of Tokyo which was far deadlier and widespread. The knowledge that Japan was not about to surrender and the invasion of the Japanese home islands would have resulted in an estimated million casualties...let alone Japanese deaths. The considerations of the Soviets attacking Japan in Manchuria and Korea early than had been agreed upon. But decisions made in the above context are not germane to Dr Oppenheimer and his thinking and experiences. Yes, the damage and death and continued radiation was horrific and cannot be minimized, but was it any worse than firebombing Tokyo? Those issues deserve a movie and narrative of its own.
As for Gov. “Dead Bounce” in FL, the narrative on slavery he wants to tell is a false narrative, that is more than a mere omission, but is downright propaganda and designed to avoid addressing the horrors of slavery, the cruelty and inhumanity. It also tries to erase the horrors of Jim Crow that followed and in the guise of reconstituting Jim Crow in a form that only serves White Christian Nationalists.
The point in the end is we must teach history as it happened, provide the context at the time, and view it and understand it for what it was starting with primary source documents and building from there. Yes, our history is replete with terrible thinking and actions, genocide of native peoples, slavery, robber barons, environmental catastrophe, and so forth. But how can we move on if we cannot know or come to grips with our past both good and bad? We cannot.
Very well stated.
Thank you, Steven…..a very accurate reflection of words, or, propaganda!
Few people take responsibility for their own actions. How are they going to own the sins of a country ?
Random thoughts that went through my mind while reading this enlightened essay:
A beautiful, funny girl from New Mexico I became friends with while we were attending our freshman year at Arizona State University--nearly 3 decades after Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb was detonated over that state. I looked forward to getting to know her, but she suddenly disappeared. Eventually we found out she had a cancerous brain tumor and was dead within months. Her parents believed it was caused by lingering radiation from the bomb when she was born.
Having worked as a nurse in emergency room settings, it sometimes felt to me like being at war, especially when calamities occurred like extensive
flooding. People carrying paper bags with what they could salvage and a blank, shell-shocked look on their faces poured into the emergency room after being rescued by dump trucks, garbage trucks and fire trucks and dropped off at hospitals. I often wondered what it was like to work in hospitals in
war zones. I couldn’t imagine how they did it.
Then, many years later I found out that not only were there “rules of war” enshrined in treaties, one of the rules is that hospitals are off-limits. Attacking hospitals and medical personnel is considered a war crime. Of course not all rules of war are followed by all who engage in it. When “terrorists” are involved, they engage in warfare outside of the normal (if war can ever be considered ‘normal.”) conventions set forth in treaties. Terrorists are stateless. Treaties
are agreements between countries, but terrorists by definition exist and operate outside of sovereign nations and don’t consider themselves bound by treaties, so conventional rules of war are obsolete
when terrorists are involved.
While reading Steven’s essay I remembered something that was really mind-blowing when I first learned of it. On Christmas Eve 1914, in the foxholes of Belgium during WWI, British soldiers heard German soldiers singing Christmas carols. Some British soldiers began singing the carols too. A German soldier shouted in English, “Come over here!” A British soldier shouted back, “You come half-way, I come half-way.”
One British soldier wrote, “During the early part of the morning the Germans started singing and shouting, all in good English. They shouted out: ‘Are you the Rifle Brigade; have you a spare bottle; if so we will come half way and you come the other half.’”
“And our chaps went out to meet them…I shook hands with some of them, and they gave us cigarettes and cigars. We did not fire that day, and everything was so quiet it seemed like a dream.”
Another British soldier, named John Ferguson, recalled it this way: “Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before, we were trying to kill!” A British soldier set up a makeshift barbershop, charging Germans a few cigarettes each for a haircut.” Other accounts describe vivid scenes of men helping enemy
soldiers collect their dead, of which there was plenty.
A soldier named Ernie Williams later described in an interview his recollection of some makeshift soccer play on what turned out to be an icy pitch: "The ball appeared from somewhere, I don't know where... They made up some goals and one fellow went in goal and then it was just a general kick-about. I should think there were about a couple of hundred taking part.” How they resumed killing each other
after that Christmas Day, is a mystery to me.
I haven’t seen “Oppenheimer” yet. From what I’ve read about it, it portrays a man who became overwhelmed by what he had created, which was the single most destructive man-made object on earth.
I’ve read that dropping the atomic bomb probably saved hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives because it ended the war. Whether or not that’s true
we’ll never know.
I imagine Hitler and Pol Pot of Cambodia are tied in second place for the “Man’s Inhumanity to Man” award. Hitler’s genocide of Jews and Pol Pot’s genocide of his fellow Cambodians are examples of wartime atrocities as yet unmatched--that I’m aware of. But, here’s my point. We have a duty to our fellow
human beings to never, ever elect someone to the arguably, most powerful position on earth-the U.S. Presidency-who is capable of committing atrocities on an unimaginable scale. We must not allow him/her to set foot inside the Oval Office.
There are people in this world who are devoid of humanity. We must somehow find a way to identify them as capable of indifference to human life, but even more important is finding a way to make war obsolete.
Well, movies are just that. They may tell the story of a real person, but they are for entertainment, not facts. That is what documentaries are for. The horror of this weapon is terrible- the people who survived, the people who were inadvertently exposed to extreme radiation with their knowledge or consent is also horrible. For those living then, ending the war in this way was extreme but necessary. I remember our fire drills at school but we also had bomb drills - we’d troop down to the basement, the windows were covered with plywood- like that would have protected us. I realized as I grew up that it was a farce and we’d all be gone in an instant if a nuclear bomb were to be dropped on the US. That is why there are treaties - but of course there are rogue governments such as North Korea, Iran and Russia who threaten to use these weapons of extreme destruction. I of course do not want to die in this manner nor want to see anyone die in this manner. However, we live on a planet with 8 billion people some of whom are still fighting tribal, religious and territorial wars. Eventually, someone is just not going to care and do it - even though they will die as well.
As far as the idiotic reasons for altering education and the truth, making people feel uncomfortable is sometimes necessary. Sugar-coating horrors do not help at all - so the kids won’t feel guilty but the racism goes on. The people like DeSantis who promote this idiocy are really the ones who are awful and racist and can’t be trusted with any sort of power or decision-making.
Though likely this was said upon the advent and use of new weapons throughout history, it is time for sober leaders to reach an understanding of what path we will take forward. I believe the United Nations was established for this purpose. Is it working?
Once again we are on a precipice. Is there an Oppenheimer to warn us now about the threat AI poses? Or are there so many voices we are not hearing them? Is profit the sole objective or some semblance of rational, balanced existence?
Taking responsibility means participating in our political process to the degree we are capable. Above all we must as a society be conscious of understanding this. And acting accordingly, not allowing for the most morally base to get a foothold, let alone have leadership over our future.
Reading this as a companion piece to Lucian Truscott’s piece on warfare and the use of arms. Both you and he pose the same question.
Hola, Steven Beschloss. I posted this earlier today to a comment on a comment about your Oppenheimer article, when I'd intended to attach it to your original article. Whoopsie!
In a nutshell, I wanted to say that, in a time when we are beset by lies on every side, and the bastardization of foundational American history by a presidential candidate with a chokehold on his state's educational apparatus, let's not condemn a good storyteller for the story he didn't tell.
Here's what I wrote elsewhere:
Please bear with me because I have an alternative point of view about the Oppenheimer movie.
I also read the Steven Beschloss article on Oppenheimer, the movie. (Actually, I read everything @Steven Beschloss writes.) I will confess that, although I have not yet seen the film, I have read the book on which it is based, and more than once. I have been interested - some might say “obsessed” - with the Manhattan Project for much of my long life. In fact, I’m several years into the writing of a novel in which the injustices that preceded and followed the Project - the making of “The Gadget, as Oppy called it - figure prominently. I am well-versed in the injustices, displacement, and suffering visited almost exclusively on Hispanic people in Southern New Mexico unto this very day by the testing of the bomb, and on residents of the Pajarito Plateau, where Los Alamos sits, to make room for the Manhattan Project. There is very little in print that I have not read, including John Hersey’s epic “Hiroshima,” with its harrowing contemporary reports of the devastation to the people and places of Japan on which the bomb was dropped.
Several writers have pilloried Christopher Nolan for omitting the tragedies of non-white people - Mexican and Japanese - at both ends of the A-Bomb saga from his story. Before I disagree ever so slightly with this premise, I want to tell you why I have such an intimate and almost lifelong connection to the story.
I was born in Santa Fe just two years after Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, practically in the shadow of Los Alamos. I have been to Los Alamos many, many times. I have stood inside Oppenheimer’s home, now a museum. I have been to Trinity site. My father was in Japan when the bombs were dropped.
The road to Los Alamos in the 1940’s was a treacherous, winding dirt road that did not yet appear on maps. Oppenheimer used to vacation and ride horses in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where he had a ranch. He chose the plateau because of its remoteness and near inaccessibility.
To make way for the Manhattan Project, the Pajarito Plateau had to be cleared of the Los Alamos Ranch School, a “finishing school for boys,” and 34 Mexican land grant homesteads that had been occupied by generations of Mexican farmers and ranchers since the 1880s.
The government, under the direction of General Leslie Groves, bought out the boys school. The farmers they just “displaced,” a genteel word for the brutal destruction of their farms, homes, and livestock. Houses were simply bulldozed. Soldiers came and shot their livestock in place. Lives were erased. It took forty years for their descendants to get so much as a dollar of compensation for what was destroyed. They were easy to characterize, after all, as Mexican squatters, though all were living and working on land granted them by the 1862 Homestead Act. Two of their sons were serving in the Pacific at the very moment that their families were being forced off their land by the country they were defending. This fact still chokes me.
I have vivid memories of the hushed tones in which the adults spoke of Los Alamos when I was a kid in the immediate post-war years and the beginnings of the Red Scare. Paranoia ran in the streets. The joke was that Los Alamos was a secret navy base. People were afraid to talk about it, afraid to be heard talking about it. It was shrouded in secrecy.
My Dad was a New Mexico boy, and a survivor of the Bataan Death March. He spent the succeeding four years in POW camps, the last of which was Camp Fukuoka #7 in Japan, where he was a slave laborer in a coal mine. He was on his back, deep underground when the bomb was dropped. It was an article of faith in my house that his life and the lives of at least a million American GI’s and Japanese civilians had been saved by the bomb, which prevented a planned invasion of the Japanese homeland. He never grappled with the reality of the burned, scarred, disfigured people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who were probably, in his mind if he thought about them at all, collateral damage. It was simply too much to comprehend. Much too much! Years later, when I became a Leftist, a pacifist, a war protester, and a civil rights activist, I still didn’t dare to bring up The Bomb. It simmered between us until he died.
Here’s where I deviate slightly from the outrage that the stories I speak of above don’t figure in the arc of Nolan’s narrative. I can forgive that omission, because I do not think his goal as a storyteller was to tell a comprehensive story in all of its factual and moral dimensions. An exhaustive DOCUMENTARY that left these poor victims out of the story would be trash. But I think that in the telling of any story, in the creation of a dramatic narrative, some pieces inevitably get left on the cutting room floor. The film is, I take it, a movie about Oppenheimer the man - his brilliance, complexity, moral struggles, victimization, and fall from grace. The title of the book on which the movie is based is instructive: “American Prometheus - The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” The tragedy of he who brought fire to humankind, only to be bound to a rock and have his liver devoured by an eagle, day after day.
I don’t fundamentally disagree with either Steven’s point or Morgaan’s. There is a larger story here, one that gets lost or excluded from Nolan’s film. Even the citation of the plight of “New Mexicans around the test site” leaves aside the larger and more purposeful crime committed against the homesteaders, a story not so well-known, I think. Personally, it still shocks me. It feels somehow personal, as if it was done to my neighbors. I want this story told. (And DeSantis won’t let it be told, that’s for goddamn sure!!) But I won’t be nailing Christopher Nolan’s hide to the barn door for not telling it.
History might be the single most important business of civilization. I think the ratio of historians to lawyers in the US Senate should be about 75/25, at minimum. I would nominate the best of them for sainthood. I crush on Heather Cox Richardson and Jill LaPore. I want to go drinking with people who live and work in that space and strive for actual truth and understanding, and to spend all my time at their feet, learning as much as I can in what little time I have left. (Looking at you and your brother here, Steven.)
But Christopher Nolan isn’t a historian, he’s a filmmaker. Pillory him for getting consequential facts wrong if he did, but give him a break for leaving some of them out. He’s telling a story and he chose a focus. Show me a great film that includes just the facts, all the facts, and nothing but the facts and, maybe, only maybe, we're talking about a Ken Burns documentary, not a riveting three-hour epic that raises fundamental questions about the nuclear age and the men and women who birthed it.
Once in my childhood an old friend of my Grandfather’s, a respected elder at Taos Pueblo, instructed me and his own grandson, as we were about to go out to hunt rabbit for the pot, “Don’t look. SEE. Learn to see. Look for the rabbit and you miss the rattler. Don't just look. See it all.” Nolan was looking, not seeing. Perhaps he’s stepped on the rattler. I can forgive him that.
I have written in my own Substack about America's shameful behavior in respect to the Holocaust, and used that story as an indictment of DeSantis's prostitution of history in that swampy appendage that was once a state. Also about the anonymous door on East Palace Avenue in Santa Fe ,to which often bewildered physicists reported before being spirited away to the plateau looming above Bandelier National Monument and San Ildelfonso Pueblo, there to be sequestered for the duration.
I'm going home next month and I'll drive up to Los Alamos while I'm there. I need to go back from time to time to remind myself of who I am and where I come from. I emerged there and will go to earth there when it's time. This might be my farewell tour. I hope not, but one can never tell.
You know what? One cannot fit everything into a movie. I learned so many things I was not aware of from that film and that has inspired me to learn even more. I walked out literally stunned for hours. I agree with you and you brought together points that do "soberly confront our history". We Americans must confront the unknowns and help others to understand the truth. It is the only way we can progress in our nation. Thank you for your thoughtful insight.
I haven't seen it but I'd bet my life he left out the 1000's of people right here in the USA who either died or lived with health issues as a result of being test guinea pigs "to see what would happen" when radioactive iodine was dropped on them in Washington State etc. etc. etc.