Some of the leading figures of the atomic age argue for a dramatic reduction in nuclear weapons — ultimately down to zero. Why?
BY DAVID E. HOFFMAN
In his resignation speech as director of Los Alamos National Laboratory in October, 1945, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the physicist Robert Oppenheimer expressed doubts about a world living in the shadow of the bomb. The scene is nicely described in the 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. As thousands listened, Oppenheimer, speaking in a low, quiet voice, said he hoped in the years ahead everyone would take pride in their wartime accomplishments. Then he declared:
"Today that pride must be tempered with a profound concern. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenal of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima".
After the war, Oppenheimer, who led the team that built and tested the first atomic bomb, warned of a nuclear arms race, the impossibility of defense against the bomb in war, and the need for international control of the atom. His concerns, and those of fellow scientists, were shared in a slim but potent volume which became a bestseller in 1946,One World or None: A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb, republished in 2007.
There's something about the bomb, something so mighty and mysterious, that many who have known of its immense destructive power and worked to restrain it have come away profoundly affected by the experience. At the dawn of the atomic age, it was the Oppenheimer generation of physicists.
In his introduction to the new edition of One World or None, the nuclear historian Richard Rhodes asks the question of why the scientists grasped so well the "radically new nuclear future" when others did not. The answer: "The scientists had done the numbers." They understood that the energy released in the fission of one uranium atom was on the order of 200 million electron volts. In contrast, ordinary chemical burning-the process in fire, for example-releases about one electron volt per atom. The physicists realized this huge difference in scale could forever change the nature of nations and war.
Many others came to share their fears. At a time of deep tensions with Moscow in 1983, Ronald Reagan watched a made-for-television movie, The Day After, while at Camp David. In his diary, Reagan wrote of the film: "It has Lawrence, Kansas wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done... very effective & left me greatly depressed..."
At the end of the Cold War, Gen. George Lee Butler, who retired in 1994 as commander of U.S. nuclear forces, called for abolition of nuclear weapons. In a speech at the National Press Club in 1996, Butler said, "We're not condemned to repeat the lessons of 40 years at the nuclear brink." He added: "Standing down nuclear arsenals requires only a fraction of the ingenuity and resources as were devoted to their creation."
Now come four prominent wise men of the American defense and foreign policy establishment with a new film, Nuclear Tipping Point, warning about the still-present threat of nuclear weapons and the fissile materials that go into them. They are George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former secretaries of state, William Perry, former secretary of defense, and Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who served 24 years in the Senate and was chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
The film is narrated by actor Michael Douglas, written and directed by Ben Goddard, and was produced by the Nuclear Security Project. The project is coordinated by the Nuclear Threat Initiative based in Washington, a group working to reduce the risks of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, in cooperation with Stanford University's Hoover Institution. NTI is co-chaired by Nunn and Ted Turner, the CNN founder turned philanthroper-activist. Link
