Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Oppenheimer
and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex
William
Hartung
July
30, 2023
Tom
Dispatch
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you’re undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher Nolan has released a new film about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as part of America’s World War II-era Manhattan Project. The film has earned widespread attention, with large numbers of people participating in what’s already become known as “Barbieheimer” by seeing Greta Gerwig’s hit film Barbie and Nolan’s three-hour-long Oppenheimer on the same day.
Nolan’s film is a distinctive
pop cultural phenomenon because it deals with the American use of nuclear
weapons, a genuine rarity since ABC’s 1983 airing of The Day After about
the consequences of nuclear war. (An earlier exception was Stanley
Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove,
his satirical portrayal of the insanity of the Cold War nuclear arms race.)
The film is based on American Prometheus,
the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005
biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Nolan made it in part
to break through the shield of antiseptic rhetoric, bloodless philosophizing,
and public complacency that has allowed such world-ending weaponry to persist
so long after Trinity, the first
nuclear bomb test, was conducted in the New Mexico desert 78 years ago this
month.
Nolan’s impetus was rooted in his early
exposure to the nuclear disarmament movement in Europe. As he said recently:
“It’s something that’s been
on my radar for a number of years. I was a teenager in the ‘80s, the early ‘80s
in England. It was the peak of CND, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the
Greenham Common [protest]; the threat of nuclear war was when I was 12, 13, 14
— it was the biggest fear we all had. I think I first encountered Oppenheimer
in… Sting’s song about the Russians that came out then and talks about
Oppenheimer’s ‘deadly toys.’”
A feature film on the genesis
of nuclear weapons may not strike you as an obvious candidate for box-office
blockbuster status. As Nolan’s teenage son said when his
father told him he was thinking about making such a film, “Well, nobody really
worries about nuclear weapons anymore. Are people going to be interested in
that?” Nolan responded that, given what’s at stake, he worries about
complacency and even denial when it comes to the global risks posed by the
nuclear arsenals on this planet. “You’re normalizing killing tens of thousands
of people. You’re creating moral equivalences, false equivalences with other
types of conflict… [and so] accepting, normalizing… the danger.”
These days, unfortunately,
you’re talking about anything but just tens of thousands of people dying in a
nuclear face-off. A 2022 report by Ira
Helfand and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
estimated that a “limited” nuclear war between India and Pakistan that used
roughly 3% of the world’s 12,000-plus nuclear warheads would kill
“hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions” of us. A full-scale nuclear war
between the United States and Russia, the study suggests, could kill up to five
(yes, five!) billion people within two years, essentially ending life as we
know it on this planet in a “nuclear winter.”
Obviously, all too many of us
don’t grasp the stakes involved in a nuclear conflict, thanks in part to “psychic numbing,” a concept regularly invoked
by Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima in America: A History
of Denial (co-authored with Greg Mitchell), among many
other books. Lifton describes psychic numbing as “a
diminished capacity or inclination to feel” prompted by “the completely
unprecedented dimension of this revolution in technological destructiveness.”
Given the Nolan film’s focus
on Oppenheimer’s story, some crucial issues related to the world’s nuclear
dilemma are either dealt with only briefly or omitted altogether.
The staggering devastation caused
by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is suggested only indirectly without
any striking visual evidence of the devastating human consequences of the use
of those two weapons. Also largely ignored are the critical voices who then
argued that there was no need to drop a bomb, no less two of them, on a Japan
most of whose cities had already been devastated by U.S. fire-bombing to end
the war. General (and later President) Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote that when he was told by Secretary
of War Henry Stimson of the plan to drop atomic bombs on populated areas in
Japan, “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief
that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely
unnecessary.”
The film also fails to
address the health impacts of the research, testing, and
production of such weaponry, which to this day are still causing disease
and death, even without another nuclear weapon ever being used in war. Victims
of nuclear weapons development include people who were impacted by the fallout
from U.S. nuclear testing in the Western United States and the Marshall Islands in
the Western Pacific, uranium miners on
Navajo lands, and many others. Speaking of the first nuclear test in Los
Alamos, New Mexico, Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which
represents that state’s residents who suffered widespread cancers and high
rates of infant mortality caused by radiation from that explosion, said “It’s an
inconvenient truth… People just don’t want to reflect on the fact that American
citizens were bombed at Trinity.”
Another crucially important
issue has received almost no attention. Neither the film nor the discussion
sparked by it has explored one of the most important reasons for the continued
existence of nuclear weapons — the profits it yields the participants in
America’s massive nuclear-industrial complex.
Once Oppenheimer and other
concerned scientists and policymakers failed to convince the Truman
administration to simply close Los Alamos and place nuclear weapons and the
materials needed to develop them under international control — the only way, as
they saw it, to head off a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union — the drive
to expand the nuclear weapons complex was on. Research and production of
nuclear warheads and nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines quickly
became a big business, whose beneficiaries have worked doggedly to limit any
efforts at the reduction or elimination of nuclear arms.
The Manhattan Project and the
Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex
The Manhattan Project Oppenheimer directed
was one of the largest public works efforts ever undertaken in American
history. Though the Oppenheimer film focuses on Los Alamos, it
quickly came to include far-flung facilities across the United States. At its
peak, the project would employ 130,000 workers —
as many as in the entire U.S. auto industry at the time.
According to nuclear expert
Stephen Schwartz, author of Atomic Audit, the seminal work on
the financing of U.S. nuclear weapons programs, through the end of 1945 the
Manhattan Project cost nearly $38 billion in
today’s dollars, while helping spawn an enterprise that has since cost
taxpayers an almost unimaginable $12 trillion for
nuclear weapons and related programs. And the costs never end. The Nobel
prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) reports
that the U.S. spent $43.7 billion on
nuclear weapons last year alone, and a new Congressional Budget Office report
suggests that another $756 billion will
go into those deadly armaments in the next decade.
Private contractors now run
the nuclear warhead complex and build nuclear delivery vehicles. They range from
Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin to lesser-known firms like BWX
Technologies and Jacobs Engineering, all of which split billions of dollars in
contracts from the Pentagon (for the production of nuclear delivery vehicles)
and the Department of Energy (for nuclear warheads). To keep the gravy train
running — ideally, in perpetuity — those contractors also spend millions lobbying
decision-makers. Even universities have gotten into the act. Both the
University of California and Texas A&M are part of the consortium that
runs the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory.
The American warhead complex
is a vast enterprise with
major facilities in California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina,
Tennessee, and Texas. And nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, and missiles are
produced or based in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, North Dakota,
Montana, Virginia, Washington state, and Wyoming. Add in nuclear subcontractors
and most states host at least some nuclear-weapons-related activities.
And such beneficiaries of the
nuclear weapons industry are far from silent when it comes to debating the
future of nuclear spending and policy-making.
Profiteers of Armageddon: The
Nuclear Weapons Lobby
The institutions and
companies that build nuclear bombs, missiles, aircraft, and submarines, along
with their allies in Congress, have played a disproportionate role in shaping
U.S. nuclear policy and spending. They have typically opposed the U.S.
ratification of a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty; put strict limits on
the ability of Congress to reduce either funding for or the deployment of
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); and pushed for weaponry
like a proposed nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile that even the
Pentagon hasn’t requested, while funding think tanks that
promote an ever more robust nuclear weapons force.
A case in point is the Senate ICBM Coalition (dubbed
part of the “Dr. Strangelove Caucus”
by Arms Control Association Director Daryl Kimball and other critics of nuclear
arms). The ICBM Coalition consists of senators
from states with major ICBM bases or ICBM research, maintenance, and production
sites: Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. The sole Democrat in the
group, Jon Tester (D-MT), is the chair of the
powerful appropriations subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee,
where he can keep an eye on ICBM spending and advocate for it as needed.
The Senate ICBM Coalition is
responsible for numerous measures aimed at protecting both the funding and
deployment of such deadly missiles. According to former
Secretary of Defense William Perry, they are among “the most dangerous weapons
we have” because a president, if warned of a possible nuclear attack on this
country, would have just minutes to decide [whether] to launch them, risking a
nuclear conflict based on a false alarm. That Coalition’s efforts are
supplemented by persistent lobbying from a series of local coalitions of
business and political leaders in those ICBM states. Most of them work closely
with Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the new ICBM, dubbed the
Sentinel and expected to cost at least $264
billion to develop, build, and maintain over its life span that is expected to
exceed 60 years.
Of course, Northrop Grumman
and its 12 major ICBM subcontractors have
been busy pushing the Sentinel as well. They spend tens of millions of dollars on campaign
contributions and lobbying annually, while employing former members of the
government’s nuclear establishment to make their case to Congress and the
executive branch. And those are hardly the only organizations or networks
devoted to sustaining the nuclear arms race. You would have to include
the Air Force Association and the obscurely named Submarine
Industrial Base Council, among others.
The biggest point of leverage
the nuclear weapons industry and the arms sector more broadly have over
Congress is jobs. How strange then that the arms industry has generated
diminishing job returns since the end of the Cold War. According to the
National Defense Industrial Association, direct employment in the weapons
industry has dropped from 3.2
million in the mid-1980s to about 1.1 million today.
Even a relatively small slice
of the Pentagon and Department of Energy nuclear budgets could create many more jobs if
invested in green energy, sustainable infrastructure, education, or public
health – anywhere from 9% to 250% more jobs, depending on the amount spent.
Given that the climate crisis is already well underway, such a shift would not
only make this country more prosperous but the world safer by slowing the pace
of climate-driven catastrophes and offering at least some protection against
its worst manifestations.
A New Nuclear Reckoning?
Count on one thing: by
itself, a movie focused on the origin of nuclear weapons, no matter how
powerful, won’t force a new reckoning with the costs and consequences of
America’s continued addiction to them. But a wide variety of peace,
arms-control, health, and public-policy-focused groups is already building on
the attention garnered by the film to engage in a public education campaign
aimed at reviving a movement to control and eventually eliminate the nuclear
danger.
Past experience — from
the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament that helped persuade Christopher Nolan
to make Oppenheimer to the “Ban the Bomb” and Nuclear Freeze campaigns that stopped
above-ground nuclear testing and helped turn President Ronald Reagan around on
the nuclear issue — suggests that, given concerted public pressure, progress
can be made on reining in the nuclear threat. The public education effort
surrounding the Oppenheimer film is being taken up by groups like The
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Federation of American
Scientists, and the Council for a Livable World that were founded, at least in
part, by Manhattan Project scientists who devoted their lives to trying to roll
back the nuclear arms race; professional groups like the Union of Concerned
Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility; anti-war groups like Peace
Action and Win Without War; the Nobel Peace prize-winning International
Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons; nuclear policy groups like Global Zero and
the Arms Control Association; advocates for Marshall Islanders, “downwinders,”
and other victims of the nuclear complex; and faith-based groups like the
Friends Committee on National Legislation. The Native American–led
organization Tewa Women United has even created a website, “Oppenheimer —
and the Other Side of the Story,” that focuses on “the Indigenous and
land-based peoples who were displaced from our homelands, the poisoning and
contamination of sacred lands and waters that continues to this day, and the
ongoing devastating impact of nuclear colonization on our lives and
livelihoods.”
On the global level, the 2021
entry into force of a nuclear ban treaty — officially known as the Treaty on the Prohibition of
Nuclear Weapons — is a sign of hope, even if the nuclear
weapons states have yet to join. The very existence of such a treaty does at
least help delegitimize nuclear weaponry. It has even prompted dozens of major
financial institutions to stop investing in the nuclear weapons industry, under
pressure from campaigns like Don’t Bank on the Bomb.
In truth, the situation
couldn’t be simpler: we need to abolish nuclear weapons before
they abolish us. Hopefully, Oppenheimer will help prepare the
ground for progress in that all too essential undertaking, beginning with a
frank discussion of what’s now at stake.
Copyright 2023 William D. Hartung
Source URL: https://portside.org/2023-08-01/oppenheimer-and-birth-nuclear-industrial-complex
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the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
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