by Andrew Marr
Oppenheimer, the director of the ‘Manhattan Project’ which produced the bomb, was a cultivated mongrel – an excellent example of the intertwining of European and US twentieth-century history. He was an early opponent of Fascism who had gone so far as to hand money over to Communists to help the anti-Fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War. He would later be accused of having been a paid-up member of the Communist Party himself, something he denied. He was fixated by Hitler. He told the crowd that day in Los Alamos that he was only sorry America hadn’t developed the bomb early enough to use it against the Germans. (Hitler had killed himself three months earlier, on 30 April, and the German surrender had been signed on 9 May.) Oppenheimer’s team was full of Europeans, refugees from Nazi Europe or simply dedicated scientists determined that it would be the democracies, not the dictatorships, that first got ‘the bomb’.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was German-Jewish himself, at least by origins, though his wealthy New York family were uninterested in traditional Jewish traditions or religion. He was brought up in an intensely highbrow, liberal family who had paintings by Van Gogh, Renoir and Picasso on their walls, who loved the music of Beethoven, learned Latin and Greek, and travelled to Europe. They were members of the Ethical Cultural Society, a secular Jewish organization which stressed good works and humanitarianism. As a young man, entranced by science, Oppenheimer would idolize the young physicist Niels Bohr and then go to Cambridge to study physics and maths. In Europe he would mingle with some of the greatest minds of theoretical physics at its most exciting period – the Danish Bohr, the Englishman Paul Dirac, the German Werner Heisenberg, the Austrian Wolfgang Pauli, the Italian Enrico Fermi and the Jewish-German Max Born. He would study at Göttingen, the Saxon university, and in Zurich.
Yet Oppenheimer was also intensely American, and his story exemplifies the shift of power from Europe to the US. Delighting in the countryside of New Mexico and California, by the mid-1930s he was settled at Berkeley, California, teaching at the California Institute of Technology. It may have been on the West Coast, but it was certainly not cut off from events in Europe. Jewish refugees from Germany, socialists and pro-Moscow Communists were part of his social circle. Arguments about the nature of Stalinism, what could be done about Hitler and the failure of the democracies to intervene in the Spanish war bubbled away on terraces overlooking San Franciscan gardens and continued during horse-rides. The Depression, followed by Roosevelt’s New Deal, had radicalized many in California, and Oppenheimer was not especially unusual in flirting with Communist thinking and the various ‘front’ organizations. He read Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s propagandistic account of the glories of life under Stalinism, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?
This was the political side of Oppenheimer’s world, which would get him into trouble after the war when US anxiety about ‘red’ infiltrators was at its height. But it was only a part of his life, and rather smaller than the part that led him to run the Manhattan Project. An intellectual gannet who gobbled up information in many fields, Oppenheimer worked on everything from the positron to the neutron star and black holes. He did key work on quantum mechanics and gravitational collapse, and was unlucky to miss a Nobel Prize.
It had been clear well before the war, from research on the structure of atoms, that in theory it would be possible to release vast amounts of energy – a huge explosion – by splitting atoms and creating a nuclear chain reaction. Albert Einstein had signed a letter to Roosevelt warning him of the danger of such a novel weapon. He had suggested that the American President order the stockpiling of uranium (the likeliest raw material for such an explosion because of its weak atomic structure) and press ahead urgently with research. After two émigré German scientists in Birmingham made a mathematical breakthrough showing it would be possible to produce the reaction in a quantity of uranium or plutonium small enough to be carried in an aircraft, the US started to take the idea seriously.
The secret project to be first with an atomic bomb was approved by Roosevelt in October 1941, and accelerated after the attack on Pearl Harbor that December. In the summer of 1942 a team including Oppenheimer concluded that a nuclear-fission bomb was possible. But the science was still little understood; at one point there was a real worry that such a bomb might ignite the earth’s hydrogen-based atmosphere and end all life on the planet. Though the project was under the firm control of the US military, the charismatic Oppenheimer was eventually put in charge of the scientific and technical side. It was an inspired choice. He suggested the Los Alamos site, a remote and beautiful part of New Mexico he knew well from his hiking and horse-riding. Uranium ore was bought from the Belgian Congo and scientists were assembled from all across America, and Britain.
Among US intelligence officers there were severe worries about Oppenheimer’s alleged Communist sympathies, which were not soothed when he suggested sharing their knowledge with Stalin. But there was no doubt that Oppenheimer and most of his team were obsessed with the need for speed, and a real fear that the Germans, led by Oppenheimer’s old friend Heisenberg, might get there first. Huge amounts of money, infrastructure, testing and competitive argument produced exactly the surge in creativity that Oppenheimer had hoped for. It became increasingly clear that Nazi Germany would not be able to respond with a usable weapon. But with Bohr alongside – the Dane had escaped via Sweden to Britain just ahead of the Gestapo – Oppenheimer argued, the American bomb must be used anyway. It might well end all wars, but it would have to be seen around the world to have that effect.28
With Germany on the edge of final collapse, the target would have to be Japan. Some scientists, such as the Hungarian Leo Szilard, who had been the first in the 1930s to properly investigate nuclear chain reactions, warned frantically against using the bomb on Japanese civilians, saying it would start a deadly arms race with Russia. Roosevelt had recently died, and the new President, Harry Truman, ignored the argument. It is possible that Truman and his team wanted the bomb to be used before Japan had a chance to sue for peace, perhaps using Stalin as an intermediary. The USSR was now just coming into focus as America’s new world enemy, and it would be convenient for Stalin to see just what the US was capable of.
Oppenheimer agreed with Truman on this and took part in detailed discussions about the ‘tremendous’ visual impact of the bomb, the need for it to kill large numbers of people, and the precise height for the explosion to have the maximum impact. It must not be detonated too high, or through clouds, or in rain or fog, ‘or the target won’t get as much damage’.29 These words have to measured against Oppenheimer’s famous reaction when the test bomb was successfully detonated at a desert site codenamed ‘Trinity’, on 16 July 1945. Much later, he said that he remembered Vishnu’s words from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad-Gita (which he had studied): ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ Others dispute whether he actually said this at the time, though just ahead of the Hiroshima attack he did say, thinking of the victims, ‘Those poor little people, those poor little people.’30
Oppenheimer was caught in one of the greatest moral challenges a scientist has ever faced. On the one hand, he was well aware of the awesome power of the weapon he was in charge of making. It could be a force for good, if it stopped conventional war. But as an admirer of the Soviets, he was well aware that they would struggle to acquire the bomb as quickly as possible; and that the future politics of the nuclear age were unpredictable. This intensely cultivated humanitarian, rather spiritual man had given his all to a machine intended to burn to death hundreds of thousands of innocent people. He had done it first of all because of the dreadful possibility that Hitler would soon have his own ultimate ‘wonder weapon’ and defeat the democracies; but now, because it simply had to be used.
Apart from anything else, Oppenheimer wanted to know if it worked. Like any theoretical physicist, he had lived his intellectual life on a plane of exciting abstraction that only rarely intersected with the ordinary world. Without world war, and the industrial
and financial might of the United States, who would have spent the money and effort trying to test a theory like this? Here was a very rare chance to see whether he and the rest of his community of physicists had got it right. There is a sense in the arguments he used, and in his ambivalent language, that he did not want to argue through the consequences with quite the toughness that he argued the science. Perhaps inextinguishable curiosity overcame any political scruple; both are equally strong parts of the human spirit.
Today Hiroshima, where the first bomb was detonated, is a bright, modern regional city with beautiful tea-gardens, clean shopping malls and a reputation for excellent seafood. Immaculately dressed children learn and play at the primary school near the city centre where, in 1945, every child – except one – and every teacher was burned to death, along with most of the rest of the population. Hiroshima simply disappeared. A busy, old-fashioned city, with European-style buildings, numerous rivers and bridges and crowded housing, became a flat, charred space. Only a few shards of buildings remained vertical, and a few black-blasted trees. Nagasaki was next; and the Japanese surrender, which had been delayed by ferocious cabinet arguments, came almost immediately after that.
Oppenheimer became a celebrity in the US, though he warned that the time might come when people would curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. He told the American Philosophical Society that he had made ‘a most terrible weapon . . . a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing’.31 Was science, he asked, actually good for mankind? Today, for the whole of a human lifespan, the greatest countries of the world have not gone to war with one another, thanks to the threat of nuclear war. But with Pakistan, India, North Korea, Israel and soon perhaps Iran all now possessors of nuclear weapons, the danger of some coming nuclear conflict has grown rather than lessened. Oppenheimer’s worries, like his ‘most terrible weapon’, have become universal.
Gandhi and the Empire
In 1930, it has been said, there existed three people who had achieved instant global recognition, not only for themselves but for what they stood for.32 One was Charlie Chaplin. One was Adolf Hitler. And the third was a sixty-year-old troublemaker, dressed in rough cloth. On 12 March at six in the morning, he set off carrying a bedroll and a shoulder-bag, a spindle so that he could do some spinning at night, his diary, a watch and a mug. Accompanied by seventy-eight supporters, he was embarking on a 240-mile walk through villages in western India, and would arrive at the coast twenty-five days later. There, he proposed simply to gather up some salt and get himself arrested.
Mohandas Gandhi did exactly what he said he would do. Trailed by journalists and film crews from around the world, he walked, bent, scooped . . . and was arrested. The pictures were perfect. He had created an instantly recognizable symbolic image, salt in his hand, the salt flats behind him. The image was a trick. The pictures were taken days after he had arrived at the coast, and in a more photogenic spot. But Gandhi got the worldwide notice he wanted. The greatest exponent of a new kind of politics was taking on the world’s largest empire, and winning hands-down.
Indian salt was taxed, not very heavily, by the British authorities, as it had been by the Mughals before them. Gandhi had considered, and tried, many ways to embarrass the British authorities in India. He had called for the prohibition of the sale of alcohol. He had called for a boycott of education. He had loudly backed striking workers. He had had moral successes, but without any political breakthrough. Salt was, however, an inspired target. Everyone ate salt. (Well, everyone except Gandhi, who was actually trying to exclude it from his diet as unhealthy.) The salt tax earned the government little but it was disproportionately hard on the poorest. Gandhi said that apart from water it was the only thing whereby, by taxing it, ‘the state can reach even the starving millions, the sick, the maimed and the utterly helpless. The tax constitutes therefore the most inhuman poll tax the ingenuity of man can devise.’33
By collecting salt himself and refusing to pay the tax on it, he was challenging the British to charge and imprison him – a polite, comparatively elderly and skeletal man – and make themselves look ridiculous. They duly did so. But to put maximum pressure on the British, Gandhi needed a world audience. The US was particularly influential. To Americans, the salt-tax revolt conjured up an immediate historical parallel, their own rebellion against the British tax on tea. The stunt was classic Gandhi: it looked simple and he seemed almost clownish, yet this was a carefully, even coldly thought-through gambit.
Gandhi was already regarded by millions around the world as a living saint. He had been dubbed ‘Mahatma Gandhi’, or ‘great-souled Gandhi’, by Rabindranath Tagore, India’s Nobel Prize-winning poet. He was famous for his ascetic lifestyle and ferociously uncompromising moralism. ‘If I need only one shirt to cover myself with but use two, I am guilty of stealing one from another . . . If five bananas are enough to keep me going, my eating a sixth one is a form of theft.’34 Eight years earlier, when he was being tried yet again for his campaign of civil disobedience, the British judge sentencing him confessed: ‘You are in a different category from any person I have ever tried or am likely to have to try . . . Even those who differ from you in politics look upon you as a man of high ideals and of a noble and even saintly life. It is my duty to judge you as a man subject to the law.’
Gandhi’s trick was like a martial arts move in which the individual uses seeming weakness to defeat an apparently mightier opponent. First in South Africa, campaigning for the rights of Indian workers (not black Africans), he had developed his theory of satyagraha, or ‘firmness in the truth’. In practice this comprised campaigns of non-cooperation, of civil disobedience and of aggressive fasting so as ‘to make the opponent think and understand’. Gandhi always tried to be extremely polite and to smile while he was leading protests, and he spoke admiringly of many aspects of British life, which only made him harder to deal with. He actively sought out imprisonment and led his followers, based in his ashrams, to do the same.
This form of moral blackmail, when raised to the level of global politics, can have a striking effect. Gandhi has inspired fighters against injustice around the world, including the civil rights campaigners under Martin Luther King in the United States in the 1960s, the Polish shipyard workers of ‘Solidarity’ in 1980, who confronted the Communist regime there; and the later anti-Soviet rebels in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, right up to the protesters who brought down Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. The force of ordinary people, well organized and peaceful, confronting power and using the international spotlight to help them, has been one of the few potent and cheering political ideas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In his domestic life, Gandhi’s willingness to court confrontation was less attractive. He used his readiness to fast or to deprive himself of something to exert iron control on those around him. If he had a row with his wife, he fasted. If two people slept together in the ashram, he fasted. If his son let him down, he fasted. The more people wept and begged him to reconsider, the happier he was. And while moral blackmail as a political tactic has its uses, it should not become a way of life. Combined with Gandhi’s strange determination to sleep with young women beside him without touching them, in order to prove he could be celibate, and his almost manic enthusiasm for enemas, this reminds us that saints are in general more to be admired from afar than to live with.
Gandhi’s moral authority, however, roused all India. Albeit briefly, he was able to unite Muslim and Hindu campaigners; and to bring untouchables and other low-caste Indians into the same movement as educated businessmen and British-trained Indian lawyers. Early on, he had understood the power of the image, and thus of what one wore. As a young law student in London he had dressed in a three-piece suit and bow-tie. As a radical lawyer in India, he had dressed in formal English clothes, but topped them with a turban. Fighting for indentured labourers, he dressed himself in the same kind of cotton tunic as they wore. And as the campaigns against expensive British-m
anufactured cloth gathered pace, he chose to wear only rough Indian cloth. As his global reputation grew, he insisted on being photographed clad only in a loincloth, having spun the cotton for it himself.
Gandhi turned himself into a brand. Charlie Chaplin with his cane and baggy trousers, and Hitler with his military cap and moustache, were both worlds away from Gandhi. But they had all hit on the importance, in a world of photographs, of being recognizable.
And Gandhi, who roused a subcontinent, was also lucky in his chosen opponent. The trouble with the British was that they wanted to be liked and admired, as well as to wield power; and Gandhi knew them well. His own influences included British thinkers such as Ruskin and Edward Carpenter, the radical former match-girl and spiritualist Annie Besant, and the British suffragists. He wrote excellent English, and could not have operated successfully without English as a language which both united Indian campaigners and allowed him to reach a global audience.
Above all, the British were susceptible, at least at times, to Gandhi’s kind of blackmail. They were embarrassable. They repressed and imprisoned, but they did not like it. Hitler, for one, simply could not understand this. (Gandhi completely misunderstood Hitler, seeing him as similar to the British. Hitler was not as bad as he was depicted, he said, and suggested German Jews should insist on staying in Germany and simply challenge the Nazis to shoot or imprison them – which rather missed the point.) Hitler, for his part, had told the British viceroy before the war, ‘All you have to do is to shoot Gandhi . . . You will be surprised how quickly the trouble will die down.’35