When Oppenheimer Really Started Getting 'Blood' on His Hands

Yes, he took part in the use of the bomb, including picking targets.

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “Hiroshima in America,” “Atomic Cover-up” and the recent “The Beginning or the End,” and has directed three documentary films since 2021, two for PBS. He has written widely about the atomic bomb and atomic bombings, and their aftermath, for over forty years.

The Christopher Nolan movie “Oppenheimer” had its NYC premiere last night, though with no red carpet, before its official opening, IMAX or otherwise, this Friday. Paul Schrader, veteran film writer and director (“Taxi Driver,” “First Reformed” etc.), went on Facebook afterward to call it the greatest film of the 21st century. I’ve been offering my own notes about the movie here at this new blog over the past few days, so if you want to catch up with that please go here and here.

Taking a partial breather today, but still some very interesting material and links follow. Meanwhile, headline on Washington Post story today: ‘Disturbing’ decline in global nuclear security, watchdog says.

Nuclear security risks are rising for the first time in a decade, according to an annual index released Tuesday by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based watchdog nonprofit that looks beyond the well-known nuclear threats such as weapons proliferation, and toward less widely considered problems, such as the storage of weapons-usable uranium that could be exploited by terrorist groups or the safety of nuclear sites during conflicts. “This diminishing commitment to reducing nuclear risks is deeply disturbing.”

But they say release of “Oppenheimer” might spark actions.

A character who gets a surprising amount of play in “Oppenheimer” is the California physicist and inventor of the cyclotron, E.O. Lawrence. Indeed, he had a long and ultimately rocky relationship with Oppenheimer before and after Los Alamos—for one thing he was politically conservative vs. Oppie’s original left-liberalism.

Looking through some of my (voluminous) past writing on this subject, I found something I’d forgotten, which reflects rather badly on Lawrence along with Gen. Leslie Groves (a rather too sympathetic presence in the new movie, as played by Matt Damon). It follows Groves being told about some of Oppie’s left-wing associations in the 1930s:

E.O. Lawrence, who knew Oppenheimer from Berkeley, had warned that there were other concerns about the man. Groves would call this “another thing that is true.” Lawrence, in fact, made "quite a point of this," Groves told an interviewer in 1965, "he said that 'The average Jew had no moral principles on a lot of scores.' He said, particularly with respect to sex life, he said, 'You cannot trust them at all.' He said, 'You take somebody that you think has been happily married for thirty years and you find him in bed with his stenographer.' That was a shock to me, but I learned to agree that that was so."

Groves in the same interview then added:

[T]he trouble essentially is, in my opinion, that the Jew who gives up his father’s religion does not have anything to cling to. He gave it up because he is a little bit ashamed of it, and that is not a good thing. Now, even those who have stuck to their religion have different ideals than we do. They very definitely have the “eye for an eye philosophy.” All you have to do is bump into it once in a while and you will see what they have, so that you cannot trust that thing.

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Let me pause here and provide a few new links.

My friend Kai Bird, co-author with Marty Sherwin of the source book for Nolan, has an op-ed in the NY Times today: “The Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” Another friend, and my co-author on two books, including “Hiroshima in America,” Robert Jay Lifton, is included in the new special (free) issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Oppenheimer’s Tragedy—and Ours.”

In fact, check out the entire issue, online, including lengthy interviews with Nolan and Bird and an important piece on the little-covered (despite my efforts) radioactive fallout from the Trinity test and effects on people living not far away. Finally, I am quoted a few times on Hollywood and The Bomb, going back to the first A-Bomb movie and my book, in this lengthy new article at Smithsonian which looks at Oppenheimer’s life or, as they put it, “The Real History.”

Plus: If you missed my piece at LitHub yesterday on Ayn Rand and Oppenheimer and the race to make the first A-Bomb movie, drawn largely from my book.

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As I noted yesterday, the Nolan film belatedly, and in just a three-second snippet, refers to this: Oppenheimer, who liked to claim he just directed the creation of the bomb, not using it, also helped pick its targets. This is a point I’ve made here and elsewhere, as his involvement in the decision to use—and how, and where—has often been glossed over in previous film. Nolan at least mentions it, albeit too briefly and in the middle of a shouting match.

The first key meeting for Oppenheimer, as an advisor to the official Targeting Committee, even took place in his office at Los Alamos! A Dr. Stearns presented five Japanese targets mainly on the basis that they were good-sized cities at least three miles in diameter and had not already been vastly damaged in our conventional air raids, so they’d provide a nice canvas.  Among the choices were Yokohama, Kokura, Niigata, and the old city of Kyoto.   

Then there was Hiroshima, which had “an important army depot…and it is such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged. There are adjacent hills which are likely to produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage.”  This effect would only arise if the weapon was dropped over the center of the city, not over the “army depot,” which was not so situated.  

Attendees agreed that “obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan” was the goal, no matter how many civilians (mainly women and children) were killed. This was a bustling city of maybe 300,000 people.   The official notes for the meeting suggested that everyone knew this, as a key heading included these telltale quote marks:  Use Against “Military” Objectives.   What followed:  “It was agreed that for the initial use of the weapon any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb.”

There is no record of Oppenheimer objecting to this at that meeting or in subsequent ones. Within three months, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would suffer at least 200,000 deaths, with about 85% of them civilians.