Nov 15 2007
A Significant Story
The Flash
It happened in a remote desert in the American West. The vast desert was suffocated in nighttime silence and the darkness was blinding from rare clouds that smothered the stars like an evil presence. In the center of this wasteland stood a handful of men waiting silently but fidgeting or smoking. They were an elite group of scientists gathered from distant countries and gathered in this one spot in New Mexico. Years of theoretical calculations and engineering led to this moment of testing the world’s most expensive science. The budget surpassed the entire automobile industry, but it was still just a theory costing billions.
A gong shattered the silence from somewhere in the desert, and then silence fell again. Five more minutes. Dawn was an hour away, and they were exhausted but still tense and dreadful. Everyone knew this moment could split open a world inconceivable in human experience, but nobody could think of anything to say.
Then it happened: light filled the desert sky from horizon to horizon, far more brilliant than sunlight and it caramelized sand in 100-million-degree heat and the brightest light ever seen on earth. It would sear their eyes to the socket if not for thick welder glasses. Some girls in Hiroshima would soon be caught off-guard gazing with naked eyes at a silver dot gliding across the sky called the Enola Gay. That one American bomber unleashed more explosive power than a fleet of thousands.
The fuel of stars. They called it Trinity, where the first atomic bomb unleashed a dragon’s breath of heat bound inside the atom. The flash towered in a mushroom of purplish, dark radioactivity. The brilliance faded and a windstorm rolled across the desert and blasted the scientists, then passed. It was silent again, but not dark.
“I am death,” someone uttered, “the destroyer of worlds.” His name was Robert Oppenheimer, the chief scientist at Las Alamos where they built The Bomb in secrecy. Like many of the scientists he was a pacifist and a humanitarian never dreaming of unleashing atomic fire against men, women and children—but they did it at Hiroshima and again at Nagasaki.
A horrified Japanese emperor declared unconditional surrender, and then America faced the new world of atomic energy with ominous implications. This is when Dr. Oppenheimer and the other scientists suddenly grew fearful of the future:
Before we opened the door to this horrifying new world in which we live today, we should have knocked. But we have chosen to fall into the house together with the door. - J. Robert Oppenheimer, Atomic Energy Commission hearings^1^
The Quest
The “Father of the Atomic Bomb” grew to despise his title, but while isolated in Los Alamos he energized the scientists to work feverishly on The Bomb. After the war the public gasped at the beast he created, and Oppenheimer reversed course: the rest of his life was devoted to stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as if he could stuff the genie back into the bottle.
Why the inconsistency? As early as 1942 Oppenheimer was aware of the Hydrogen bomb and its near-infinite capacity for destruction, but he pressed forward and soothed squeamish scientists afraid of the implications. In the self-contained world of Las Alamos he thrived in his role as “Father of the Atomic Bomb.” It all made perfect sense.
Oppenheimer’s famous and confused life depicts The Quest: a lifetime struggling for significance. In Las Alamos he was The King, crowned with significance. Outside Las Alamos he fought for years against the misinterpretations and aspersions the public cast against him for The Bomb. He tried reaching for higher peaks of greatness, and became the first chairman of the new Atomic Energy Commission. From that platform he launched an effort to steer world powers and direct the future of mankind through international control of nuclear weapons. But from such lofty heights he also made political enemies, and they rallied and finally denounced him as a communist sympathizer during the “Red Scare” of the McCarthy era. The accusation was absurd, but reason and justice rarely prevail in such times.
