Just Peace Task Force spotlight: Oppenheimer movie makes Hiroshima vigil timely
by David Keppel, Co-Chair, Just Peace Task Force
It is not every day that an event of the Just Peace Task Force is bolstered by the release of a major motion picture. This year our vigil to mark the 78th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki coincides with the release of Christopher Nolan's powerful film Oppenheimer about the brilliant physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the Manhattan Project that built the bomb.
The movie is a biopic, not a political statement. It follows Oppenheimer from his youth studying quantum physics, to his days at Los Alamos, to his persecution after the war by rabid anti-communists, who destroyed him for his pre-war friends and associates. The film conveys the tremendous destructive power of the nuclear explosion in the Trinity test, upon which Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” But it seems never even to have occurred to President Truman not to use the bomb on Hiroshima and (more unforgivably) days later on Nagasaki. They simply saw it as the way to save thousands of American lives that would have been lost in an invasion of Japan.
It is not part of the movie, but there were a few courageous scientists who tried to warn Truman not to use the bomb. A member of our congregation, the late Howard Gest, was among the scientists who signed a petition drafted by physicist Leo Szilard: “The development of atomic power will provide the nations with new means of destruction. The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.”
We gather this August 6 to mourn the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But we are not here to judge the past, but to work for a better future. Today there is a global movement to curb, then eliminate nuclear weapons. Yet our government is on the opposite path, embarked on a $1.5 trillion project to build a new generation of new, “usable” nuclear wepons and integrate nuclear weapons into our entire arsenal. By luck, the world survived since 1945 without war between superpowers. But today we realize that war with Russia or China is a real possibility. If it is a nuclear war, it will be an unprecedented catastrophe that could well mean the end of human life, if not all life, on Earth.
Now is the time concerned citizens must speak out and insist our government step Back from the [nuclear] Brink. That is why we will gather on the evening of August 6th, at the Courthouse Square in downtown Bloomington at 7 p.m. Please stand with us.
