Name: From the archives: Robert Oppenheimer in 1965 on if the bomb was necessary
Uploaded: 2024-11-04T17:05:28.000Z
Duration: 8 min 13 s
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Looking back now, do you think that our country's use of the bomb was necessary?

Basic passive voice

I believe that the view, which I learned from many, but above all from General Marshall and from Colonel Stimson, the Secretary of War, the view that they had that we would have to fight our way to the main islands, and that it would involve a slaughter of Americans and Japanese on a massive scale, was arrived at by them in good faith, with regret, and on the best evidence that they then had.

Past perfect

To that alternative, I think the bomb was an enormous relief. The war had started in 1939.

It had seen the death of tens of millions.

It had seen brutality and degradation, which had no place in the middle of the 20th century.

The ending of the war by this means was certainly cruel, was not undertaken lightly, but I am not, as of today, confident that a better course was then open.

I have not a very good answer to this question.

Dr. Oppenheimer, nevertheless, with all the rationalization, with all the inevitability of the decision that history demonstrates to us, you and many like you who brought the bomb into being still seem to suffer, may I say, from a bad conscience about it.

Is that true, sir? Well, I don't want to speak for others because we're all different.

I think when you play a meaningful part in bringing about the death of over 100,000 people and the injury of a comparable number, you naturally don't think of that as with ease.

I believe we had a great cause to do this, but I do not think that our consciences should be entirely easy at stepping out of the part of studying nature, learning the truth about it, to change the course of human history. Long ago I said once that in a crude sense, which no vulgarity and no humor could quite erase, the physicists had known sin, and I didn't mean by that the deaths that were caused as the result of our work.

I meant that we had known the sin of pride.

We had turned to affect, in what proved to be a major way, the course of man's history.

We had the pride of thinking we knew what was good for man.

And I do think it has left a mark on many of those who were responsibly engaged.

This is not the natural business of a scientist. You know, in the first days after Hiroshima, you pointed out that the scientists who built the bomb had nurtured the hope, really, that nuclear weapons, as you put it, would lead to new patterns of behavior.

Why has that hope failed of realization? Well, I think I may have said that then.

I said two things, new patterns of behavior and new institutions.

I think that when you remember the manifest causes of conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, which have bedeviled us for 20 years and which are by no means in any conventional sense solved, when you remember the ideological ferocity that animated the post-war communists that we see now in the Chinese unmuted form, you think of the anti-communist ferocity with which we met this, the notion that there is a telephone communication between the White House and the Kremlin to make sure that there are no misunderstandings is a damn new pattern of behavior. I think it's something that, almost without precedent, in wars and conflicts which have such a total character as that between the communists and the free world has tended to have, I think the notion that the United States should be fixing up its power to fight limited engagements on the ground and in the air with old-fashioned weapons that we hope are a little better than they used to be, not as a step in conquering the world, but as a step in giving a chance to think, to pause, to argue and to persuade before a holocaust, that's a pattern that I believe is not familiar either. When you think that for years the intellectuals of Russia were interested in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, have gotten together to talk to each other about the problems of armament and the problems of the application of science and the problems of maintaining the peace, this also is not quite something that is familiar.

The patterns are faulty, frail, very vulnerable.

But there is a wind blowing. Dr. Oppenheimer, from all that you have said, it seems that when you contemplate the future, it is more with hope than with pessimism.

Or is that an oversimplification? Yes, I've tried to talk about the hopeful things.

The unhopeful ones jump to everyone's mind.

Will the Chinese change their views of human destiny and of the relations between them and us before or after they have the power to make major nuclear war?

Will the detente between the Russians and the West survive the strains of this time?

Will they survive what's going on in Asia today?

There are a hundred reasons for seeing no hope at all.

And I take it for granted that everybody can think of them without being reminded.

It's harder to think of anything on the other side.

 And I have tried to say that however frail and however tentative and however limited, they do exist and they look to me like a bridgehead to a livable future, but not without work.