[The new film about Robert Oppenheimer leaves out some important
facts and context.]
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OPPENHEIMER AND THE BIRTH OF THE NUCLEAR-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX  
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William Hartung
July 30, 2023
Tom Dispatch [[link removed]]

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_ The new film about Robert Oppenheimer leaves out some important
facts and context. _

, Shutterstock

 

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months,
you’re undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher
Nolan has released a new film
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about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb”
for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as
part of America’s World War II-era Manhattan Project. The film has
earned widespread attention, with large numbers of people
participating in what’s already become known as “Barbieheimer
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by seeing Greta Gerwig’s hit film _Barbie_ and Nolan’s
three-hour-long _Oppenheimer_ on the same day.

Nolan’s film is a distinctive pop cultural phenomenon because it
deals with the American use of nuclear weapons, a genuine rarity since
ABC’s 1983 airing of _The Day After_
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about the consequences of nuclear war. (An earlier exception was
Stanley Kubrick’s _Dr. Strangelove_
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his satirical portrayal of the insanity of the Cold War nuclear arms
race.)

The film is based on _American Prometheus_
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the Pulitzer Prize-winning
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biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Nolan made it
in part to break through the shield of antiseptic rhetoric, bloodless
philosophizing, and public complacency that has allowed such
world-ending weaponry to persist so long after Trinity
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the first nuclear bomb test, was conducted in the New Mexico desert 78
years ago this month.

Nolan’s impetus was rooted
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in his early exposure to the nuclear disarmament movement in Europe.
As he said recently:

“It’s something that’s been on my radar for a number of years. I
was a teenager in the ‘80s, the early ‘80s in England. It was the
peak of CND, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Greenham Common
[protest]; the threat of nuclear war was when I was 12, 13, 14 — it
was the biggest fear we all had. I think I first encountered
Oppenheimer in… Sting’s song about the Russians that came out then
and talks about Oppenheimer’s ‘deadly toys.’”

A feature film on the genesis of nuclear weapons may not strike you as
an obvious candidate for box-office blockbuster status. As Nolan’s
teenage son said
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when his father told him he was thinking about making such a film,
“Well, nobody really worries about nuclear weapons anymore. Are
people going to be interested in that?” Nolan responded that, given
what’s at stake, he worries
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about complacency and even denial when it comes to the global risks
posed by the nuclear arsenals on this planet. “You’re normalizing
killing tens of thousands of people. You’re creating moral
equivalences, false equivalences with other types of conflict… [and
so] accepting, normalizing… the danger.”

These days, unfortunately, you’re talking about anything but just
tens of thousands of people dying in a nuclear face-off. A 2022 report
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by Ira Helfand and International Physicians for the Prevention of
Nuclear War estimated that a “limited” nuclear war between India
and Pakistan that used roughly 3% of the world’s 12,000-plus
[[link removed]]nuclear
warheads would kill “hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions”
of us. A full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia,
the study suggests, could kill up to five (yes, five!) billion people
within two years, essentially ending life as we know it on this planet
in a “nuclear winter
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Obviously, all too many of us don’t grasp the stakes involved in a
nuclear conflict, thanks in part to “psychic numbing
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regularly invoked by Robert Jay Lifton, author of _Hiroshima in
America: A History of Denial_
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(co-authored with Greg Mitchell), among many other books. Lifton
describes [[link removed]]
psychic numbing as “a diminished capacity or inclination to feel”
prompted by “the completely unprecedented dimension of this
revolution in technological destructiveness.”

Given the Nolan film’s focus on Oppenheimer’s story, some crucial
issues related to the world’s nuclear dilemma are either dealt with
only briefly or omitted altogether.

The staggering devastation
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by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is suggested only indirectly
without any striking visual evidence of the devastating human
consequences of the use of those two weapons. Also largely ignored are
the critical voices who then argued that there was no need to drop a
bomb, no less two of them, on a Japan most of whose cities had already
been devastated by U.S. fire-bombing to end the war. General (and
later President) Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote
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Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the plan to drop atomic bombs on
populated areas in Japan, “I voiced to him my grave misgivings,
first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and
that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”

The film also fails to address the health impacts
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testing, and production of such weaponry, which to this day is still
causing
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disease and death, even without another nuclear weapon ever being used
in war. Victims of nuclear weapons development include people who were
impacted by the fallout from U.S. nuclear testing in the Western
United States and the Marshall Islands
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in the Western Pacific, uranium miners
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on Navajo lands, and many others. Speaking of the first nuclear test
in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin
Downwinders Consortium [[link removed]], which
represents that state’s residents who suffered widespread cancers
and high rates of infant mortality caused by radiation from that
explosion, said
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“It’s an inconvenient truth… People just don’t want to reflect
on the fact that American citizens were bombed at Trinity.”

Another crucially important issue has received almost no attention.
Neither the film nor the discussion sparked by it has explored one of
the most important reasons for the continued existence of nuclear
weapons — the profits it yields the participants in America’s
massive nuclear-industrial complex.

Once Oppenheimer and other concerned scientists and policymakers
failed [[link removed]] to
convince the Truman administration to simply close Los Alamos and
place nuclear weapons and the materials needed to develop them under
international control — the only way, as they saw it, to head off a
nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union — the drive to expand the
nuclear weapons complex was on. Research and production of nuclear
warheads and nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines quickly
became a big business, whose beneficiaries have worked doggedly to
limit any efforts at the reduction or elimination of nuclear arms.

THE MANHATTAN PROJECT AND THE BIRTH OF THE NUCLEAR-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

The Manhattan Project
[[link removed]] Oppenheimer
directed was one of the largest public works efforts ever undertaken
in American history. Though the _Oppenheimer _film focuses on Los
Alamos, it quickly came to include far-flung facilities across the
United States. At its peak, the project would employ 130,000 workers
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— as many as in the entire U.S. auto industry at the time.

According to nuclear expert Stephen Schwartz, author of _Atomic Audit_
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the financing of U.S. nuclear weapons programs, through the end of
1945 the Manhattan Project cost nearly $38 billion
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today’s dollars, while helping spawn an enterprise that has since
cost taxpayers an almost unimaginable _$12 trillion_
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_for nuclear weapons and related programs. And the costs never end.
The Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear
Weapons (ICAN) reports that the U.S. spent $43.7 billion
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nuclear weapons last year alone, and a new Congressional Budget Office
report suggests that another $756 billion
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will go into those deadly armaments in the next decade.

Private contractors now run the nuclear warhead complex and build
nuclear delivery vehicles. They range
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Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin to lesser-known firms
like BWX Technologies and Jacobs Engineering, all of which split
billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon (for the production
of nuclear delivery vehicles) and the Department of Energy (for
nuclear warheads). To keep the gravy train running — ideally, in
perpetuity — those contractors also spend millions
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lobbying decision-makers. Even universities have gotten into the act.
Both the University of California and Texas A&M are part of the
consortium
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that runs the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory.

The American warhead complex is a vast enterprise
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with major facilities in California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico,
South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. And nuclear-armed submarines
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bombers
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and missiles
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are produced or based in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana,
North Dakota, Montana, Virginia, Washington state, and Wyoming. Add in
nuclear subcontractors and most states host at least some
nuclear-weapons-related activities.

And such beneficiaries of the nuclear weapons industry are far from
silent when it comes to debating the future of nuclear spending and
policy-making.

PROFITEERS OF ARMAGEDDON: THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS LOBBY

The institutions and companies that build nuclear bombs, missiles,
aircraft, and submarines, along with their allies in Congress, have
played a disproportionate role in shaping U.S. nuclear policy and
spending. They have typically opposed
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the U.S. ratification of a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty; put
strict limits
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the ability of Congress to reduce either funding for or the deployment
of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); and pushed
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for weaponry like a proposed nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise
missile that even the Pentagon hasn’t requested, while funding think
tanks
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that promote an ever more robust nuclear weapons force.

A case in point is the Senate ICBM Coalition
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(dubbed part of the “Dr. Strangelove Caucus
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by Arms Control Association Director Daryl Kimball and other critics
of nuclear arms). The ICBM Coalition consists of
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senators from states with major ICBM bases or ICBM research,
maintenance, and production sites: Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and
Wyoming. The sole Democrat in the group, Jon Tester (D-MT), is the
chair
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of the powerful appropriations subcommittee of the Senate
Appropriations Committee, where he can keep an eye on ICBM spending
and advocate for it as needed.

The Senate ICBM Coalition is responsible for numerous measures aimed
at protecting both the funding and deployment of such deadly missiles.
According to
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former Secretary of Defense William Perry, they are among “the most
dangerous weapons we have” because a president, if warned of a
possible nuclear attack on this country, would have just minutes to
decide to launch them, risking a nuclear conflict based on a false
alarm. That Coalition’s efforts are supplemented by persistent
lobbying from a series of local coalitions
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of business and political leaders in those ICBM states. Most of them
work closely with Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the new
ICBM, dubbed the Sentinel and expected to cost
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at least $264 billion to develop, build, and maintain over its life
span that is expected to exceed 60 years.

Of course, Northrop Grumman and its 12 major ICBM subcontractors
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have been busy pushing the Sentinel as well. They spend tens of
millions of dollars
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contributions and lobbying annually, while employing
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of the government’s nuclear establishment to make their case to
Congress and the executive branch. And those are hardly the only
organizations or networks devoted to sustaining the nuclear arms race.
You would have to include the Air Force Association
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Base Council [[link removed]], among others.

The biggest point of leverage the nuclear weapons industry and the
arms sector more broadly have over Congress is jobs. How strange then
that the arms industry has generated diminishing job returns since the
end of the Cold War. According to the National Defense Industrial
Association, direct employment in the weapons industry has dropped
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from 3.2 million in the mid-1980s to about 1.1 million today.

Even a relatively small slice of the Pentagon and Department of Energy
nuclear budgets could create many more jobs
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if invested in green energy, sustainable infrastructure, education, or
public health – anywhere from 9% to 250% more jobs, depending on the
amount spent. Given that the climate crisis is already well underway,
such a shift would not only make this country more prosperous but the
world safer by slowing the pace of climate-driven catastrophes and
offering at least some protection against its worst manifestations.

A NEW NUCLEAR RECKONING?

Count on one thing: by itself, a movie focused on the origin of
nuclear weapons, no matter how powerful, won’t force a new reckoning
with the costs and consequences of America’s continued addiction to
them. But a wide variety of peace, arms-control, health, and
public-policy-focused groups are already building on the attention
garnered by the film to engage in a public education campaign aimed at
reviving a movement to control and eventually eliminate the nuclear
danger.

Past experience — from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
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_Oppenheimer _to the “Ban the Bomb
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and Nuclear Freeze
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stopped above-ground nuclear testing and helped turn President Ronald
Reagan around on the nuclear issue — suggests that, given concerted
public pressure, progress can be made on reining in the nuclear
threat. The public education effort surrounding the Oppenheimer film
is being taken up by groups like _The Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, _the Federation of American Scientists, and the Council
for a Livable World that were founded, at least in part, by Manhattan
Project scientists who devoted their lives to trying to roll back the
nuclear arms race; professional groups like the Union of Concerned
Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility; anti-war groups
like Peace Action and Win Without War; the Nobel Peace prize-winning
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons; nuclear policy
groups like Global Zero and the Arms Control Association; advocates
for Marshall Islanders, “downwinders,” and other victims of the
nuclear complex; and faith-based groups like the Friends Committee on
National Legislation. The Native American–led organization Tewa
Women United has even created a website
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“Oppenheimer — and the Other Side of the Story,” that focuses on
“the Indigenous and land-based peoples who were displaced from our
homelands, the poisoning and contamination of sacred lands and waters
that continues to this day, and the ongoing devastating impact of
nuclear colonization on our lives and livelihoods.”

On the global level, the 2021 entry into force of a nuclear ban treaty
— officially known as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear
Weapons
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is a sign of hope, even if the nuclear weapons states have yet to
join. The very existence of such a treaty does at least help
delegitimize nuclear weaponry. It has even prompted dozens
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of major financial institutions to stop investing in the nuclear
weapons industry, under pressure from campaigns like Don’t Bank on
the Bomb [[link removed]].

In truth, the situation couldn’t be simpler: we need to abolish
nuclear weapons
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before they abolish us. Hopefully, _Oppenheimer _will help prepare the
ground for progress in that all too essential undertaking, beginning
with a frank discussion of what’s now at stake.

Copyright 2023 William D. Hartung

* The Film
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* Oppenheimer; The Manhattan Project; Atomic Bomb; Nuclear War;
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