The guilt that persecuted the father of the atomic bomb until the last moment of his life

Hiroshima
August 6, 1945
8:15 am

The life of 300 thousand Japanese They developed normally. With the normality that can exist in times of war. Suddenly, these lives have changed. In a few seconds. Forever.

This is for the lucky ones. Around 150 thousand They did not have any more life.

None of the survivors remembers hearing anything when the bomb fell. Those who heard about it were tens of kilometers away from Hiroshima: a terrifying, unforgettable, shocking roar of their lives.

Yes they saw. Something never seen. The descriptions vary. "A tremendous glow", "Everything shone with the whitest white I've seen", "A huge bright yellow flash", "A giant photographic flash" "I thought the sun had risen from the sky", told survivors.

Then, in a few seconds, the deep night. At 8:16 in the morning. A dirty darkness that it would not be possible to remedy with the appearance of the sun. A night in which the city would be submerged for years.

"The sun broke and fell. The sky, which had always seemed so far away, ended up without the support of the sun and fell almost at the same moment. The light grew so much that he could not stand it anymore. So that the light is also dead that day"he wrote Makiko Kada, a resident of Hiroshima.

One hundred thousand dead in nine seconds. 70% of the houses are absolutely destroyed. 70 thousand seriously injured. The vast majority of them died in the days and months that followed the atomic explosion.

Few survivors remained.
Total destruction.

A terminological clarification: the Japanese avoid calling survivorsbecause focusing too much on life can be an offense to the sacred dead. The term they use is hibakusha, people affected by an explosion. And these hibakusha suffered for years from the consequences of the bomb. Chronic fatigue, skin problems, leukemia, cancer of the most diverse organs.

The radiation did not leave them on August 6, 1945. He persecuted them for years and eventually killed them.. Beyond the Brigadier General's Folly Thomas Farrell At a press conference in Tokyo in September 1945, he said: "No one in Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffers the radioactive effects of the bomb, and those who received them are already dead." Farrell was lying. Tens of thousands of dead have shown it during the two decades that followed his statements.

The story began several years earlier. Many attribute it to a letter sent by Albert Einstein to Franklin Roosevelt in August 1939. He talked about the possibility of a new bomb, extremely powerful, of unknown type. Everything, he said, was due to the progress of research on nuclear fission. In the hands of Adolf Hitler It could be very dangerous.

The destruction capability of this bomb was unimaginable. According to Einstein, he would have a defect: it would be too heavy to transport it by air. After reading the letter, Roosevelt launched the Manhattan Project, with $ 6,000 of initial capital.

American scientists took two years to convince themselves of the possibility of creating an atomic weapon. When the notice was given to President Roosevelt, he allocated a considerable budget to the project. It was December 6, 1941. The next day, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Scientists and technicians from around the world have been recruited. Several Nobel laureates have joined the list. In the scientific direction of the Manhattan Project, he was appointed Robert Oppenheimer.

The first big achievement, they got it almost a year later. December 2, 1942 Enrico Fermi (1938 Nobel Prize in Physics) divided an atom of uranium and released neutrons, which can be divided into several atoms of uranium: the chain reaction. From that moment, the scientists solved the various problems posed by the creation of the pump.

Robert Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist of great relevance. Since he was young, he has distinguished himself in his field (activity in which precocity is the norm), he studied with the main referents of his time (Bohrm and Heisenberg among others) and made several contributions to physics. But, without a doubt, your memory will always be tied to the creation of the atomic bomb.

As a responsible scientist, he had to recruit the best scientists of his time, solve the various technical problems that arose and manage the large team that lived in isolation and in the strict respect of confidentiality in the city. Los Alamos, created especially to welcome those who worked on the project. There was little merit in maintaining leadership and harmony, managing to reconcile two worlds as disparate as the military and science. His badociates admired and followed him with devotion. They were captivated by his calm and sure word and by his celestial eyes, by his icy look. He spoke 8 languages ​​and had a vast culture. Everything that seemed human seemed interested.

On July 16, 1945, it was the definitive proof. They had to check if everything was working as expected, if it worked in the lab, it was happening in the field. These calculations and experiments, the theoretical formulas, would show their destructive power. Was in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Robert Oppenheimer, other scientists and military commanders were nine kilometers from where the bomb would impact. The explosion overwhelmed them. For a few seconds, they were blinded. The roar was terrifying. The mushroom of earth and fire has gone up to heaven. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Some thought that the bomb had penetrated the earth's crust.

Oppenheimer started talking loudly. The others took a few seconds to understand what he was saying. He recited a fragment of the sacred book of Hindus, the Bhagavad-Gita: "The Almighty opened the gates of heaven and the light of a thousand suns sang in chorus: I am death, the end of all time"

These lines, some say that Oppenheimer remembered many years after the launch of the atomic bomb, they contain the ethical dilemma with which the scientist has lived all his life.

His brother Frank, also a scientist, recalled that his brother had a less poetic and more prosaic reaction. Seeing the shocking explosion, I would have shouted with enthusiasm: "It worked". This is understandable. Years devoted exclusively to this work, to the dependents, to the war, to the Nazi bomb-making race, the pressures and the scientific challenge. All the physics of the last 300 years converged at this moment. It was a scientific feat for them. The challenge had been overcome.

A few days later, when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated and their population succumbed to bombs, Oppenheimer's design was changing. Although he never regretted his performance in public, guilt accompanied him and the change of position was obvious. In the following years, until his death from a throat cancer – he was a fervent smoker – in 1967, it was a enemy of nuclear armament. He had a bitter argument with one of the scientists who had worked under him, Edward Teller, by the hydrogen pump.

These ethical problems are manifested in all scientists who collaborate with the war machine. Although not all reach the same answers. Several years ago, during the First World War, Fritz Haber, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, he was the inventor of chemical warfare. With his discovery, he released deadly gases that devastated entire populations, a new way of killing. His wife, an exceptional chemist also, reproached him for this activity. Fritz Haber replied energetically that in peacetime, a scientist was to serve humanity, but that at war he was to serve his country. His wife committed suicide the same night.

The shadow of the lack of loyalty, the conviction (real or invented) that the enemy is always worse, the call of their nation, the vanity and the possibility of realizing their theories, to have an unlimited budget to cross the borders These scientists have not yet wondered about the moral relevance of their creation. The quick explanation of the moment, the immediate response on the few occasions these statements occurred at Los Alamos during the development of the Manhattan Project, was that millions of unborn children would be beholden to the weapon they created. . .

Oppenheimer formed a chosen one; He managed to bring together the best scientists in the world. A conglomerate that has not been repeated in history. Almost no one resisted his offer, he collected very few rejections. The main argument was that they should be concerned only with the scientific development, the creation of the instrument. Its use and relevance were an exclusive preserve of the military commands, absolutely foreign to the scientific orbit.

The General Glover, the military leader of the project who summoned Oppenheimer, was his main support. Rumors and interests have done their job. Everyone wanted the Oppenheimer post, which was watched with suspicion. Glover told an badistant: "It's impossible for Oppenheimer to betray us, his desire to leave his name in the story is greater than anything else."

After the war, Robert Oppenheimer occupied for several years the direction of the new National Atomic Energy Committee. Until the middle of the macartist wave, he was also accused of communist They asked for his position and the return of security pbades (which few people had) and he was not allowed to have access to military and state secrets.

At first, they wanted to move it in silence. They asked for a quiet resignation. Oppenheimer refused and asked to be judged. I could not stand the thought of being considered unfair, a traitor.

The process was fierce, ended with his exclusion from the public service (the climate of time could not allow another to be the end) and with many of his secrets and intimacies unveiled. But that all this business is public, years later, his image will be recognized again. The Johnson government has rehabilitated him by awarding him the Enrico Fermi Award.

His post-nuclear opposition was strict. And internal dilemmas and remorse continued to consume him until the end.

"These doubts, that it was his illness and his martyrdom, they continue to draw an endless Greek tragedy, in which a man warns that he has created a force similar to that of God and spends his life to escape, terrified, "he wrote . Tomás Eloy Martínez.

His last years were internal battles. The search for personal recognition, the recomposition of his image, the desire to tame his creation, to try not to continue to spread the damage, to trap the monster he was born.

A mixture of pride, regret and remorse: a personal struggle that lasts a lifetime

Since the creation of the atomic bomb and its use, the world was never again the same. Impossible that it is. There has always been war, death, destruction and evil. But from that moment, something has changed irretrievably. Someone (many in fact) had and had the power to end up with millions of people in a second, simply by triggering a mechanism. That's what the scientist discovered during his last years and tried to fight. The conviction of having contributed the persecuted until his last moments. Robert Oppenheimer and modern science have definitely changed modern life.