No Historical Memory

Yesterday, I watched the superb movie Oppenheimer, written and directed by Christopher Nolan.  The movie is historically accurate, with one caveat. Nolan could not have presented the new physics—quantum mechanics—in his film. The closest he comes is Werner Heisenberg pronouncing in a lecture that there is no causality in the new physics of submicroscopic particles. During the movie’s time period, quantum mechanics was not completely understood; only years later, with the double slit experiment with single electrons done by a Japanese group at Hitachi, was quantum physics placed on an irrefutable foundation. See my Quantum Physics and Mind.

While Oppenheimer is historically accurate, we as a general populace have no historical memory. My conjecture is that few readers of this blog remember in detail or if younger have heard about the Cuban Missile Crisis.

How Humanity Escaped Annihilation by the Skin of Its Teeth

In a television address to the nation on October 22, 1962, President Kennedy declared a naval quarantine of Cuba to prevent the Soviet Union from delivering nuclear weapons to the communist nation ninety miles off the coast of Florida. On October 27, eleven United States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph, through sonar sounding, located off Cuba the diesel-powered Soviet submarine B-59 sent from its Arctic base on October 1. Despite being in international waters, the Americans started dropping hand-grenade-sized depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification. None of the American Naval Commanders knew the Soviet submarine was armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo.

Vadim Pavlovich Orlov, a communications intelligence officer on board the B-59, said the depth charges exploding right next to the hull “felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer.” Another crew member, Anatoly Petrovich Andreyev, recorded in his diary the emotional state of the Capitan of B-59, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, days before his encounter with the American destroyers: “the commander’s nerves are shot to hell, he’s yelling at everyone and torturing himself. . . . He is already becoming paranoid, scared of his own shadow. He’s hard to deal with. I feel sorry for him and at the same time angry with him for his rash actions.”^[1]

The physical conditions on B-59 were horrible. The temperature throughout the submarine was 113 F° and in the engine area 140 F°. Crew members were fainting; no one could sleep; and CO₂ levels were dangerously high.

USS Beale and USS Cony dropped 10 concussive grenades on the B-59 over five hours. Orlov reported that a particularly powerful depth-charge explosion next to the submarine made the “totally exhausted” Captain Savitsky “furious.” Savitsky screamed, “Maybe the war has already started up there, while we are doing somersaults here! We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not disgrace our Navy!” He ordered the “special weapon”—a ten kiloton nuclear-tipped torpedo—to be readied for use. His intended target was the USS Randolph.^[2]

The three primary officers on board—Captain Savitsky, the Political Officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and Deputy Brigade Commander Vasili Arkhipov—had to agree unanimously to authorize a nuclear launch. A heated argument broke out, and Maslennikov gave his consent to the torpedo being fired, but Arkhipov stubbornly refused to give his approval.

If the B-59’s torpedo had been fired and had vaporized the USS Randolph, nuclear Armageddon would have ensued, with the 100 tactical nuclear weapons on Cuban soil launched against the United States along with hundreds of nuclear-armed ICBMs on Russian soil; the 5,500 nuclear weapons in the American arsenal would have been launched against the Soviet Union and its allies. A thermonuclear war between the United States and Russia would have entailed the death of at least 100 million people in each country, the destruction of the industrial and military capacity of both, and long-term radioactive contamination of 50,000 square miles. The surviving Russians and Americans would have suffered like the victims of Hiroshima.^[3]

Arkhipov persuaded Savitsky to surface and await orders from Moscow; Savitsky spurned assistance from the U.S. destroyers, and the B-59 made its way slowly home to Russia.

World War III was averted not by decisions in the White House or in the Kremlin, but in the sweltering control room of a Soviet submarine. Vasili Arkhipov saved the world. We should celebrate his disobedience to humankind, not to the Nation-State, on October 27, Arkhipov Day, a proposed international holiday by students of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Although we are a month late, I suggest you raise a glass of vodka or wine and salute Vasili Arkhipov for his disobedience to the Nation-State, something the physicists at Los Alamos could or would not do. Consider their argument not to pursue the development of the hydrogen bomb.

Soldiers-Not-In-Uniform

When Oppenheimer lost his security clearance in June 1954 that ended his access to the government’s atomic secrets, and his guidance of the development of nuclear weapons was over. Near the very end of Oppenheimer, Einstein cynically tells Oppenheimer, “Now it is your turn to deal with the consequences of your achievements. And one day when you’ve [been] punished enough, they’ll serve salmon and potato salad, make speeches, give you a medal.” Einstein’s prediction came true. 

In a minority report of the General Advisory Committee’s Report on Building the H-Bomb[4], dated October 30, 1949, Fermi and Rabi first noted that the destructiveness of a hydrogen bomb “enters the range of very great natural catastrophes” and therefore its use “in practical effect” would approach “genocide.” Then, the two physicists gave an unassailable moral argument: “The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.” For these reasons, they urged “the President of the United States to tell the American public, and the world, that we think it wrong on fundamental ethical principles to initiate a program of development of such a weapon.”

Hans Bethe, the head of the theoretical physics group at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, agreed with Fermi and Rabi that the development of the hydrogen bomb was evil, only worthy of barbarians. “If we fight a war and win it with H-Bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for, but the methods used to accomplish them,” he argued. “These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who brutally killed every last inhabitant of Persia.”^[5]

Three months later, on January 31, 1950, President Truman ordered the Atomic Energy Commission to develop the hydrogen bomb. Fermi’s moral argument meant nothing, not even to himself, for he worked[6] to construct a device that is “necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.” Fermi abandoned his reasoned moral judgment and readily conformed his will to the decision of his Commander in Chief when he heard President Truman announce, “I have directed the Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb. Like all other work in the field of atomic weapons, it is being and will be carried forward on a basis consistent with the overall objectives of our program for peace and security.”[7]

Rabi thought that Truman’s public announcement of the decision to pursue the Super was a display of gross ignorance. Years later, he recalled with anger that he “never forgave Truman for buckling under pressure. . . . he simply did not understand what it was about.” For Truman “to have alerted the world that we were going to make a hydrogen bomb at a time when we didn’t even know how to make one was one of the worst things he could have done.”[8] Nevertheless, Rabi readily accepted the Chairmanship of the General Advisory Committee, the high-level scientific and technical body that oversaw the development of the hydrogen bomb for the Atomic Energy Commission.

Bethe initially refused to work on the hydrogen bomb. In a letter to Norris Bradbury, the Director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, he stated in unequivocal terms that “if and when I come to Los Alamos in the future, I will completely refrain from any discussions related to the super-bomb.”[9] A year later, Bethe changed his mind and returned full-time to Los Alamos, although he later said that his work on the hydrogen bomb was “not critical to [the] success” of the Mike shot.[10]

Mike, the code name for the first test of a thermonuclear device, was detonated on November 1, 1952, on Eniwetak, an atoll in the Pacific Ocean. This full-scale test validated the Teller-Ulam design, although Mike was not a bomb since the 82-ton device was essentially a building. Less than two years later, the United States detonated Castle Bravo, a deliverable hydrogen bomb, on March 1, 1954 at the Bikini Atoll. The yield of Mike was 10.4 megatons of TNT, equivalent to some 700 Hiroshima gadgets[11], and the yield of Castle Bravo was 15 megatons of TNT. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT. The yield of nuclear weapons increased by 1,000.

For good citizens like Fermi, Rabi, and Bethe, the Nation-State possesses an absolute moral authority that overrules the authority of any religion and every individual citizen. The new barbarians gave the Nation-State a weapon that Genghis Khan had never dreamed of, a “technically sweet” marvel that could destroy humankind thrice over on a lazy Saturday afternoon.[12]

For generals and politicians, physicists had become the most important resource a Nation-State could call upon. Novelist and physicist C. P. Snow called the scientists at Los Alamos soldiers-not-in-uniform, and like all good soldiers of the Nation-State, they were obedient to power.^[13]

For the current state of weapons development at Los Alamos,  see my post Oppenheimer: Los Alamos, Then and Now

We Jam Our Eyes Closed

Oppenheimer, the final scene:  Oppenheimer visualizes the expanding nuclear arsenals of the world. He says to himself when I can take it no longer, I jam my eyes closed.[14]

Most of us jam our eyes closed to the reality of the Nation-State. In the late 1800s, the Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke grasped that war is an intrinsic part of the Nation-State: “War is not only a practical necessity, it is also a theoretical necessity, an exigency of logic.  The concept of the State implies the concept of war, for the essence of the State is Power.”^[15]

Most Americans believe that the United States is a peace-loving nation that only engages in war to protect its hard-won freedoms, especially when threatened by dictators. But the facts say otherwise. The United States, over a 150-year period, engaged in eleven major wars—the Mexican-American War, the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Iraq War I, War in Afghanistan, and Iraq War II—which on average is one major military conflict every fourteen years.  During that period, numerous other military operations occurred, such as the Indian Wars, the opening of Japan to Western trade, and the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. 

A world of Nation-States contesting to expand and secure their spheres of political, economic, and ideological influence is unstable. The British Empire, France, and Russia were aligned against Germany; then, a minor event, the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, set off War I; the war ended four years later with 9,700,000 military personnel dead. Twenty-five years later, the Nation-States went at it again, this time resulting in 51,000,000 military and civilian deaths. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union did not result in World War III because of nuclear weapons. To avoid nuclear war, both nations adhered to the strategy of MAD, mutually assured destruction: If the Soviet Union attacked the United States, it would be annihilated by a massive nuclear weapons attack from the United States, ensuring that both nations would be destroyed; and same held if the United States attacked the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer likened the Soviet Union and the United States to two scorpions in a bottle.

MAD almost failed during the Cuban Missile Crisis because of poor intelligence—the United States did not know that nuclear weapons were already in place in Cuba—and—and the pursuit of power—the Kennedy administration believed atomic weapons in Cuba would be perceived as a shift of power to the Soviets. The two scorpions came within a hairsbreadth of attacking and killing each other.

Nothing remains the same. MAD does not apply in the current Ukraine War between a nuclear and a non-nuclear power. If Russia airbursts a small atomic bomb over Ukraine to intimidate its leaders, the United States would be insane to attack Russia and initiate World War III. Not unlike Russia’s claim about Ukraine, China maintains Taiwan is its lost territory that must accept unification, preferably peacefully, but by force, if deemed necessary by the Chinese Leaders. Any attempt by China to forcefully make Taiwan part of the People’s Republic of China would result in something like the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Regional wars fought with atomic bombs could create a global catastrophe. Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon, both climatologists, claim that “new analyses reveal that a conflict between India and Pakistan, for example, in which 100 nuclear bombs were dropped on cities and industrial areas—only 0.4 percent of the world’s more than 25,000—would produce enough smoke to cripple global agriculture. A regional war could cause widespread loss of life even in countries far away from the conflict.” They estimate that from such a “limited” war 20 million people in the region could die from bomb blasts, fire, and radiation. In addition, a billion people worldwide with marginal food supplies could die of starvation because of the ensuing agricultural collapse. Robock and Toon do not consider the scenario of a rogue terrorist state, such as ISIS, that embodies an apocalyptic view of history ending with Armageddon, acquiring nuclear bombs through the political collapse of Pakistan.[16]

The worst-case scenario is that a dictator like Hitler gets control of thermonuclear bombs. Arguably the secret wish of Hitler was for the destruction of the Third Reich on a cosmic scale, much like Wagner’s masterpiece, the Der Ring des Nibelungen, which culminates in the Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the gods; the opera ends with a fiery cataclysm on stage and the intimation that a new cycle of history will begin.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Nation-States pursuing their political, economic, and ideological ends will not end in nuclear war.

We Nudged God Aside

The beginning of complete autonomy of humankind from Nature and the transcendent can be precisely dated: In October 1620, Francis Bacon, the principal architect of the experimental method of modern science,published The Great Instauration, a pamphlet that changed the world. Bacon’s grand vision for the future of humankind rested upon a heretical reading of Genesis. To partially restore humanity to the Garden of Eden, the only time in human history that Homo sapiens had real authority over Nature, a new science was needed “in order that the mind may exercise over the nature of things the authority which properly belongs to it.”^[17]

Bacon was the first to enunciate the fundamental principle of modern science: “The testimony and information of the sense has reference always to man, not to the universe; and it is a great error to assert that the sense is the measure of things.”^[18] But a total rejection of the senses is madness, so to arrive at trustworthy information about nature, the senses must be assigned a limited role. In one sentence, Bacon presented the heart of the experimental method, something entirely new to humankind: “The office of the sense shall be only to judge of the experiment, and the experiment itself shall judge of the thing.”^[19] Said another way, the scientist touches the experiment, and the experiment touches nature. The scientist has no direct contact with nature. No scientist has ever seen, or will ever see, with his or her own eyes a neutrino, the helical structure of DNA, or the background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Scientific instruments touch nature, and the physicist, the chemist, or the biologist reads the numerical outputs, analyzes the data, applies theories, and eventually discovers the real constituents of nature—subatomic particles, molecules, and genes. The experimenter is an actor manipulating nature, not misled by its surface beauty.

Bacon introduced one other principle entirely new to humankind: The true test of human knowledge is whether nature can be commanded, for “those twin objects, human knowledge and human power, do really meet in one; and it is from ignorance of causes that operation fails.”^[20] The new science would make humankind the master and possessor of Nature, much as Adam was in the Garden of Eden. 

In effect, Bacon rewrote the Bible. The Hebrew Bible told how Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden; the New Testament gave hope that what had been lost through disobedience to God would be restored at some point through faith in Jesus Christ. In Bacon’s version of Genesis, the restoration of the lost Paradise was expected to come about not through faith but from the “great mass of inventions”^[21] that would flow forth from the new experimental science that would give humankind the command over Nature that Adam had in the Garden of Eden. As a result, the descendants of the first man and woman could on their own return to Paradise and “subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity”^[22] that resulted from the expulsion of Adam and Eve to East of Eden, where women painfully suffered childbirth, and the cursed ground brought forth thistles and thorns.

Without looking Him in the face, Bacon told God in sotto voce, “We do not need your help. We now know how to return ourselves to the Garden of Eden. Besides we are tired of waiting; 1,600 years is too long.” After registering his complaint, Bacon gently nudged God aside and more forcefully dumped Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas in the dustbin of history.

In America, indeed now practically everywhere, each person is freed from the group, Nature, and the transcendent and left alone to pursue happiness as he sees fit. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, imagines what greeted the Dutch sailors’ eyes when they first saw the islands that were later to become New York City: “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”^[23]

In the New World, every avenue for profit-making and securing comfort was to be relentlessly pursued. Forests became stands of timber, prairies farmland, and rivers transportation waterways and sources of power. Two centuries later, major cities became blanketed with life-threatening smog, rivers because of industrial pollution became fire hazards, and planet Earth, due to climate change, experienced mass species extinction. The unbridled desire for material goods led to ecological disasters, apparent to all.

Universities, corporations, and governments set up departments of human resources; men and women became objects to be used, just like plants and animals. Everything became a commodity, waiting for the last dollar to be squeezed out of it. What now lies completely hidden is the human being’s essence, to wonder, to behold, and to offer thanks for the plants and animals that form the web of life.

With God nudged aside, we managed with our “great mass of inventions” to “subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity.” The wealth generated by science and capitalism was staggering, although not disturbed justly; nevertheless, we have all profited. Without the vast wealth that poured out of the cornucopia of science and technology, I would have been a Romanian peasant stealing chickens and telling fortunes (see illustration).

Yet the future of humanity looks bleak, but there is no going back; I cannot become a Romanian peasant. The way forward is in some way to undo the grip of the Nation-State on its citizens. Christians should ask themselves, “Am I an American who happens to be a Christian?” or “Am I a Christian who happens to be an American?”

Endnotes

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[1] Milan Rai, “Arkhipov Day: Celebrate the Man Who Saved the World,” http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Arkhipov-Day-Celebrate-the-Man-Who-Saved-the-World-20141025-0018.html. Also see Marion Lloyd, “Soviets Close To Using A-Bomb In 1962 Crisis, Forum Is Told” The Boston Globe, October 13, 2002. Available http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/cold-war/sovietsbomb.htm, and “The Cuban Missile Crisis: 40 Years Later,” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/liveonline/02/special/world/sp_world_blanton101602.htm. Also, the excellent PBS documentary Missile Crisis: The Man Who Saved the World, available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr_WkfOMx4c.

[2] Ibid.

[3] See United States government document The Effects of Nuclear War, pp. 27-32, pp. 37-39, and pp. 94-100. Available http://atomicarchive.com/Docs/pdfs/7906.pdf.

[4] E. Fermi and I. I. Rabi, General Advisory Committee’s Majority and Minority Reports on Building the H-Bomb (October 30, 1949), the Minority Report. Available www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Hydrogen/GACReport.shtml#Minority.

[5] Hans A. Bethe, “The Hydrogen Bomb II,” Scientific American (April 1950): 18-23.

[6] See Richard L. Garwin, “Enrico Fermi and Ethical Problems in Scientific Research,” https://fas.org/rlg/011019-fermi.ht.

[7] Harry S. Truman, “Statement by the President on the Hydrogen Bomb,” January 31, 1950, https://trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=642&st=&st1=.

[8] Isidor Rabi, quoted by Jeremy Bernstein, “Physicist~II,” The New Yorker (October 20, 1975): 78.

[9] Hans Bethe, quoted by Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 416. 

[10] Ibid., p. 487.

[11] Nothing in weapons work is called by its proper name. A bomb is a “device” or “gadget;” a detonation of a nuclear weapon is a “shot;” Los Alamos Scientific National Laboratory is “the Ranch” or “the Hill;” an implosive bomb is made with “ploot,” for plutonium, named after Pluto, the god of hell. A hundredth-millionth of a second is a “shake”—a shake of a lamb’s tail. The chemical energy of a quarter of a ton of high explosive is a “jerk.” The Hiroshima shot released sixty kilojerks.

[12] Stan Ulam and Edward Teller together discovered the technical trick to make a hydrogen bomb, described by J. Robert Oppenheimer as “technically sweet.”

[13] See C. P. Snow, The Physicists (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1981), p. 185.

[14] See the last page of the screenplay at https://8flix.com/assets/screenplays/o/tt15398776/Oppenheimer-2023-screenplay.pdf.

[15] Heinrich von Treitschke, quoted by Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies:  Volume Two: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and The Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 65.

[16] Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon, “Local Nuclear War, Global Suffering,” Scientific American 302 (January 2010): 74, 76.

[17] Francis Bacon, The New Organon and Related Writings (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960 [1620]) pp. 3, 7. Italics added.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid., p. 22.

[20] Ibid., p. 29.

[21]Ibid., p. 103.

[22] Ibid., p. 23.

[23] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Collier Books, 1980 [1925]), p. 182.