This is the last in a three-part series about “Oppenheimer” and the historical issues raised by the blockbuster film. Part two focused on the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Part one featured an interview with arms control expert Joe Cirincione.
By the time he left office in early 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had overseen the expansion of the nation’s nuclear arsenal to 20,000 weapons. The United States had dramatically outpaced the Soviet Union in the opening years of the arms race. The USSR had roughly 2,000 nuclear bombs after the first full decade of the Cold War. The “missile gap” notwithstanding, both superpowers had more than enough nuclear firepower to destroy the world many times over – and that indeed was the point of the policy of “mutually assured destruction.”
That was exactly the outcome Robert Oppenheimer and like-minded scientists hoped to avoid as they tried – and failed – to influence national defense policy after World War II. Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film “Oppenheimer” shines a light on the physicist’s opposition to the H-bomb program and his support for international arms control and openness, rather than secrecy, in national security policy before losing his top-secret clearance in 1954.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historian Gregg Herken, author of “Brotherhood of the Bomb,” discusses whether the U.S. missed a chance to avoid an arms race and decades of Cold War by ignoring Oppenheimer’s advice in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
“It’s hard to imagine how the Cold War would not have occurred mostly because of the leadership of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. It’s hard to imagine Stalin agreeing to international control of atomic energy, for example, which is what Robert Oppenheimer was promoting,” said Mr. Herken, who noted that after Stalin’s death in 1953 there was an opening for a less confrontational policy between the two nations.
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