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Thanking God for the Bomb: Killing in the Name of Healing Oppenheimer was living inside a system of beliefs that prevented him from seeing all these factors which might have brought his fanatical devotion to the Bomb into question. By invoking Krishna's justification for righteous Holy War, he invoked a profoundly mythical and mystical will to power. The doctrine of pure 'disinterested knowledge' is the principle doctrine that Krishna gives to Arjuna. This appealed to Oppenheimer for the obvious reason that his devotion to physics and so called "pure science", resembled in its essential form the doctrine of knowledge in the Bhagavad Gita. He thought the bomb would defeat Hitler and Japan and bring an end to war. Like Himmler or Arjuna he believed in his own righteousness, and was willing to kill for an exalted notion of the beneficence of scientific truth. But he never really questioned the other, darker, aspect of scientific truth, which would have meant questioning his own ambitious use of science as a road to power and fame. He believed that one could not hold back science for fear of what the world would do with its discoveries. This amoral and rather Machiavellian attitude to the world is what allowed him to create the bomb and then justified its creation even after he learned of the hundreds of thousands that were murdered. The value neutrality that is an implicit part of the scientific method encourages unethical practices. As Lifton's book on the Nazi Doctors shows, many, if not all, of the scientific experiments performed on live human subjects were legitimate experiments, according to a strict interpretation of the scientific method. Some were bogus, it is true. But there is nothing intrinsic to the scientific method that either supports human rights or prevents science being used for terror, atrocity, inhumanity or cruelty. Jane Goodall has demonstrated this in her protest against the cruel use of animals in laboratories. Oppenheimer, unlike Jane Goodall, believed that science should not be held back for fear of what the world would do with its discoveries. Goodall's attempt to defend chimpanzees and other animals from torture by scientists is implicitly a protest against the amoral character of science. Science should be held back and circumscribed by natural and human rights concerns. Lifton quotes estimates that there are over "one million survivors of radiation experiments in the United States alone". [1] The U.S. government supported these experiments and kept them secret until recently. Citizens were injected with plutonium, zirconium and subjected to total body radiation. Children women and African Americans were all used as guinea pigs. "Retarded children were fed irradiated cereal...and the testicles of prisoners were irradiated with heavy doses of x rays"[2] Jane Goodall has written extensively on the laboratory use of animals. There are no intrinsic checks within the scientific method to prevent these atrocities. They can only be prevented by "holding back science" and limiting its explorations in view of human and natural rights. But the true believers in the religion of science and private property resent any restrictions on their activities. Oppenheimer believed, for instance, that the atom bomb would be an ultimate touchstone that would, as he said, "shake mankind free from parochialism and war".[3] Still a Romantic and idealist, he thought the bomb he made to kill could be used to heal. He thought it should come under international control and unite mankind, perhaps in conjunction with the United Nations, which could oversee atomic energy development. The very weapon that most threatened the world, was supposed to save the world, as if science, as an ultimate panacea, could save us from the problems caused by science. This strange from of narcissistic and imitative magic, that the bomb could cure us of the very malignancy that created the bomb, seems to have obsessed others besides Oppenheimer. The psychology involved in this absurdly magical and paradoxical form of thinking is not easily explained. I can only speculate that Oppenheimer was so convinced of the tremendous power of his creation that he was sure, despite the delusional nature of his certainty, that nuclear power would cure the problems caused by nuclear power. More power would be the solution to the problems caused by power. A similar delusion seems to have visited Truman. Truman said that the bomb "was the greatest thing in history".[4] Truman thought the bomb was somehow a gift from god, that "harnessed the basic power of the universe" and the 'force from which the sun draws its power", [5] Truman also said "we thank God that the atom bomb has come to us instead of our enemies and we pray He guide us to use it in His ways and for his purposes". But meanwhile Truman ordered all newspapers throughout the U.S. to say nothing about the bomb or its effects without government permission. If the bomb was so great, why the shroud of secrecy around it? This Government silence would continue until recently, and there are indications that information is still being withheld. What were Oppenheimer and Truman seeking to escape through the manufacture of such strategies of self delusion? Were they trying to escape awareness of the delusional nature of their own love of power through knowledge? It would seem that they were. Lifton observes that Truman thought the bomb "could seem to enable one to do everything- to solve all immediate problems, bring about instant victory as well as control of the future and over those who used it a deitie's dominion and immortality. Truman decided to use the bomb because he was drawn to its ultimate power...". Like Truman, Oppenheimer saw the bomb as a religious panacea. But after Hiroshima, part of him, and it seems a small part, had doubts about the nuclear religion he was in process of both creating and accepting. He ambiguously endorsed and opposed the development of the Hydrogen Bomb. This would come back to haunt him later. But to understand why it would haunt him requires going deeper into the paradoxes of power and knowledge and Oppenheimer's relation to these paradoxes. His view that a weapon of total destructive power could be a means to world peace is a paradoxical illusion. This illusion is born of the pursuit of disinterested knowledge, as if Oppenheimer's experience of personal transcendence and power upon seeing the first bomb explode could liberate mankind as Oppenheimer had felt liberated, if only the world could understand what it meant to him. He had a vision of what it must be like to be god. But if god is an illusion that Oppenheimer, like others, projected on the universe, then his vision of god in the nuclear cloud was really no more than a vision of his own need of power. He saw his own illusions in the radiating red and ultraviolet cloud and convinced himself these illusions were a god. This paradox is not really a paradox, but grows directly from the experience and meaning of power itself. The definition of power that I am using here is that power is a program of action, based on a theory of knowledge, which assume man's alienation from this knowledge, and thus those who possess this knowledge have power and are able to confer benefits or exact punishments and deprivations against those who do not conform to or possess the requisite knowledge. The drive for knowledge is often the drive for transcendence, for the Beyond, for totality or immortality. The drive for power requires powerlessness, and this often means it requires victims, which become proof of the strength of the powerful. The apparent lunacy of Oppenheimer believing the weapon that could destroy mankind, could save mankind, is virtually identical to the Christian belief that Christ who is supposed to have saved mankind, will one day destroy it. The paradox involved is really only a mystification of the dual nature and the dynamic of the knowledge/power relationship. Total knowledge claims total power over life and death, the past and the future. The will to create a god image of total power, a bomb or a ultimate panacea hides within it a will to destruction. Creation becomes complete in its own destruction, which undermines the power of the creator. This is not easily understood, but it seems that knowledge/power is the paradox of being in between creation and destruction, maximum life and maximum death. Both Oppenheimer and Truman became involved and, to some degree, possessed by the paradox of power that their positions and their involvement with the bomb immersed them in. They could not resist the power over life and death that the bomb put in their hands. It made them feel like gods. |