History of the Nuclear World
To coincide with the debut of Oppenheimer, national security analyst Joe Cirincione has published a five-part series on the history of the nuclear world, based on his book on the same subject.
To help you prepare for the opening of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film, Oppenheimer, I am publishing a nuclear history primer. It will be a series of five articles adopted from my book, Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons. This short series will provide you with a summary of the history, physics, strategy and politics that combined to create the world’s first atomic bomb — and usher in a terrifying nuclear arms race.
Building the Bomb
Albert Einstein signed the letter. Years later he would regret it, calling it the one mistake he had made in his life. After the war, he said that “had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing.”
But in August 1939, Adolf Hitler’s armies already occupied Czechoslovakia and Austria and his fascist thugs were arresting Jews and political opponents throughout the Third Reich. Signing the letter seemed vital. His friends and fellow physicists, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, had drafted the note he would now send to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The scientists had seen their excitement over the recent breakthrough discoveries of the deepest secrets of the atom turn to fear as they realized what unleashing atomic energies could mean. Now the danger could not be denied. The Nazis might be working on a super-weapon; they had to be stopped.
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Plus 1
-“Oppenheimer” ignites controversy in Japan
“Oppenheimer” has generated backlash in Japan, for what critics argue is its failure to fully grapple with the destructive reality of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and its celebration of the “father of the atomic bomb,” Axios’ Kira Wang writes.
- Why it matters:While the film does chronicle J. Robert Oppenheimer’s guilt over the deployment of the weapon he helped create, it doesn’t truly show “what happened under the mushroom cloud,” Keiko Tsuyama, a former staff writer for Kyoto News who covered the aftermath of the bombing in Nagasaki, tells Axios.
- It has also been deeplyuncomfortable for some Japanese people and Japanese Americans to see the development of weapons that killed upwards of 200,000 people in 1945 become part of a pop culture phenomenon.
Warner Brothers apologized for using fanmade “Barbenheimer” memes — playing on the fact that “Barbie” and Oppenheimer debuted in the U.S. to huge audiences on the same weekend — to market “Barbie” on social media, noting that it had been “insensitive” to make light of nuclear detonations.
- The images, such as one showing Barbie’s hair as a mushroom cloud, had been widely criticized on social media in Japan, including by the Japanese account for Barbie, which called them “extremely regrettable” and inconsiderate to Japanese history. #NoBarbenheimer and #StopBarbieRelease both trended on X, formerly known as Twitter.
What’s next: For now, there is no opening date set for “Oppenheimer” in Japan.
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Plus 2
-Oppenheimer’s forgotten astrophysics research explains why black holes exist
-Long before he began work on the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer was a pioneering scientist working on the formation of dark stars: what we now call black holes.
-Even though there are quantum rules that govern the Universe, with enough mass in one location, even individual protons and neutrons will succumb to gravitational collapse.
-Once a critical mass threshold is crossed, the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, a black hole’s formation is unavoidable. Here’s the science you won’t find in the movie “Oppenheimer.”
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The Cosmopolitan Globalist cross-posted a post from Strategy & History
