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"..."On Becoming Death"
David Krieger, 1995
"Now I am become death,
the shatterer of worlds."
Bhagavad Gita
When Oppenheimer thought,
"Now I am become death,"
did he mean,
“Now we have become death?"
Was Oppenheimer thinking
About himself, or all of us?
From Alamogordo to Hiroshima
Took exactly three weeks.
On August 6th, Oppenheimer
Again became death.
So did Groves,
And Stimson and Byrnes.
So did Truman.
So did a hundred thousand
That day in Hiroshima.
So did America.
"This is the greatest thing
in history," Truman said.
He didn't think
He'd become death
That day.
We Americans know how to win.
Truman was a winner,
A shatterer of worlds.
Three days later, Truman
And his Military boys
Did it again at Nagasaki.
Some time later,
Oppenheimer visited Truman.
"I have blood on my hands,"
Oppenheimer said.
Truman didn't like those words.
Blood?
What Blood?
When Oppenheimer left,
Truman said,
"Don't ever
let him in
here again."
That August of '45
Truman and his military boys
Shattered a few worlds.
They never learned
That the worlds they shattered
Included their own.
Oppenheimer professed to feel no remorse; and in fact said as much in relation to developing the bomb and its test, named Trinity, at Alamogordo, New Mexico. At the time of the test, which was four times more powerful than the calculations and the "visual effect…beyond imagination", the scientists were apparently "transfixed with fright" and the words of the Hindu sacred epic, Bhavagad Gita, flashed into Oppenheimer’s mind, "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One." However, when the huge, sinister mushroom-shaped cloud rose into the sky, another line from the poem came to him: "I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds." At other times, Oppenheimer revealed feelings of guilt and responsibility - in his meeting with Truman, for example (the above poem is a true record except that Truman actually said "I don't want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again" and referred to him afterwards as 'that crybaby'). Oppenheimer also at times remarked that he had "known sin", had done the "devil's work," and in justification of the moral issue, that the prior firebombing of Tokyo removed any moral imperatives. Dr. Lifton, a psychiatrist who specializes in the psychological effects of the nuclear age, believes that it left such an impression in his soul - (soul is my word) - that as he aged his face became that of a grotesque death mask. Oppenheimer died of throat cancer. I do not know if it was thyroid cancer - the fate of many people and their families involved in the nuclear research, development and manufacture of nuclear weapons. (Lifton & Mitchell, 155;Kumar; Lifton & Mitchell, 226)
Though most of the Manhattan Project atomic scientists experienced guilt, it was not in connection with research and development, not on working – to refer to Frayn's question - "on the practical exploitation of atomic power," but rather more about the actual dropping of the bomb, the mass killing of civilians - their predominant concern was killing women and children. Another concern was that the bomb must never be used again, and many began to activate for international control of atomic energy.
I wonder why, at the time the choice was made to undertake this research and development, these men thought no farther than the technological aspects of the bomb itself? It had a purpose, it had a use. It had a potential to kill on a mass scale, and a potential when produced on a mass scale, to eradicate all life from the planet. The absence of reflection, of contemplation, of the larger issues surprises me.
A Just Cause
In the first instance there was arguably a good reason for scientists to put their energies to work on developing the atomic bomb. Professor Sir Josef Rotblat, a British physicist tells of his concern that Hitler's scientists would be doing the same kind of experiments and making the same kind of discoveries that he, in his laboratory in Poland and others, in laboratories elsewhere, were working on. Rotblat left Poland for England (because of Hitler) and approached the University of Liverpool with his concerns which began a bomb development project and which later combined with the Americans as the Manhattan Project with Rotblat a member of the team.
However, in 1942, when it was discovered that the Germans had failed (perhaps thanks to Heisenberg) and dropped their project, and Rotblat learned from General Leslie Groves, the project's administrator, that the bomb's development would continue because the real intention was to drop it on Japan as a demonstration to the Russians, Rotblat left the Manhattan project, - the only one to do so. He was silenced until the 1950s and treated in a humiliating manner as a security threat. He returned to England, worked on nuclear applications for medicine and served as President of Pugwash, an organization of scientists dedicated to ending war.
The surrender of the Japanese and the end of the Second World War have been attributed to the dropping of the atomic and plutonium bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans. This is the official story promulgated by President Truman and his advisors and maintained by censorship and decades of secrecy, at great psychological cost to the American people: to their health from radiation poisoning from tests, arsenal development and experiments on people; and I might add to the democratic principles of the United States of America. When the documents were released under the Freedom of Information Act the official story was seen to be false. The secrecy and the actions to maintain it, to control the official story, and to hide the awful truth of the effect of the bombs on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the means used to do so, are a familiar tale to those of you who grew up subject to the Soviet totalitarian system.
"The language of what belongs to man as man has long since been disintegrated"
George Grant
One of the things that I have noted with others and experienced myself is difficulty, almost to inability, of describing the absolute horror of the nuclear weapon. I struggle to find words that will convey the outrage I feel. I look for the meaning in myth, in fiction, from a primitive ethic or one from a religious, more spiritual age. One of the scientists in experiencing the Trinity explosion talked of it as Doomsday and the official government reporter/cum propagandist wrote about it terms of, what can only be, psychological reversal - "Creation" rather than Destruction, the destructive force it is. Oppenheimer's mind flashed back to a sacred Hindu text. Dr. Lifton comes closest to my feelings in his choice of language which seems archaic in the technological era – where nothing is sacrosanct, where there are no concepts concerned with the sacred and the profane - when he entitles a chapter of his book, "Desecration."
I have struggled to express my outrage: wrestling with concepts like Pandora's box, Frankenstein's Monster, the Philosopher's Stone. However, I fail! The Philosopher's Stone, symbolic of a thirst for forbidden powers beyond and greater than the laws of Nature is applicable to scientific research and development and a warning of the dangers it poses today. However, this metaphor is insufficient to describe the outrage I feel when related to such a momentous crime against Nature: To utilize the elements and four forces of Nature in the service of universal destruction! We are creatures of these elements and forces of Nature! To create from this a tool that can destroy all of Nature Herself! To use Life and Nature against Herself - complicit in Her self-destruction! - in the service of our destruction - Nature's creatures! I have come to the conclusion that the meaning of the nuclear weapon can be expressed only in the form of the Sacred as a blasphemous act - in terms of Good and Evil. If God is defined as the universal communion of man then this is the destruction of God, the evil destruction of the Good, desecration - the violation of all that is sacred.
Hans Morgenthau, who has been described as the "main ideologist and mandarin… of the realist school of [thought]," - that is to say, not a person that one would imagine would concern himself with the ethics of this issue - warns that it is a fallacy to think conventionally about nuclear weapons. He argues that after Hiroshima the symbolic systems and linguistic tools that were appropriate to describe weapons of war prior to Hiroshima are redundant and our linguistic tools are insufficient and sometimes seriously misleading. Weapons of war prior to Hiroshima, he says, were tools of engagement between two warring parties after which one would be defeated and the other emerge the winner - "a rational relationship between a means, an instrument and an end." In his view, to refer to nuclear instruments and their utilization as weapons and war is resorting to euphemisms. A nuclear device, he says, is not a weapon but "an instrument of unlimited, universal destruction"; nuclear war is not war but - to quote him, "suicide and genocide…. a self-defeating absurdity". (Pertti Joenniemi, Arms and Language: In the Beginning there was the Word, Cultural Roots of Peace, Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, Zurich, 1984, 38-9)
Morgenthau's discussion of language provides rational credence to what I am trying to express. However, it is "Clausewitzean” in concept; rational in the acknowledgement of exchange relationship with its sense of "other" and a strange "justice" - Clausewitzean justice, that is to say, concern for other's deprivation of victory or defeat. It is diminished and soulless in its absence of concern for the sanctity of life. He bespeaks the language of the technological age.
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
We can attribute the articulation of a transformation of the idea of the Good, to Nietzsche for he articulated the values for the new age and confronted us with the profound implications for our technological destiny. This destiny is rooted in and develops organically within the technological age.
In the technological age, the moral and spiritual dimensions of Being are diminished. Being itself is diminished. One is no longer valued as "Being", for his or her humanness, but rather for his or her usefulness. One becomes and is valued as a "human resource", raw material, cannon fodder, and a tool in human form, valued for his or her utility. The moral imperative of human value, human dignity, has been transformed to a technological imperative, value as a commodity. Technology takes over human abilities, the human is diminished. Lewis Mumford writes that the phonograph and radio do away with the impulse to sing, the automobile to walk, the camera the impulse to see and to remember. We assimilate aspects of the machine and the machine assimilates aspects of the human. The human inevitably is diminished. Only part of him or her is valued. The pervading attitudes of the technological culture discourages humanity in individuals.
Technology is not just the instruments, the prostheses made by and for man, it is also a new way of knowing and understanding and both instruments and knowledge are affected by their mutual infusion. Canadian philosopher, George Grant, believes that "Technology is the ontology [essence of things or being] of the age." Technology shapes and is shaped by all aspects of human development, that is to say our language, constructs, concepts, attitudes, belief systems. There is no longer a concept of the sacred, ethics are diminished to principles of survival, codes of behaviour, operational ways and functions of life; morality an invention of organized society in its own interest; and justice, no longer related to truth and beauty is, in Grant's view, "the result of interested calculation." (George Grant, Technology & Justice, Concord, Ont. 1986, 61)
"Have we not been told that to speak of what belongs to man as man is to forget that man creates himself in history?"
George Grant
Our language, as articulation of Being, shapes, is shaped by and thus constitutes the world view and affects the way we think and perceive.
Language is not a neutral factor - the power to name and define is a form of societal influence and control. In language one organizes, classifies and makes normal one's experience of the world - the more narrow the world view the more diminished the language. In the narrowing and simplifying of language, of concepts, of reason, in the technological age, unmitigated by the moral and spiritual dimensions of the soul makes it impossible for concepts like the "sanctity of life", higher concepts of justice than those in human created law, to have meaning.
Unless we comprehend that this world view, that the essence and being of technological society is less than (merely part of) the totality of being, of existence, Grant warns that "we obscure from ourselves the central difficulty in our present destiny: we apprehend our destiny by forms of thought which are themselves the very core of that destiny." (Grant, 32)
Since the Enlightenment when the great humane ideals of freedom, justice and equality co-existed in harmony with scientific thought, the understanding of human progress, to paraphrase Albert Schweitzer, has dwelt more and more on the results of science and less and less on reflection on the individual, society, humanity and civilization. Moreover, Descartes' concept of being, "I think therefore I am," rather than a humanistic concept of, say, "I live therefore I am," or "I am life therefore I exist", has tended to dominate critical enquiry, and has led thought into abstractions, fragments and away from knowledge of what is in essence human, of what is humane.
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The abdication of thought has been… the decisive factor in the collapse of our civilization
Albert Schweitzer
I would suggest that the language of Good and Evil, the sacred and the profane was not part of the conscious lexicon of these ("our") scientists until, in some, the explosion of Trinity or, in others, the information that the bomb has been dropped on the two cities in Japan, resulted in a transformational or transfiguring experience which was then followed by a period of reflection -contemplation of the event - Oppenheimer's remark that the people who have survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki may envy the dead, for example. The scientists' anger and rejection of Heisenberg's "moral reservations", referred to earlier, not only suggests - because their response was not a blank stare - that perhaps they were defending against their own feelings of guilt, conscious or unconscious, but also perhaps – a failure to recognize the language of inner conviction, or find it at best irrelevant, outmoded in a profession whose only recognized ethic is "loyalty to truth" whose models of nature are mathematical and completely eliminate the human dimension. (Weeramantry, 157)
We have talked for decades with ever increasing light-mindedness about war and conquest, as if these were merely operations on a chess-board.
Albert Schweitzer..." |
