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Dwayne David Paul Seventy-eight years after the U.S. dropped nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Dwayne David Paul considers what Christopher Nolan’s latest film — and the real man who inspired it — got right (and wrong) about the morality of nuclear weapons. There’s a scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer where Danish physicist, Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), refers to J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) as a modern day Prometheus, the Titan in Greek mythology said to have stolen fire from the gods to give it to humanity. In the scene, Bohr attempts to convince his friend to have a more sober-minded view of the realpolitik of the Manhattan Project, the U.S.’ name for the program that oversaw the development of the first atomic bomb in a race against the Nazis. Once unleashed on the world, the bomb, like the gods’ flame, could not be returned. Some things simply can’t be undone. Bohr was wrong to compare Oppenheimer to Prometheus for one major reason: Nuclear weapons are unambiguously evil. The myth of Prometheus is about order. It helps explain humanity’s capacity to share some of the creative and destructive power of the gods. The myth highlights how the line separating divinity and humanity can, at times, appear fuzzy. No Western myth of human aggrandizement can account for the evil brought forth by the race for the atom bomb. While we’ve sometimes misused Prometheus’ gift, the same flame that can burn us also feeds us. But there’s nothing redemptive about incinerating an estimated 210,000 people as the U.S. did when we bombed the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively. No good can come from that. In May, leaders of the seven largest industrial economies convened in Japan. The leaders also visited the Hiroshima Peace Park and met with Hirosha Harada, the former director of the museum and a survivor of the U.S. bombing. Harada told NPR of the permanent exhibit, “If we were to reproduce the situation of that time, no one, including myself, would be able to enter the museum.” It is a horror that defies memory. Bohr was mistaken on another point, too: History is not destiny.
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