Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [115]
The lengthy memo, written on the very day she accepted the assignment, is remarkable for revealing layers of meaning within a categorically new event. Always quick to discover large, original themes among steel girders and diaphanous evening gowns, she pitted liberty against tyranny as the core principle at stake in any discussion of the weapon. The memo also suggests an apparent, and potentially disturbing, disregard of the suffering brought on by the deployment of the bomb. No doubt, use of the weapon saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, and possibly as many Japanese lives, by making unnecessary an American land invasion. But this was not Rand’s point, and the theme she chose to illustrate took no account of ordinary civilians, even in this real-life calamity. To Wallis, she joked that “if there is a God, He” might have planned the successful development of the bomb as proof of the superiority of American capitalism. Urging Wallis to adopt her approach, she wrote, “The responsibility of making [this] picture [with the proper moral lesson] is greater than that of knowing the secret of the atomic bomb.”
One wonders: Did she really mean that framing an idea is more important than possessing the power of life and death over an entire population? There is nothing in her work to suggest she didn’t. Three months earlier, she had answered a confused fan by noting, “If there is such a thing as an average man, who cares about him or why should anyone care? What I am interested in is the great and the exceptional.” At times, the unexceptional simply wasn’t real to her. Perhaps the first half of her famous formulation—her interest in men as they reflect philosophical principles—meant more to her than the second half, her interest in principles as they affect the lives of men.
She set to work immediately. She scheduled interviews with General Leslie Groves, the army’s senior commander at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the bomb was built, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former scientific director of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, who had returned to his teaching post at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. She visited Dr. Oppenheimer twice, winning his cooperation and goodwill through her respect for his scientific achievement. He endorsed her interpretation of Germany’s failure to produce a bomb and told her, thrillingly, that the ethos at Los Alamos precluded giving or taking official orders. In other words, the device was created by free men and free minds. She found Oppenheimer enormously intelligent and fascinating but also slightly bitter and apparently tormented by moral doubts. He certainly became bitter: Within a few years federal agencies, angered by his public opposition to the American-Soviet nuclear arms race, would accuse him of having been a Communist and strip him of his security clearance. Perhaps because of his political liberalism, otherworldly air, and battered pride, she made him her primary model for the character of Dr. Robert Stadler in Atlas Shrugged, a vain, weak, and progressively evil-minded physicist. She even borrowed the details of his office to use for that of Stadler.
The story she was outlining for Top Secret, as the film was called, became a rehearsal for Atlas Shrugged in other ways as well. She introduced into the film script a purely fictional character named John X., a young soldier she invented as a guard for Dr. Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. John X., influenced by