Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [188]
7. The critics of nuclear weapons
Just as nuclear weapons were developed in a number of nations over time, so were the weapons, and nuclear power generally, criticized from a variety of vantage points and for a number of reasons. In the United States, some scientists who had initiated, designed, or built the bomb had profound second thoughts, or articulated emphatically after the war doubts that had crept in earlier. ‘If I had known that the Germans would not succeed in constructing the atom bomb,’ said Albert Einstein, ‘I would never have lifted a finger.’ Robert Oppenheimer’s deputy at Los Alamos, Samuel Allison, confessed: ‘I don’t have a comfortable feeling for having helped cremate a hundred thousand Japanese civilians.’ Oppenheimer himself later wished that the Japanese had been warned explicitly about the bomb. Cyril Smith, co-director of the Experimental Physics at Los Alamos, told an interviewer: ‘Sometimes I wake up at night feeling the plutonium metal in my hands—metal that I personally helped fabricate for the bomb—and realize that it killed hundreds of thousands of people. It’s not a pleasant feeling.’ Several leading nuclear physicists walked away from weapons’ work forever; others, including Arthur Holly Compton and Hans Bethe, would campaign, quietly but openly, against developing a thermonuclear bomb. So too did radical intellectuals, including the pacifist A. J. Muste and the social critic Dwight Macdonald, excoriate the use of the bomb. Muste, and others, compared Hiroshima to Dachau. ‘Like all great advances in technology of the past century,’ wrote Macdonald in 1945, ‘Atomic Fission is something in which Good and Evil are so closely intertwined that it is hard to see how the Good can be extracted and the Evil thrown away.’10
In Britain and the Commonwealth, voices were raised against the bomb, though they were at first scattered and most prominent among pacifists (who objected, obviously, not only to nuclear weapons but to war in general) and communists, who could be stigmatized by their countries’ governments and whose moral footing became slippery once the Soviets had tested a bomb in 1949. Vera Brittain, one of a few British writers who had protested during the war against the policy of bombing German cities, was bolstered by the surprising extent to which many ofher countrymen and -women now criticized the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, appalled if not by the bombing of civilians then at least by the use of nuclear weapons against them. The physicist P. M. S. Blackett was among the first to argue that the bombs had been used as tools of diplomacy against the Russians rather than to end the war against Japan, the implication being that the bombings’ purpose had been ignoble and, worse, that they represented, wrote Blackett, ‘not so much the last military act of the second world war, as the first act of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress’. Drawing from Aristotle (‘one must not do evil that good might come’) and Catholic doctrine, the philosopher Gertrude Anscombe attacked the Allied policy of unconditional surrender as ‘visibly wicked’, rejected arguments based on military necessity for bombing enemy cities, and in 1957 protested when her university, Oxford, gave the atomic bomber Harry Truman an honorary degree. In Canada the government largely preempted opposition by declaring that it would not pursue a bomb, but organizations of scientists and technicians issued statements deploring nuclear weapons anyway. Australian journalist Wilfred