Were Nuclear Weapons Inevitable?

Last night, in light of the rumors that North Korea may be working with Burma to develop a nuclear weapons program, I took the chance to watch Roland Joffe's 1989 film, Fat Man and Little Boy.

Roland Joffe had also directed two other fantastic films that promote peace, partly by evoking the pain of conflict: The Mission and The Killing Fields.

Fat Man and Little Boy starred John Cusack in one of his first major roles. His character, a scientist on the U.S. Manhattan Project in 1944 (on the eve of consummating a romantic relationship with a nurse played by Laura Dern), accidentally contaminates himself with radioactivity.

Meanwhile, the scientists, believing they have discovered a way to end war by raising the costs so high that no human would want to risk fighting anymore, trigger the very first atomic bomb explosion. While Cusack's character writhes and dies, many on the team nevertheless fall in love with The Bomb.

Those who fell for the atomic weapon, then the hydrogen weapon, decided that The Bomb was inevitable, that if the U.S. did not develop it, Nazi Germany or Fascist Japan would have had it and used it first. They believed that there was no other option, leaving those of us who are fundamentally opposed to nuclear weapons in all forms with the question of "What would we do?"

If the Nazis really did survive long enough to develop a bomb, wouldn't they have used it? Would the U.S. have been able, if not to develop a bomb, develop instead a bomb prevention device?

What do you make of the theory that, given that the U.S. needed to make one bomb to deter the Nazis, Fascist Japanese, or Stalinists, the U.S. did not need to keep making bombs?

Or the most important question: Would the Japanese Fascist leaders have surrendered in 1945 if, rather than atomizing 200,000 people first, the U.S. had instead just showed them the weapon used on an abandoned desert landscape instead?

Any honest appraisal of the situation leads a free-thinker to two contradicting conclusions. First, that developing and then using the atomic weapon was the worst crime against humanity ever committed. And second, that if any of us who currently oppose these weapons were in a situation where we believed the Fascists were about to bomb us first, we may also have pressed the green button on the development program.

Nevertheless, today the Obama Administration is doing somewhat better than the last few Presidents about walking the program back. Whatever one feels about the development of the nuclear program, today we should all work together to vote in and retain politicians committed to undoing the nuclear stockpiles and preventing further development of all sizes of nuclear weapons. Otherwise, we're all crazy.

To bring the essay to a close on these big questions, I thought I'd reach out for some poetic lines from the classic American peacenik-beatnik Edith Sitwell. One of my favorite coffeehouses in Cincinnati is named for her, so if you're there check them out and mention I said hello. I found the quote in Frederick Glaysher's deep essay on the nuclear question, "Poetry in the Nuclear Age."

"There came a roar as if the Sun and Earth had come together; The Sun descending and the Earth ascending; To take its place above ... the Primal Matter, was broken, the womb from which all life began, Then to the murdered Sun a totem pole of dust arose in memory of Man ..." - Edith Sitwell, 1948.

Photo credit: U.S. Dept of Defense