SUFFOLK CLOSEUP
By Karl Grossman
The film Oppenheimer, a movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, is out and it’s a great film, extraordinary, as most movie reviews are accurately saying, and so, so important.
It takes place largely in Los Alamos, New Mexico where the main work of the Manhattan Project was done. Why then was this World War II crash program called the Manhattan Project? Its initial headquarters in 1942 was in Manhattan at the North Atlantic Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. General Leslie Groves, its director, was in the Corps.
As noted in this space last week, Suffolk County had a significant connection. From Suffolk a letter signed by Albert Einstein was sent to President Roosevelt in 1939, a year after the splitting of the atom—fission—was done in Germany. The letter warned about how this could result in “extremely powerful bombs.” And from this, the Manhattan Project to build an atom bomb came about—to fight fire with fire.
I related a report by British journalist Alistair Cooke on BBC about how two refugees from the Nazis, like Einstein, journeyed to Suffolk County to search for Einstein and found him at his summer home on Nassau Point on the North Fork. The report by Cooke also involved a second visit, by Leo Szilard, one of the scientists who first searched, this time accompanied by Edward Teller. A ”bold and simple letter” had been drafted, noted Cooke. Einstein signed it. “The president got the letter.” That led to the Manhattan Project.
In a book I wrote, Cover Up; What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, published in 1980, I present a facsimile of much of the Einstein letter and discuss it and the Manhattan Project. Through the years since, nuclear technology has been a focus: I have written more than a thousand articles and additional books and have been the presenter of many TV programs on the subject.
In 1999 I went to Los Alamos for an event in which the Nuclear Free Future Awards for that year were presented. I had been invited to be a member of a panel of judges for the award given to people involved in education about and also challenging nuclear technology.
The setting of the awards ceremony was right out of the Manhattan Project, literally.
Claus Biegert, head of the Nuclear Free Future Awards program, arranged for it to be held in Fuller Lodge, a main building among the original structures used by the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. Awards were given to people including Stewart Udall, interior secretary in the Kennedy administration. President Kennedy led in ending atmospheric nuclear weapons tests because of their radioactive fall-out. Among those present was Peter Oppenheimer, son of J. Robert Oppenheimer and an opponent of nuclear weapons, who warmly welcomed Biegert to Fuller Lodge. There are several scenes in Oppenheimer filmed in the Fuller Lodge.
I stayed at a motel in Los Alamos a few blocks aways—a motel the halls of which were lined with photographs of nuclear bombs exploding with their mushroom clouds.
The morning after the ceremony, I had breakfast at the motel at a table with Arlo Guthrie, involved in the awards program and long a musical advocate of peace. And here we were in a building glorifying nuclear bombs. But glorification of nuclear weapons has been and is still going on especially in places like Los Alamos that are involved in their production, thus having a vested interest
Einstein would later call signing the letter the “one great mistake in my life.” Szilard and 70 other Manhattan Project scientists put together a petition for President Truman in 1945 declaring: “The development of atomic power will provide the nations with new means of destruction. The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available…”
But Teller through his life believed nuclear war was feasible and winnable. He developed an even more powerful nuclear weapon than the atomic bomb—what he called the “super,” the hydrogen bomb. His conflict with Oppenheimer over this is repeated through the Oppenheimer film. I had a run-in with Teller in requesting the use in Cover Up of passages from one of his books that claimed “we can survive” nuclear war. I was told no. I quoted from it anyway.
I urge folks go and see the brilliant Oppenheimer film.
Can the nuclear weapons genie be put back in the bottle? Chemical weapons were outlawed—put back in the bottle—through a set of international treaties after World War I during which their terrible consequences were demonstrated. The vehicle today for eliminating nuclear weapons is the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, passed at the United Nations by a vote of 122 nations in 2017. It is now backed by two-thirds of the world’s nations and is international law. It bans the use, development, testing and production of nuclear weapons and also prohibits threats to use them. However, the nine the countries which now possess nuclear weapons—which include the U.S., Russia and China—are not supporting the treaty.
Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.