With the film Oppenheimer opening in theatres on Friday and being widely heralded by media, and this past Sunday the 78th anniversary noted of the first explosion of a nuclear device, and, so importantly, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons becoming international law, the time for putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle has arrived with great timeliness and strength.
Can it be done? Can nuclear weapons be abolished?
Yes.
Consider what the world did in the wake of World War I when the terrible impacts of poison gas had been tragically demonstrated. Mustard gas, chlorine gas, phosphene gas killed thousands on both sides of the conflict. Thereafter, the Geneva Protocol of 1925 and the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1933 outlawed chemical warfare, and to a large degree the prohibition has held.
This month The New York Times ran a front-page story headlined: "Toxic Arsenal Nears Its End, Decades Later." The July 6th article began: "In a sealed room behind"armed guards and three rows of high barbed wire at the Army's Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado, a team of robotic arms was busily disassembling some of the last of the United States' vast and ghastly stockpile of chemical weapons. In went artillery shells filled with deadly mustard agent that the Army had been storing for 70 years. The bright yellow robots pierced, drained and washed each shell, then baked it at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Out came inert a harmless scrap metal, falling off a conveyer belt into an ordinary brown dumpster with a resounding clank."
The article continued: "'That's the sound of a chemical weapon dying,' said Kingston Rief, who spent years pushing for disarmament outside government and is now deputy assistant secretary of defense for threat reduction and arms control. He smiled as another shell clanked into the dumpster. The destruction of the stockpile has taken decades, and the Army says the work is just about finished."
"They were a class of weapons deemed so inhumane that their use was condemned after World War I, but even so, the United States and other powers continued to develop and amass them," said the piece.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, adopted by the United Nations in 2017""with 122 nations in favor""and entered into force in January 2021 can be the nuclear counterpart to the chemical weapons genie being, at long last, put back in the bottle.
The nuclear genie began taking form in 1939 seven air miles from where I live.
It started in a little waterfront community in which Albert Einstein spent summers on the North Fork of Long Island, called New Suffolk, just across Little Peconic Bay from where I and my wife have lived for nearly 50 years, in Noyac, a hamlet on Long Island's South Fork.
That is where Einstein worked on and signed the letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in August 1939 after the splitting of the atom""fission""having the year before been done in Germany. The letter said: "This phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable""though much less certain""that extremely powerful bombs of this type may thus be constructed."
It caused formation of the Manhattan Project, the program to build atomic weapons""to fight fire with fire against Nazi Germany. J. Robert Oppenheimer became the crash program's scientific director.
In the end, Einstein regretted what he had wrought with that letter. "If I had known that the Germans would not succeed in constructing the atom bomb, I never would have moved a finger," he wrote in his 1950 book Out of My Later Years.
I reprint a portion of the letter in my 1980 book, Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power and write about it, too, in my 1986 book Power Crazy. Power Crazy is about the plans to turn Long Island into, in the parlance of nuclear promoters then, a "nuclear park"""with seven to eleven nuclear power plants. The first to be built was at Shoreham, 25 miles west of New Suffolk. A groundswell of public and governmental opposition on Long Island stopped it from going into commercial operation; it sits now as a hulk. None of the other nuclear power plants proposed for Long Island were built. Further, the two nuclear reactors at Brookhaven National Laboratory, opened on Long Island in 1947 largely to develop commercial uses of nuclear technology, were shut down after they were found to be leaking radioactive tritium into the sole-source water supply of Long Island. The island is now nuclear-free""an example of how commercial uses of nuclear power (the other side of the coin to its military use) can be put back in the bottle.
Oppenheimer also had concerns about what came out of the Manhattan Project""especially the push by Edward Teller, director of its Theoretical Division, who pushed to and did develop an even more powerful weapon than the atomic bomb, a thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb. As Oppenheimer declared in 1947 in a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin."
Oppenheimer, as explored in the film Oppenheimer, upon viewing the explosion of the first nuclear device in 1945 at the Alamagordo Bombing Range in New Mexico, remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
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