Oppenheimer and the threat of nuclear destruction.

: “As the video illustrates, it doesn’t matter much who starts the war: when one side launches nuclear missiles, the other side detects them and fires back before impact.

“…Each impact creates a fireball about as hot as the core of the sun, followed by a radioactive mushroom cloud. These intense explosions vaporise people nearby and cause fires and blindness further away. The fireball expansion then causes a blast wave that damages buildings, crushing nearby ones.”

War never solves anything, not for long anyway. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings did not end all wars as some had hoped.

A. Kathirasen – 07 Aug 2023,

Upon returning home, I searched the web to see the comments of those Japanese who had watched the movie. There was none. Simply because the movie has yet to be screened there.

I learnt that neither the makers of the movie nor those who bring in films into Japan have announced a release date for the film on the Manhattan Project and its head Robert J Oppenheimer.

I learnt too that the Japanese hardly ever ban any movie and are used to films about the Second World War, including those depicting American gung-ho. Also, I learnt, some movies are screened weeks after their release in the US……………………………………..

I cannot imagine how the surviving victims of the tragedy will feel, especially because the film shows the creation of the atomic bomb being celebrated. It also leaves out the Japanese perspective.

How would Taiji Manda, for instance, feel? In 2014, Taiji, then 77, told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper that he had lost his parents, a sister and two brothers in the Hiroshima bombing.

That fateful day, the nine-year-old and two younger brothers and a sister were out in the street when a sudden powerful blast of hot air blew them away. Taiji suffered some burns to his head but his brothers were badly injured and his sister was “groaning with the skin on her back peeled and hanging down”. She died the following day and his two brothers a few days later.

The report said Taiji needed to take 23 different medications for the eight diseases he had, including cancer.

Although Oppenheimer was – and comes out in the movie – as a rather conflicted and complex personality, he was still celebrated in the US, at least until the vilification he endured in the 1950s for speaking out against the arms race. He has since been vindicated.

He remains, however, the man who effectively managed a group of scientists and technologists and kept the military happy as they produced the atomic bomb. He remains the “father of the atomic bomb”.

I hope Oppenheimer the movie and the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb yesterday will make everyone pause and ponder on the nature of such destructive weapons. I hope political leaders and military strategists will be goaded into eliminating the possibility of a nuclear nightmare…………………………………

 the warheads on just one US nuclear-armed submarine have seven times the destructive power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. And the United States usually has ten of those submarines at sea.”……………………………………………………..

War never solves anything, not for long anyway. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings did not end all wars as some had hoped.

If you want to have an idea of the possible impact of a nuclear conflict between Russia and the US, check out the video [above] of a scientifically realistic simulation produced by Max Tegmark, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tegmark says: “As the video illustrates, it doesn’t matter much who starts the war: when one side launches nuclear missiles, the other side detects them and fires back before impact.

“…Each impact creates a fireball about as hot as the core of the sun, followed by a radioactive mushroom cloud. These intense explosions vaporise people nearby and cause fires and blindness further away. The fireball expansion then causes a blast wave that damages buildings, crushing nearby ones.”

He says as the UK and France have nuclear capabilities and are obliged by NATO’s Article 5 to defend the US, Russia will strike them too.

“The Hiroshima atomic bomb caused such a firestorm, but today’s hydrogen bombs are much more powerful. …This black smoke gets heated by sunlight, lofting it like a hot air balloon for up to a decade. High-altitude jet streams are so fast that it takes only a few days for the smoke to spread across much of the northern hemisphere.

“This makes Earth freezing cold even during the summer, ………………………………………………………………….

I pray leaders of nations with nuclear capability won’t send the world spiralling into mass death and destruction. We don’t need another Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And we certainly don’t need anything worse than that.

I hope too that scientists involved in the making of weapons of mass destruction have a severe attack of conscience and reconsider the ethics of what they are doing.

They should not, like Oppenheimer, produce a destructive weapon and then, after its use, try to make amends by pushing against an arms race.  https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/opinion/2023/08/07/oppenheimer-and-the-threat-of-nuclear-destruction/

August 8, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized