At my elementary school, a lifetime ago, duck and cover was as integral to our routine as recess. An alarm would signal the drill, and we first-through-sixth graders would drop whatever we were doing and scramble into a crouch under our wooden desks. The prescribed position was head down—one arm curled around your noggin, the other on top, for protection. We were to hold it until the all-clear, a few minutes later. It was the only time being a small kid was a distinct advantage. When it was over, we’d go back to Dick and Jane or long division without giving it another thought. It was a normal part of the only normality we knew.
Most of us haven’t given it much thought since. We know the threat of nuclear catastrophe is out there, but have managed to mostly ignore it and go on with our lives as if it isn’t—pushing that knowledge into a dark, silent corner (where, not coincidentally, those in charge of military secrets prefer it). Even in the face of new nuclear arsenal build-ups, blatant weapon brandishing, and a hot war in Europe, most of us were barely noticing. They were tiny red flags waving frantically, from a distance.
It took a big, noisy movie to get our privileged attention.
Last Sunday, exactly 78 years after the U.S. dropped its “Little Boy” atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists cohosted a panel discussion after (another) packed-house showing of that film—screenwriter and director Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer—at the Music Box Theatre.
Like its atom-bomb subject matter, Oppenheimer (based on the major 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin) is larger than life, hard to comprehend, and, except for its often inaudible dialogue, earsplitting. As several panelists and many others have noted, it also omits the stories of those on the receiving end of the bombs. “This film humanizes Oppenheimer,” DePaul professor Yuki Miyamoto observed. “When will the victims be humanized?”
Still, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists president Rachel Bronson said, this movie reminds us of the immense destructive power of these weapons. With every major nuclear nation investing in their arsenal, and with weapons now much more powerful than the one Oppenheimer was developing, “We’re on the cusp of arms race 2.0.”
“We’re in a very precarious moment,” Bronson said.
A little background here: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded as a newsletter in 1945 by Manhattan Project scientists who’d been working at the University of Chicago (the same concerned scientists you can see trying to reach the president to stop him from dropping the bomb on Japan in Oppenheimer and, more fully, in the clunkier, more objectionable, but easier to follow 1989 Manhattan Project movie, Fat Man and Little Boy).
The newsletter’s original title was Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago. Its purpose was to inform the public on nuclear dangers, while providing scientists with a forum where they could discuss public policy. The late Martyl Langsdorf—artist, Schaumburg resident, and wife of Manhattan Project physicist Alexander Langsdorf—created the now-famous Doomsday Clock for its first issue as a full-fledged magazine in 1947. The clock is reset annually; this year, in part because of the war in Ukraine, it moved to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been to indicating imminent global catastrophe.
Astrophysicist and University of Chicago professor emeritus Don Lamb, who spoke with me just before Oppenheimer opened, said what really impressed him about this history was that the “physicists stood up and talked about things that are really important without being asked, and in spite of attempts to stop them. They took responsibility.” The Bulletin was integral to this, Lamb said, and the key was “when ordinary people paid attention to what scientists were saying, and became deeply concerned. In the 1970s and early ’80s, there were huge marches against nuclear weapons . . . putting pressure on the government to rein in this nuclear arms race.” A reduction in the number of nuclear weapons followed.
At a Bulletin webinar earlier this month, Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow shared what she saw after she was pulled from a crushed building a mile from ground zero: a bright sky turned dark, the ground littered with dead bodies, shuffling victims burned and swollen: “Nobody shouting or running; everybody just begging for water . . . my dear city, disappearing in one moment.” A founder of ICAN, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Thurlow did not just go on with her life, as if it couldn’t happen again.
And at the Bulletin’s website, in an essay that’s a companion to their excellent Oppenheimer special issue, physicist Lisbeth Gronlund argues that no one is in control: “Policy makers—not just in the United States but in all nations with nuclear weapons—have abdicated their responsibilities to curb and eliminate the threat posed by their nuclear weapons. They have let the interests of their military and arms producers control the agenda.”
Like the Reader, the Bulletin is a nonprofit. You don’t need a subscription to read most of the content on their website, but you need one to support it: $59.99 a year, at thebulletin.org.