Leaving the Manhatten Project

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has made another achival article temporarily available on the Manhatten Project.  This is the story of the only physicist to leave the project on ethical grounds: Leaving the bomb project by Joseph Rotblat Aug Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 1985.

Gradually I worked out a rationale for doing research on the feasibility of the bomb. I convinced myself that the only way to stop the Germans from using it against us would be if we too had the bomb and threatened to retaliate. My scenario never envisaged that we should use it, not even against the Germans. We needed the bomb for the sole purpose of making sure that it would not be used by them: the same argument that is now being used by proponentsof the deterrence doctrine.

With the wisdom of hindsight, I can see the folly of the deterrent thesis, quite apart from a few other flaws in my rationalization. For one thing, it would not have worked with a psychopath like Hitler. If he had had the bomb, it is very likely that his last order from the bunker in Berlin would have been to destroy London, even if this were to bring terrible retribution to Germany. Indeed, he would have seen this as a heroic way of going down, in a Götterdammerung.

After Hitler had committed suicide and Germany was defeated, Rotblat felt that the military urgency of the project had ended.  He questioned whether even the test of the bomb itself should go forward.  And he gives us a glimpse about how even a genuinely principled man like Robert Oppenheimer may have been affected by the progressive brutalization that always accompanies war:

Recently I came across a document released under the Freedom of Information Act. It is a letter, dated May 25, 1943, from Robert Oppenheimer to Enrico Fermi, on the military use of radioactive materials, specifically, the poisoning of food with radioactive strontium. The Smyth Report mentions such use as a possible German threat, but Oppenheimer apparently thought the idea worthy of consideration, and asked Fermi whether he could produce the strontium without letting too many people into the secret.  He went on: “I think we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill a half a million men.” I am sure that in peacetime these same scientists would have viewed such a plan as barbaric; they would not have contemplated it even for a moment. Yet during the war it was considered quite seriously and, I presume, bandoned only because it was technically infeasible.

His reservations led Rotblat to leave the project.  He concludes his article this way:

After 40 years one question keeps nagging me: have we learned enough not to repeat the mistakes we made then? I am not sure even about myself. Not being an absolute pacifist, I cannot guarantee that I would not behave in the same way, should a similar situation arise. Our concepts of morality seem to get thrown overboard once military action starts. It is, therefore, most important not to allow such a situation to develop. Our prime effort must concentrate on the prevention of nuclear war, because in such a war not only morality but the whole fabric of civilization would disappear. Eventually, however, we must aim at eliminating all kinds of war.

This is a far cry from neoconservative militarists who have a romantic and monstrous notion of the purifying effects of war.