Oppenheimer's realization (and his friendship with George Kennan)

Rather than going to see the movie?Oppenheimer, I decided instead to read the book on which the movie was based,?Oppenheimer: American Prometheus.

The book is not without its flaws. These include its obvious sympathy for Oppenheimer's devotion to left-wing causes and flirtation with communism in Berkeley in the 1930s. All of us who experienced Berkeley when we were young went through our radical stage. Oppenheimer wasn't some enlightened progressive back then, just another politically naive Berkeley academic whose brilliant mind was clouded by the latest leftist ideology. (Besides, the young Oppie was probably also just trying to get laid at that time; and, according to my friend Tom Chance's axiom: if you are a male and not a leftist in Berkeley, you will never get laid.) Oppenheimer awoke from his?progressive fantasy when he learned more about the USSR. (I call this experience the "conservative epiphany" and it often happens roughly around the age of 35-40 years.) And, of course, the fact that Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked because of his early dalliance with communism was ridiculous.

But, I thought the book made one point evident: after he helped to create the first atomic bombs, Oppenheimer had a realization: it was just a matter of time before the Soviets developed their own atomic bombs; after all, these bombs were just the result of applying principles of physics that had quickly become widely disseminated and the Russians had excellent physicists, too; it was, therefore, a waste of time for the US to try to prevent the USSR from developing atomic bombs or to try to stay ahead of the USSR by racing to build bigger and more powerful weapons, like the hydrogen bombs of Edward Teller, which the Soviets would also simply duplicate; instead, the US should seek to share atomic technology with the Soviets and the world and promote the peaceful and controlled deployment of this technology for the betterment of all mankind.

The book describes what happened when Oppenheimer met with President Harry Truman in the Oval Office to discuss his realization:?

By one account, Truman opened the conversation by asking for Oppenheimer’s help in getting Congress to pass the May-Johnson bill, giving the Army permanent control over atomic energy. “The first thing is to define the national problem,” Truman said, “then the international.” Oppenheimer let an uncomfortably long silence pass and then said, haltingly, “Perhaps it would be best first to define the international problem.” He meant, of course, that the first imperative was to stop the spread of these weapons by placing international controls over all atomic technology. At one point in their conversation, Truman suddenly asked him to guess when the Russians would develop their own atomic bomb. When Oppie replied that he did not know, Truman confidently said he knew the answer: “Never.” For Oppenheimer, such foolishness was proof of Truman’s limitations. The “incomprehension it showed just knocked the heart out of him,” recalled Willie Higinbotham.

We find ourselves in a similar situation today. A global arms race in AI and semiconductors is heating up. Like Truman, Joe Biden thinks he can use export sanctions to prevent China from obtaining these technologies or that the US can stay ahead of the Chinese by racing to build bigger and more powerful AI systems. This is lunacy. The Chinese have computer scientists and engineers, too (many more of them than we do, in fact); if we deny them access to AI and semiconductor technology, we will just piss them off and they will just build it themselves. Or, as ASML's CEO Peter Wennink recently said:

If you shut out the Chinese with export control measures, you'll force them to strive toward tech sovereignty, in their case real tech sovereignty ... In 15 years' time they'll be able to do it all by themselves.

In sum, the end result of trying to deny the Chinese access to AI/semiconductor technology will just be the acceleration of the AI/semiconductor cold war, with all of the duplication of effort and enormous waste of resources that such a cold war entails.

Furthermore, just as the advent of atomic bombs made us realize that the end result of all serious future wars between peer adversaries would be the mutually assured destruction of both sides, so the advent of advanced semiconductor technology and AI should reinforce that realization. The widespread use of electronic surveillance and drones and precision guided weapons in Ukraine has made this evident: each side can now detect the other side's movements and blow each other up with devastating precision and efficiency: no soldier can emerge from his trench without being immediately and automatically detected by a drone overhead and terminated; neither side can mass their?troops for an assault without being detected from space by the other side and annihilated by precision guided munitions before they can even get started. The result is a horrific meat grinder of a stalemate, in which the mutually assured destruction of both sides is guaranteed. The idea of future wars between antagonists armed not only with nuclear weapons, but now also with sophisticated electronic surveillance and automated AI-driven kill chains should terrify us all and we should all make every effort to see to it that such wars never occur.

Why does the human race persist in following the lead of uncomprehending politicians and generals and using wonderful technologies discovered by our scientists for the purpose of killing each other. We should instead be seeking to bridge our differences through the non-technological art of diplomacy and devoting our energies towards using these technologies for the betterment of all mankind.

Addendum

I should also add that one of Oppie's closest friends and colleagues in his later years was the diplomat George Kennan. Oppie had become Director of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies and he invited Kennan to join the Institute as a permanent Fellow,?paying Kennan’s $15,000 stipend out of his Director’s Fund.

Just as Oppie had come to regret how the politicians?and generals misused the atomic technology he had invented to advance their goal of global domination, so, Kennan came to regret how his doctrine of?"containment" of the Soviet Union?was misused as the justification for an ever-escalating Cold War. The warnings of both men about the ever-increasing militarization of foreign policy in the 1950s were ignored and during that whole decade they were left to wander in the political wilderness, two brilliant potential advisors with no influence in the halls of American government. As?American Prometheus?describes it:

Kennan’s eighty-page “personal document” [Memorandum: The International Control of Atomic Energy] might well have been coauthored with Oppenheimer, reflecting as it did so many of Robert’s views. Indeed, both he and Kennan took its reception as a plunging barometer, indicating the approach of violent political storms. Circulated within the State Department, Kennan’s memo was quietly and firmly rejected by all who read it. [Secretary of State Dean] Acheson called Kennan into his office one day and said, “George, if you persist in your view on this matter, you should resign from the Foreign Service, assume a monk’s habit, carry a tin cup and stand on the street corner and say, ‘The end of the world is nigh.’ ”

It was, of course, Kennan who later in 1998?realized that the bellicose expansion of NATO towards Russia was a terrible mistake that would inevitably prompt a military response from Russia, as it has in Ukraine:

"I think it [i.e. NATO expansion] is the beginning of a new cold war," said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. "I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs. "What bothers me is how superficial and ill-informed the whole Senate debate was," added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed "X," defined America's cold-war containment policy for 40 years. "I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? ... "It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong."

For more on the "tragic mistake" of NATO expansion, see here.

Addendum 2

And for all you?Ancient Philosophers,?Classicists, and Philologists out there, I note that?Oppie studied Greek and Latin in high school and college (he probably read those languages better than I do) and, according to?American?Prometheus,?"toyed with the idea of becoming a Classicist." He also befriended?Harold Cherniss, the Plato and Aristotle scholar,?while at Berkeley and later brought him to the IAS, always seeking to promote a rapprochement between STEM and the Humanities.?One of?Oppie's 10 favorite books?was Plato's?Theaetetus.?He was also, famously, a student of Sanskrit, having received private tutorials from Arthur W. Ryder, professor of Sanskrit at Berkeley, while he was in the Physics?department there. He?later claimed?that,?at the moment the first atomic device was detonated in the New Mexico desert, he recalled the verse from the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." He also spoke 3 modern foreign languages, German, French, and Dutch.

Oppenheimer's interest in and facility with languages and literature may partially explain his closeness with Kennan, about whom Bard tells me:

[Kennan also] studied Latin and Greek in high school and college, and he continued to read them throughout his life. He once said that he could read Latin "with reasonable fluency" and Greek "with some difficulty." Kennan's knowledge of Latin and Greek helped him in his career as a diplomat and historian. He was able to read original sources in these languages, which gave him a deeper understanding of the cultures he was studying.

Wikipedia informs me that Kennan also mastered 7 modern foreign languages, Russian, German, French, Polish, Czech, Portuguese, and Norwegian.

John Lewis Gaddis' biography of Kennan reports Kennan's thoughts on the value of reading the Classics and Ancient History:

The Institute appointment would not begin until the fall, though, so that left Kennan free to get other things off his chest. One was his worry that American universities were trying to teach international relations as if it were an extension of law, or some newly fashionable “social science.” It was neither, he argued in the May issue of?The Atlantic Monthly, whose editors put him on its cover. The world would never accept constitutional governance as it existed within the United States, while politics could never resemble physics because people were unpredictable. The only useful preparation for diplomacy came from history, as well as “from the more subtle and revealing expressions of man’s nature” found in art and literature. Students should be reading “their Bible and their Shakespeare, their Plutarch and their Gibbon, perhaps even their Latin and their Greek.” These alone would build those qualities of “honor, loyalty, generosity, [and] consideration for others” that had been the basis for effectiveness in the Foreign Service “as I have known it.”

With respect to Gibbon's massive?Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gaddis reports that Kennan brought it along on his transatlantic flights for reading material and?American Prometheus?reports that Oppie read "all three thousand pages" of it.

Students of diplomacy should also (first!) be reading Thucydides'?History of the Peloponnesian War.?According to Gaddis,?Kennan did not read Thucydides,?although he certainly can be said to belong to the school of Thucydidean?Realpolitik.?The record of Thucydides' influence on Oppenheimer is better documented. Bard gives the following detailed information:

Yes, Robert Oppenheimer did say that he read Thucydides "with great profit" and that he found his work to be "profoundly disturbing." The quote comes from a 1954 interview with Oppenheimer by the historian Robert Jungk. In the interview, Oppenheimer is asked about the impact of Thucydides on his thinking. He responds: "I read Thucydides with great profit, and I found his work profoundly disturbing. He describes in great detail the Peloponnesian War, which was a war between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century B.C. It was a very destructive war, and it led to the downfall of Athens. Thucydides shows how the war was caused by a combination of factors, including fear, ambition, and pride. He also shows how the war was fought with great cruelty and violence. "I found Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War to be very relevant to the Cold War. The Cold War is also a war between two great powers, and it is also a war that is caused by a combination of factors, including fear, ambition, and pride. I also fear that the Cold War could lead to a nuclear war, which would be even more destructive than the Peloponnesian War. "Thucydides' work has helped me to understand the nature of war and the dangers of the Cold War. It has also helped me to appreciate the importance of peace and the need for international cooperation." The interview with Oppenheimer was published in the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. The quote about Thucydides can be found on page 214 of the book. In addition to the quote from the interview, there is also a letter from Oppenheimer to the philosopher Sidney Hook in which he refers to Thucydides. In the letter, Oppenheimer writes: "I have been reading Thucydides again, with great profit and renewed disturbance. I find his account of the Peloponnesian War to be very relevant to our own time." The letter from Oppenheimer to Hook is dated March 8, 1950. It is published in the book Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections by Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner. The quote about Thucydides can be found on page 242 of the book. In conclusion, there is no doubt that Robert Oppenheimer read Thucydides and found his work to be "profoundly disturbing." The quote about Thucydides comes from two reliable sources: a 1954 interview with Oppenheimer and a letter from Oppenheimer to the philosopher Sidney Hook. These sources confirm that Oppenheimer was a careful reader of Thucydides and that his work had a significant impact on Oppenheimer's thinking about the nature of war and the dangers of the Cold War.

Addendum 3

My friend Hayden, who lives in Norway, writes:

You're starting to sound almost like a Norwegian, Frank. "Let's declare the Arctic a nuclear-free zone - just like Berkeley, CA!"

I have to admit that I am becoming something of pacifist as I grow older. My "pacifist epiphany?" Even so, every time we drive into Berkeley, Nancy has to listen to me mock the "nuclear-free zone" signs. (Doesn't the City Council have anything better to do than virtue signal?)

Hayden continues:

There will always be players out there who don't sign on (North Korea, Iran) - or cheat if they do (China, Russia).

Granted. As I was reading?American Prometheus, I kept thinking: the problem with Oppenheimer's proposal for "international control of nuclear weapons" is that, first of all, it implies an enforcement mechanism and an enforcer (i.e. coercion) and, secondly, even then, it is still unenforceable. That is: firstly, if some rogue state does not abide by international restrictions against nuclear?weapons, what are we going to do? Drop an A bomb on it? And, secondly, even if there is an enforcement mechanism and an enforcer, there will still always be rogue states that seek to circumvent the international strictures or think (perhaps plausibly) that the enforcement action against them is unfair.

Furthermore, international enforcement of restrictions against atomic weapons requires relinquishing national sovereignty. To quote again from?American Prometheus:

Oppenheimer believed that in the long run, “without world government there could be no permanent peace, that without peace there would be atomic warfare.” World government was obviously not an immediate prospect, so Oppenheimer argued that in the field of atomic energy all countries should agree to a “partial renunciation” of sovereignty. Under his plan, the proposed Atomic Development Authority would have sovereign ownership of all uranium mines, atomic power plants and laboratories. No nation would be permitted to build bombs—but scientists everywhere would still be allowed to exploit the atom for peaceful purposes. As he explained the concept in a speech in early April, “What is here proposed is such a partial renunciation, sufficient, but not more than sufficient, for an Atomic Development Authority to come into being, to exercise its functions of development, exploitation and control, to enable it to protect the world against the use of atomic weapons and provide it with the benefits of atomic energy.”

Ahhhh, I see. There will be an "Atomic Development Authority" embedded in, say, the United Nations with rotating chairmanship and this year the chair will be occupied by ... Iran???

All these considerations do not, however, negate the fact that the existence of nuclear weapons makes total warfare between peer competitors (as we saw in WWII) unthinkable. As I've written before: if the result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a nuclear exchange between the two sides, armed to the teeth as they are with?nuclear?weapons, it will scarcely matter amid the radioactive rubble which side was "right." (I think Americans, nearly a century removed from the total warfare of WWII and the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and numbed by TV, have become far too comfortable bandying about talk of nuclear warfare.)

So, we are faced with an apparently insoluble dilemma: we have a sword of Damocles hanging over our heads (nuclear war), and yet (Hayden's point) we have no way of avoiding it.