Arms intervention: Alastair McIntosh on nuclear weapons

‘Blessed are the peacemakers, even if they come from unexpected quarters.’

Last month, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its annual report. Included was the finding that global stockpiles of operational nuclear weapons had increased during 2022.

The institute went on to warn that the world is ‘drifting into one of the most dangerous periods in human history’, and that it is imperative that world governments learn to cooperate in order to calm geopolitical tensions.

I remember when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Unlike with Russia and Ukraine today, our hopes back then were for a ‘peace dividend’: that the money that had been spent on building-up hostilities, and fear of mutually assured destruction, might now be spent for the greater common good.

But other influences prevailed, and in writing about those recently, I’ve had occasional correspondence with Charles Oppenheimer, the grandson of J Robert Oppenheimer, who is often called ‘the father of the atomic bomb’.

Robert Oppenheimer codenamed the first nuclear test ‘Trinity’ – a Christian term – and when the bomb went off, he quoted from a Hindu sacred text: ‘I am become death, the destroyer of the worlds’ (Bhagavad Gita XI:32).

But what’s less widely known is that within a fortnight of the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he signed off a scientific committee’s letter to Henry Stimson, the US secretary of state for war. It expressed ‘grave doubts’ around the idea that developing nuclear weapons could prevent wars. True security, it concluded, ‘can be based only on making future wars impossible.’ 

Perhaps for this, Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance, in a decision that the US government reversed only last year, posthumously.

Oppenheimer is about to get some significant cultural attention: a major movie, released today, has been given his name (see picture), and a star director, Christopher Nolan. It explores Oppenheimer’s life, and his bottom-line message that ‘the peoples of this world must unite or they will perish.’

Blessed are the peacemakers, even if they come from unexpected quarters. For as the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put it: ‘Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.’

The chapter from the SIPRI report that deals with ‘World Nuclear Forces’ can be read at https://www.sipri.org/yearbook/2022.

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