Ie that attempted prevention at almost any cost is justified.
Whether it’s terrorism, distant climate apocalypse, epidemics, the common thread in the response of policy and elites to these ‘unknowns’ has been the so-called ‘precautionary principle’. Since ‘Oppenheimer: American Prometheus’ was first published in 2005 fears of existential threat have come to dominate our lives perhaps more thoroughly than even the Russian atomic menace during the Cold War. Oppenhiemer claims “the means by which it is solved is sometimes called style.” It’s style, he argues, that “makes it possible to act effectively, but not absolutely…it is style which is the deference that action pays to uncertainty it is above all style through which power defers to reason.” Replace ‘style’ with ‘class’ and I think you’d be nearer the essence of Oppenheimer. It’s about “the problem about doing justice to the implicit, the imponderable, and the unknown” in politics and science.
There’s a long quote near the end from an essay published about a year after his security ‘trial’ which exposes this other-worldliness, or patronising default position. Second, because the boy blinkered by that ‘sheltered home life’ grew into the Brahmin floating above the grubby concerns of mere mortals. He was, if you like, the apocryphal ‘absent minded professor’ (so long as you forget that almost everyone who knew him, including his enemies, rated him as a polymath unique in science). First, he was as much a man of theory not practice in physics (the opposite of his nemesis Ernest Lawrence) as he was in politics (admiring the ideals of communism despite the mounting evidence of despicable practice in the USSR he can hardly have not known about). The former partly by applying his game theory to global politics the latter, well, because he appears to have been pretty much a ‘bastard’.Ĭharitably, it appears Oppie’s real world naivety might be excused in two ways. For no less brilliant Los Alamos amigos like John Von Neumann and Edward Teller ‘got it’.
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And then he might have been prepared for, or at least grown a thicker skin against the character assassination that almost tarnished his entire reputation.
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“My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things”, he reminisces, and his sheltered home life offered him “no healthy way to be a bastard." If only the boy ‘Oppie' had got more dirt under his finger nails and learned to be that ‘bastard’! Then he might have foreseen the high probability that his delivery of the first atomic bomb would open a Pandora’s Box to the scary but so far futile nuclear arms race we’ve survived these last near 80 years.
Arguably the ‘tell’ in this admirable and epic inquiry into the enigma that was Robert Oppenheimer comes early.
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