I am a pacifist but i don’t intend to write here about peace directly. I thought of writing about things related to the monumental tragedy of bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but in a rather indirect way. This is a “Non-Linear” post and is basically in three parts.
I believe August 6 and 9 will remain in human memory for eons for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I am an optimist and i don’t think there will be any large nuclear conflict in the medium term future. On the latter date 63 years ago the city of Nagasaki was obliterated, Leaving 80,000 people dead by the end of 1945 (140,000 dead in Hiroshima) and a large number continued to suffer for a much longer time after that.
[The city of Nagasaki before and after the atomic bombings, Source: Wikipedia]
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Threnody For the Victims of Hiroshima
One thing that I have always imagined was thinking about how it would be like to be in a city that gets hit by an Atomic (Fission), Thermonuclear or a Neutron Bomb. And let me tell you it is one thing that is almost impossible to imagine. Also then there are a number of things, like your position and what you were looking at. If you are in the inner radius near ground zero, i don’t think there would be any time to react to anything. Seeing the bomb drop and being present at ground zero is even harder to imagine. Now being somewhere far, say 3-4 Kilometers from ground zero, is again really hard to imagine. It is really hard to think what would go in the mind in a short span of a few seconds if you do get to see the wave approaching and destroying everything on its way for some moments.
My girl once gifted me a few CDs on my birthday (which was a very sweet gift, but let me not digress), and introduced me to a wonderful quote by Aldous Huxley (1931):
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
One of my favorite compositions is “Threnody For The Victims of Hiroshima“, it is a masterpeice by Krzysztof Penderecki. When I first heard it, I thought it was rather creepy. However after hearing it a few times, it started growing on me and it is only sometime back that I started marveling at the intensity of this composition and admiring the depth it had. One afternoon I got into thinking that it was a composition on which no video cover could be made. It was impossible for me to assign any image to that music, which made a video on it impossible. This is somewhat related to the above paragraph where I expressed my inability to imagine what it would be like during a nuclear explosion on my city. And very rightly so, this composition is dedicated to the victims of the twin bombings.
[All copyrights rest with the composer and the producer ]
A black screen in my humble opinion represents best the composition and speaks a thousand words for the dead and the mentally shocked.
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[Pale Blue Dot: The image of the Earth taken by the Voyager I from a record distance]
Carl Sagan was a wonderful man, an elegant speaker and a man of great learning. I have read almost all books by him and also thoroughly admired and enjoyed the Cosmos television series. One book that I particularly liked was “Pale Blue Dot“, a book based on the photograph by the same name. A photograph taken by the Voyager 1 from a record distance of 6.4 billion Kilometers that shows the Earth as an obscure dot in a beam of scattered sunlight. The video below has Sagan speaking from the book. Having him talk is something else, such is the effect of his voice. I think this is one piece that everyone of us should see once in while!
Such is the beauty of this part that it is worth quoting it:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
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The Geeta of J. Robert Oppenheimer
[J. Robert Oppenheimer, Source: Wikipedia]
J. Robert Oppenheimer is probably best known as the father of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was over-educated in a number of fields other than his forte, that was Physics. He was known for his mathematical acumen, erudition over theoretical physics, knowledge of eastern philosophy and languages particularly Dutch and Sanskrit.
On a personal front, Oppenheimer was emotionally troubled almost all his life often slipping into depression. He was a chain smoker (which ultimately caused throat cancer and subsequent death) and neglected food for long periods in times of emotional and intellectual discomfort. A lot of his colleagues have said Oppenheimer had a self-destructive tendency, and with his insecurities and melancholy he worried his friends. People associated with him generally fell into two categories, ones who thought he was a silent man of great learning and a brilliant genius, while some thought he was unstable and a pretentious person.
General Leslie Groves was appointed the project director of the Manhattan project and inspite of doubts about Oppenheimer being a possible security risk he made him the scientific director. Many of the generals and people in the defense staff have maintained that inspite of Oppenheimer’s communist inclinations and doubts about his loyalty (that time any communist in America was viewed with suspicion, take for example the rise of Mc-Carthy as an example of the narrow-mindedness prevalent at the time ), Manhattan project would have never been completed without him. He was so indispensable for the project and for keeping the people from diverse backgrounds working on it together.
[Trinity : The first ever nuclear explosion]
Click to Enlarge
After the end of the great war Oppenheimer became an outspoken critic of the arms race and supported the establishment of an international agency that would have been in control of all the nuclear arsenal. He opposed the development of the Hydrogen bomb initially on technical grounds. Increasingly worried about the danger to humanity from scientific discoveries he lectured on peace till his death, and also joined with Einstein, Bertrand Russell and formed what later became the world academy of art and science in 1960. He had to pay for his outspokeness, for decisions he took that appeared to be plagued with confusion, his leftist leanings and the ire of the politicians that he attracted as a result of his outspoken character after the war in the form of a very publicly humiliating hearing in 1954, which resulted in his security clearance being revoked. For the remainder of his life surprisingly Oppenheimer never showed much resentment for the hearing and it seems he took the humiliation rather gracefully.
In a rare recording in 1965 Oppenheimer was persuaded to quote again the phrase from the Bhagwad Gita that he claimed crossed his mind when he saw the Trinity explosion.
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita, Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi armed form and says “now I become death the destroyer of the worlds”. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
In this rare footage, Oppenheimer has tears in his eyes, in what seems to be due to intense guilt and regret.
A lot of people think Oppenheimer was a hypocrite, a moral monster who was instrumental in making the bomb, for scouting for both the locations over which the bomb was eventually dropped and for supporting the development of the Hydrogen bomb and other devices and that he was a person who was a poser, who lectured on peace but yet supported the bomb and its development and even its use in WW-II.
I think this is unfair on the man, for those who have read stuff on Oppenheimer would know that he had a deep interest in some eastern scriptures, particularly the Bhagwad Geeta. It won’t be wrong to assume that the Geeta had a very marked impact on Oppenheimers thinking and his philosophy on life and duty. The ideas in the Geeta in a way marry the seemingly inherent contradictions that were apparent sometimes in what Oppenheimer spoke about and clear the fog over some of his ideas on peace and support for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and even scouting for a place for bombing.
The Geeta like many other scriptures is subject to interpretations and obviously Oppenheimer’s interpretation is bound to be different. However his knowledge and his interest in the Geeta were enough for him to formulate a code on ethics and life loosely based on the principles of it. Oppenheimer never said in the open what the importance of the Geeta in his life was, but there is enough circumstantial evidence to show that it was indeed very important.
After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he was dispirited by the continuation of the development of nuclear weapons and constantly wrestled with moral and ethical problems as he thought he was instrumental in handing over humanity the means of its own possible annihilation. He at this time revisited the Geeta, his old favorite and drew power from it which steadied him in his work and worldview.
Also like i said earlier, the Geeta makes comprehensible some acts of Oppenheimer that were otherwise difficult to grasp for example not only did Oppenheimer build the bomb, he maintained till the end that he did the right thing and yet he always said that he had blood on his hands. Let us try to see that there was no real contradiction in Oppenheimer’s views about peace taking the Bhagwad Geeta as the base. It makes it understandable why a man of such a great persona would become inactive and confused at times and why a man of peace would build the atomic bomb.
Oppenheimer studied Sanskrit at Berkeley in 1933 with Indologist Arthur Ryder and acquired a deeper knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita that he had read in the original tongue. Much later in life Oppenheimer was to call the Geeta the most beautiful philosophical discourse in any known tongue. He kept a copy of the Geeta always at hand on his desk and often gifted the Geeta as a gift to many of his colleagues. often his own translation. An indication of the impression that the Geeta had made on him.
The Geeta is the single most important sacred text for the Hindus and is a piller of Hinduism. The importance of the Geeta in Hinduism is perhaps the greatest as compared to the other scriptures. It is essentially on philosophy, ethics, code of conduct and life and is set in midst of the Mahabharata (to be precise the Geeta is from the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata), the longest epic in the world. Things in the Geeta are told in the context of a story of good against evil. The story has a royal family in which all the cousins grow up together but as they grow up to be men they are torn apart due to a quarrel resulting from the royal inheritance. The differences are only resolved by war. Arjuna, the third oldest of the five Pandavas is shown to be a warrior and an archer unparalleled in history.
The geeta begins with Arjuna riding onto the battlefield with lord Krishna, the 8th avatar of Lord Vishnu but on seeing amongst enemy ranks his own friends and relatives, his heart breaks. He is confronted with the prospect of killing his own people and with the fact that if he did not fight it would mean more humiliation for the Pandavas. Depressed by this, he refuses to fight. He is given solace by Krishna, who is being Arjuna’s charioteer.
The geeta has 18 chapters in the course of which Krishna counsels Arjuna on why he should take part in the war. The arguments given are diverse and take care of even the slightest doubts. Inspite of the lengthy nature of his discourse, Krishna’s arguments can be summed up in some very basic points, out of which these seem to have had a major bearing on Oppenheimer’s conduct and view of duty and life :
1. Arjuna is a soldier, his duty is only to fight.
2. Krishna (god or fate) will decide on who lives and who dies, so there is no point in mourning or rejoicing over results. There should be a detachment from the result and one should only focus on the work. “Worry only about the job at hand, don’t worry about what the result would be”.
Oppenheimer’s position was like that of Arjuna before the war. Arjuna was the younger brother of Yudhistra who was more intelligent, a better man than Duryodhana, his cousin who is driven by hate. Duryodhana was so blinded by hate that he tries to kill his cousins, the Pandavas to rule. Krishna’s message to Arjuna was clear. He MUST fight. The message would have been equally clear to Oppenheimer. One other important idea in the Geeta is the idea of duty. Another is of fate, The Geeta espouses that duty and fate should not be mingled together and that one should only focus on his duty and not worry about what is responsibility of others (in his case the politicians and President Truman for example). This and many simple yet profound ideas defined how Oppenheimer acted. He only did his duty as a scientist and as the director, he did what he had to do.
Professor James Hijiya gives a very beautiful commentary of this aspect. I would recommend you to read it (link given below). It is not possible to analyze most of Oppenheimers actions on a blog post. It might need a book. So I would direct all interested to that link. It is short and makes a brisk read for those who get scared by volume. Please read to get the whole point of me mentioning the Geeta of Robert Oppenheimer in this post. I believe that the man who made the atom bomb did not sin. That is my point. And though I greatly admire J. Robert Oppenheimer, that is not the reason why I think that he did not sin, and that he only did his duty.
Recommendations and References:
1. Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima – Penderecki
2. Pale Blue Dot– Carl Sagan
3. The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer – James Hijiya. Click Here >>
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Onionesque Reality 