GREATNESS
Greatness is of course an elusive characteristic, not easily defined, and stingily conferred by most of us on others. However it appears to be recognizable enough that paradoxically, only one criterion need be met, that is, greatness applies when it is universally (or nearly universally) acknowledged of an event or an individual. Philosophically greatness manifests in the hero (including the exceptional leader or thinker) and in the saint – two poles of the purposefully selfless individual. The story of Los Alamos offers two interesting lessons on heroic greatness.
The first involves great actions. Regarding the great Niels Bohr’s visit mainly for a psychological boost to the scientists, Victor Weisskopf concluded “Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution…This we learned from him.”9 This is a lesson for all of us of course.
The second involves the great leader and comes from Oppenheimer who said at the Los Alamos memorial to FDR. “When three days ago, the world had word of the death of President Roosevelt, many wept who are unaccustomed to tears, many men and women, little enough accustomed to prayer, prayed to God. Many of us looked with deep trouble to the future; many of us felt less certain that our works would be to a good end; all of us were reminded of how precious a thing human greatness is.”10 Precious and rare as people of the 21st century are learning.
EVIL AND REPENTANCE
We have already seen how the calculus for scientists to develop the atomic bomb – called by General Groves a ‘repugnant weapon’ – was based on the fear the Nazi’s might develop one first and use it to win World War II. After the defeat of Germany, many of the scientists began to waiver on continuing to develop the atomic bomb as there was no fear of the Japanese developing one. Scientists such as Szilard (who was the first to encourage Roosevelt) began to be tout responsible science and opposed its use on “moral grounds.”11 However, Edward Teller, the father of the later and stronger H-bomb, did not assign responsibility to scientists, saying “The accident that we worked out this dreadful thing should not give us the responsibility of having a voice in how it is to be used. The responsibility must in the end be shifted to the people as a whole…”12
Other scientists felt more guttural repulsion particularly over the dropping of what they thought was the unnecessary second bomb on Nagasaki. Oppenheimer, on leaving one ‘victory dinner,’ tells us “he found one of his best group leaders vomiting in the bushes.”13 Many decided they would never again do defense work while some justified research given the potential upsides of nuclear technology.
Others argued “it was impossible to stop progress and that the evil lay in the hearts of men and not in scientific discovery.”14 Oppenheimer seems to have felt some regret, and dedicated himself to the control of nuclear weapons and opposed the H-bomb. While he believed “physicists have known sin,”14 and even expressed this to a flabbergasted and irate President Truman, Oppenheimer sought hope (called by some the ‘Elysian Daydream’) in the utter destructiveness of nuclear weapons,:
“The people of this world must unite or they will perish. This war that has ravaged so much of the earth has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them, in other times, of other wars, or of other weapons. They have not prevailed. They are misled by a false sense of human history who hold that they will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that. By our works we are committed to a world united, before this common peril, in law, and in humanity.”15
(further continued next post)
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9Conant, Jennet, 109 East Palace. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2005. ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-5008-5, page 204
10Ibid., page 277
11Ibid., page 289 .
12Ibid., page 291 .
13Ibid., page 329. For some reason I am reminded of Sartre’s Nausea.
14Ibid., page 343 .
15Ibid., page 347 .
