Listening to the recent hoopla and philosophic confusions born out of the new “Oppenheimer” movie, I was reminded of a visit I made last year to Las Vegas.
I was attending the funeral of a close childhood cousin and visiting relatives I hadn’t seen in many years. My mother’s cousin, Ed, who had babysat my brother and me when we were young, demanded an afternoon to entertain me and decided to take us both to one of his favorite destinations in Vegas – the National Atomic Testing Museum (I’m not quite sure what that says about Ed).
Being in Vegas, you would think gambling or restaurants or Vegas shows would be at the top of the bill. But with time limited, the museum became my cousin’s preference for a quiet afternoon.
In all honesty, I entered the museum thinking I had a fairly good understanding of our atomic history. I’d seen the 1950s propaganda films as a kid, and documentaries of our World War II past and Truman’s ultimate decision. It seemed a relatively benign choice. In truth, the museum itself appeared insubstantial. A conservatively restrained chrome building. Boring. Nothing that might suggest the horrors within. Yet, the museum turned out to be as agonizing an experience as I’ve ever had.
Where I’d been tooling around on the paved surface of atomic history, the museum dragged me into the subversive bowels. It’s labyrinth of rooms and disjointed displays laid bare the nuts and bolts of atomic technology, the forebearers of its final product. Archives of in-depth interviews with participating engineers showcasing the enthusiasm for creating the weapon, and the painful (for me, anyway) lack of restraint for its use.
It also contained films and catalogs of scores of sub-surface and open-air tests, and the mappings of fallout patterns that deluged the desert southwest of 1950s America. In fact, John Wayne and other western film stars allegedly developed cancers following filming in these areas in 1954.
Nevertheless, the very worst the museum had to offer was the documented evidence of the Bikini Island testing that our government conducted between 1946 and 1958. With little protection or preparation for the Pacific islanders living there, we exploded 24 nuclear weapons, virtually annihilating the Bikini Island culture with radiation. The outcomes are too tortuous to consider here. Needless to say, these were in the very truest sense, crimes against humanity. Yet, history moves on.
Frankly, my cousin had slipped me a curveball I hadn’t seen coming. In many respects, I’m still absorbing it.
As time has passed, it’s raised other questions concerning our historic human arrangement (or is that “derangement”). I mean, few human cultures seem to have avoided violence and open warfare. Early cultures spent time defining hunting territories between disparate groups. Tribal warfare was long a part of human experience. Many of these disputes were based in beliefs recognizing spiritual lineage and ancestral redress.
Yet, when I reach the crossroads of Western European belief systems (our heritage), something changes. It is with the rise of the French philosopher Rene Descartes in the 17th century that the separation of western humanity from their environment begins. The idea of accepted dualisms – the presumption of opposing forces. The belief in mind/body and nature/culture as dissimilar agents. Portions of the world simply became expendable, regardless of their necessity. “Cartesian dualism” became the lens by which we see the world and all those organisms living in it. And that is precisely the belief system by which all our modern scientific/industrial narrative has been gauged. The belief system we have followed through scorching genocides and mechanized development, environmental catastrophe and societal isolation. And that is precisely the belief system that allowed the nuclear bomb to be developed and eagerly employed.
So how do we judge Oppenheimer? That would be impossible. We’ve all emulated the same beliefs that made its development nearly inevitable. Our “disposable culture” lies at the very heart of Cartesian thinking. We simply have no connection between what we discard and where it will go. The crew of the Enola Gay had no attachment to the ground beneath them. Nor do we. Perhaps we’ve reached a time when we need to reappraise exactly what it is we do believe. Or perhaps reassess the technologies we have wrought. After all, Descartes was wrong.
Paul Wheeler grew up in suburban Chicago and traveled much of the United States before settling in Ottawa, and now Streator. He writes about a variety of topics including art, writers, politics, history, education and environmental issues. He can be reached at newsroom@mywebtimes.com.