The award-winning movie Oppenheimer opened in Israeli theaters in the summer. It was good, and informative, but in many ways incomplete. One can access further details by reading Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s biography of the theoretical physicist [American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer] on which the movie was based, and the two volumes by Richards Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun. The second book describes how the hydrogen bomb was built. Taken together, they number slightly less than 2,000 pages.
If one reads seriously, as I did, starting when the movie premiered, it takes several weeks to get through the material, overlapping with Parshat Vayera and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah – including the argument that Abraham had with the Deity to prevent the destruction of cities.
This is a thought-provoking exchange, not because of Abraham’s chutzpah but because the arguments he uses are the same as those used by Oppenheimer, Szilard, Fermi, Lawrence, Niels Bohr, and others to dissuade president Harry Truman from authorizing the use of atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, five to six thousand years later.
Sodom and Gomorrah were not destroyed by atomic bombs. The description of what happened could indicate a volcanic eruption. Other devastating natural disasters such as flooding, forest fires, and earthquakes could also have been attributed to divine intervention.
Harry Truman who, as president of the US, authorized the atomic bombing of the two Japanese cities was certainly not divine, but the president has powers far in excess of the vast majority of mankind; powers which he can use to intervene (interfere?) in the affairs of distant states, which is an analogous situation.
Arguments against mass destruction
One may describe the argument against mass destruction in the following way. A society has a majority of members who behave in unacceptable ways. An external entity has powers to punish that society by destroying it, but it should not exercise these powers if there is even a small minority who are innocent of the offending behavior. This is an idea which has been transferred from generation to generation over the last five to six thousand years, which is the only way to explain its permanence.
Human characteristics such as hair and eye color, body build, and haemophilia are all inherited, which is to say carried in the genes which are made of different DNA structures. But these, one way or another, are material entities. Ideas are not material and cannot be transmitted this way.
Ideas cannot be considered or discussed without the activity of the brain and the ability to speak and write.
Different parts of the brain have different functions. For example, we see with the back of our brains, while thinking is done in the front. The way it works is that the individual nerve cells – neurons, and astrocytes – carry an electrical discharge along their axons, which are the equivalent of cables when they are stimulated. A chemical is released from the end of the axon when it meets another brain cell. The meeting place is called a synapse. These messages determine how we think and feel physically and emotionally.
In the context of this article, the element of emotion in those who argue altruistically is important. Our emotions are determined in the lower and therefore older, in the evolutionary sense, centers of our brains. We would know how the system really works if we could learn how the impulses travel from synapse to synapse, but this not possible because there are an estimated trillion synapses, and neuroscientists do not have tools that are sufficiently developed to identify the patterns in this detail.
These patterns depend on the structure of the brain, and that information is carried in the DNA which form the genes that make our brains. Since we inherit our DNA, we inherit the brain structure that will lead to altruistic thinking. Similarly, we do not inherit speech. We inherit the ability to learn to speak.
One can ask how it came about that an inherited set of connections leads to Abraham’s altruistic thinking and the arguments of the atomic scientists. The answer is evolution.
The evolution of altruism
Homo sapiens, our species, has dominated the world for 300,000 years, or 7,500 generations at 40 years for a generation. But the structure of society, in which humans live together in large numbers, which we call civilization, has existed for only 6,000 years, or 150 generations. This means that for 98% of our species’ existence, our ancestors were hunter gatherers, and it is during that period that the inherited characteristics such as I have described for brain structure developed.
One can only guess about why a brain structure suited for altruistic thinking developed, but a possibility is that when natural resources were readily available, survival was enhanced when small groups of humans learned to cooperate with one another in activities such has hunting mammoths. The problems these activities present may be difficult to solve, but the solution is a great reward in evolutionary terms.
But altruistic thinking is not a universal trait, as the story of the atomic scientists and their opponents demonstrates.
There are climatic and environmental situations in which survival resources are scarce, and survival is enhanced by aggression. This, too, can be passed via brain structure from one generation to the next. So that could be why some people will say bomb the expletives, and others will say don’t forget the innocent. The bottom line is always what is perceived to be best for personal, including one’s group, survival.
It is also probable that this is not a “one or the other” situation. We may, all of us, have a mixture of altruistic and aggressive components in the genes which determine our personality, but the balance differs from person to person.
A binary system of this type is consistent with the “tough minded”- “tender minded “ range observed by Hans Eysenck when he studied politicians’ thinking. If these ideas are accurate, action taken would be a response to the nature of the perceived threat.
The foregoing model could explain the thinking and actions of two of Oppenheimer’s fiercest opponents, Edward Teller and Lewis Strauss, both Jewish. Teller had initiated the program to construct the hydrogen bomb. If he was successful, it would enhance his standing as a physicist with all that it would imply. He was aggressive in pursuit of his survival in modern society.
Strauss was motivated in other ways. As a deeply religious Jew, who was president of the Emanu-El congregation, he was probably hostile to Oppenheimer’s more patrician German Jewish and Reform background, particularly since Oppenheimer was secular in attitude.
Altruism was not restricted to the Jewish scientists. Fermi was not Jewish, but his wife was. There were others like Nun May, who gave the Soviets information in the hope that if East and West knew how to build weapons of mass destruction, their shared need for human survival would ensure that they would never be used.
It is instructive to note that Sun Zhu, a Chinese general who wrote The Art of War 500 years before the common era, said that if a general’s army captured prisoners of war, the prisoners should be well treated in captivity.
These are not trivial speculations. The argument continues, not always honestly, even as these words are “written.”
Examination of the Cuban Crisis of 1962 is instructive.
General Curtis Le May was commander of the American Air Force in 1962, and that included control of the nuclear missiles. Le May had been in charge of the firebombing of enemy cities during WW II. His assault on Hamburg ignited the tar in the streets, and it has been estimated that the destruction and loss of life in Hamburg was the same as the result of an atomic bomb. Le May was neither stupid nor ignorant. When he was asked by an officer cadet in class whether he had ever considered the altruistic argument, he said that he had. He also said that if the Allies had lost the war, he would have been tried and executed as a war criminal by the Germans.
But he added, if you let such ideas affect your chosen tactics, you were a bad soldier. Sun Zhu might not have agreed.
In 1962, the Soviet Union tried to establish nuclear missiles in Cuba against the US. Le May wanted to authorize a preventive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union’s centers of industry, and president Kennedy vetoed it.
Le May did not know that there were sufficient nuclear missiles aimed at America’s industrial centers already in Cuba. If Le May had been given permission to launch his preemptive strike, it would have triggered an all-out atomic war. With the destruction of the world’s industries followed by a nuclear winter, civilization as we know it would have been lost, perhaps resulting in humanity’s extinction.
This is why investigation of these mechanisms of the brain is required. An exercise of this kind is the responsibility of neuro-science. The aim would be to define precisely the areas of the brain and the connections between the relevant neurons which determine the altruistic or aggressive nature of the individual. Such information would indicate the neurological mechanisms which evoke the thinking and emotional reactions of senior politicians when facing such potentially existential problems.
The tools currently available for that type of study, such as MRI and CAT scanning, may not be sufficiently precise; but perhaps if they were boosted by AI, their accuracy could be improved. It is also possible that new technology would have to be developed for this purpose. Such information could establish an individual’s suitability to deal with these situations, but the Oppenheimer story warns us about how that kind of information can be used in unacceptable ways. ■
The writer is a retired physician living in Beersheba.