The new film about Manhattan Project physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer raises counter-intuitive questions about nuclear weapons as instruments of peace.Despite serious misgivings about the bomb he had created (“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”), Oppenheimer clung to the ironic hope that humankind had devised a weapon too terrible to be used. Later, when the Soviets joined the “nuclear club” in 1949, further hopes for peace were generated among strategists concerning “mutual deterrence.” But as the following argument clarifies: these subsequent hopes were not logically or historically supportable; the assumption of rational decision-making in nuclear matters could not be reliable in all cases, and inevitable searches by a nuclear superpower for primacy, superiority or hegemony could generate “atomic war” by accident, miscalculation or inadvertence.
“We are mad, not only as individuals, but as nations also.” Läs artikel