Stranger Things
Oppenheimer, Scary Science and Q Anon
We all have our personal relationships to The Bomb. I came of age during the last years of the Cold War. DOD footage of missile tests on CNN was wallpaper in rooms where we lolled on couches passing joints. Sometimes, back then, I dreamed of mushroom clouds, always at a distance, the end not quite nigh, but close. I came to think of the recurrent images as metaphors for whatever personal crises I was undergoing at the time. But the fact that civilization-ending explosions were part of our dream world was still something new for humanity.
Some years later, I wrote a book about the generation that founded the CIA. Like everyone else of my generation, I believed the guys in gray suits who plotted coups to protect American oil interests and banana corporations in the name of national security were evil incarnate. Writing the book, I came to understand them a little. People born in 1920 had lived through a dividing line, a Before and After in human history that cracked them, morally and psychically. They were in their 20s when two primitive American atom bombs killed a quarter of million people in Japan in August 1945, half that number immediately, the rest over weeks and months.
Before, one could not imagine what After we all take for granted: We can kill ourselves off.
The men responsible for “national security” after that went mad with horror, paranoia, power. Some, like physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the bomb, immediately regretted. He tried, without much success, to “put the genie back in the bottle.” The military wasn’t having it. As soon as the scientists proved that the new “gadget” worked, out in New Mexico, the military said: “We’ll take it from here.”
Where they took it led American society directly to where we are today: distrustful, prone to ever wilder conspiracy theorizing, especially, about scary science. After Oppenheimer, Edward Teller worked out the hydrogen bomb, thermonuclear horror matched - of course - by the Russians.
By the end of the Cold War, around when I was sitting on the couch high watching DOD missile tests, Americans and Russians had produced 60,000 atom bombs, all far more powerful than the ones we dropped on Japan.
The now culturally iconic madmen in white lab coats didn’t stop with nuclear explosives. For decades, they beavered away at weapons labs in New Mexico and California making ever more efficient killing machines, from uranium shells to cluster bombs. In Fort Detrick, Maryland, American scientists worked on biological weapons, and dosing unwitting people with LSD for mind control were just the benign experiments. Stephen Kinzer’s book Poisoner in Chief, on the scientists behind the bio-weapons program, details such horrific human lab rat situations that it is almost impossible to read.
As scary science advanced, the national security apparatus required to keep it secret metastasized. The Q clearance that Oppenheimer lost is now part of the name of a conspiracy cult that millions of our people belong to. Even among the non-Q crowd, most Americans believe Stranger Things are underway, somewhere, maybe in Area 51, maybe in that gated warehouse out in the woods beyond the highway.
A lot of them will vote for Trump or RFK, Jr. next year.
Last year, I happened to be in southern New Mexico on one of the two days of the year the Army opens the Trinity site to the public. Of course, I went and wrote about it for the Times. The fact that it is only open twice a year reminded me of the holy relics that Catholic priests in Italian villages show to the public just once a year.
Visiting this secular relic is both profound and absurd. As I wrote:
All that’s left of the 100-foot tower that evaporated that morning is a 2-inch stub of concrete, but a 12-foot obelisk with a plaque commemorates the date and detonation site. There the crowd coagulated, like at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, awaiting selfie turns.
Between selfies and noshing on brats and chips, visitors rock-hunted, peering down at the sand between tufts of hardy grass for bits of the sage-green substance called trinitite. Trinitite was formed when sand, sucked up and liquefied by the blast, fell back to earth. It is against federal law to take it home, but bits are for sale at a nearby rock shop, for $30 to $60 a gram.
The French philosopher Michel Serres has compared ubiquitous pop-culture images of mass death, like the mushroom cloud and Sept. 11, to pagan ritual voyages to the underworld, surmising that they serve some primal human need. Visitors to Trinity struggle to express its simultaneously prosaic and profound effect, and to extract meaning from the obelisk. Should it be celebrated, mourned or just gawked at?
“Creepy,” “awesome” and “a little boring” were some of the comments I heard. One couple, who met online playing the video game Fallout, had road-tripped from Missouri to get engaged at the site. Richard Cooper, a retired physicist from Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the bomb was invented, said he felt “mixed emotions” at the obelisk. “It is a terrible invention, but it was going to get made. If not us, the Germans.
The “it was going to get made” excuse comes up in the Christopher Nolan movie, Oppenheimer, which I watched yesterday in a Pennsylvania strip mall. The theater was, was, to my surprise, packed and no one left early - everyone sat through all three hours of a vivid American history lesson, on one of the nicest summer Saturday afternoons of the year.
I read the biography on which the film is based, American Prometheus, last year before my visit to the site. It’s a doorstopper of a book, with, in my view, too much minutia about the American communist party, information the authors deemed necessary in order to state the facts about how Oppenheimer ultimately lost his security clearance.
The most memorable images of Oppenheimer from the book are also in the movie. One - a young, psychologically unstable Oppenheimer poisoned an apple for a professor. Two - Oppenheimer, after Hiroshima, met Truman and cried, regretting the “blood on my hands.” Truman (in the movie played by Gary Oldman) was unmoved and told an aide to keep “crybaby scientists” out of his office in future.
Regrets, some had a few. But the Los Alamos scientists were in a race to defeat the Nazis, who, everyone understood, had some of the world’s greatest physicists who could, if Hitler ordered, be building the bomb on their side. The movie shows Oppenheimer, trying to convince a reluctant colleague to join the Los Alamos project saying “We have no choice.”
The Biden administration, sending cluster weapons to Ukraine last week used the same language.
The rest of us are even more choice-less, of course. Abject to, if no longer exactly stunned by the mushroom cloud, we seek out and find ways to forget about it. But we never really do.
SOUNDING THE DEPTHS OF DEPRAVITY
Your Freakshow can’t keep up with the tidal wave of abuse and horror MAGA and the Christofascists inflict on our public discourse, and worse, the real lives of our fellow Americans. So we are adding this new feature, Sounding the Depths of Depravity, to catalog reports of recent madness.
Trump threat message. Trump Truth Social post: “If you f*ck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.”
Texas hates women The first women to testify about the effects of the abortion ban on medical care. One woman could barely get words out through her tears. Another ran to the restroom as soon as she was done, wordless, wretched sobs wracking her tiny body. A third threw up on the witness stand.\
Melania is selling Moon Landing NFTs
Trumpy Judge Aileen Cannon schedules Trump documents trial for May. The height of campaign season, weeks before the convention, for maximum fundraising benefit.
Related Reading
Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer
A CIA history book by me
Random scary science conspiracy theory from the web last week
Atomic New Mexico in the NYTimes
" ... the end not quite nigh." Jeez, how long has it been this way? Forever and forever. We may be, however, getting to the end of that rope. Perhaps we've become too familiar with the many modes of destruction, which may be the reason the takeaway, for me, was the image of the woman throwing up on the witness stand. A perfect visual for expressing the feelings of millions when it comes to the atomic bombing, if you will, of women's rights and people's freedoms.