‘Oppenheimer’ shows that political fighting could bring us again to brink of nuclear war

Astrophysicist and science writer Andrew May says the Big Bang Theory describes the moment of creation of the universe when an “infinitely hot and dense single point apparently inflated and stretched — first at unimaginable speeds, and then at a more measurable rate — over the next 13.7 billion years to the still-expanding cosmos that we know today.”

Admittedly this is a far cry from the Genesis creation story. Yet, I do get the overarching idea of a dramatic and awesome moment which still continues to this very day that some scientists describe as the Big Bang Theory at the beginning of creation of the universe. Unfortunately I am not sure how God fits into that scientific paradigm and whether God can do anything about human society’s insatiable desire to create weapons of mass destruction.

After watching the movie “Oppenheimer,” I drew a contrast between the Big Bang Theory and a kind of reversal of the expansion process of the universe by destroying a small part of it. This image appeared to me as I watched the films that show the carnage from the first atomic blasts against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during World War II. The summer blockbuster movie challenges us in dramatic ways to revisit our recent history, but it also presents us with a nightmare scenario of the frightening possibilities of a future of nonexistence of our species and all life on earth.

As a person who studies religion and theology as well as one who works with a congregation, I see two sides to this fascinating and tragic story of Robert Oppenheimer, who worked for the United States and led a team of brilliant scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to develop a bomb which would destroy the Nazi empire but ended up being dropped on the Japanese empire after the Germans surrendered.

The one major point I left the theater contemplating is the stark contrast between the brilliant minds of scientists who imagined a theoretical construct of an atomic bomb and the less than brilliant and downright cutthroat politics in Congress. I thought of the betrayal not only by the government interrogating Oppenheimer as a suspected communist sympathizer but also by some on his own team who turned against him under pressure from politicians who resented him and his notoriety and were fearful and jealous of him.

The movie demonstrated that, no matter how brilliant the scientists were and how tirelessly they worked to defeat the Nazis, human nature was still a counter-measure or a weapon itself utilized to exploit this technological achievement and ignore the moral repercussions of what atomic bombs would do to our existence.

The carnage that this bomb created in Japan did, in fact, end the war against the Japanese. Several hundred thousand people died in those moments when the bombs exploded. Japan and America remember Aug. 6 and 9, 1945.

The world’s great minds still debate the use of nuclear weapons and whether or not their use was right during World War II. The scope of the destructive power of these weapons should continue to scare us all, especially when we listen to Russian leaders threaten to use them today against Ukraine or the potential use of nuclear weapons by Iran.

The movie presented the tortured soul of Oppenheimer, who struggled with the consequences of the destruction brought on by his team’s accomplishment. He told President Harry S. Truman that he had blood on his hands. He was equally worried that his the atomic bomb would be used against not just the United States but against the entire world. The fact that he raised these concerns to Congress ultimately cost him his public standing in Washington, D.C., where he was stripped of his national security clearance. His story is both inspiring and heroic as well as tragic, too.

I am reminded of the Tower of Babel story in Genesis. The people built a giant tower that would give humankind the power to reach heaven and eternal life. We would be immortal with this tower yet, at the end of the day, God confused our languages — Babel comes from the Hebrew root to confuse — and sent us back to our status as mere mortals. Was God laughing at humankind because they actually believed that they could achieve some sort of divine status? Did God shew them away with a millisecond of thought to confuse their languages and disable the entire project of humankind’s obsession to achieve equal status to God?

I don’t think God is laughing at what we have achieved today.

In the movie, America’s scientists, military planners and politicians justified the creation of the atomic bomb to defeat Germany and later on to save the lives of American soldiers in the Pacific. In the back rooms of Washington, D.C., however, those same folks were portrayed as devoted to a single goal, which was to secure a weapon unsurpassed in human technology, to build a different kind of “stairway to heaven” for America’s adversaries and assure America’s security.

The movie “Oppenheimer” is frightening not just to contemplate the enormity of atomic warfare between nations. Instead, the equally frightening aspect relates to the lack of moral scruples, greed and pettiness that still pervades human political culture. This movie shows the conflicts going on between the work of scientists and politicians and how political fights could bring us again to the brink of nuclear war. For me, that is what is most unsettling about this movie.

Every generation of leaders is looking for the ultimate weapon, a Tower of Babel that will elevate the nation to military dominance and a kind of immortality of power equal to God. To me, the Big Bang Theory goes beyond a fascinating theory of the creation of the universe and remains as a everlasting threat to not only our way of life to but to life itself.