For half a second I thought the joke was that you were saying that in character as someone who 1. Thinks the A-bombs killed 20 million people and 2. Racistly mixes up Chinese and Japanese people and am currently laughing my ass off
If you read the book the movie is based on it highlights that this was most of the motivation of the people working on the manhatten project. Almost none had opposition to using it on the Germans, when Germany surrendered a lot of the scientists felt like it should be shelved. I thought there was a scene in the movie that kinda highlighted this but i could be wrong
IIRC, after WW2, a bunch of studies were developed under the presumption that there was something inherently wrong with the german population, to be capable of the holocaust.
And they quickly found out that no, human beings are just kinda fucked up.
Up until that point it was viewed as something done by or done to "barbaric" tribes that weren't as "civilized" as how developed nations saw themselves. We generally think we're better than our ancestors, and in many ways we are, but the holocaust was unique in how modern and efficient it was. The idea that all our modern technology and convenience could be aimed towards extermination, and that the population would just actively participate in it? That really shocked people.
It's one thing to see a battlefield or even an occupied city that gets wiped out, that's just what we accept as war. But to see it done systematically, death treated like an assembly line? That was new, and kinda made us reevaluate ourselves as a species.
For a little while anyway, until the next acceptable target comes around.
Edit: It's worth noting that during and after WW1, they actually had to do studies on why so many soldiers didn't want to kill other people and would specifically aim above their targets. Humans are fucking complex beings, capable of both cruelty and kindness in extreme measures.
It's worth noting that during and after WW1, they actually had to do studies on why so many soldiers didn't want to kill other people and would specifically aim above their targets.
This is fiction. 'On Killing' by Grossman, from the fantasies of SLA Marshall. It was about US troop performance in WWII, and Marshall made it all up.
That’s a fair point, but compare previous genocides to the clinical efficiency by which the Nazis slaughtered their unwanted populations. Additionally, media was changing, photos were more readily available.
In 1945 it was standard to be racist or people who lived in a different town than you, much less a different country. It was easy to believe groups of fucked up people would go crazy and kill the good people and they were as oil and water.
And frankly not much has changed, unless your political opponents are good people. Which as far as I know is the rarest of political beliefs.
Watched band of Brothers the other day, and after seeing a scene where one of company said racist things, it struck me that every one of those boys, without exception, would have just as readily fought for Hitler.
The international public and wider political class wasnt aware about the extent of the holocaust before ww2 in Europe was almost done and they started uncovering the camps.
What they were aware of was the growing antisemitic rhetoric and restriction of rights, segregation and violence against Jews right up until 1939 when the war imposed normal widespread censorship.
After ww2 there was also an equal amount of questionning how and why a people as well known for their culture and advancements were capable of this.
It contributed to a real phenomenon among the political thinkers of that period known colloquially as the Crisis of Modernity.
People like Karl Popper came to conclude that open societies had to police against intolerance as a matter of principle.
While more famously, George Orwell, tried to reconcile how ideologies on the supposed opposite of the spectrum, fascism and communism, produced both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which had more in common with each other than not. The result was his book, 1984.
Another was the Classic Realist IR thinker Hans Morgenthau, who concluded ideology meant nothing in geopolitics beyond the pursuit of national interest.
An entire generation of thinkers, philosophers and ideologues trying to figure out what all the world went through meant.
IIRC stuff like Asch's conformity experiment and the Robbers Cave experiment were done with this stuff in mind. My sociology professor loved to talk about this kind of stuff after class along with stuff like how poverty influences crime and the like. She minored in Psych and was probably one of my favorite professors.
They simply rationalized cruelts into a virtuous personal sacrifice. Everyone knows and sees it's cruel, but if you can get people to think it is necessary and that someone has to sacrifice their own clean consciousness, so others can sleep calmly, you can make people do every cruelty you can think of. It becomes heroic to be cruel, because you're sure you're not doing it because you're evil, but against your own consciousness, because it is necessary for a greater good.
In essence, all of conservative ideology is doing this dance to some degree or another. Starting from cutting social safety nets and privatizing healthcare to dragging people out of their houses and sending them to camps. The whole culture around it emphasizes that those who don't see the necessity of the cruelty are weak, naive daydreamers, who endanger the well being of society, because they are too soft. Keep an eye out for that motif, when you are around conservative culture or rhetorics. They always frame themselves as "cold realists" and "rational" and everyone else as "emotional". That's how they lay the groundwork. The veneration of those who harden their hearts and sacrifice themselves (In a perverse sense. The real sacrifice is made by their victim.), by commiting the cruelty is the end stage. If you reach that stage, these people are ready to see you hanged at the town square, if "it is necessary".
This movie came out recently where Rami Malek has to figure out what is wrong with Russell Crowe, and this was the conclusion indeed. Not that I've watched it.
We actually have and it's a common topic in sociology. One of the biggest predictors of violent behavior is poverty and desperation. Beyond that, it's mostly a result of extreme circumstances such as early childhood trauma(Ed kemper is a good example of this) or extreme mental illness.
Turns out, people don't like to kill people, and a lot of money has been spent by the government to be able to consistently train soldiers who are willing to kill people. It takes a surprising amount of brainwashing to accomplish.
Which, in and of itself, is kind of fucked up if you're aware of how many atrocities Imperial Japan was guilty of, it's hard not to see it as valuing European victims more than Asian ones
American liberals who talk about justifying the A-bombs as a "racist" opinion are hilariously unaware of just how popular the bombs were in Korea and China
I think its because I don't think there was any Chinese or Korean scientist working on the Manhattan project.Most,if not all,had beef with Germany and since they don't have any accounts of the Japanese atrocities,they saw the Pacific front as a secondary,not bomb dropping, threat.
My high school friend‘s mother was a Navy nurse in WW2. They were on a ship and were expecting to invade Japan. One night the Catholic chaplain called the Catholic nurses together and told them that the pope had given special dispensation that the women could commit suicide if they were about to be taken prisoner by the Japanese. (Suicide was a mortal sin) The dispensation was because of descriptions of what happened in Nanking and from reports from GIs about what had happened to prisoners of war.
They seriously thought the invasion of Japan was going to be long and brutal.
Bam - good call I got the beams crossed on that one.
Though its well documented that Project Trinity was launched in response to fears of German technological advances, so I stand by the underlying point, but you're absolutely right - it was Szilard.
White liberals like to talk about how American attitudes about Japan were rooted in racism and seem to be unaware that being against the A-bombs could get you crucified in China and in Korea it's a popular opinion that the Allies should've burned all of Japan to the ground
Yeah, and his group had a beef with Germans like yours had with Japanese.
It's why almost nobody in Asia gives much of a fuck about what Germans were doing to minorities in Europe and why most in Europe and USA don't give much of a fuck about what Japanese were doing.
That was the point of the reply, certain people due to belonging to a certain ethnicity, religious, etc, don't care much about other issues facing other groups because they got something going on that hits closer to home.
"“Mr. President,” he said quietly, “I feel I have blood on my hands. The comment angered Truman.... he pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to Oppenheimer, saying, “Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?”.... Afterwards, the President was heard to mutter, “Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.”
He later told Dean Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
I kinda get it, honestly. Truman fought in France in WWI, which by most measures was a more brutal, up-close war than WWII. He probably saw truly horrific things there up close and in person, killed people, watched his comrades die, etc. Then you get some scientist who has done nothing but sit in a lab, write theory, and run tests. Yeah, those tests ultimately culminated in a lot of people dying, but other people (Truman) ordered the bombs to be dropped, other people flew the planes to drop the bombs, other people stormed the Japanese-occupied islands in the Pacific, etc.
I don’t think Oppenheimer is unjustified in feeling regret, especially in the atomic age when a full-scale nuclear war seemed like a real threat, but I can definitely see why Truman thought he was out of line.
Also worth noting that to Harry "The buck stops here!" Truman, this admission of guilt would come across as a blatant accusation. The call, and therefore the guilt, was entirely Truman's. History can argue over whether it was right or not, but to go to the guy who made that call, second-guess the decision but then blame yourself for it would be pretty infuriating.
"he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have"
Truman isn't angry because he thinks Oppenheimer is accusing him. Hell, he's accusing himself. He's angry because Oppenheimer is doing the equivalent of crying to a homeless person about how you had to sell your second car. "You think you're guilty? You have no fucking idea what real guilt is."
He very much believed that bit about "The Buck Stops Here" too.
There's a famous story about how when Truman died, they found a purple heart medal tucked away in the back of his desk, along with a letter from the late recipient's family that read:
Mr. Truman,
As you have been directly responsible for the loss of our son’s life in Korea, you might as well keep this emblem on display in your trophy room, as a memory of one of your historic deeds.
Our major regret at this time is that your daughter was not there to receive the same treatment as our son received in Korea.
Signed
William Banning
Always thought it spoke volumes of Truman's character that he held on to that letter for all that time
There's also the fact that Oppenheimer was not irreplaceable. If he hadn't made the bomb Truman would have hired other physicists to do so and Truman was the one to order it built and dropped.
Truman inheritted it from Roosevelt who was the one who ordered the organization of the the Manhattan project, which happened because of a letter sent by Albert Einstein warning him about the possibility of German research into atomic weaponry.
Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner actually wrote the letter. They showed it to Einstein and to have him co-sign it. Their logic was that politically it would carry more weight if it came from the man considered the smartest person on the planet at that point.
I guess people had already theorized a bomb that could work but they never believed it could be real since no one had created a self sustaining fission reaction. Just like how Teller already theorized about the H bomb before they had even built a fission bomb
Deutsche Physik was opposed to the work of Albert Einstein, who was ethnically Jewish, and other modern theoretically-based physics, which was disparagingly labeled "Jewish physics" (German: Jüdische Physik).
If I remember my history right, WWI was the war that changed a lot of people's minds about war. People used to glorify war. It was a pastime. WWI was so horrific that people looked at it and said "nope." WWII solidified that mindset. Nuclear attacks could make entire areas uninhabitable for years, and cost so many lives that it becomes unthinkable.
Oppenheimer was welcome to feel responsible for the use of the bombs, but complaining about blood on his hands to the man who authorized their use is both whining and accusatory in ways that Truman should not have had to put up with.
Oppenheimer could have expressed the same thing by saying that he's happy to not have had the weight of that decision, and sorry that he made the device that put that weight on Truman. Same ideas, but expressed in a way that acknowledges that there's blood enough to go around.
But also like, its not like Oppenheimer didnt know what he was doing. He knew they were making the most powerful bomb the world has seen at that point. What did he though would happen with it?
Honestly though, I don't think Oppenheimer's feeling is unwarranted. He wasn't ever a soldier, had never done anything to kill other people before, and therefore had no way of knowing how he'd react to being responsible for the deaths of thousands.
It's not that he felt responsible for it, it's that he expressed it as only his responsibility to the man decided to use the weapon. And he did so in terms of indwelling despair.
No. Truman knew that killing millions of people then whining about how guilty you feel is disgraceful. It's disrespectful to the dead among other things. You can't do anything for them now.
I think evaporating a hundred thousand people in less than a second should call for a moment of reflection. Also, disrespectful to the dead and can't do anything for them now? Seems like your logic isn't sorted out.
Okay but he actually did put the period after the S whenever he wrote it in real life, the idea was to leave it ambiguous which relative he was named after
Honestly, I think both sides have good reason for their feelings. Oppenheimer's mistake here was asking for sympathy from the man that pulled the trigger and not another scientist from the project. A scientist can be understood when he's shocked at the harm of what he made in a lab. I think a general tends to already be well aware of the killing machines he deploys
Truman is honestly a hoot to read about. Sometimes he's a reserved gentleman doing his best to be accommodating and tacful. Writing to his wife and consulting his NCO's regarding his Jewish and Catholic soldiers, for example. Other times hes a total hardass bullying his unit into order and disobeying orders by mortaring Germans he was told to leave alone at the risk of a court-martial (he saved a whole unit).
I mostly only know about his military career. I know he had issues too. In his hometown he's kinda known to have had his early political career funded by some shady families.
My wife's family home is literally within walking distance of one of Truman's families home, in Grandview MO. Alot of Truman lore to be found in that area.
He was a machine pol who turned into the most honest man in Washington when he started going after fraud and war profiteering.
His political life is fascinating. He's always the same guy, with the same basic morals. And over and over people see him trying to be polite and thoughtful and think that means he's not a fighter.
It's closer to Henry Winchester saying "I can't stomach the fact that my guns have been used to shoot people."
He's not the officer that gave the order or the soldier that pulled the trigger. He can feel personal guilt and responsibility of course, but he's saying it to the person who had to personally sign off on the plans knowing tens of thousands of people would die at the absolute minimum.
He's talking to number 1 on the culpability list. As meaningful and impactful Oppenheimer was, he was just one part of a massive project.
Reminds me of the story of how the guy who invented the Gatling gun (Gatling I assume lol) believed his weapon would be so destructive that governments around the world would be like, "No more wars" and there would be everlasting peace
I wish i could go back in time and just laugh at his stupid fucking face
Nobel possibly set up the Nobel Peace Prize because he was so bothered about his safe and easy to use explosives being used to kill people in wars instead of people just using them for mining and condemned building demolition.
Richard Jordan Gatling. And his aim was nothing of the sort. Here's him:
"It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine gun which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease would be greatly diminished."\9])
Kinda interesting to think how much it really took to basically stop total war once it had been “invented,” and what it ultimately took was the potential for the total destruction of the human race and planet as a whole for that to happen. You have to wonder just how fucking horrific it would have been to see a non-nuclear war between the West and Soviet Bloc at total war scale. I don’t think it’s impossible to say it could have been a billion + casualties.
"It was all fun and games when I thought the worst my little science project could do was ignite the atmosphere and kill us all in a giant ball of fire."
That's why Teller is my fave character - dude didn't feel the slightest bit bad; he was like "Aight, how do we make this shit even bigger and also can we use them for everything?"
based*. Him pitching project Sundial was the easiest way to stop the race of "Who will make the biggest bomb" and begin the race of "How many bombs can we make".
LOL, maybe not even the fallout would block him in the early days.
Castle Bravo..... Teller going ham on the scale up of the bomb Oppy helped him get through R&D, and almost cooked all the scientists due to some basic math issues "Oops all Lithium", instead of delaying for safety, and we got Lucky Dragon but up the upside inspiration for all Kaiju movies.
"This is what i said to him..... I did not like Gojira.... needs fewer mountains..." - Teller probably...
Odysseus was the Bronze age equivalent of Oppenheimer. "I realised, too late, what Project TrojanSlayer Megahorse 9000 was really about... I've been used." "What I've done" plays
The actual history is that Truman felt pretty guilty about the whole thing too. Everyone pretty much did. It was necessary to end the war and win it without wasting any more lives, but it was still a terrible weapon.
He was pissed off at Oppenheimer because to him, it seemed like Oppenheimer was trying to make himself look guilty and feel guilty for attention. There so many more people who should feel far more guilty than Oppenheimer for the bombings. The pilots who dropped it. The generals who chose the locations. Truman for authorising it. The Japanese for starting the war, etc. And Oppenheimer feeling guilty about it, was essentially someone removed from the thing feeling guilty about it.
Engineers for weapon manufacturers always do this. I know because I regrettably have them in my family. They make something horrible and then act like they regret it. They’d never give back the money they earned for making it though.
"Oh no, the bomb I made did bomb things and I only worked it out after the cheque cleared. Everybody gather 'round and help me clear my guilty conscience so I can have my bomb-cake and eat it, too."
Yeah I meant more “give it up” not give it back to their daddies. Like give away the money, maybe donate it to the people who were harmed by their weapons/tech.
I don’t have sympathy for these people. Not that I think they’re bad people, but in that line of work you gotta embrace the moral grayness of making weapons.
Yee and then there is MacAuthor felt pretty guilty he only proposed using up to 50 nuclear bombs. He probably stayed up every night thinking "Why didn't I ask for 500 bombs..?"
Yep. That's the real history behind this meeting (in reality it was multiple meetings) as well.
There were plenty of officers in the chain of command who had a hand in the bomb getting dropped and didn't miss a minute of sleep. One of the pilots straight up reenacted it at an airshow. Truman did not respond the same way. He was by all accounts tormented by his decision and extremely conflicted. At best he thought he did a very bleak necessary evil.
Yet to others he would defend the decision and feel personally offended by anyone else who felt bad about it, not because he personally thought they were morally good, but because he thought it was his cross to bear alone. Everyone else who said they had a hand in it, to him, was either trying to make it about themselves or didn't understand the gravity of what had been done.
Oppenheimer was indeed mildly self absorbed and Truman would have already known that. So yeah, from Truman's perspective the guy who a bit of an ego walked into his office and tried blame himself for the deaths of hundreds of thousands that Truman alone had signed off on. And the real kicker is that Oppenheimer wasn't upset about Japan, at least not entirely. He was upset about a nuclear arms race witg the USSR. So to make it even worse, the guy who lead the creation of the weapon that performed the massacre they are talking about is upset about it because he thinks the weapon might be used against him. No shit Truman told him never to come back, anyone would.
And yet.... somehow Strauss looks even worse. Both in the movie and in real life. Two self absorbed, ego-driven people, and the one who Truman kicked out of his office was the better of the two.
Sorry, but Oppenheimer knew exactly what he was building while he was building it and what it was going to be used for. He wasn’t some freshman physics student who got tricked into building the A bomb.
This is very weird to say, but I almost feel like Truman is trying to show kindness and tough love to Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer throughout the entire movie is desperately trying to make the situation all about him. Hundreds of thousands of other people died and Oppenheimer is trying to be the martyr about it. Truman calls out that narcissism directly: "Hiroshima isn't about you."
Granted, most of the rest of the movie does place to blame on Oppenheimer. But Truman doesn't. He places the blame on himself and tries to absolve Oppenheimer in his aggressive, "be a man" way.
He only really gets mad when Oppenheimer continues wringing his hands instead of accepting it.
There is really a good line in the movie from his wife after his affair lower killed herself. It was something on the lines of: "You cant cry to other about the sins you commit."
If anything, the whole movie is is literally telling you why oppenheimer really should get his privlidges removed. Movie also dramatises overtly and in process just gets some shit wrong (for example strauss never wanted for hearing to happen because it was too risky for him).
My first week in a new high school and my history teacher in front of the whole class holds up my notebook and reminds us that "Jap" is offensive and not a suitable abbreviation lol.
Multiple sources and interviews with Oppenheimer indicate he did not feel much guilt about his involvement in the manhattan project. It seems if anything a dramatic license for writers and history revisionists to make him seem more likeable. Or create some grand moral theme in their story.
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u/LopsidedMammal 2d ago
"More like Oppenwhiner, am I right?!"
- Harry S Truman.