Superpower

Everybody should have fully realised after the A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that world history had entered a new age. In 2019, a group of experts from a range of disciplines formally proposed a date in the decades following 1945 as marking the beginning of the Anthropocene rather than 1784 as suggested by Crutzen and Stoermer. They are currently looking for appropriate evidence especially in Antarctic ice core records and therefore constituting an appropriate Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) marker or Golden Spike as an alternative to that suggested by Lewis and Maslin for 1610.1 However, at the time, although scientists understood the new situation more completely than statesmen, even they began to disagree among themselves about how to proceed. Their dilemma was expressed in different ways by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller. At first, they appear to have agreed that further research could not be stopped, that, as Teller put it, they should not try ‘to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we had just allowed it to escape’. However, while Oppenheimer continued to work for international understanding and restraint, Teller's anti-communism and Russophobia came to convince him that the United States should pursue its own research.

In November 1945, Oppenheimer gave a speech to fellow scientists at Los Alamos. ‘It is not possible to be a scientist’, he argued, ‘unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences’. He went on to say ‘that atomic weapons are a peril which affects everyone in the world, and in that sense a completely common problem, as common a problem as it was for the Allies to defeat the Nazis’. To the argument that there were many parts of the world in which one of the deepest American beliefs, democracy, did not exist, he responded that there was ‘something more profound than that; namely, the common bond with other men everywhere’.