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80 YEARS AFTER TRINITY  
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Eric Ross
July 17, 2025
TomDispatch [[link removed]]

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_ In 1945, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico
worked feverishly to complete the first atomic bomb. Meanwhile, their
colleagues at the University of Chicago mounted a final, ultimately
unsuccessful effort to prevent its use. _

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In recent months, nuclear weapons have reemerged in global headlines.
Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan approached the brink of a
full-scale war, a confrontation that could have become an
extinction-level event, with the potential to claim up to two billion
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worldwide.

The instability of a global order structured on nuclear apartheid has
also come into sharp relief in the context of the recent attacks on
Iran by Israel and the United States. That system has entrenched a
dangerous double standard, creating perverse incentives for the
proliferation of world-destroying weaponry, already possessed by nine
countries [[link removed]]. Many of those
nations use their arsenals to exercise imperial impunity, while
non-nuclear states increasingly feel compelled to pursue nuclear
weapons in the name of national security and survival.

Meanwhile, the largest nuclear powers show not the slightest signs of
responsibility or restraint. The United States, Russia, and China are
investing heavily in the “modernization” and expansion
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their arsenals, fueling a renewed arms race. And that escalation comes
amid growing global instability contributing to a Manichean world of
antagonistic armed blocs, reminiscent of the Cold War at its worst.

The nuclear threat endangers not only global peace and security but
the very continuity of the human species, not to speak of the simple
survival of life on Earth. How, you might wonder, could we ever have
arrived at such a precarious situation?

The current crisis coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Trinity
Test, the first detonation of an atomic weapon that would soon
obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and so
inaugurate the atomic age. So many years later, it’s worth
critically reassessing the decisions that conferred on humanity such a
power of self-annihilation. After all, we continue to live with the
fallout of the choices made (and not made), including those of the
scientists who created the bomb. That history also serves as a
reminder that alternative paths were available then and that another
world remains possible today.

A TALE OF TWO LABORATORIES

In the summer of 1945, scientists and technicians at Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico worked feverishly to complete the
construction of the atomic bomb. Meanwhile, their colleagues at the
University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory mounted a final,
ultimately unsuccessful effort to prevent its use.

The alarm spreading in Chicago stemmed from a sobering realization.
The Manhattan Project that they had joined on the basis of a belief
that they were in an existential arms race with Nazi Germany had, by
then, revealed itself to be a distinctly one-sided contest. Until
then, the specter of a possible German atomic bomb had conferred a
sense of urgency and a veneer of moral legitimacy on what many
scientists otherwise recognized as a profoundly unethical undertaking.

Prior to the fall of Berlin, Allied intelligence had already begun to
cast serious doubt on Germany’s progress toward developing an atomic
weapon. By April 1945, with the Nazi regime in a state of collapse and
Japan’s defeat imminent, the threat that served as the original
justification for the bomb’s development had all but vanished.

No longer represented as a plausible deterrent, the bomb now stood
poised to become what Los Alamos Director J. Robert Oppenheimer
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after the war as “weapons of terror, of surprise, of aggression…
against an essentially defeated enemy.”

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Buy the Book
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By that point, it was evident that the bomb would be used not to deter
Germany but to destroy Japan, and not as the final act of World War II
but as the opening salvo of what would become the Cold War. The true
target of the first atomic bomb wasn’t, in fact, Tokyo, but Moscow,
with the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sacrificed on the altar of
American global imperial ambition.

For the scientists at Chicago, that new context demanded new thinking.
In June 1945, a committee of physicists led by James Franck
[[link removed]] submitted a
report to Secretary of War Henry Stimson warning of the profound
political and ethical consequences of employing such a bomb without
exhausting all other alternatives. “We believe,” the Franck
Report stated [[link removed]], “that the
use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan
[would be] inadvisable.” The report instead proposed a demonstration
before international observers, arguing that such a display could
serve as a gesture of goodwill and might avert the need to use the
bombs altogether.

One of that report’s signatories, Leo Szilard
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the bomb’s earliest advocates
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further sought to prevent what he had come to recognize as the
catastrophic potential outcome of their creation. With Germany
defeated, he felt a personal responsibility for reversing the course
he had helped set in motion. Echoing concerns articulated in the
Franck Report, he drafted a petition
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be circulated among the scientists. While acknowledging that the bomb
might offer short-term military and political advantages against
Japan, he warned that its deployment would ultimately prove morally
indefensible and strategically self-defeating, a position which would
also be held by six of the seven
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and admirals of that moment.

Szilard emphasized that the atomic bomb wasn’t just a more powerful
weapon but a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare, an
instrument of annihilation. He already feared Americans might come to
regret that their own government had sown the seeds of global
destruction by legitimizing the sudden obliteration of Japanese
cities, a precedent that would render a heavily industrialized,
densely populated country like the United States especially
vulnerable.

Moreover, he concluded that using such weapons of unimaginable
destructive power without sufficient military justification would
severely undermine American credibility in future arms control
efforts. He observed that the development of the bomb under conditions
of extreme wartime secrecy had created an abjectly anti-democratic
situation, one in which the public was denied any opportunity to
deliberate on such an irrevocable and consequential decision.

As Eugene Rabinowitch
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co-author of the Franck Report (who would later co-found _The
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists_), would note
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after, the scientists in Chicago were growing increasingly uneasy in
the face of escalating secrecy: “Many scientists began to wonder:
against whom was this extreme secrecy directed? What was the sense of
keeping our success secret from the Japanese? Would it have helped
them to know that we had an atomic bomb ready?”

Rabinowitch concluded that the only “danger” posed by such a
disclosure was that the Chicago scientists might be proven right, and
Japan might surrender. “Since there was no justifiable reason to
hold the bomb secret from the Japanese,” he argued, “many
scientists felt that the purpose of deepened secrecy was to keep the
knowledge of the bomb… from the American people.”

In other words, officials in Washington were concerned that a
successful demonstration might deprive them of the coveted opportunity
to use the bomb and assert their newly acquired monopoly (however
temporary) on unprecedented power.

THE ROAD TO TRINITY AND THE CULT OF OPPENHEIMER

Seventy scientists at Chicago endorsed the Szilard Petition. By then,
however, their influence on the project had distinctly diminished.
Despite their early contributions
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notably the achievement of the first self-sustained nuclear chain
reaction in December 1942, the project’s center of gravity had
shifted to Los Alamos.

Recognizing this, Szilard sought to circulate the petition among his
colleagues there, too, hoping to invoke a shared sense of scientific
responsibility and awaken their moral conscience in the critical weeks
leading up to the first test of the weapon. Why did that effort fail?
Why was there so little dissent, debate, or resistance at Los Alamos
given the growing scientific opposition, bordering on revolt, that had
emerged in Chicago?

One answer lies in Oppenheimer himself. In popular culture and
historical scholarship, his legacy is often framed as that of a tragic
figure: the reluctant architect of the atomic age, an idealist drawn
into the ethically fraught task of creating a weapon of mass
destruction compelled by the perceived exigencies of an existential
war.

Yet the myth of him as a Promethean figure who suffered for unleashing
the fundamental forces of nature onto a society unprepared to bear
responsibility for it obscures the extent of his complicity. Far from
being a passive participant, in the final months of the Manhattan
Project, he emerged as a willing collaborator in the coordination of
the coming atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When Oppenheimer and physicist Edward Teller
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to be known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb”) received
Szilard’s petition, neither shared it. While Oppenheimer offered no
response, Teller provided a striking explanation
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“The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of
protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.” He
further rejected the idea that he held any authority to influence the
bomb’s use. “You may think it is a crime to continue to work,”
he conceded, “but I feel that I should do the wrong thing if I tried
to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which
we just helped it escape.”

Teller later claimed to be in “absolute agreement” with the
petition, but added that
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asked me to collect signatures… I felt I could not do so without
first seeking Oppenheimer’s permission more directly. I did so and
Oppenheimer talked me out of it, saying that we as scientists have no
business meddling in political pressure of that kind… I am ashamed
to say that he managed to talk me out of .”

Teller’s explanation was likely self-serving given his later
acrimonious rift with Oppenheimer over the hydrogen bomb. Yet further
evidence indicates that Oppenheimer actively sought to suppress debate
and dissent. Physicist Robert Wilson
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that upon arriving at Los Alamos in 1943, he raised concerns
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the broader implications of their work and the “terrible problems”
it might create, particularly given the exclusion of the Soviet Union,
then an ally. The Los Alamos director, Wilson remembered, “didn’t
want to talk about that sort of thing” and would instead redirect
the conversation to technical matters. When Wilson helped organize a
meeting to discuss the future trajectory of the project in the wake of
Germany’s defeat, Oppenheimer cautioned him against it, warning that
“he would get into trouble by calling such a meeting.”

The meeting nonetheless proceeded, with Oppenheimer in attendance,
though his presence proved stifling. “He participated very much,
dominating the meeting,” Wilson remembered. Oppenheimer pointed to
the upcoming San Francisco Conference to establish the United Nations
and insisted that political questions would be addressed there by
those with greater expertise, implying that scientists had no role to
play in such matters and ought to abstain from influencing the
applications of their work.

Reflecting on his mindset at the time, Oppenheimer explained
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is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what
to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is
the way it was with the atomic bomb.” In a similar vein,
his oft-quoted remark [[link removed]] that “the
physicists have known sin” was frequently misinterpreted. He was not
referring, he insisted, to the “sin” of the destruction of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but to pride for “intervening explicitly and
heavy-handedly in the course of human history.”

When situated within this broader context of a professed commitment to
scientific detachment, Oppenheimer’s behavior becomes more
intelligible. In practice, however, his stated ideals stood in stark
contrast to his conduct. While he claimed to reject political
engagement, he ultimately intervened in precisely such a manner, using
his position to advocate forcefully for the bomb’s immediate
military use against Japan without prior warning. He emerged as
a leading opponent
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any prospective demonstration, cautioning that it would undermine the
psychological impact of the bomb’s use, which could only be realized
through a sudden, unannounced detonation on a relatively untouched,
non-military target like the city of Hiroshima. This position stood in
sharp contrast to that of the Chicago scientists, of whom only 15%
supported
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the bomb in such a manner.

That climate of deference fostered a culture of complicity, where
questions of social responsibility were subordinated to uncritical
faith in authority. Reflecting on that dynamic
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physicist Rudolf Peierls
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“I knew that Oppenheimer was on a committee and was briefing with
the high-ups. I felt there were two things one could rely on:
Oppenheimer to put the reasonable ideas across, and that one could
trust people. After all, we are not terrorists at heart or anything…
Both these statements might now be somewhat optimistic.”

Ultimately, the only member of Los Alamos to register dissent
was Joseph Rotblat
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quietly resigned on ethical grounds after learning in November 1944
that there was no active Nazi atomic bomb program
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departure remained a personal act of conscience
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however, rather than an effort to initiate a broader moral reckoning
within the scientific community.

“REMEMBER YOUR HUMANITY”

The legacy of Oppenheimer, a burden we all now carry, lies in his
mistaking proximity to power for power itself. Rather than using his
influence to restrain the bomb’s use, he exercised what authority he
had to facilitate its most catastrophic outcome, entrusting its
consequences to political leaders who soon revealed their
recklessness. In doing so, he helped lay the groundwork for what
President Dwight D. Eisenhower would, in his farewell address to
Congress in 1961, warn against
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“the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”

Yet we are not doomed. This history should also remind us that the
development and use of nuclear weapons was not inevitable. There were
those who spoke out and a different path might well have been
possible. While we cannot know exactly how events would have unfolded
had dissent been amplified rather than suppressed, we can raise our
own voices now to demand a safer, saner future. Our collective
survival may well depend on it. How much longer a world armed with
nuclear weapons can endure remains uncertain. The only viable path
forward lies in renewing a commitment to, as Albert Einstein and
Bertrand Russell urged, “remember your humanity
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and forget the rest.” With ever more nations developing increasingly
powerful arsenals, one thing remains clear: as the Doomsday Clock
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midnight, there is no time to waste.

Copyright 2025 Eric Ross

_Follow TomDispatch on Twitter
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Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands
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final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s
novel Every Body Has a Story
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Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War
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as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
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Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World
War II
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Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from
America’s Wars: The Untold Story
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_Eric Ross is an organizer, educator, and PhD candidate in the history
department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst._

* nuclear weapons
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* Robert Oppenheimer
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* Szilard
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* Hiroshima
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