2023-08-09 19:11:46
Oppenheimer should be screened for free on Capitol Hill and the White House, in Washington DC, to those hell-bent on spending $1.7 trillion (trillions, not billions) over the next few decades to build new nuclear weapons to kill us all, or nearly all.
Only those with a desire for existential catastrophe, or on the payroll of Northrop Grumman, the main military company with the nuclear “modernization” contracts, could see Oppenheimer and still support America’s nuclear rearmament, a horror show now going on with the blessings of Potomac politicians. It is necessary to repeat the nuclear weapons freeze of the 1980s, we must prevent Congress and the White House from raiding the US Treasury, which is owned by the American people, to expand the already excessive nuclear arsenal of the country and thus provoke that Other powers follow the same path.
In addition to bringing humanity closer to a nuclear disaster that will probably cause the sixth global extinction¹, for the first time involving billions of human beings.
That money, technology, talent, resources of all kinds, are urgently needed in public health, education, confronting climate change, food production, and a host of other useful causes that 99 percent of the human race wants and needs.
On the agenda is a new sea-launched nuclear Cruise missile, a two-stage radiation implosion gravity bomb, a long-range strategic bomber, replacing 400 underground nuclear missiles in the Midwest with 600 new ICBMs. . These new ICBMs, known as Sentinels, could each carry up to three warheads 20 times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs that incinerated 200,000 people in three days and continued to kill many others for decades.
Irish actor Cillian Murphy plays the role of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a Machiavellian scientist, an unfaithful womanizer, a man with few convictions but many “dragons” within himself, living through an emotional time of ambition, doubt, selfishness, regrets and “resignation”.
In a scene reminiscent of absurd 1950s America, when schoolchildren hid under desks in mock nuclear strikes, scientists don sunburn lotions and dark glasses to protect themselves during the first test nuclear powerhouse known as Trinity. This atomic test, by the way, was carried out without prior notice to those who resided in regions where the wind carried the radioactivity, most of them indigenous peoples who lived on reservations in the southwestern US and who developed different types of cancer as a result. of radiation. Later Truman (represented in the film as affected and arrogant) would order to drop a uranium bomb called “Little Boy” on Hiroshima and another (“Fat Man”), on Nagasaki.
I wondered when leaving the cinema:
“Where are the Japanese victims in this movie? Why are your images missing? “Why are they never shown writhing in pain, their lives and cities destroyed?” Instead, human targets are viewed only through the lens of Oppenheimer, who envisions X-rayed faceless ghosts ripping into the burning wreckage, their skin, their flesh falling from their bones, their bodies disappearing into nothingness. “The omission of actual victims may make sense from a filmmaker’s perspective, but not from the point of view of historians and truth-tellers. « Writer-director Christopher Nolan could have shown us photos, authentic aerial images of the Japanese, blinded and burned, before the end credits roll to remind us that horror is real, not just a Hollywood movie destined to receive several film nominations. Oscar».
Oppenheimer It breaks the persistent myth in the United States that there was no choice but to drop the atomic bombs to end World War II. Through dialogue, it is clearly expressed that Japan was about to surrender, the Emperor simply needed to save face; the point of irradiating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, targeting civilians in faraway cities, was not to save the world, but to show the Soviets (who were at the time executing the massive offensive in Manchuria, South Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and North Korea) that the United States possessed the technology to destroy the world, so better not go around bothering the powerful empire, which would be an “ally” of the USSR for a few more days, and then immediately (as it had been during 1917-1941) return to its homeland. frantic and relentless enemy role.
On the other hand, the capture of the main islands of Japan with conventional methods would have involved huge amphibious operations, which would have made the Normandy landings (1944) pale, US casualties. by hundreds of thousands, and from Japan probably by millions of people.
It should not be forgotten that the war between the United States and the Japanese Empire was an inter-imperialist war for control of the Pacific Ocean, control of the huge Chinese market; by the natural and demographic resources of the British, French and Dutch colonies. This war did not start with the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 (as many decades later the war in Ukraine did not start in February 2022, far from it).
On the other hand, there is not the slightest doubt that the Japanese imperial hawks, the Tojos, Yamamotos and many others, had they succeeded in building the atomic bomb, they would have used it against the US and its Western allies, against the USSR and first and foremost against the Chinese people. During the Manchurian Strategic Offensive, Soviet troops captured Japanese Detachment 731, a huge laboratory where lethal biological weapons such as the bubonic plague were tested on Chinese, Soviet and Western prisoners.
None of this justifies, even for an instant, the use of atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Among the 214,000 killed in horrible circumstances there was not a single admiral, general or member of the Japanese imperial family. Town only.
The Soviet strategic offensive in Manchuria and other areas (1945) destroyed Japan’s main ground forces, the so-called Kwantung Army, and its allies. These forces included: In Manchuria 665,500 troops, 290 tanks, 1,042 aircraft. On the Korean peninsula 335,900 troops, 80 tanks, 962 planes. In the south of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, more than 100 thousand troops. The Manchukuo puppet forces and other pro-Japanese formations numbered some 250,000 strong. The Soviet Army handed over most of the weapons, ammunition and infrastructure captured from Japan and its puppets, to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, instrumental in its victory and the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. .
The Pacific War was essentially a naval war and amphibious operations, the Soviet strategic offensive in Manchuria by far the largest land battle of that conflict.
The movie Oppenheimer It is compelling and significant today, though one can’t help but think that it would have been exponentially more powerful if it had been told from a different point of view, that of a scientist opposing humanity’s march to death and extinction. .
We see on the tape an Albert Einstein who in real life lobbied to finance the research of the atomic bomb, to later strongly oppose the project. It could have been his story, or the story of one of the 70 scientists who signed a “Truman, don’t drop the bomb” petition that Oppenheimer crushed, persuading Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” not to file. to the president the petition drafted by Leo Szilard, the chief physicist of the Manhattan Project’s Chicago laboratory. The film’s reference to the petition was so quick, so quiet, so whispered, that a large part of the audience (especially the American one) could have missed it.
If we don’t take swift action, we could miss the chance that many hundreds of millions of people are alerted to the enormous nuclear danger hanging over the world today and avoid a nuclear holocaust, a nightmare in which five of the eight billion people people on Earth would perish, either immediately or in the following months during the famine of an atomic winter.
The White House and the majority of Congress want to push a sleepwalking American population into World War III with Russia, a nation of 143 million people, 195 different ethnicities and more than 6,000 nuclear weapons. For those—like the shameful editors of the Washington Post—who insist that we continue to finance wars for universal power forever, for those in high places who reject calls for a ceasefire, this film reminds us of the existential danger we face. in a sea of denial, complicity and exceptionality (of believing that the US, like Israel, are the Chosen People and therefore have a Manifest Destiny). The same with China, Iran or the DPR of Korea.
Despite defending during his election campaign not to be the first to use nuclear weapons, President Joe Biden’s so-called “Nuclear Posture Review” echoes his predecessor Donald Trump’s approval of being the first to use them, in in case the “interests of our allies are threatened”.
Use:
1.- The first five global extinctions of life in the geological past:
Ordovician-Silurian Extinction: 440 million years ago Devonian Extinction: 365 million years ago Permian-Triassic Extinction: 250 million years Triassic-Jurassic Extinction: 210 million years Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction: 65 million years
Taken from Latin Press
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