Image by The Official CTBTO Photostream via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
RT America on Feb 19, 2022
On the show, Chris Hedges discusses J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the bomb with the author Kai Bird.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, “the father of the atomic bomb,” was by the end of World War II one of the most celebrated men in America. He was instrumental, as one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists, in the massive government effort to build the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But in the post-war anti-communist hysteria he was declared a security risk because of his warnings about the use of atomic weapons and his opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb as well as the Air Force’s plans for massive strategic bombing with nuclear weapons—plans he condemned as genocidal.
He was hauled before Red-baiting congressional investigative committees, the FBI tapped his home and office phones and put him under surveillance. Scurrilous stories about his political past were planted in the press and he was put on trial, becoming America’s most prominent victim of the post-war anti-communist witch hunts.
Oppenheimer was a central figure in the greatest struggles and triumphs faced by the United States in war, science, social justice and ultimately the Cold War. He oversaw the development of the most devastating weapon in human history and then spent the rest of his life warning that this weapon of indiscriminate terror did not make us safer but more vulnerable.
The only effective defense against the nuclear nightmare, he said, was the elimination of nuclear weapons. For this warning he was ruthlessly silenced. “We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945,” E.L. Doctorow observed. “It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after forty years, compose our identity?” The great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture—its logic, its faith, its vision.”
Kai Bird, along with Martin J. Sherwin wrote the Pulitzer-prize winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Watch the video on RT.
From the archives:
David Swanson and Daniel Ellsberg: The Most Dangerous Missiles
Hiroshima Is A Lie, by David Swanson
100 Seconds To Midnight: The Dissonance and Madness of Our Time, by Rainer Shea
David Swanson, Alice Slater and Bruce Gagnon: Obstacles to Nuclear Abolition
Martin Sheen: The Twin Dangers Facing Humanity
Daniel Ellsberg: The Doomsday Machine, Parts 1-13
Abby Martin and Peter Kuznick: The Untold History of Imperial Japan and the Bomb
Top 12 Reasons the Good War was Bad – Hiroshima in Context by David Swanson
Gar Alperovitz: Nuclear Attack on Japan was Opposed by American Military Leadership
Hiroshima: Last military act of World War II or first act of the Cold War? by William Blum (1995)
Dandelion Salad 
I posted a full transcript of this interview on my blog. Feel free to use it here. https://dennisriches.wordpress.com/2022/05/20/robert-oppenheimers-denunciation-of-americas-bomb-culture-and-the-ongoing-suppression-of-dissident-scientists/
Thank you so much, Dennis.