J. Robert Oppenheimer’s shadow has stretched well into the 21st century. We are still living in the nuclear age he helped create in 1945—and still confronted with the same moral and political dilemmas he wrestled with about weapons of mass destruction. Now, Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer offers a chance to reinvigorate public debate about the nuclear threat.
BY MARY ROBINSON
OPPENHEIMER WAS HORRIFIEDby the terrible power of the technology he had helped create. His story should sound as a wake-up call to global leaders and citizens alike who continue to exhibit alarming complacency and fatalism about the existential risk of nuclear annihilation.
Russia’s war on Ukraine has heightened the threat, and rendered much more difficult the prospect of meaningful U.S.-Russian dialogue on arms reduction. Its absence makes it all the more imperative that Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping put reducing nuclear risks at the top of their agenda whenever they next meet. Progress could help ease Sino-U.S. mistrust and improve wider geopolitical stability.
Yet when the nuclear threat is greater than at any other time since the height of the Cold War, all leaders in all states bear responsibility. As a young woman, I marched alongside hundreds of thousands of protesters against “the Bomb.” Now a grandmother, I am appalled that my grandchildren still face the same specter of nuclear war, and I ask myself, “Where are today’s marchers?”
THE SILENCE IS INTOLERABLE. The hands of the Doomsday Clock stand at 90 seconds to midnight. The erosion of the taboo against using nuclear weapons (including from Vladimir Putin’s open threats to do so), the breakdown of the remaining nuclear arms control architecture between Russia and the U.S., and the emergence of potentially destabilizing new technologies (including AI) have raised the risk level to frightening heights.
China’s apparent decision to significantly expand its nuclear arsenal, political instability in Pakistan, North Korea’s defiance of the U.N. Security Council, and instability in the Middle East add further dangerous pressures.
The record of close calls over the past 80 years suggests that it has been more through luck than great statesmanship that we have avoided catastrophe. The only guarantee against the use of nuclear weapons is their complete abolition. Yet the world’s nuclear powers continue to expand their arsenals and reaffirm the role of nuclear weapons within their security planning.
The U.S. and Russia bear particular responsibility for this. They possess around 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons and have dangerously undermined nucle
