After the Trinity test in July 1945, Los Alamos celebrated. Richard Feynman, one of the youngest group leaders on the project, sat on a jeep beating drums. His colleague Bob Wilson, who had recruited him in the first place, was moping. When Feynman asked why, Wilson said, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.” Feynman pointed out that Wilson was the one who had gotten them into it.
Jewish thinkers would wrestle with that terrible thing for decades. At the height of the Cold War, Rabbi Maurice Lamm’s 1962 essay, “Red or Dead?—An Attempt at Formulating a Jewish Attitude,” considered the stark choice facing the world: nuclear destruction or submission to Soviet communism.
The end of the Cold War retired Lamm’s either-or, but not the questions underneath it. Attention turned to the enormous nuclear arsenal left by the Soviet Union, particularly the weapons located in former Soviet republics. And as nuclear threats have again become part of international conflicts, questions about deterrence, disarmament and the use of nuclear weapons have returned to the public conversation.
Earlier this year, more than 50 of us gathered at the Los Alamos Jewish Center to open our Scientists in Synagogues series with Dr. Katharine Mullen’s talk, “The Why Behind the Bomb: Jewish Physicists and the Creation of the Atomic Era.” The room held synagogue members, visitors from Santa Fe, and scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the very place where the bomb was designed and built.
Mullen began with the scientists themselves. Her slideshow featured black-and-white photographs of many of the Jewish physicists who helped lay the groundwork for the nuclear age and the development of the atomic bomb. Among them were Otto Frisch, Leo Szilard, Rudolf Peierls, Edward Teller, Emilio Segrè, Richard Feynman, Eugene Wigner, Robert Serber, I. I. Rabi, Hans Bethe and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific head of the Manhattan Project. And then there was Lise Meitner, who helped explain nuclear fission in 1939 but turned down an invitation to work on the bomb.
The role of Jewish scientists in this history was substantial and far out of proportion to their numbers.. But the evening was not simply a history lesson. It raised a harder question: what does Judaism have to say about a weapon so many of our own helped make possible? I wish I could tell you there is an easy answer. Judaism places an extraordinarily high value on the preservation of human life. At the same time, Jewish tradition recognizes the responsibility to protect oneself and others from those who seek to do harm. Hillel captured that tension more than 2,000 years ago in Pirkei Avot 1:14: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for my own self, what am I?”
Rabbi Pinchas Peli addressed much the same dilemma in Confronting Omnicide: Jewish Reflections on Weapons of Mass Destruction, edited by Daniel Landes. “Evil must be combated relentlessly,” Peli wrote, while warning against causing damage to “the image of God” in humanity or wrecking the world entrusted to us as its guardians.
As a rabbi and physicist whose career at Los Alamos National Laboratory spanned several decades, I’ve long been challenged by the tension that Hillel articulated. It would be both naïve and irresponsible to imagine that unilateral disarmament would lead to peace. And while many scientists, Einstein among them, hoped for a world government after World War II, we seem to be quite far away from such a utopia.
I have found as a scientist that it is relatively easy to focus on the science of one’s research and let the moral questions about its use go quiet. Feynman admitted as much in “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”:
“You see, what happened to me – what happened to the rest of us – is we started for a good reason, then you’re working very hard to accomplish something and it’s a pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just stop. So Bob Wilson was the only one who was still thinking about it, at that moment.”
Feynman says they started for a good reason. For the Jewish scientists, many of whom had fled Nazi Germany, that reason was the fear of a Nazi bomb. Germany surrendered in May 1945. Trinity came that July. The reason was gone, and the work went on.
Some of these same scientists did keep thinking. Joseph Rotblat left Los Alamos once it became clear Germany would not get the bomb, the only scientist known to have walked away on grounds of conscience. Decades later he shared the Nobel Peace Prize. Leo Szilard, like Bob Wilson, had helped get everyone into it: he drafted the 1939 letter Einstein sent to Roosevelt. In July 1945 he circulated a petition urging that the bomb not be used on Japan without first giving Japan a chance to surrender. And Oppenheimer himself came to oppose building the hydrogen bomb.
The Jewish mathematician, Stan Ulam, whose work was instrumental in the development of the H-bomb in the 1950s, recognized that calculus was necessary for the design of the bomb, but this does not mean that calculus is immoral. Lise Meitner lived that distinction: she helped uncover the physics and refused to build the weapon. Our prophets understood it too. Isaiah envisions a day when nations “beat their swords into plowshares” (Isaiah 2:4). Joel calls for the reverse: “Beat your plowshares into swords” (Joel 4:10). Same metal. What changes is what we choose to make of it. Yet Isaiah’s verse ends, “neither shall they learn war any more.” Is there a difference between learning calculus and learning war?
As my own views on the Jewish perspective on nuclear weapons evolve, I anticipate additional insights to be gained from the subsequent talks in our Scientists in Synagogues series.
All this made Mullen’s presentation a fitting way to begin the Scientists in Synagogues series. The program gave the audience a chance to look back at the scientists and decisions that shaped the atomic age while considering how Jewish tradition might help us think about the dangers that remain.
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