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Opinion

The Jews behind America's atomic past

Cold war comedy, a chilling crisis and America's atomic Jews

March 24, 2022 12:36
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2 min read

Full house to those readers whose bingo card of predictions for 2022 included “Return of the US-Russia nuclear face-off”. Dr Strangelove will see you now.

Both Stanley Kubrick, who directed the 1964 release, and Peter Sellers, who played bomb-loving ex-Nazi scientist Strangelove (and two other characters in the film), were Jewish. 

Jewish Americans are rightly proud of their disproportionate contribution to civilization, but they tend not to dwell on their disproportionate contribution to the means of destroying it. They also tend to overlook the fact that the success of America’s nuclear and space programmes derived not just from Jewish fugitives from Nazism, but also from Nazi fugitives from justice, like the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.

The American nuclear programme was kickstarted in 1939 by Albert Einstein’s letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, warning that the US lacked sources of uranium and Nazi Germany was already stockpiling it. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico where the first atomic bombs were designed, was Jewish. So were Oppenheimer’s colleagues Edward Teller, later dubbed the “father of the hydrogen bomb”, John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born polymath whose legacies include the terms “kiloton” and “mutually assured destruction” (MAD). So was Herman Kahn, another of the inspirations for Dr Strangelove. Kahn, who worked for the RAND Corporation, applied game theory and systems theory to develop the MAD theory of “second-strike” deterrence. He called himself a futurist but he spent much of his time thinking about what he called the “unthinkable” – and having thunk it, planning for how the US might come out on top.