Opinion
The Jews behind America's atomic past
Cold war comedy, a chilling crisis and America's atomic Jews
March 24, 2022 12:36
2 min read
Cold war comedy, a chilling crisis and America's atomic Jews
March 24, 2022 12:36Full 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.
In his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War, Kahn discussed how a “doomsday machine”, a computer hooked up to a stockpile of nuclear devices, might render the planet uninhabitable in one big bang.
The doomsday machine is spoofed in Dr Strangelove, where the RAND Corporation becomes the BLAND Corporation. Kahn seems to have had a sense of humour. A 1973 collection of his essays was called Herman Kahnsciousness: the Megaton Ideas of the One-Man Think Tank. It blows the mind (no pun intended) to contemplate this stuff.
Fred Kaplan is the author of The Bomb, a history of America’s experiments at the end of the world. He has been described as “the world’s foremost Dr Strangelove whisperer”. I was intrigued that in a 2020 podcast with Michael Shermer, Kaplan had characterised Donald Trump as a rogue nuclear threat and Vladimir Putin as a stable strongman who shared the US’s interest in nuclear deproliferation.
Two years later, Putin has gone rogue and is threatening to drop the big one, or at least a small one or two. Meanwhile, Joe Biden is doing his best to give the Iranians a path to the bomb, which would create a new nuclear arms race in the Middle East. So I emailed Kaplan, asking how he could have got it so wrong. “I really don’t want to be quoted on this,” he replied. I regretted this, as Kaplan also writes about jazz when he’s not writing about Armageddon, and I’d been looking forward to turning the conversation into a hilarious story about jazz and nuclear war.
My father Benny told me that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was convinced by playwright Arnold Wesker to bring a jazz quartet to an event protesting against nuclear weapons. The organisers did not explain how a few show tunes might convince Khrushchev and Kennedy to cool it. Nor had they considered the evidence that, prior to the invention of rap, jazz was the music most likely to make listeners not only contemplate the end of the world, but also, in cases of exposure to experimental styles, want to press the button personally.
But a gig is a gig. There he was, playing Slow Boat to China or some other blameless melody from the age of Oppenheimer and Teller, when Arnold Wesker sidled onto the stage and put his mouth to Benny’s ear.
“Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve just heard they’ve dropped the bomb,” Wesker said. “Just keep playing.”