J Robert Oppenheimer advocated for the regulation of nuclear energy after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and attempted to communicate with Jawaharlal Nehru about this in 1951.
Director Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer has once again put the spotlight on one of history’s most controversial figures, and by Nolan’s own estimation, ‘the most important person who ever lived’. Oppenheimer was in charge of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, a American endeavor which resulted in the creation of the world’s first atomic bombs.
Oppenheimer often spoke about the guilt that he felt after two bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and dedicated the rest of his days to advocating for the regulation of nuclear power. He refused to participate in the creation of the hydrogen bomb, and urged his government to tread very carefully. These themes are prominently explored in Nolan’s film, which ends with a guilt-ridden Oppenheimer having a vision of the world’s destruction.
And according to writer Nayantara Sahgal, Oppenheimer attempted to communicate with then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru about the US government’s efforts to build a weapon ‘far more deadly than the atomic bomb’, and begged Nehru to not trade all-important thorium with the Americans in exchange for the wheat that India needed at the time. In her book Nehru: Civilizing A Savage World, Sahgal, who is Nehru’s niece, reproduced a letter that received in 1951 from her mother and his sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who was serving at the time as India’s envoy in Moscow, Washington and London.
In the letter, she told him about a conversation she had with Oppenheimer, who’d run her up from Princeton, and told her that he had ‘something very urgent to communicate’ and was sending an emissary, Amiya Chakravarti, who brought the ‘chilling message that the United States was developing a weapon far more deadly than the atom bomb.’ For this purpose, the US needed access to India’s ‘inexhaustible supply’ of thorium, and was prepared to offer wheat in exchange. Oppenheimer begged of India not to sell any thorium to the US voluntarily or through pressure, but Nehru wouldn’t have done it either way, as he ‘abhorred nuclear weapons and strove passionately to seek their total elimination’, as Sahgal wrote.
In an interview with the Hindustan Times, Oppenheimer’s co-biographer Kai Bird said that the theoretical physicist was offered Indian citizenship by Nehru in 1954, but likely didn’t take it seriously because he was a staunch patriot. Starring Cillian Murphy in the central role, Oppenheimer extensively explores the witch hunt that was carried out against him by his own government, after he refused to comply with its demands. The film has been a hit in India, where it has made over Rs 50 crore.
