Sir, – The release of the film Oppenheimer in Ireland has brought into focus the emotive issue of exploiting scientific research for military purposes, in this case, the construction of an atomic bomb. The film reveals the extent to which such a development impacts the world on a global scale not only by its existence but even as a threat. The social and moral implications of such developments have surfaced in the past, albeit on a very much smaller scale, notably when in 1932 Ireland’s physics Nobel laureate, the late Prof Ernest Walton, who, along with John Cockcroft, split the atom in Cambridge University.
In later years, as his colleague in the physics department in Trinity College Dublin, I was privileged to become aware of his thoughts on many probing questions on the topic of research for war-like purposes. He was at pains to point out that he did not in any way feel responsible for the subsequent development of nuclear weapons such as the atomic bomb, rather identifying the essential underpinning discovery of the neutron (Chadwick, 1932) and the controlled transformation (fission) of uranium into barium when bombarded by neutrons (Hahn and Strassmann, 1938).
In 1939, Walton was invited by Chadwick, his former colleague in Cambridge, to join a group of people travelling to the United States. There was no clarification given at that time as to the purpose of the visit but later he received a letter from the British office in Dublin specifying war work, which turned out to be the “Manhattan Project” to develop an atomic bomb. In consultation with Trinity’s provost, and mindful of the seriously depleted staff numbers in the physics department, he decided not to go. Further approaches were made by CP Snow of the British Ministry of Labour and National Service in 1941, and Chadwick again in 1942, for him to participate in war-work but to no avail: “My answer has been long delayed”, he replied, “I have been torn between various loyalties . . . My duty is to remain in Ireland to help.”
Although he was a deeply religious Methodist, his decision not to participate in scientific war-work was not based on inalienable pacifist principles alone. In 1963, he was invited to address the Dublin Jewish Students’ Union on “The Moral Aspects of the Atomic Bomb” and raised a number of conflicting issues for debate, conceding that they were “little more than groping in the dark”: “Nuclear war may be a means to an end. Does the end justify the means? The answer is – sometimes it does”; “We have to decide that the enemy is so bad that its victory would be worse than the use of nuclear bombs”; “If enlightened nations do not abandon war, then frightened ones will – a case of nuclear weapons as deterrents”; “Is it better for the human race to come under subjection than that it should cease to exist: dictatorships carry the seeds of their own destruction”; “What is the object in destroying the enemy if our friends do not survive either?”
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Walton further reminded his audience that nuclear war was all-out with no possible gradation of force and that, compared to conventional warfare, there is an accompanying change in the magnitude of both controlled and uncontrolled damage inflicted with persistent serious after-effects, as was demonstrated in the Oppenheimer film with its vivid account of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Walton was a member of the Irish branch of the international Pugwash Group whose aim was to seek a world free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.
It is apposite, on a more positive note, to recall that the research carried out by Walton and Cockcroft continues to have far-reaching benefits from the accelerator-based nuclear physics that has grown to giant proportions in laboratories around the world, typically in Cern (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research). The scientific legacy, uniquely reflecting the unanimity of nations, emanating from their work is indeed formidable. – Yours, etc,
VINCENT McBRIERTY,
(Physics Professor
Fellow Emeritus,
Trinity College Dublin),
Sutton,
Dublin 13.