Serpents & Doves and Nuclear Gadgets

See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; 

so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. 

                           Matthew 10: 16 NRSVue 

Yesterday we saw the film Oppenheimer, which is exceptional story-telling and acting. Christopher Nolan is a remarkable director, even if the dialogue is rather mumbly in this movie -- it isn't just me saying so!

We've spent some time unpacking the three hours in which actor Cillian Murphy is central to virtually every scene as Robert Oppenheimer and embodies his brilliant and tortured soul. Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist but splitting the atom to create a deadly military device was a concrete enterprise with implications far beyond the goal of bringing Japan to its knees as the Second World War lurched to its conclusion. The Italians and the Germans had been defeated and Japan was teetering. Yet the juggernaut of creating an atomic bomb seemed unstoppable. 

Oppenheimer was well aware that the devastation of the two "gadgets" deployed to kill more than a hundred thousands Japanese civilians immediately (likely 200,000+ eventually) was a beginning rather than an end. He admitted to being haunted by his role and questioned whether they needed to be used at all. He foresaw the beginning of the arms race and within a few years Russia had created its first nuclear weapon. In the 1950s he went from being a hero to being hounded as a suspected communist who was stripped of his security clearance.

                                                       Cillian Murphy and J. Robert Oppenheimer 

Today there are nine nations with nuclear weapons and Canada is in the flight path of the two countries with the greatest stockpiles. If we somehow think that they could never be used, consider the standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States, the Cuban Missile Crisis of the early 1960s. Some of us were grade-schoolers who went through drills to get under desks in the event of a missile exchange. 

Even with a Non-Proliferation Agreement which has reduced the number of nuclear weapons to 12,700 -- to my mind that's roughly 12,700 too many -- North Korea, India are not part of the pact and Russia has recently backed away. 

Often "world leaders" are akin to children playing with a can of gasoline and a box of matches. Do you recall the reckless pissing match between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump? Russian ministers have made threatening comments about parking nukes in Belarus for possible use against Ukraine. The word is that the Canadian government began to develop a contingency strategy if this threat became reality.

Ya, I appreciate that this all sounds bleak. Yet as followers of the Prince of Peace we need to be "wise as serpents, innocent as doves." The world tells us that instead we should follow the double-speak of George Orwell's 1984 with the motto of "war is peace." Let's stick with "blessed are the peacemakers."

I almost forgot...the scenery in Oppenheimer looked very familiar having visited the stunningly beautiful Ghost Ranch Retreat Centre in New Mexico three times. It turns out that the movie set for Los Alamos was built on Ghost Ranch.