Oppenheimer and more..
Good afternoon,
I’m writing the first Companionship email for a long time because for a number of reasons, I’ve been thinking about a subject rarely explored today – the threat of nuclear war.
For one thing, I went to see Oppenheimer at the cinema last week. This film portrays the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the first nuclear bombs, detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing about the surrender of Japan and the end of the Second World War. It’s a brilliantly written story, which conveys some of the moral dilemmas around the creation of nuclear weapons with their huge numbers of casualties, both when at war, and in the Cold War which followed.
For another, earlier this month I visited Scotland’s Secret Bunker below fields near Anstruther. This was to be the centre of government in Scotland in the event of a nuclear attack. While the communications machinery looked comically old-fashioned, there was nothing humorous in a film being shown there, The War Game, made in 1966, depicting likely effects of a nuclear war and its aftermath in Britain. Over 50 years since it was made, it still was shocking and deeply sobering in its portrayal of suffering in the chaos brought about by such destructive weapons.
These reflections coincide with a concert taking place in St Salvator’s Chapel a week on Wednesday 9 August at 7.30 pm. This date is the 78th anniversary of the bomb over Nagasaki. Called A Japanese Concert for Peace, it will feature the parents of a current student. Gen Akashi will play music by J.S. Bach on a specially-made 11-string guitar, designed to play Renaissance lute music, while his wife Ayako will recite Japanese poetry with musical background. Together they have formed Education by Arts, which promotes peace activities. In their own words: “The concert is conceived as a kind of ceremony, which encourages participants to contemplate feelings of love and loss by listening profoundly to the sounds of music and words. The aim is to let wounded hearts blossom via the language of the arts. We hope to transcend negative memories and together to find beauty and harmony.” Entry is free, and there will be a collection for the Disasters Emergency Committee Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal. All are welcome.
For two years I lived in Japan, and visited Hiroshima once, and Nagasaki a number of times with visitors. It is deeply moving to see one or two buildings in each city which somehow survived the blast and firestorm. Museums tell the story of what happened in each city, in poignant detail. We are fearful of the effects of climate change on the world’s population, and rightly so, but nuclear war remains a distinct and appalling threat to huge numbers of lives.
Here is an image of Nagasaki, taken on my most recent trip there, in 2012.
Finally, all through the three hours of Oppenheimer, I was thinking of a lyric from Billy Bragg’s masterpiece of a song mixing pop and politics called Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards:
In the Soviet Union a scientist is blinded
By the resumption of nuclear testing and he is reminded
That Dr Robert Oppenheimer’s optimism fell
At the first hurdle.
There, in four lines, is the film in a nutshell. See the wonderful Billy Bragg song here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHd2O_KuCxA
I hope your summer is going well. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to talk to me or another chaplain – about a moral dilemma, or any issue in your life.
Yours,
Donald.