Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

JOHN ADAMS – DOCTOR ATOMIC – SAN FRANCISCO – OCTOBER 1st 2005 – DE NEDERLANDSE OPERA – 2007

We are dealing here with a highly political subject and opera. We are dealing here with the scientists who invented, tested and then supervised the use of the first atom bomb ever produced, tested and used in the world. The main character is thus Oppenheimer himself with a couple of his colleagues and the military personnel that is following the project. We are after the victory over Germany and before the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that will bring the surrender of Japan, or should I say precede Japan’s surrender that was expected any time before the bombs were dropped. The opera only considers the stakes and ethical questions of the scientists themselves. The fact that the use of these atom bombs will bring the Cold War is not even considered, it is even hinted at as being a common project with the Soviet Union, which is totally false. It was a unilateral action of the US that could have been avoided politically and militarily because it was purely useless: the victory and the surrender of Japan was only a question of days.

Even so this opera is strongly anti-military and anti-atomic from the purely scientific point of view. Ethics are here and there alluded to, especially by second zone scientists, not the top ones, but it is only anecdotes more than real facts and actions. The opera’s libretto is supposed to have been written from authentic documents, and it contains a lot of literary quotations. This implies the positions defended by the two top scientists and the top general in this case are supposed to be authentic, in spite of the numerous and long literary quotations that are set in Oppenheimer’s mouth. The anti-war and anti-atomic meaning of the opera is not really expressed as such, but can be derived from what is being said, because it may freeze our blood in our own veins.

First of all the chorus opening the opera is scientifically fundamental.

“Matter can be neither created nor destroyed but only altered in form.” . . . “Energy can be neither created nor destroyed but only altered in form. But now we know that matter may become energy and thus be altered in form.”

It was known before since Einstein had proposed it as a theory. But the atomic research, today known as nuclear research, proved it. All is energy and energy is material by essence. It is the volatile and flexible form of matter and matter is nothing but an assemblage of energy. This is frightening because it states there was no creation, hence no possible god or other event that would have brought the world into existence from nothing. This is frightening because everything in the world being matter and energy and the former being only a particular form of the latter we are nothing but an assemblage of energy particles. That brings up the fundamental principle of Buddhism: we are part of cosmic energy and our material existence is nothing but a transient condensation of this energy in our evanescent body and being. No divine soul, nothing stable and long-lasting in us, nothing but unstable energy that can be released or can release itself eventually. Life is not our essence, death is and life is nothing but a short suspension of that death thanks to the condensation of a certain amount of energy into our likeness we call our body or our mind, and death is only the point when and where the enrgy that composes our body is restructured, naturally altered in form. Religion is totally side-tracked and even science is marginalized. The scientist is a sorcerer’s apprentice playing with some natural criteria and parameters that we cannot control. At best, maybe, we can manage them so that we do not get burnt up or destroyed by our tinkering about.

We are not then surprised by what Oppenheimer says about the soul:

“The soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes so embarrassing that at this loss [the loss of human conscience due to the work on this humanity-negating nuclear energy] I felt only a little more emotion than if, during a walk, I had lost my visiting card.”

We are beyond the negation of God. We have reached here the reduction of the divine soul to some kind of ethical essence that is anyway nothing at all and practically rejected by Oppenheimer. To do what he or they is or are doing he or they must have no soul whatsoever. When the scientist who is second in command says that they should speak up and try to influence the politicians who are making the decisions how to use this atomic power he is rebutted by Oppenheimer in the most condescending way possible:

“The nation’s fate should be left in the hands of the best men in Washington.”

Who says they are the best men? And the principles of the use of this atomic power in Japan are simple:

“. . . Psychological factors in selecting the targets are of great importance. . . We cannot give the Japanese any warning. . . Doctor Conant suggests a vital war plant is the most desirable target, employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by worker’s houses. . . Several strikes would be feasible. . . The more decisive a weapon is the more surely it will be used, and no agreement will help. Would we have started the atomic age with clean hands?”

Then everything has been said and the only words that can be used here are cynicism, hypocrisy, unconsciousness, vanity and of course thirst and hunger for power and prestige, even if criminal. The attitude of the General is typical: he wants to command the weather, order nature to do what he wants and abide by his law, or diktat. And this libretto is nearly nice on the subject because it does not speak of the time when the bomb must be dropped, which is early enough in the morning to catch the workers going to work and the children going to school to make sure the casualties are essentially innocent and totally non military by definition, even if they work in some military factories, though children do not. Civilian victims are not even collateral. They are the target. We are dealing here with a crime against humanity and it necessarily feeds the thirst and hunger for authority in many men.

Then the wrapping it up in Oppenheimer’s wife’s pangs of conscience is useless since she has no say in what is happening. Her husband neither by the way. The attitude of some disagreeing scientists like Wilson in the opera is just vain and useless, if not hypocritical, since they know security would stop their petition before it even entered the oval office or penetrate the White House. And we have nothing to say about Oppenheimer himself and his near nervous breakdown during the count down for the test. Do not even mention the cynical Teller, second in command in the scientific team, who is just up-handedly brandishing some negative arguments as his taste for black humor allows him to make fun of everything. Cynicism and foolishness are the main two characters of these people. Note the fact that humanity will always do what it can do, no matter how criminal or dangerous it may be, is not really questioned and anyway if Americans did not do it, Germans would do it, or the Japanese, or Russians. There is in this opera a fatality in history: always will human beings invent new weapons that will always have to be more and more destructive.

The conclusion comes from Oppenheimer who does not speak in his own words but quote a sonnet by John Donne. He addresses a plea to “three-person’d God” to take him and imprison him because by becoming the prisoner of God he could be freed from God’s enemy who he is “betroth’d to.” This is a vision of absolute dependence, total and final subservience, immense and yet divided obedience.

The only challenge then comes from Oppenheimer’s Navajo nurse and maid, Pasqualita, who brings in that bleak picture a more “natural” approach. First a lullaby from her culture to put the baby to sleep: the Cloud-Flower Lullaby, one of the Songs of the Tewa translated by Herbert Joseph Spinden and published in 1933. The Tewa are Pueblo Indians, who live on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona. 

“In the north the cloud-flower blossoms,

And now the lightning flashes,

And now the thunder clashes,

And now the rain comes down!

A-a-aha, a-a-aha, my little one.”

It will be repeated four times. The full stanza for the west, next the south, and finally the east, but in this last case Pasqualita will be interrupted after two lines.

Then Pasqualita will quote part of the eighth elegy, from the 1949 volume “Eligies” by Muriel Rukeyser, which is an evocation of the dead during the WWII, and their possible return that will never happen (being sung by Pasqualita we could think it means the Indians who were killed during the Indian wars and the Indian genocide):

“Then word came from a runner, a stranger:

The coming again of our leaders. But they did not come.

And the dreams spread.

They all were the same dream.”

This is of course the evocation of World War II and the fifty million casualties, and in particular, since Muriel Rukeyser is Jewish, the fate of the Jews in the Shoah. They were gone and they did not come back. They were taken beyond the gate of light that casts no shade and they never came back.

The only solace or support Oppenheimer can find in his situation is an evocation of Vishnu, the Preserver in the Hindu trinity, who is brought forward by the chorus in a translation that seems personal. We have to keep in mind Oppenheimer studied Sanskrit in 1933, and the “Baghavad Gītā” in particular. He declared to Christian Century Magazine in 1963:

"The general notions about human understanding… which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of or new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find [in modern physics] is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom."

But the quotation the “Baghavad Gītā” sounds like a very poor solace and a deep anguish if not fear in front of the imminent first explosion of this bomb:

Shouldering the sky, in hues of rainbow,

All my peace is gone; my heart is troubled.”