The Manhattan Project

by Dennis Green

One of the most evangelical, fundamentalist “religions” abroad today is secular humanism. This is the notion that a life of the Spirit, a life taken on faith, faith that life is not really as meaningless as it sometimes feels, has been made outmoded by modern science and technology. It ranges from the outspoken atheism of writers like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, (The End of Faith), to the assumption that all the woes in the world today are caused by religious fanatics.

An irony in all this is that the greatest threat from terrorists today is the possibility of a “suitcase nuke” being set off in the heart of New York City. In fact, a novelist friend of mine, Frank Frost, professor of history emeritus from UC Santa Barbara, was in the first draft stage of such a story, when he sent me an email saying, “The more research I do into the subject, the more inevitable it looks, and the more depressing. So I just gave up. No fun of the fictional sort there!”

We can debate whether Muslim extremists are religious fanatics or brilliant political manipulators. An interview with Omar bin Laden in this month’s Rolling Stone suggests that his father Osama is a very clever political strategist, and in his personal life a dominating bully. And not a man driven by religious faith at all, nor solely by sympathy for Palestinians.

But the suitcase nuke is possible, inevitable, only because of one man — Albert Einstein, who was not a secular humanist, let alone an atheist. Rather, Einstein wrote in Cosmic Religion that the more he knew about the universe, the more he sensed a unifying Spirit, Force or Principle within it all, and he regarded the pursuit of such a Unifying Principle as the inevitable and ultimate fruit of all his labors.

The men who did take his work to fruition in the form of the atomic bomb, in their own work on the Manhattan Project, were secular humanists, not religious men at all. Lawrence, Teller and Oppenheimer were all skeptical of Einstein’s cosmic religion, calling it a “romantic lapse in his thinking.” In this respect, they were the modern secular humanists of their day.

And of the three, only Oppenheimer had serious doubts and moral reservations, after the Project’s work was completed, about the applications of their work. And for that he was thrown under the wheels of Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist bus.

I once met John Lawrence, brother of Ernest Orlando Lawrence, who worked on the team led by Glenn Seaborg that discovered plutonium, who invented the cyclotron and founded the U.C. Lawrence Livermore Lab, which does research into atomic energy and weaponry for the U.S. Government. John and I had lunch at the U.C. Berkeley Faculty Club, and I did some promotional writing for his own projects — the Exploratorium in San Francisco, nuclear medicine at the Donner Labs, where he was director, and on behalf of his brother’s continued Lawrence Hall of Science Exhibits in the hills above U.C.

John was a Nobel Laureate, and a very interesting man. He felt a good deal of contrition about his brother’s work, and said so. “My work with the heavy ion medical accelerator is in part to redeem our family reputation,” he said. “We began our work at a time when we were confidant that with science in the forefront, all the irrational fanaticisms of mankind — the religious and the totalitarian — would subside, would be defeated. Instead, we got the calculations of fascists who claimed they were descended from the Norse Gods, and oppression from those who told us religion was ‘the opiate of the people’ — My God!”

So when my boyz were little, I took them to the Exploratorium and the Lawrence Hall of Science, where they gloried in the playful exhibits. And as for religion and the life of the Spirit, I let them figure that out for themselves as well. And the only Manhattans I care for anymore are the liquid kind. Hats off!

©2010 Dennis Green