Nuclear Danger Is An Eternal Threat

The Age

Thursday July 20, 2000

WITH the passing of Sir Mark Oliphant, who died last Friday aged 98, the world lost a man who had participated in one of the pivotal acts in human history, the creation of the atom bomb. Sir Mark, one of the most distinguished Australians of the 20th century, was someone to be admired, and pitied. Because of his eminence as a physicist, he was, by his early 30s, at the forefront of nuclear and experimental physics. This inevitably led him to the United States in the early 1940s and the Manhattan Project, which devised and built the atom bombs that were dropped on Japan in 1945. The experience led Sir Mark to become an eloquent spokesman against the use of nuclear weapons, although he remained an advocate for the peaceful use of atomic energy. To him, using nuclear weapons was ``a dirty, rotten way to kill people" and something that could never be justified. These views were ignored by nations with the money and technology to build their own nuclear arsenals; for 40 years from the late 1940s the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in an arms race, stockpiling enough weapons to be able to destroy the world many times over.

It was a scenario that was as almost as absurd as it was frightening. For Sir Mark, who lived the latter half of his life in the knowledge that his outstanding facility in his chosen field had helped bring the nuclear monster into the world, the stand-off between the two great global powers of the late 20th century was an enduring source of dismay. However, Sir Mark lived long enough to see the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus an end to what had been regarded as the Cold War between the so-called Free World and the communist bloc. The spectre of instantaneous and reciprocal mass destruction through a breach of the always-delicate detente eased, but the world was left with the weapons created during the Cold War and the ineradicable knowledge of nuclear capability.

How to deal with this knowledge now that many of the tensions of the latter half of the century have receded poses as great a challenge for humankind as it has ever faced. At least the arms build-up of the Cold War provided a form of logic for nuclear weapons technology. Now there is none. In one respect, mutual deterrence, which formed some of the philosophical foundation of the arms race, did make sense. Those who lived in the shadow of the bomb knew how crucial it was to avoid serious conflict. But time moves on. Ten years after the fall of the Eastern bloc, new generations for whom the Cold War is little more than a topic from a history exam are coming of age. It is hoped their disdain for the nuclear option will be innate. That would go some way towards salving the sense of disappointment that plagued Sir Mark Oliphant.