After the Coke bottle, the most enduring icon of the 20th century might be the mushroom cloud. Unlocking the secrets of the atom is science’s crowning achievement, equating matter with energy, and discovering a cheap and limitless source of power. On the other hand, it represents the all-too-possible destruction of life as we know it on Planet Earth. Needless to say, there are some issues to be worked out here. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, artists have been hard at work trying to make sense of the paradox. And as we all know, the end of the Cold War certainly didn’t moot the process. If anything, the specter of “rogue states” developing nuclear capabilities is much scarier than anything during the Soviet era—at least if you believe the rhetoric these days. Two events this month look at different sides of the nuclear question: Park Square Theater’s staging of the play Copenhagen, opening January 8, and Oak Street Cinema’s film and lecture series “Radioactive Reels,” running Tuesdays through January.
Copenhagen, Michael Frayn’s Tony-winning drama about the earliest days of the nuclear age, is a cerebral snapshot of a real-life meeting in October 1941 between the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish mentor Niels Bohr.
It was the height of the Nazi regime, and the two men were politically opposed, though still friendly. Whatever Heisenberg came to discuss shattered that friendship, and may even have kept the Nazis from winning World War Two. (Heisenberg’s miscalculation of how much uranium was needed is cited as a major reason the Nazis didn’t develop such a weapon.) What really happened? The simplest explanation is that Heisenberg merely wanted scientific advice, and that Bohr, a Jew, broke off their relationship when he realized his former student wanted to give Hitler nuclear weapons. But there are other possibilities, many suggested by Heisenberg himself after the war.
In the play, Heisenberg claims he wanted to know whether the Americans were trying to build a bomb, so he’d know whether Germany should put the enormous resources required into its own effort. In real life, Heisenberg went even further, claiming in 1956 that his intention was to get Bohr to work with him in actively suppressing A-bomb projects by either side. That statement prompted Bohr to write an angry letter with the accusation that “under your leadership, everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons.” It was never sent, and only released by the Bohr family after Copenhagen’s success.
Heisenberg stuck to his claims, but historians discounted them until the 1993 publication of the so-called “Farm Hall transcripts,” which prompted the writing of Copenhagen. British spies secretly recorded Heisenberg’s conversations with other German scientists while they were prisoners of war. In the transcripts, Heisenberg seems to suggest that he deliberately delayed the German bomb project. Was that a moral choice, or a convenient revision of his past to better fit the post-Nazi world? Or even a white lie to salvage his pride at failing where the Americans had succeeded?
It’s a murky historical question befitting the man most famous for formulating the Uncertainty Principle. Frayn makes the most of that metaphor, framing the moral questions of the play in terms of quantum physics. You don’t need a complete grasp of the science to understand the ethical issues, but Frayn takes admirable care to explain as much as he can in layman’s terms. Just as Heisenberg showed that the act of observing an object is inevitably obscured by the act of observation itself, Copenhagen suggests that truth is never completely knowable because of the lies we tell, both to ourselves and others.
The place of nuclear power in popular culture has also been, in its way, constantly shifting, and governed by our growing understanding of its dangers, our willingness (or lack of it) to face the issue, and our vacillating confidence in the powers that be.
In the years immediately after Hiroshima, nuclear energy was treated as a miracle of science, with an almost charming naiveté—we were supposed to take the futurists seriously when they predicted atom-powered toasters. Still, the destructive potential of atom-splitting was never too far off in the wings, psychologically speaking. In the fantastic plots of pulp fiction, nuclear power took over as the primary device to explain an otherwise outlandish plot, just as electricity had animated Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s 1816 novel. In popular films of the 50s, the horrible effects of radiation were exaggerated, spawning gigantic monsters in movies like Them! and Godzilla—simultaneously acknowledging our fears and putting them in a form ludicrous enough to handle. (These days, radioactivity’s mantle as a great source of monstrous mutation has been commandeered by genetics-meddling, as the most recent incarnation of Spider-Man will tell you.)
Soon enough, and thanks to the increasingly frigid Cold War, nukes were depicted almost entirely in nightmare terms. In addition to the monster movies, the early 60s spawned a number of earnest Cold War thrillers like Henry Fonda’s Fail-Safe, a nightmare scenario in which the U.S. accidentally nukes Moscow, prompting the president to deliberately sacrifice New York to prevent full-scale nuclear war. The reigning champion of Armageddon satire, 1964’s Dr. Strangelove, had the same artistic aim despite the addition of a brilliant sense of humor.
But then even the satirical impulse dried up. Some writers have claimed that the Cuban Missile Crisis was so unsettling that the American public would no longer accept stories overtly depicting nuclear destruction, and there may be some truth to that—for 15 years after Strangelove, the most high-profile nuclear-themed films were the mostly ridiculous Planet of the Apes movies.
Realism in nuke movies didn’t make a comeback until the socially conscious 1970s, most strikingly with 1979’s The China Syndrome, a harrowing thriller about a catastrophic near-meltdown at a nuclear power plant. By some cosmic coincidence, it debuted just a few days before the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, the catastrophic near-meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. The ensuing psychic jolt stuck in the national consciousness for a long time. The number of nuclear-themed novels and movies rose steadily through the 1980s, probably influenced by Reagan-era nuclear proliferation and Chernobyl in 1986. More importantly, there was a noticeable shift in tone. The children of China Syndrome—The Day After, Testament, Threads—dared to depict the post-Apocalyptic nuclear winter with terrifying realism. And, mirroring the growth of the punk movement, science fiction became much more nihilistic. The mutant monster of the 50s always had its vulnerabilities, a scourge that could be permanently defeated. But by the time of The Terminator, WarGames, and Silkwood, even the popcorn thrillers acknowledged that nuclear war meant total destruction. The only mystery that remained—as it has always remained—was just how we were going to figure our way out of this dilemma. Having split the atom once, are we ever going to be sure the chain reaction has stopped?