“In August of 1945, the city of Hiroshima was destroyed in about nine seconds by a single atomic bomb.” So begins the 1981 documentary The Day After Trinity, in a voice-over against a black background. “The man responsible for building the bomb was a gentle and eloquent physicist named J. Robert Oppenheimer.”
Directed by a young filmmaker named Jon Else and financed by a public-television station in San Jose, The Day After Trinity quickly became a hit across the United States. One of its innovations was to pair the story of the bomb with that of Oppenheimer, foregrounding the contradiction of this “gentle” pacifist giving the nation its greatest weapon of war. As the historian David K. Hecht has argued, Else’s film helped transform Oppenheimer from a Cold War political figure into a symbol of the profound moral dilemmas inherent in the nuclear age.
In the years since the documentary premiered, Americans have continued to view Oppenheimer (and, by extension, his bomb) through Else’s lens. American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, repeatedly cites Else’s interview transcripts and largely replicates his approach. Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster 2023 film adaption of the book, does much the same.
Now Else, at 82, has revisited the bomb, this time in a nonfiction book he’s been working on for 20 years. Yet Frenchman Flat: The Rise and Fall of Atomic Bombs is not another story of the doomed Oppenheimer; Else relies on his own remarkable interviews from almost half a century ago but doesn’t focus on the scientist, and he declines to “relitigate the decision to drop the bomb” on Japan.
Neither is Frenchman Flat quite what its publisher is promoting, the “story of a single nuclear bomb” (a 37-kiloton nuke called Priscilla that exploded over Frenchman Flat, a dry lake bed in Nevada, in 1957). That story, though compellingly told, disappears for whole swaths of the text. Instead, much to its credit, the book unspools an unhurried, capacious story of human society’s collective journey to the brink of annihilation, and of the individuals and movements that have, so far, held us back from the edge. It is a major work, highlighting the heroism and the absurdity of our atomic present and this Strangelovian, Lovecraftian thing we call “nuclear policy.”
[Read: The nuclear club might soon double]
Today, the famous Doomsday Clock, which measures the risk of nuclear cataclysm, is at just 85 seconds from midnight, the closest it’s been to Armageddon since the clock’s creation in 1947. After decades of disarmament, Russia, China, France, and several other nuclear powers are rapidly expanding their arsenals, while Germany, South Korea, Japan, and others are considering developing their own programs. The agreements that long ago halted U.S. and Russian testing recently expired. Donald Trump has been expressing an alarming interest in the use of nuclear weapons for decades.
Among Else’s most important accomplishments is recognizing how crucial secrecy has been to the maintenance of nuclear stockpiles. Since the bomb was first developed, the U.S. government has denied the public basic facts about atomic weapons. “The extreme secrecy surrounding almost everything concerning nuclear weapons impeded effective democratic debate for decades,” one report quoted by Else concluded. The bomb, in other words, is bad for democracy, just as democracy is bad for the bomb.
The tight grip on information goes back to the beginning—to the Manhattan Project, which brought hundreds of scientists and their families to the New Mexico desert to build an unprecedented weapon. At the height of World War II, the U.S. military concluded that the decision to develop a bomb could not be subject to public debate. Even among members of the U.S. Congress, the historian Alex Hellerstein has calculated, only about 1 percent were brought into the loop. In 1943, the wartime Office of Censorship banned media references to “war experiments,” and officials issued false or misleading responses to press inquiries. Thus, when a bomb exploded onto Hiroshima and “instantly broiled the skin of every person in the open within half a mile,” in Else’s appropriately gruesome phrasing, almost everyone on the planet was genuinely shocked.
But that was wartime—and the cessation of hostilities generated new complexities. Could this degree of unaccountability really persist in a time of peace? Else’s interview subjects felt that it shouldn’t. Within weeks of Japan’s surrender, hundreds of Manhattan Project scientists put out a statement calling for “free and enlightened public discussion” of atomic power. Oppenheimer and liberal members of Harry S. Truman’s administration quickly proposed a plan to place control of all nuclear materials and weapons in the hands of the United Nations.
As the historian Daniel Immerwahr has noted, much of the scientific community went so far as to seek a “global government” to regulate the bomb. Today this idea might seem unthinkable, but in the ’40s, the notion enjoyed the support of such wild-eyed radicals as Winston Churchill, Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. The postwar constitutions of France and Italy explicitly countenanced a future global body that would trump their own sovereignty. Else cites polls suggesting that about two-thirds of Americans supported some version of this concept.
[Read: What Trump doesn’t understand about nuclear war]
It did not come to pass. U.S. leaders waffled on the idea, and eventually the U.S.S.R., hastily developing a bomb of its own, rejected it. What, then, to do with America’s swelling nuclear arsenal? Many elected officials feared that some “dashing lieutenant colonel” might go rogue with a nuke or three, and so in 1946, Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act, taking control of the bomb away from the military and placing it solely in the hands of the president.
Given the trigger-happy proposals floated by many within the military brass in the years to follow, this structure may well have saved countless lives, but it hardly provided for democratic accountability, much less actual arms control. The historian Garry Wills has powerfully argued that the postwar nuclear chain of command altered the United States “down to its deepest constitutional roots,” giving the president exclusive and unfettered power far beyond the comprehension of our country’s founders. Kennedy, for one, considered the presidential nuclear prerogative “insane.”
Much of Frenchman Flat is devoted to documenting the insanity that resulted from a nuclear-powered state (and, soon, states) freed from checks and balances and uninterested in public debate. There was no public hearing concerning the U.S. decision to start exploding nuclear bombs in Nevada in 1951; the state’s governor heard about it only a week before the first bomb fell. For years thereafter, the government insisted that nuclear fallout was safe, even as kids across the desert West started receiving leukemia diagnoses. Decades later, studies estimated that as many as 212,000 cases of cancer resulted from U.S. nuclear testing.
Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the global superpowers were accelerating the arms race. Both the Americans and the Soviets seriously considered nuclear testing on the moon. The first U.S. test of a hydrogen bomb (hundreds to thousands of times stronger than an atom bomb) was in 1952, and the first Soviet H-bomb test followed in 1953. When a government committee chaired by Oppenheimer recommended strongly against the development of the H-bomb, the Atomic Energy Commission buried the report by classifying it as secret. The H-bomb’s existence became public only after a congressman inadvertently disclosed it on live television. Even Truman hadn’t learned of the “super bomb” until years after its development began.
Over the course of the 1950s, as information leaked, public opposition to nuclear testing spread. Impelled by increasing discontent, the Americans and Soviets tentatively entered arms-control discussions. In 1963, they agreed to halt aboveground nuclear testing (underground testing would cease 30 years later). Dozens of countries suspended in-progress nuclear programs. “We are alive to discuss these things thanks in large measure to the grand patchwork of treaties, agreements, and unilateral actions,” Else writes.
[Read: The president’s weapon]
Yet the nuclear peace has always been a fragile one. At least twice, full-scale nuclear war has likely been averted only because a single individual—Vasily Arkhipov in 1962 and Stanislav Petrov in 1983—decided to stand in the way. The U.S. and Russia still have about 5,000 bombs apiece, more than enough to end human civilization. Only voluntary forbearance precludes renewed testing or development or, for that matter, the deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles and B-2 stealth bombers that are always at the ready. The oceans still teem with nuclear submarines, Else notes, “each boat packing more firepower than what was spent in all the wars in history.” The “nuclear club,” according to an essay in this magazine, is on track to double.
Remarkably, Else concludes Frenchman Flat on a note of ambivalence about this unstable status quo. “I have come to appreciate deterrence and understand that until we learn differently our bombs may save us from their bombs,” Else writes. Global abolition, the goal of generations of peace activists, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Pope Leo XIV, is, he adds, “unrealistic.” He shares this perspective with several of his interview subjects, who are international negotiators—members in good standing of what Else labels the “diplomatic bomb squad.” At the same time, he recognizes the absurdity of the nuclear buildup. “Why are you so concerned with saving lives?” he quotes one U.S. general as having said in 1963. “Look, at the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win.”
Ultimately, Else does not recommend a path out of the nuclear quagmire (which in fairness was not the task he set for himself). In any event, our international institutions are presently far too weak to provide the supranational control envisioned by mid-century luminaries, and a good number of our current world leaders are almost uniquely ill-suited to steer political bodies that are armed to the teeth.
Yet Frenchman Flat does provide some directional cues toward a safer future. Integral to an awareness of nuclear dangers is an end to the regime of secrecy—or at least substantial reform. Democratic oversight of this greatest weapon of war is impossible if the people are deprived of basic information. Of course, democracy is not a sufficient condition for disarmament, much less abolition. The H-bomb was popular with the American public at moments of peak anti-Soviet fervor, just as 70 percent of South Koreans, facing a nuclear regime to the north, want the bomb today. Nonetheless, popular discontent, often driven by leaked information, has historically curbed the nuclear ambitions of many of the most martial leaders. It is reasonable to imagine that even more awareness would spur even more opposition.
Sunlight alone will not solve the problem of nuclear proliferation. The aim of the abolitionists, realistic or not, has always been not just to eliminate the bombs but also to alter the conditions that might lead countries to use them. The prospect of a future free of mushroom clouds, they believe, is inseparable from a global order built on cooperation and democracy.
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