ABSTRACT
Innovate. Innovationen in German, innovare in Italian, innover in French. These almost identical-sounding European words have a certain beauty about them. If you don’t see the beauty in print or pronunciation, then perhaps you will concede that they would at least suggest something positive. Technological innovation in particular tends not to be taken as negative in any overtly harmful way unless, perhaps, we think nuclear fission and fusion, which made possible the atomic bomb, an innovation with only one purpose. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead scientist in the development of the atomic bomb, did not feel very positive when, after witnessing the test explosion, he said, quoting a line from the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ Dramatic, yes, but so is the footage of the fireball and mushroom cloud curling up over the New Mexico desert in 1945 – as dramatic as the bomb’s subsequent deployment in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific. Oppenheimer used his testimony before a security clearance hearing for the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954 to give another insight into his attitudes to technology and innovation. It was a perspective less melodramatic, but nonetheless just as important as an example of an age-old view that the scientist takes to his or her work. Here is his reply to a question regarding any reservations he may have had about working on a crash programme to develop the hydrogen bomb in 1949, just as the Cold War with the Soviet Union (which had tested its own bomb in that year) was getting very tense: ‘When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success’ (Polenberg 2002: 46-7).
