The Theatre of Nuclear Science

Weapons, Power, and the Scientists Behind it All

Jeanne Tiehen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000474725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The Theatre of Nuclear Science theoretically explores theatrical representations of nuclear science to reconsider a science that can have consequences beyond imagination.

Focusing on a series of nuclear science plays that span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and including performances of nuclear science in museums, film, and media, Jeanne Tiehen argues why theatre and its unique qualities can offer important perspectives on this imperative topic.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, politics, and literature.

1 A matter of time

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025757-2

Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity's core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species—our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will—those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.

(U.S. President Barack Obama, at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial on May 27, 2016)

Seventy-one years after the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, President Obama's words illuminate the ways in which nuclear science led to both an astonishing scientific breakthrough and devastating consequences. The bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 were a defining moment of the twentieth century and a turning point in which things would never be the same. We speak of the bombings occurring decades ago, before many of us were alive: consequently, fear of nuclear war is seemingly not as prevalent today, and the cultural perception of this threat is that it is one preserved within our past.

What does it mean, however, to speak of an event as part of the past? Phenomenologically, it makes sense why we look at our world's and nation's history, or even our personal lives, and regard the past as being different from the present, and often assume that the future will be different from both. We can observe changes that may delineate tenses, such as transformations in society or our individual progression of age. The past and future can thus feel distant or unfamiliar from our present experiences. When it comes to nuclear threat, the atomic bomb dropping is not a lived experience in my personal life history or for many people alive today. I do not have any memories of urgently fearing a nuclear attack in the same that way my parents remember bomb drills in school. I also do not remember learning a great deal of specifics involving the atomic bomb in most U.S. history classes. Even when visiting the Pearl Harbor site in O‘ahu, Hawaii years ago and seeing the sunken hull of the USS Arizona—a ship visible but corroded by the saltwater—the phenomenological and temporal distance I felt was not shortened between the events surrounding World War II and my own perception of them. The experience was somber and educational, but it also felt like glimpsing a relic from the past.

In the black and white photographs of the atomic bomb's infamous mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, the temporal disassociation one might have with such an image relates to the fact that this is an icon from another age, perhaps in ways that Americans born today look at images from 9/11 and someday future generations will look back at images from the Covid-19 Pandemic. This disassociation is also related to culture, as I am an U.S. American and view the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a distinct and different cultural perspective and national memory than I imagine most Japanese do.¹ Spencer Weart's writing about the infamous cloud describes its “unforgettable impression” that became a folk symbol for “overwhelming and numinous power.”² Seeing the images today I can appreciate the devastation the cloud represents, but I do not share the same, once-collective impression Weart describes. I instead view such images with a cognitive disbelief that this event even occurred. It may be a part of our past but it is not my past. I write these words even though my maternal grandmother Betty Haas worked at the bomber plant in Nebraska during World War II where the Enola Gay was built, which was the first bomber plane that dropped the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. I remember her speaking about this experience, but only later in life when I started this research and explored the many books and exhibits did I truly grasp my own small, familial connection to this dot in time. After all, this was “the past,” and I am not a part of it. Some of this phenomenological perspective is tied to the notion of time flowing; the past is comprised of moments that we have flowed and moved past, individually or culturally. We have progressed, moved ahead, and the past is gone. Yet, complicating this line of thinking is that the past may not quite work this way, and specifically, the past tied to the threat of the atomic bomb may never work this way, despite our best wishes that it did.

Time is important to the comprehensive picture of the race to create the bomb and to the large arsenal of nuclear weapons that continues growing from 1945 through today. In theatre, time matters considerably, and in plays about nuclear science, time and tense can therefore be critical facets. Playwrights responding to the bomb often did so in ways that play with the urgency of time, and portray the rush to make decisions by many characters. Other playwrights reflected on the bomb by writing about a point in time that was in the past or future from where they stood themselves. Due to the critical importance of time in relation to the development and persisting thoughts about the bomb, this chapter looks closer at the idea of time, considering what theatre and its own temporal possibilities offer to the examination of nuclear threats. Specifically, this chapter will reflect on how treating the bomb as part of the/our past is complicated. This idea is investigated through the examination of Michael Frayn's uniquely time-tensed play Copenhagen and by looking at the Bradbury Science Museum and the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History and observing how they present the bomb in connection to time and history.

Michael Frayn's Copenhagen plays with time with a specific intelligence, and there is special attention given to the play's structure of events and its temporally complex conversations, which make it difficult to know which tense is actually happening in the play as it unfolds. Examining Copenhagen also shows how Frayn utilizes Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in a creative way to highlight how the truth involving Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr and the building of the bomb may be a matter of perspective, which can also be related to how one views history and time. Then the chapter further explores how time relates to the bomb, and how Copenhagen and other nuclear science dramatic works offer a chance to investigate the phenomenological boundaries of time on stage. Through this analysis, it is clear that what time is and how we experience time are often two different things, which phenomenology helps elucidate. In light of this, I reconsider what it then means to say the bomb is a part of our past. Other references about nuclear weapons and time are included in this examination, such as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, to indicate that time and nuclear bombs have always been inseparable. The chapter concludes with an examination of how time functions differently in the two nuclear science museums: the Bradbury Science Museum and the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. Unlike the strictures of time theatre adheres to, a patron of a museum can experience exhibits under their own time discretion. Moreover, the ideas in these museums are shared differently due to the experience it asks of its patrons based on space and time. Both museums utilize timelines and space to arrange the performative story they want to tell, and here it is evaluated what story each museum is performing and what that adds to one's perception of nuclear science. This chapter illustrates how time, phenomenologically experienced, conflicts with how we have often thought about threats of nuclear weapons, and it presents the idea that theatre, due to its unique relationship with time, offers important possibilities to revisit the past and make concerns about nuclear weapons a present interest.

Copenhagen's uncertainty of time and truth

Near the end of Michel Frayn's Copenhagen, Heisenberg asks the critical question to Bohr: “Does one as a physicist have the moral right to work on the practical exploitation of atomic energy?,” and Heisenberg says Bohr “gazes at me, horrified” (88).³ The question shifts the relationship between the two men, and “Already they’re both flying away from each other in the darkness again” as their cordial relationship cannot bear the weight of such considerations (Frayn 88). The exchange is one of many that demonstrates the high stakes of the conversation at hand, and the realities spoken (and perhaps unspoken) at the infamous meeting of Heisenberg and Bohr many decades ago. Responding to the strong reactions his play Copenhagen garnered, Michael Frayn explains, “When I wrote the play I thought it unlikely that anyone would want to produce it. Even if I sometimes hoped I might find some small theater somewhere that would take it on, I can’t remember ever thinking that anyone would come to see it, much less have strong views about it.”⁴ Frayn's concerns are not entirely unfounded, as many plays about the atomic bomb had short production runs and were not always positively received. Nevertheless, the emergence of science plays in the last 30 years can be seen as beginning, in part, with Frayn's genre-defining play.⁵

Frayn centers his action on the infamous visit of Werner Heisenberg with Niels Bohr in Denmark in 1941, before the bomb was complete. Frayn's work plays upon the contentious question of why Heisenberg would visit Bohr. In Copenhagen, the character Werner Heisenberg defends his choice to stay in Germany, working under the Nazi's atomic science program as one of its principal scientists. Based on the historic meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr, Frayn's play often shifts back and forth between their conversations revealed in the present that are also full of reflections of the past. The exchanges in the play dodge and dart between two men who share a mutual love of physics, who respect each other, but are also irreparably divided given their current status and alignments. The play also includes the character Margrethe, Bohr's wife. Copenhagen's uniqueness lies in its richness and depth of conversation; in some regards nothing truly happens within the play. Instead, the play's significance stems from deriving what it is that might be happening, i.e., is Heisenberg testing Bohr's knowledge about what the Allies are doing, is he asking Bohr what he should ethically do under the Nazis, or is he really asking whether atomic bombs are possible and if so, is it moral? Heisenberg's biggest question similarly echoes throughout many of the plays in this book: what should nuclear scientists do under the governments they work for, particularly when put under so much pressure given the consequences of these choices?

What makes Copenhagen such a well-written play is how this question is just one of many demanding ethical inquiries all three characters must confront regarding the bomb, and Frayn elegantly does so through an interwoven construct of the concept of tensed time. The play reaches a dramatic moment when Heisenberg quizzes Bohr about whether the Allies are making a bomb, to which Bohr replies:

BOHR: But, my dear Heisenberg, there's nothing I can tell you. I’ve no idea whether there's an Allied nuclear program.

HEISENBERG: It's just getting under way even as you and I are talking. And maybe I’m choosing something worse even than defeat. Because the bomb they’re building is to be used on us. On the evening of Hiroshima Oppenheimer said it was his one regret. That they hadn’t produced the bomb in time to use on Germany (Frayn 42–43).

In this dialogue, two temporal particularities unfold. One, Frayn has made the character Heisenberg talk about the bomb as part of his present—that the bomb is being made by the Allies during the very moments he speaks. Then, Heisenberg shifts within the same passage of dialogue, speaking about the bomb with retrospective knowledge. He peers into his future, which is a part of the audience's past. He states that it was Oppenheimer directing the Allied project, and he identifies comments Oppenheimer made after the bombs had already been used, far past the 1941 meeting occurring. Two, evident in this moment and many others like it throughout, the play creates a phenomenological dissonance for the audience as what is present for these characters is in constant flux, exacerbating the uncertainty as to what actually happened. From which dot in time are the characters speaking? Shepherd-Barr states: “Frayn revisits this decisive moment in history and in science, positing three ‘drafts,’ as the characters call them, each with different outcomes, and the audience essentially has to choose which draft it prefers, since no concrete answers are explicitly given in the text.”⁶ In these drafts, time and tense waver, and the truth becomes indiscernible for us as we see it is a matter of perspective.

The play nods to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, a fundamental principle in quantum mechanics that explains how an act of measurement disrupts how the object is measured, or as Alok Jha specifies, “The uncertainty principle says that we cannot measure the position (x) and the momentum (p) of a particle with absolute precision. The more accurately we know one of these values, the less accurately we know the other.”⁷ Frayn himself writes that what the “uncertainty of thoughts does have in common with the uncertainty of particles is that the difficulty is not just a practical one, but a systematic limitation which cannot even in theory be circumvented.”⁸ We are always limited in one way or another by our abilities and tools for observation; we cannot always know all things reliably and truthfully at once. Frayn artistically transforms this scientific idea into his play's theme by using uncertainty to illustrate that the more each character tries to recount this conversation with details, the less we in the audience (and characters too) know what truly happened. It is hard to know whose account has the most veracity, but this is what makes the play emblematic of a larger human experience that anyone can relate to regarding the perception of a conversation. Part of this uncertainty is also related to how time strictures in the play, like tense, constantly alter. Although the play is set in 1941, at the start of the second act, the characters reflect on how the two physicists met and conversed in 1924, and the present tense often collapses in this recollection of memory. Are the characters speaking in the same present the audience is living? It is unclear. The definitions of the play's presentness may be tied to death, as Heisenberg states early, “Now we’re all dead and gone” (Frayn 4). Fittingly, Shepherd-Barr refers to the play's setting as an afterlife.⁹ The characters speak with near omniscience about the bomb and its history that evokes a feeling that the characters are not quite alive. Yet, phenomenologically, these characters also in no way appear dead—the stage directions do not suggest that they should be made to appear otherworldly, they argue as if they are actively involved in these events, they think aloud with urgency, and they are fully embodied before us in the audience. This is all a part of the play's intricate design that has offered much for analysis, proven by the vast number of articles written about the play from theatre and nontheatre scholars alike.

What is significant about the play and often overlooked in criticism, however, is how the play's deployment of time demonstrates that the atomic bomb ruptured a sense of time for these scientists. The play conveys thoughts and feelings of guilt and responsibility that time has not dissipated. The first line of the play is Margrethe's question, “But why?” (Frayn 3). Asked repeatedly throughout the play is the debated concern: why has Heisenberg visited Bohr, and what happened during their conversation? Eva-Sabine Zehelein describes Copenhagen as framed by such poignant questions; the play is “a replay hunting for answers to lingering questions: what happened and why, and for what purpose?”¹⁰ The never-quite-answered answers are correlated to the scientists’ work on the bomb and cannot be resolved no matter how they look at the questions, whether from some afterlife present or from within the past itself. Time has not healed the wounds of their misunderstandings of one...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The nuclear stage
• Seeing science as a part of culture, us, and I
• Using phenomenology
• History in the making
• 1 A matter of time
• 2 The power of a human
• 3 Doomful disaster and responsibility
• 4 The limits of reason
• 5 Future imaginings
• Conclusion
• Index