Oppenheimer finds Peace in the Virgin Islands
Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” has done over one billion at the box office, garnered seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director and has opened up a Pandora’s Box of thought on the pros and cons of what the new age of nuclear weapons means to civilization.
The gripping biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who was primarily responsible for creating the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, killing over 200,000 people on August 6, 1945 gives a rather detailed account of the trials and tribulations endured by the men and women who took part in the bomb’s creation. From the moment J.D. Cockroft and E.T.S. Walsh split the atom every scientist worth their salt knew all too well the atomic bomb was next on the agenda. What could not be foretold after all the shock and mind-boggling destruction was the effect such an event would have on its creator.
The Father of the Bomb, as Oppenheimer is notoriously known, spent many of his final days as something of a castaway sailing through the Virgin Islands with his family and spending time on St. Croix before finally settling down in a small beach house on St. John. What in fact caused this maddest of all mad scientists to seek refuge and tranquility in the U.S. Virgin Islands is perhaps not difficult to understand. In a 1965 CBS News interview that appears to have been conducted on St. John, Oppenheimer said he thought of the Hindu scripture from Bhagavad Gita while watching the first ever atomic bomb explode during the Trinity Test: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Oppenheimer publicly grappled with the moral consequences of his creation in the the years following World War II. He reportedly told then President Harry Truman “I have blood on my hands,” when Truman ordered him and other American scientists to build a hydrogen bomb whose nuclear explosion could be 1,000 times more powerful than an atomic bomb. Even though he objected on moral and practical grounds, Oppenheimer’s escape to the Virgin Islands was spurred more by the fact that he became one of the chief targets of the U.S. anti-communist hysteria during the Cold war era. He was not only branded a communist but also suspected of being a spy.
The Oppenheimer's were no strangers to the islands. In the early 1950’s, before they sought refuge on St. John, they had vacationed on St. Croix in a modest house built for them by their friend Ted Dale at Pull Point on a stretch of property east of Cheney Bay. Oppenheimer became convinced that due to the trade winds, the U.S. Virgin Islands would be one of the last places on Earth to be affected by nuclear fallout.
