Charles Oppenheimer knows his family name comes with a heavy responsibility.
He’s the grandson of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the Manhattan Project, becoming the father of the atomic bomb. The 50-year-old tech investor waded into the arms control arena years before the 2023 film “Oppenheimer” brought his grandfather’s name and legacy back into the American popular consciousness.
This being the 80th anniversary year of the atomic bombings and the end of World War II, the younger Oppenheimer, who lives in San Francisco, wants to see through his grandfather’s unrealized (and not widely known) vision for reining in the weapons his family helped bring into the world. Oppenheimer spoke with USA TODAY before the Aug. 15 summit between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
While both leaders suggested that nuclear arms control was on their agenda, the meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, failed to yield any publicly acknowledged progress on that front.
The New START treaty, the last remaining arms control pact between the United States and Russia, expires in February 2026. The pact limits the two powers to keeping no more than 1,550 strategic (or long-range) nuclear warheads ready for launch at any given time, and it lays out verification measures such as inspections.
Nuclear risk reduction advocates (and some lawmakers) fear the end of New START could usher in a new three-way arms race amongst Russia, the United States and China.
Country | Nuclear Warheads |
|---|---|
Russia | 4309 |
United States | 3700 |
China | 600 |
Paul Dean, a former senior U.S. arms control official who served as the American commissioner for the New START oversight body, told USA TODAY that the treaty is important in helping the two countries understand the arrangement of one another’s nuclear forces. Losing that “day-to-day picture,” the Nuclear Threat Initiative executive said, could increase the chances of a “catastrophic” nuclear misinterpretation or miscalculation between the United States and Russia.
More: Biden’s nuke chief pushes back on calls for new arms race with Russia, China
‘All necessary international arrangements’
“I, as an Oppenheimer, often get asked on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9 about those symbolic dates,” of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings that ended World War II, said Oppenheimer, a veteran Silicon Valley investor and founder of the Oppenheimer Project. He said the day he’s focused on is Aug. 17, 1945.
On that day, Oppenheimer’s grandfather penned a top-secret letter to Secretary of War Henry Stimson as part of his duties on a panel of civilian scientists tasked with writing a report on the future of nuclear weapons.
The letter came less than two weeks after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No nation has used nuclear weapons in battle since.
The committee of Manhattan Project physicists – Oppenheimer and Nobel Prize winners Arthur Compton, Ernest Lawrence and Enrico Fermi – explained in the letter that they had “been unable to devise … effective military countermeasures for atomic weapons,” and that nuclear weapons would grow only more powerful with the development of the hydrogen bomb. (The United States detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb in November 1952, vaporizing a coral atoll in the Marshall Islands in an explosion physicists said was 1,000 times larger than the Hiroshima bomb.)
The physicists also argued in their letter that the United States could not maintain a monopoly on nuclear weapons.
“We believe that the safety of this nation …. can be based only on making future wars impossible,” the elder Oppenheimer wrote. “It is our unanimous and urgent recommendation to you that … all steps be taken, all necessary international arrangements be made, to this end.”
Oppenheimer’s grandson praised the letter’s “incredible foresight” and characterized his forebear and his colleagues as “the ones who understood what was at stake, what was going to happen and how to prevent … an arms race.”
Trump as nuclear pathbreaker?
Eight decades later, the world now has thousands of nuclear weapons and, if New START expires without a successor deal or executive agreement in place, there will be an uncontrolled relationship between top nuclear powers for the first time since 1972, when the original Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union went into effect.
More: Putin teases new nuke deal ahead of Alaska meeting with Trump
Oppenheimer sees Trump as a potential game-changer amid worsening nuclear relations between the United States and Russia. He thinks a dialogue about nuclear weapons could happen even if tensions remain between the United States and Russia or the United States and China.
“It doesn’t matter how much we hate each other, (or) how many wars or skirmishes we’re in – you have to talk about the (nuclear) weapons issue, no matter what the circumstances are,” he said. “And Trump provides a rare potential break in that because he’s saying that we should negotiate with China and Russia.”
