│By Sofía Sanabria de Felipe, Gale Ambassador at the University of Oxford│
On July 21, 2023, the world – or at least the world that exists on the internet – was taken over by a cinematic phenomenon: the simultaneous release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. ‘Barbenheimer’, if you will. The long, pandemic-delayed release of a film about the world’s most famous doll and the man behind the Manhattan Project became an unlikely couple, drawing people back to the cinema screen in unprecedent numbers.
As a historian who’s particularly fascinated by popular culture and the Cold War, the summer of 2023 became a perfect opportunity for me to reflect on the relationship between these two concepts, especially when understanding the prevalence of the American – arguably Western – perspective on the twentieth century. Two years on, Gale Primary Sources’ collections, primarily Archives Unbound, have given me the tools to explore my interests further.
Into the Archives
The Archives Unbound collection Cold War: Voices of Confrontation and Conciliation provides access to several different transcriptions of interviews conducted on significant figures of the Cold War. The interviews were conducted in the wake of the Cold War’s ‘end’, between 1997 and 2002, and acted as an opportunity for these individuals to speak ‘freely’ on their involvement in a period marked by secrecy, discretion, and even deceit.
Some of these interviews were conducted on September 11th and its immediate aftermath – the interviewer quick to respond to the attacks in New York, further establishing a sense that the old-world order was truly over. The attacks, as Oleg Nechiporenko, once Deputy Head of the KGB’s anti-terrorism department, put it, weren’t just an American tragedy, but rather ‘this is the tragedy of the whole world this is a shocking event’.
The binary ‘us vs them’, Capitalist vs Communist mentality that was said to have informed the national and foreign policy of the two superpowers was increasingly replaced by a language of reciprocity, of empathy and shared understanding. Countless historians have worked on the role propaganda had played in both the USA and USSR and the framing of the Cold War as, indeed, a ‘Cold War’, one marked by binary divisions and the explicit need for individuals to choose between one and the other.
Reading through this interview archive, the language used by most interviewees, primarily government officials on either side of the Iron Curtain, simultaneously retains echoes of that dominant binarism, and challenges it by bringing in the more contemporary language of diplomacy and support of the new millennium. There is one source, however, which routinely challenges the dominance of that linguistic and epistemological binary, a source which belongs to an outlier amongst politicians: the American-Hungarian physicist, Edward Teller.
Father of the Hydrogen Bomb
Most will recognise Teller as the so-called ‘father’ of the Hydrogen Bomb. Some, especially those who encountered this figure because of the Barbenheimer phenomenon, might remember him as the grumpy man that apparently ‘snitched’ on Oppenheimer and was refused a handshake by a defiant Emily Blunt. While the animosity between him and Oppenheimer does come across in this interview – not least because of his tired refusal to talk about Cillian Murphy’s character – Teller’s memories of the Cold War and his role in it consistently blur any attempt to speak of this period as a tale of ‘good vs evil’.
I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends
If I were to quantify the number of times the word ‘friend’ appears in Teller’s interview, I would not be surprised to find that it was the most prominent word used by the scientist to describe his international relations during this period. This may seem surprising, considering the man in question goes into great depths to discuss the intricacies of atoms and the building of the H-Bomb, yet ‘friend’ remains Teller’s favourite way to conceptualise the scientific community and its struggles in a period of political extremism.
In a world shaped by propaganda designed to hate on an ‘other’, Teller’s discussion of the scientific community speaks to a world of mutual respect and acceptance, where discovery and duty to knowledge and its pursuit are championed over political affiliation or desire.
An abstract, shared sense of ‘humanity’ is alluded to, as the number of different nationalities and personas are recurringly mentioned, slowly breaking down that Iron Curtain and speaking to a far richer, more fascinating context of international relations in which human curiosity, safety, and advancement is championed over the motivations driving politicians and their speeches.
To Advise or Not To Advise?
This was, explains Teller, what drove his animosity towards Oppenheimer in the first place. As a physicist with an unusually high public profile, Oppenheimer was asked to advise the US government and its presidents. In Teller’s mind, political consultancy is not the realm of science, and Oppenheimer had no reason to provide politicians with any degree of advice – especially not one that seemed amply to contradict widespread consensus on what ought to be done in the name of scientific discovery and best interest of humanity.
While he admits having contradicted this belief at points in the twentieth century, Teller justifies these instances in the name of science, in the importance of scientific discovery as opposed to as a means of surpassing an ideological opponent on the military field.
An awareness of the unintended military consequences of scientific discovery is acknowledged by Teller, and while he provides no clear methodology for mitigating this, the physicist’s language of international friendship and intellectual collaboration shines through – his atheist devotion to the goddess science as emotively charged, perhaps, as Oppenheimer’s ‘Destroyer of Worlds’ statement after the first trial of the atomic bomb in New Mexico and the realisation that came with it of the dangers it would poise to the world.
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie had a narrator voice-over running through the film, breaking the fourth wall and guiding viewers through a challenge of the narratives that have been created about the Barbie doll and what it stood for. In a similar line, following Edward Teller’s narrative voice of the Cold War helps us bring into question the strength of those political binaries, as well as shining a light on a different form of international relations, based on friendships, mutual respect, and a shared devotion to curiosity.
If you enjoyed reading about the Cold War and the language of International Relations, check out these posts:
- Uncovering the Betrayal of J. Robert Oppenheimer with Gale Primary Sources
- Reimagining Global Politics: International Relations through a Non-Western Lens
- Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth Century British Intelligence, Monitoring the World
Blog cover image citation: a collage made by the author using Canva elements and images of Edward Teller from Wikimedia. Wikimedia Commons. (1956). Edward Teller, in 1958, as Director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EdwardTeller1958.jpg; Wikimedia Commons. Los Alamos wartime badge photo: Edward Teller, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_Teller_ID_badge.png.
