The excellent film Oppenheimer directed by Christopher Nolan and recently released has the virtue of striking deep into consciences and chilling minds by taking us into the drama of the human apocalypse.

The plot takes one's breath away, nailing viewers to their seats as it raises awareness that, now more than ever, self-destruction is no longer science fiction.

The impossibility of nuclear conflict is based on the reasonable consideration that it is unthinkable that it could happen because there would be neither winners nor losers, as Robert Oppenheimer himself, the engineer 'father' of the atomic bomb, states.

But the unthinkable is not the impossible.

The unthinkable is based on the deterrence of mutual total destruction between the belligerents and thus on the certainty that human reason rules it out. This presupposes that governments always have the ability to control situations and always know how correctly to judge security risks. However, history, and more precisely human nature, shows that unfortunately what seems unthinkable as unreasonable can happen, even if it happens rarely.

Human beings - not excluding some political leaders - also know how to be inhumanly unreasonable. The Second World War apocalypse, which passed through the horror of Auschwitz and ended in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, proved this.

Since then, history teaches that the unthinkable sometimes happens. Oppenheimer hoped it was an exception confirming the rule. He tried to stop the evolution towards new generations of H-bombs and nuclear bombs, but failed. US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Soviet President Nikyta Khrushchev agreed on arms reduction and non-proliferation; correct strategies that failed, so that today several nations, not excluding small economies such as Israel, Pakistan and North Korea, are nuclear powers.

The 1945 'never again' was quickly forgotten: since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has repeatedly threatened the use of nuclear weapons if the conflict threatened its security. And so, more than trusting the unthinkable, how can we make impossible a self-inflicted end for the humanity?

The most realistic peacemakers, from Giorgio La Pira to Don Tonino Bello and to Pope Francis, have shown possible ways for the common security of peoples.  

First and foremost, we must promote education for peace and global citizenship, respect for fundamental human and civil rights, and invest in practices of multicultural respect and socialization.

Conflicts are defused if we disarm hearts. We must then strive to remove the many exaggerated inequalities and strengthen cooperation for sustainable development, because we know that belligerences are caused by the greed for the global exploitation of the common good, i.e. the natural and cultural resources from which we should all benefit: a common benefit, today undermined by the greed of our consumerist societies. Included in these common and public goods are aspirations for public health and decent work for all.

If one then thinks with intellectual honesty about the question of the whole of humanity’s common security, it would make sense that no one in the world would have the right to launch a nuclear attack.

In order to get as close as possible to this absolute ban, a first step that can be taken immediately is the reform of the UN Security Council, which should be subjected to the overwhelming will of the UN General Assembly, which has repeatedly called for a program of progressive reduction of nuclear weaponry. Using the right of veto to refuse averting the apocalypse is inhuman. In order not to remain nailed to our armchairs, terrified of the unthinkable apocalypse, we must get up every morning with the will to build all possible spheres and relationships of coexistence and tolerance.

See, Come evitare l’Apocalisse prefigurata da Oppenheimer?