Robert Oppenheimer and Jiro Horikoshi

Jiro Horikoshi and J. Robert Oppenheimer both shaped World War II, one through aeronautical engineering and the other through theoretical physics. What they built changed the course of the war and the peace after it, and both had to live with what that meant.

Horikoshi designed the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, the fighter plane that stood for Japanese military power. Oppenheimer led the science team on the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb for the United States. Both pushed the limits of what was technically possible.

After the war, Japan's defeat ended Horikoshi's career in military aircraft production, and he moved to commercial airliners and education. Oppenheimer became an advocate for nuclear regulation, then got accused of communist sympathies in the Red Scare and lost his security clearance and his influential position. Horikoshi's planes flew in the war and in kamikaze missions, and they caused death and destruction. Oppenheimer's bomb brought unprecedented destruction to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and an immense loss of life. So both are remembered for the engineering and for the suffering and destruction it caused.

Horikoshi and Oppenheimer hit the same dilemma every scientist and engineer hits when their work ends up in a war, and they spent the rest of their lives in the shadow of what they made.

We conveniently consume Horikoshi as a war criminal and Oppenheimer as a war hero. If history unfolded differently, would we so conveniently say the same thing?

Just to be clear, I am not advocating any of the war criminal activities. I'm making a point that a scientist's path may be swayed regardless of one's intent, and the two scientist's fates may have unfolded differently if the two had been born in different environments. And I'm feeling disgusted about the fact that however we try, we can never be set free from the string and ties of the nation we work for.