Philosophy
What Greek Myth Teaches Us About The Morality Of Nuclear Technology
And why taking fire from the gods has unintended consequences for human morality.
The Ancient Greeks used myths to help them make sense of everyday life. Could the story of Prometheus and the gift of fire help us think about how we view nuclear technology?
In Greek mythology, Prometheus was one of the Titans, a group of supernatural beings who emerged before the time of Zeus and the rest of the Olympian gods. Prometheus was inquisitive, an intellectual, with his name meaning “Forethinker”. He was known as a culture hero and a trickster.
As Prometheus and his brother Epimethus supported Zeus in overthrowing Kronos, Zeus’s father, they alone among the Titans escaped being cast by Zeus into internal damnation. Instead, the brothers were tasked with creating all life on Earth, and Prometheus with creating humans in particular. Prometheus chose to make humans in the gods’ image, but Zeus insisted they remain mortal and faithful in their worship of him and the other Olympians.
One day, Zeus demanded humans provide him an animal sacrifice, but Prometheus tricked him into accepting just the bones and fat. Angry, Zeus took fire away from humans, leaving them in the dark.
Prometheus cared deeply about humankind, having taught them not only fire but writing, mathematics, agriculture, medicine, and science. He defied Zeus, stealing fire and bringing it back to humankind. Once again, fire kept humans warm, cooked their food and was a powerful tool that shaped great civilisations.
When Zeus found out what had happened, he was once again angry and craved revenge. So he sent Pandora to be Prometheus’s wife. When on Earth, as a punishment for the theft of fire, she released from a box all evils, hard work and diseases that plague mankind to this day. All that was left in the box was hope (our last defence against evil). Once out the box, these evils could not be put back in again. Fire itself was put to work forging weapons, bringing war and misery to many.
Humans relied on fire for millennia, from stone age to Industrial age. But 20th century science gave us a new fire: that of nuclear science. Just as with the old fire, this fantastic tool took human civilisation to unimagined new heights.
Nuclear power provides clean energy for millions with the tiniest amount of fuel and no emissions. It’s why climate scientists recognise that we’ll never meet our emissions targets without nuclear power. It also turned out to be pretty much the safest way to make electricity. In the coming decades, nuclear technology will power humankind to new worlds for the first time. We use nuclear medicine to save millions of lives in the fight against cancer.
But nuclear science also came with its own “Pandora’s box”. In 1945, this box was dramatically opened over the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though some may try, we cannot unknow the bomb. The evils are out and we must learn to live with them.
In the myth, giving up fire, the symbol of human knowledge and ingenuity, would not have made the evils go away. Fire and the evils came together. Would ignorance of fire have stopped the evils from plaguing humans? Maybe, but by the time this was realised, it was too late.
It is the same for us. Giving up our new fire — nuclear science — won’t make the evils of the bomb go away. Knowledge of the tool and the weapon were revealed together.
This is why fear of the bomb is not a good argument against the safe and sustainable use of nuclear power, nuclear medicine and other benefits the new fire brings. Whether or not we phase out nuclear power, the weapon is unlikely to go away — would any country give it up when their enemy still had it? Even if all publicly agreed to get rid of it, a country could retain it in secret. And if it really were given up, the Manhattan Project produced a bomb in a few years with 1940s technology, suggesting it could be built again from scratch in short order.
The Promethean myth is helpful when thinking about what to do with other controversial technologies too, such as genetics. The myth teaches us that technology itself cannot be good or evil. It is only what humans do with it that makes it so.
So what does Greek myth teach us about how we use technology? When Prometheus stole fire from the gods, there were unintended consequences. He thought by bringing humans a tool he would make their lives better in every sense. But powerful technology must be used responsibly. Giving humans fire also meant giving humans a moral choice: to use the tool for good or for evil.
Looking at nuclear power through the lens of the Promethean myth reminds me of the fable of ‘The Fisherman and the Genie’, which Walt Disney used in its story on the history of the atom. I wrote about that back in 2019:
