Like many of my generation, I grew up grateful to be alive because the atomic bomb had ended the war with Japan before my father and the other GIs who had just won the war in Europe might have been transferred to the Pacific Theater, where many of them would certainly have been slaughtered in an invasion of the Japanese home islands. I am still grateful that, thanks to the atomic bomb, Japan surrendered earlier than expected, that my father was thus spared, that I was subsequently born, that I have lived through the atomic age (even with all its attendant anxieties and ambiguities). I have now no other world except the nuclear one, a world in which as kids we hid under our desks in ostensible fear of nuclear annihilation and then went out and played as if nothing were ever goofing to change.
One of the primary architects of this age, J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), the « father of the atomic bomb, » was the director of the Los Alamos lab during World War II, where he played a pivotal role in the research and development that produced the atomic bomb, that successfully ended the Second World War. After the war, Oppenheimer became the Director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and, among other things, opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, the latter move suggesting a certain insouciance on his part about the reality of technology’s inexorable advance in a dis-enchanted scientific age, regardless of moral considerations or catastrophic consequences. (If in doubt about that, just check the planet’s increasing temperature!)
As Oppenheimer himself acknowledged in 1948: « it was clear that with nations committed to atomic armament, weapons even more terrifying, than those already delivered would be developed; and it was clear even from a casual estimate of costs that nations so committed to atomic armament could accumulate these weapons in truly terrifying numbers. » (Foreign Affairs, January 1, 1948) Such is the reality not only of nuclear weapons in a nuclear age but of all technology in a dis-enchanted, scientific, technological age.
Oppenheimer is an epic, must-see, 2023 film, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, and based on the Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin biography of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf, 2005). Among others, the film stars Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, Emily Blunt as his wife « Kitty, » Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, and Robert Downey, Jr., as Oppenheimer’s enemy, AEC Chair, Lewis Strauss.
As is typical of very long movies, Oppenheimer is very long – likely longer than it needs to be. And, as is also typical of « arty » movies, its artistry may be overdone and thus get in the way of the story. That said, its length is worth sitting through, and its artistry of entangled timelines, constant scene-shifting amid a confusingly large cohort of famous scientists (whose names most of us no longer remember or never knew), and its gratuitous back-and-forth from color to black-and-white are all worth the extra work they impose on the audience.
Apart, obviously, from the dramatic, convincingly scary, central scene of the Trinity atomic test, this is largely a three-hour talk-fest, following Oppenheimer’s life and career from his early student days, problematic political alliances, and several sexual relationships, through his rise to scientific prominence as a theoretical physicist, through his direction of the Manhattan Project and his subsequent concerns about the bomb’s implications for humanity’s future, to his post-war career at Princeton and his later persecution due to his alleged past communist connections and his apparent opposition to the H-Bomb and ambivalence about what he and science had wrought in the world.
Presumably everybody already knows something about the story of the atomic bomb, the competition to build one ahead of the Nazis, its eventual use to win the war against Japan, its initiation of a whole new concept of military and deterrence strategy, and all the varied moral and ethical debates it and its much more powerful successors in nuclear weaponry have generated. This film successfully lays all that out in the context of one scientific genius’s personal struggles, cultural commitments, and political allegiances. It also provides a particularly powerful – if far from flattering – insight into scientists at work and the role of personal and professional rivalries in the scientific enterprise and the damage such rivalries can create when accompanied by access to political power. It also highlights the transformation of the United States, thanks to World War II and then the Cold War, into a much more security-obsessed society, (while also illustrating the real threats to national security from enemies abroad and from enemy agents closer to home).
Through Oppenheimer’s eyes, we enter into the realization of what it has meant to unleash more powerful and destructive weaponry than the world has every known, the link between the amazing possibilities of science and the amazingly terrifying forces science has set free. So far at least, the regime of deterrence has worked and mutually assured destruction has been avoided, but not without enormously corrupting consequences in human relationships and in the rarified intellectual recesses of science itself, now more and more complicit in taking the world to an unknown brink. As the film’s final conversation suggests, the chain reaction did not literally set the atmosphere on fire and destroy the world, but in other ways maybe it has accomplished something similar.
