Oppenheimer and the Atom-Bomb: Part 2

By Colleen O’Connor

Part 1 of this series addressed the popularity and the consequences of the two iconic figures featured in the two movies: “Barbie” (a plastic doll) and “Oppenheimer” (physicist and “Father of the A-Bomb).

“One movie hilarious and fun while being cartoonishly clever (Barbie).  The other darker, more deadly, but equally as relevant today.  Both popular.

And remain so.  Barbie crossed the $1 billion box office mark over the weekend.  Still #1.  While Oppenheimer fights to hold second place.

Both characters are tripped up by generation changes and confused about their own damaging contributions to humanity.  Neither comprehended the extent of that damage until too late, yet both tried to limit it. For more.

In a way, Barbie and Oppie are diabolical twins.

Part 1 concentrated on Barbie.  Part 2 tackles Director, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

Described variously as a “a supersize masterpiece,” (Ann Hornaday, Washington Post); “infernally beautiful to behold,” (Anthony Lane, The New Yorker) and “Pure Visual Poetry,” (Jennifer Ouellette, ArsTechnica), this three-hour biopic, brings some to tears, some to terror, some to “never again.”

It is also great way to teach history’s past, present, and a future still unfolding.  The creation and use of the A-Bomb; the next generation fight over the H-Bomb; the McCarthy anti-Communist era when Oppenheimer is stripped of his security clearance; the advance of tactical nuclear weapons; and the generational contemporary never-ending “fallouts” (literally) from the blast sites.

To comprehend the gravity of nuclear weapons (if not the actual physics), think of the power of unstoppable chain reactions.  Environmental collapse.  Generational cancers. Ask the “downwinders” near the Alamogordo Trinity tests now fighting for recognition. And the cosmic nightmares still unfolding.

“A new study, released Thursday before submission to a scientific journal for peer review, shows that the cloud and its fallout went farther than anyone in the Manhattan Project had imagined in 1945.

“Using state-of-the-art modeling software and recently uncovered historical weather data, the study’s authors say that radioactive fallout from the Trinity test reached 46 states, Canada and Mexico within 10 days of detonation.” New York Times July 20, 2023

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“The bombs later dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki exploded with the yield of 15 kilotons and 20 kilotons of TNT, respectively, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“In contrast, the first test of a thermonuclear weapon, or hydrogen bomb, in the United States in November 1952 yielded an explosion on the order of 10,000 kilotons of TNT.

Now, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, more unknowable consequences, only intensifies the nightmare. Politico

As Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas, warned in the late 40s, while advocating for civilian, not military, control of nuclear weapons, “Imagine the Unimaginable.”  Few could.

Read the American Prometheus on which the Oppenheimer film is based.  Prometheus’ crime, defying the Olympian gods by stealing fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge.

The second iteration of the myth, Frankenstein (1818), a novel by Mary Shelley (also based on Prometheus), where Baron Frankenstein, a scientist who creates and brings to life a manlike monster that eventually turns on him and destroys him.

That time has arrived.

Dmitry Medvedev, “a former Russian president and Putin ally, has warned there is ‘simply no other way out. Ukraine should ‘pray that they do not ‘allow the global nuclear fire to flare up.”

Add to this the recent Russian-Chinese strafes off the Alaskan coast; the war in Ukraine; vulnerable nuclear power plants (think Chernobyl); the recent Russian move to store nuclear weapons in Belarus; and the escalating threats to deploy them.

The key moment in the film, as described by Nolan, strikes the dark note that the film closes on.

“As Einstein (a pacifist) turns to leave, Oppenheimer reminds him of an earlier conversation they had before the testing of the first atom bomb, when the Manhattan Project physicists were worried that the chain reaction caused by the atomic bomb might never end — that it could proceed to ignite the Earth’s atmosphere and destroy the planet. (Embellished)

“When I came to you with those calculations,” Oppenheimer tells Einstein, “we thought we might start a chain reaction that might destroy the entire world.”

“What of it?” Einstein asks.

“I believe we did,” Oppenheimer says.”

Nolan: gets the last word: “The whole film is about consequences. The delayed onset of consequences that people often forget.”