“Radioactive: Oppenheimer, the Atomic Bomb, and the Unquantifiability of the Human Condition”

“I am death! The destroyer of worlds!” This passage is notably derived from the Bhagavad Gita, during a conversation between an Indian prince and the Hindu god Vishnu. It is also infamously associated with Robert Oppenheimer, the eponymous subject of Christopher Nolan’s new mega-popular biographical drama. Irish actor Cillian Murphy stars as the main character, the cagey, soft-spoken scientific head of the (in)famous Manhattan Project.

The Film

The film begins in 1926, when the protagonist- a 22-year-old doctoral student- suffers from anxiety and homesickness while studying at Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. His tutor is experimental physicist Patrick Blackett (James D’Arcey). While abroad, the younger Oppenheimer crosses paths with some of the greatest physicists of the time, including Niels Bohr (Kenneth Brannagh), Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), and Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighofer). Oppenheimer completes his PhD in physics at the University of Göttingen in Germany, and then moves back to the U.S. He teaches quantum physics at the University of California, Berkley, and California Institute of Technology. There he meets his future wife, Katherine Puening (Emily Blunt), a biologist and ex-communist, and dallies intermittently with Communist Party USA member, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh).

Brigadier General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) recruits Oppenheimer to the Manhattan Project in 1942. Oppenheimer is Jewish, and so the potentiality for the Nazis to complete their nuclear weapons program (under Werner Heisenberg) drives him (Oppenheimer) to spearhead the scientific end of the project. He assembles a team, including Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) and Isidor Isaac Rabi (David Krumholtz), and he moves operations down to Los Alamos, New Mexico. Oppenheimer also collaborates with scientists Enrico Fermi (Danny Deferrari) and David L. Hill (Rami Malek). His team cycles through various experiments and calculations before finally running the famous “Trinity Test.” The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki occur in August 1945. Nearly a decade later, though, a security hearing that involves Oppenheimer, his personal and political associations, and potential ties to communism and the Soviet Union eventually brings about his fall from grace.

Christopher Nolan directed, produced, and wrote the film’s screenplay (based on the 2005 biography, American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin). Emma Thomas and Charles Roven were its two other producers. Hoyte van Hoytema provided principal photography. Jennifer Lame edited the film, and Ludwig Goransson was responsible for its music. Syncopy Inc. and Atlas Entertainment were its production companies, and Universal Pictures distributed the film.

Making the Film

Nolan used a combination of IMAX 65 mm and 65 mm large-format film to shoot Oppenheimer. The film switches constantly between color and luminous black & white. Nolan used the former to convey Oppenheimer’s “subjective” viewpoint, and he used the latter to convey a more “objective” historical perspective. The crew implemented real explosives to recreate the Trinity nuclear test (forgoing CGI)³. They built a special set that they created with gasoline, propane, aluminum powder, and magnesium, and constructed what the film’s special effects supervisor called “big-atures” (“big miniatures”) for various models (using forced perspective in some instances to create more visual accuracy)⁴.

Nolan also used practical special effects to depict stars, black holes, supernovas, and the interactions between atoms, molecules, and energy that appear throughout the film’s numerous cutaways. The editing team used digital compositing for the “Trinity” scene and added multi-layers to the explosion (which the crew shot from multifaceted viewpoints)⁵. As far as Oppenheimer’s music goes, Ludwig Göransson’s haunting, violin-rich score transitions seamlessly from “the most romantic, beautiful tone in a split second to neurotic and heart wrenching, horror sounds”⁶.

Nolan noted in his production of the film that the story’s narrative “texture” illustrates “how the personal interacts with the historic and the geopolitical,” with the goal of conveying a cautionary tale^7,8,9. He had been thinking about making a film about Oppenheimer for at least 20 years and wanted to explore “‘the phenomenon of delayed reactions,’ as he felt people are not ‘necessarily confronted with the strongest or worst elements of [their actions] in the moment.’”^7,10. He also added that he modeled the tense relationship between Oppenheimer and Strauss on the relationship between Mozart and Salieri in Milos Forman’s Amadeus (1984)¹⁰.

Nolan has always been a very cerebral director. His earlier films like Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige, and Inception all explored complex psychological topics (memory, sleep, vision, and dreams, respectively). Even his comic book adaptations- Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises- delved into themes of psychopathy and anti-social behavior. In recent years, though, he’s swapped out his forays into the psychological with explorations into the physical, social, and historical. Interstellar took viewers on a Kubrick-esque journey across the universe, Dunkirk told the story of the famous, eponymous World War II battle, Tenet explores matter and entropy, and Oppenheimer blends all those themes together.

Oppenheimer also does return to the world of the psychological. The story mostly orients itself through the eyes of Dr. Oppenheimer. Countless shots depict his imagination of the quantum world and all its wavelike vibrations. Oppenheimer— “father of the atomic bomb”—appears quite meek and mild. He constantly smokes his pipe and dresses in a non-descript grey suit and fedora and doesn’t appear to stand out in a crowd. Super-galaxies of tempestuous energy whirl about within him, though. He envisions literal particle fields, but also particle fields of morality and experience. After the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer is deeply torn and guilt-ridden. He helped end the war and contribute to American victory, and yet he feels that “blood is on [his] hands.” In one scene, when he conveys this sentiment to Harry Truman, the sitting U.S. president dismisses him as a “crybaby.” Vivid, horrifying images of the blasting atomic light flash through his mind when he gives public speeches. His hallucinations include blood-curdling screams and atomic light tearing off people’s skin.

I guess it’s impossible to know what any person- famous or otherwise- really thinks, feels, or experiences. But, at least as far as the “black-and-white” sections of the film go, what do we objectively know about Dr. Robert Oppenheimer?

The Life of Dr. Oppenheimer

Julius Robert Oppenheimer (born April 22, 1904, New York, New York – died February 18, 1967, Princeton, New Jersey) was an American theoretical physicist and science administrator¹. The son of a German immigrant (who made a fortune importing textiles into New York City), Oppenheimer studied as an undergraduate at Harvard University, where he excelled in Latin, Greek, physics, and chemistry¹.

Oppenheimer also studied Eastern philosophy and published poetry¹. He graduated in 1925 and conducted further research at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England¹. Under the leadership of Lord Ernest Rutherford, Oppenheimer garnered an international reputation for his cutting-edge research on the atomic structure¹.

The British scientific community invited Oppenheimer to collaborate with them, and Max Born invited Oppenheimer to the University of Göttingen¹. Oppenheimer accepted Born’s invitation and met other prominent physicists, including Niels Bohr and P.A.M. Dirac¹. He then received his doctorate in 1927¹. Oppenheimer made several short visits to science centers in Zurich and Leiden before returning to the United States and teaching physics at the California Institute of Technology and University of California Berkley¹.

In the 1920s, new quantum and relativity theories were at the forefront of science¹. Several early discoveries- mass was equivalent to energy, and matter could be both corpuscular and wavelike¹. Oppenheimer rolled up his sleeves and delved into an investigation behind the energy processes of cosmic rays, electrons, positrons, subatomic particles, neutron stars, and black holes¹.

During World War II, Oppenheimer sympathized with the Spanish republic during its civil war¹. He subsidized anti-fascist organizations (using the money that his father, who died in 1937, left to him)¹. However, the wide-scale suffering Joseph Stalin inflicted on Russian scientists turned Oppenheimer off from the Communist Party (which he never actually joined)¹.

With Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, various physicists- including Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner- warned the U.S. government what would happen if Nazi Germany made the first nuclear bomb¹. Oppenheimer got to work, seeking a process whereby he could separate uranium-235 from natural uranium (and to determine the critical mass necessary to make a bomb from uranium)¹. In August 1942, the U.S. Army organized efforts between British and U.S. physicists/scientists to harness nuclear energy for military purposes¹. Oppenheimer established and administered a laboratory near the plateau of Los Alamos near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Los Alamos would become ground zero (a term invented then) for the “Manhattan Project.”¹. 

A turning point in the quest for atomic energy came several years earlier, though². In January 1939 (eight months prior to the beginning of World War II), German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann proved that if uranium particles bombarded neutrons, they produced radioisotopes of barium, lanthanum, and other “middle-of-the-table” elements². Hahn and Strassman made their discovery based on a clue that French scientists Irène Joliot-Curie and Pavle Savić provided to them, and two Jewish scientists- Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch- conveyed this information to Bohr in Copenhagen². Bohr, who arrived in New York in January 1939, discussed the matter with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and others². On January 26, 1939, Meitner and Frisch called the process “fission.”². Enrico Fermi proposed to Bohr that neutrons released during the fission process could heighten the possibility of a sustained nuclear chain reaction².

The “Manhattan Project” was named for the office- 270 Broadway- in Manhattan, where the chief leader, Brigadier General Leslie Groves, initiated the project². It involved over 37 installations across the country, more than a dozen university laboratories, and 100,000 people². Nobel Prize-winners such as Arthur Holly Compton, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Ernest Lawrence, and Harold Urey were all involved². People set up plants and other sites in Chicago, Knoxville, Tennessee, central Washington state, and, finally, Los Alamos².

The first nuclear explosion occurred on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico (Germany had just surrendered prior to this explosion)¹. Oppenheimer named the test explosion “The Trinity Test” in reference to poet John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets”². The experiment entailed raising “Gadget,” a plutonium implosion device, up a 100-foot (30-meter) tower named “Zero” (hence, the earlier term “ground zero”)². Scientists and other military officials, stationed at observation posts at least 10,000-17,000 yards (9 to 15.5 km) away, lay down with their feet towards the tower and their eyes protected against the explosion’s blinding flash².

“Gadget” detonated at 5:29:45 A.M.2. The skies were dark and rainy, but the explosion illuminated mountain peaks at least 10 miles (16 km) away². A tremendously powerful, sustained roar occurred, and a tornado-like burst of wind followed². A mushroom cloud rose at least 40,000 feet (12,200 meters) into the air, and, where the tower once stood, remained a completely vaporized structure and a surging ball of fire². A saucer-shaped crater a half mile (800 meters) in diameter and 25 feet (8 meters) deep appeared as well². Trinitite, a glassy, jade-colored mineral, covered the floor of the crater². The bomb’s power was the equivalent of at least 21,000 tons of TNT². The ground shook and windows shattered at least 125 miles (200 km) away, but no one was hurt or killed².

Oppenheimer then resigned his post in October of that year, and, two years later, became head of the Institute for Advanced Study¹. There, he served from 1947 until 1952 as chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission¹. In October 1949, his committee opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb¹. His post was later canceled in December 1953 when a military security report accused him of associating with communists, opposing the building of the hydrogen bomb, and delaying the naming of Soviet agents¹. He was found not guilty of treason though¹.

In 1963, U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson presented Oppenheimer with the Enrico Fermi Award of the Atomic Energy Commission¹. Oppenheimer retired from the Institute for Advanced Study in 1966 and died of throat cancer the following year¹.

The Atomic Bombings

What exactly happened on those fateful days over the Land of the Rising Sun? At 2:45 A.M. on the morning of August 2, 1945, pilots, mechanics, and crews from the 509th Composite Group of the Twentieth Air Force- all trained to fly specially modified B-29s- took to the sky². The Colonel was Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., and his B-29 would ultimately drop the bomb over Hiroshima². Tibbets was part of an 11-man crew that included Major Thomas Ferebee (bombardier) and Manhattan Project ordnance expert Captain William (“Deak”) Parsons (weaponeer)².

Tibbets asked a maintenance worker to paint his mother’s name (Enola Gay) on the nose of the aircraft². Meanwhile, Parsons added the final components to Little Boy (the bomb)². At 7:15 A.M. (Tinian time), Enola Gay approached the target (and encountered no opposition while doing so)². The skies were clear, Parsons armed the weapon, and Enola Gay ascended to an attack altitude of 31,000 feet (9,450 meters)². Just after 8:00 A.M. local time, the crew sighted Hiroshima². At around 8:12 A.M., Tibbets relinquished control of the aircraft to Ferebee². They spotted their dropping site (the distinct T-shaped, Aioi Bridge that spans the Ota River), Tibbets ordered his crew to don their protective gear, and at 8:15 A.M. they released the bomb²!

After 45 seconds of free fall, Little Boy exploded in the sky (at an altitude of 1,900 feet or 580 meters) directly above Shima Hospital². It didn’t take more than a fraction of a second for the ground level temperature to exceed 7,000 degrees Celsius (12,600 Fahrenheit), and the powerful blast wave vaporized the entire landscape². At least 70,000 people were killed instantly². Out of the total population of 343,000, over 100,000 died². “Nuclear shadows” could be seen everywhere! A massive mushroom cloud rose 40,000 feet (more than 12 km) into the air²!

Exactly a week later, at 3:47 A.M., the B-29 Bockscar took off from Tinian². Major Charles Sweeney piloted the aircraft, alongside Captain Kermit Beahan (bombardier) and Manhattan Project veteran Commander Frederick Ashworth (weaponeer)². Their bomb was the Fat Man, a plutonium-fueled implosion device like the bomb that Oppenheimer and his men detonated during the Trinity Test². They took to the skies, which were slightly hazy but relatively clear. Nagasaki was not an ideal target. Unlike the flatter terrain of Hiroshima, Nagasaki was divided into two coastal valleys that a range of hills separated².

The crew targeted a Mitsubishi arms plant near the city’s harbor². A little after 11:00 A.M., they released the bomb, which descended to an altitude of 1,650 feet (500 meters) and exploded over the Urakami Valley (northwest of the city center)². Fat Man detonated with a force of over 21,000 tons of TNT, and the explosion killed at least 40,000 people instantly². At least 30,000 more people would succumb to their injuries, as well as radiation poisoning and cancer². Like the Little Boy, the second bomb’s mushroom cloud rose tens of thousands of feet into the air². The following day (August 10, 1945), Japanese Emperor Hirohito set aside his tradition of imperial nonintervention in political affairs². He declared his support for an official surrender to the United States by the terms of the Potsdam Declaration².

The effects on those who initially survived either of the blasts were unspeakably horrific—confusion, convulsions, weakness, fatigue, inflammation of the throat, bleeding into the skin, skin reddening, cataracts, hair loss, central nervous system damage, internal bleeding, gastrointestinal distress, and cancer²! In 1950, reconstruction began in Hiroshima, and it is now the largest industrial city in Japan’s Shikoku and western Honshu regions². Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki became spiritual centers that moved to ban nuclear weapons, and they both also set up Peace Parks at the epicenters of both explosions². Hiroshima constructed the Atomic Bomb Dome, which UNESCO designated a World Heritage site in 1996². In Nagasaki, the Roman Catholic cathedral Urakami (built in 1959) replaced the 1914 cathedral that the bomb destroyed².

The bombings were of course extremely controversial (then and for decades to come). Truman noted in one speech of his:

“It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”².

Truman also pointed out that, despite the level of atrocity that the bombings incurred, he “never lost a night of sleep.” The bombings, in Truman’s assessment, constituted a necessary wartime measure, based upon a severe cost-benefit analysis. Japan refused to surrender. It was estimated at least 1 million American lives would be lost invading mainland Japan, so Truman committed to the atomic bomb as a means of subduing Japan and forcing them to surrender.

And yet, at least overall, the United States didn’t take glee in or gloat over the bombings. As soon as the dust settled, we assisted Japan (as well as Germany) in rebuilding their countries, and, today, both Japan and Germany are some of our closest allies!

The Atomic Human Condition

What were those on the vanguard of the Manhattan Project thinking once Little Boy and Fat Man vaporized their two respective cities? This is not a rhetorical question. Many may have been relieved or felt a great sense of pride. Anyone who lived during that period may have had the types of reservations that Oppenheimer had about the whole thing, though. The U.S. wins the war, but then the dust settles. The “promethean” dilemma emerges. Humanity has entered the nuclear age…an era fraught with the immense potential for immediate, worldwide human destruction. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). The Cold War era. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Under-the-desk school drills. Fallout shelters. The deep fears that plagued my parents’ generation! “How did it really come to this?!” humanity collectively asked itself.

For tens of thousands of years, groups of people across every square inch of the globe clocked each other on the heads with stones. They stabbed each other, sliced each other up, speared each other in the chest, shot arrows at each other, and then graduated to cannonballs and bullets. The brutality and the carnage were serious, but the conflicts were localized or regional. Civil wars broke out. Wars between nations broke out. But a global conflict? That truly was a 20^th century invention!

World War II had a sinister “bonus feature” (so to speak)—ideologies. Communistic ideologies…fascistic ideologies…ideologies that devolved and degenerated into bloody mayhem. These ideologies, in short, precipitated the holocaust, the gulags, the concentration camps, and all the genocide in Maoist China and Cambodia that followed World War II. These pathological ideologies spread, and they spread quickly and aggressively! World War II nearly broke the world down and exhausted it into oblivion!

The aggression that epitomized the 20^th century mirrors humanity’s (still-ongoing) battle with cancer. We can’t seem to cure cancer. The reason is partially that there are so many variations of it. But cancer is also mainly endogenous. It develops within us. Cancer evolves and mimics the natural life processes of growth and adaptation (and yet, when it spreads, it destroys everything). It proliferates randomly and arbitrarily, and, in its most aggressive forms, it is extremely resilient. Cancer is one of the most repugnant natural forces on the planet. The only force more repugnant than cancer is the human capacity for total, global, genocidal evil and destruction.

When Oppenheimer confers with other scientists on the potential consequences of the atom bomb, one possibility that they hypothesize is “atmospheric ignition.” The bomb could set off a chain reaction that, as the name suggests, lights up the entire atmosphere. A reaction that both immolates and atomizes the entire globe terrifies even General Groves (who speaks with Oppenheimer on that possibility before they set off the “Trinity Test”).

Oppenheimer is a film that explores conflict on many different levels- the personal, the interpersonal, the geopolitical, the cosmic, and the microscopic. We can look at the world the way Oppenheimer (or Einstein, Bohr, or Heisenberg) does—a world constituted of quarks, atoms, and molecules, all the way up to stars, planets, and galaxies. But that means nothing if the glue—the personal, ethical, spiritual glue—that floats all the way up that spectrum—is rotten, malevolent, and destructive. Human tendencies like arrogance, resentment, hatred, and cruelty can easily climb that ladder if we’re not careful, and they can “ignite the whole atmosphere.” While we never know what he really thought, we can surmise that potential reality certainly crossed through Dr. Robert Oppenheimer’s mind.

SOURCES

[1] J. Robert Oppenheimer | Biography, Manhattan Project, Atomic Bomb, Significance, & Facts | Britannica

[2] Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki | Date, Significance, Timeline, Deaths, & Aftermath | Britannica

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[4] Collin, Robbie (July 14, 2023). “Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan: ‘Not worried about a nuclear holocaust? You should be'”. The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on July 14, 2023. Retrieved July 14, 2023.

[5] “How Christopher Nolan Recreated Oppenheimer’s Nuclear Bomb Explosion Without CGI”. July 6, 2023. Archived from the original on July 22, 2023. Retrieved July 23, 2023.

[6] Ebiri, Bilge (July 17, 2023). “An Action Movie About Scientists Talking Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer plays out across the landscapes of Los Alamos and of Cillian Murphy’s face”. Vulture. Archived from the original on July 20, 2023. Retrieved July 20, 2023.

[7] Overbye, Dennis (July 20, 2023). “Christopher Nolan and the Contradictions of J. Robert Oppenheimer”. The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 20, 2023. Retrieved July 20, 2023.

[8] Collis, Clark (July 11, 2023). “Why Christopher Nolan wrote Oppenheimer script in the first person”. Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on July 12, 2023. Retrieved July 12, 2023.

[9] Grimes, Christopher (July 21, 2023). “Director Christopher Nolan: ‘Oppenheimer is absolutely a cautionary tale'”. Financial Times. Archived from the original on July 21, 2023. Retrieved July 21, 2023.

[10] Ebiri, Bilge (July 17, 2023). “An Action Movie About Scientists Talking Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer plays out across the landscapes of Los Alamos and of Cillian Murphy’s face”. Vulture. Archived from the original on July 20, 2023. Retrieved July 20, 2023.