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mariacallous · 1 year

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Amid a desert landscape a visionary unveils an invention that will forever change the world as we know it.

That’s the climactic scene of the Christopher Nolan biopic Oppenheimer, about the eponymous J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb.” It’s also the opening scene of the Barbie movie, directed and co-written by indie auteur Greta Gerwig, which opened on the same day as Oppenheimer.

Despite the two films’ radically different subject matter and tone—one a dramatic examination of man’s hubris and the threat of nuclear apocalypse and the other a neon-drenched romp about Mattel’s iconic fashion doll—they have far more in common than just their release date. Both movies consider the complicated legacies of two American icons and how to grapple with and perhaps even atone for them.

In Oppenheimer, the desert scene depicts the Trinity test, the world’s first detonation of a nuclear bomb near Los Alamos, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. A brilliant but flawed theoretical physicist and the rest of his team work frantically to develop the weapon for the United States before the Nazis can beat them to the punch; they then gather on bleak, lunar-white sands near their secret laboratory to test the terrifying creation.

The countdown timer ticks to 00:00:00, the proverbial big red button is pushed, and a blast ignites the sky—a blinding white flash that quickly morphs into a towering inferno. Everything goes silent as Oppenheimer stares in awe from behind a makeshift protective barrier at what he has created.

Suddenly, he begins experiencing flashes of a different kind, premonitions of the human horror and suffering his weapon will wreak. Nolan is unambiguously signaling to the audience that this is a pivotal moment for the world, and for Oppenheimer personally, as what was once merely a theoretical idea has become monstrously real. The fallout, both literally and figuratively, will be out of Oppenheimer’s control.

Barbie’s critical desert scene comes not at the film’s climax but at its very beginning. The movie opens with a parody of the famous “The Dawn of Man” scene from Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1968 science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. As a red-orange sunrise breaks across a rocky desert landscape, a voiceover (from none other than Dame Helen Mirren) begins: “Since the beginning of time, since the first little girl ever existed, there have been dolls. But the dolls were always and forever baby dolls.” On screen, underscored by the ominous notes of Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” little girls sit amid dusty canyon walls playing with baby dolls.

“Until…” Mirren says. And then comes the reveal: The little girls look up to see a massive, monolith-sized Margot Robbie, dressed in the black and white-striped swimsuit of the very first Barbie doll. She lifts her sunglasses and winks. The little girls are stunned—and, like the apes in the classic sci-fi movie, they begin to angrily dash their baby dolls against the ground.

This is Barbie’s mythic origin story: Once upon a time, little girls could only play with baby dolls meant to socialize them into wanting to be good wives and, eventually, mothers. Then came Ruth Handler, who in 1959 decided to create a doll with an adult woman’s body, adult women’s fashions, and adult women’s careers so that little girls could dream of being more than just wives and mothers. And the rest is history. Thanks to such iterations as doctor Barbie, chef Barbie, scientist Barbie, professional violinist Barbie, and beyond, Barbie opened up young girls to a world of possibilities and, Mirren says, “All problems of feminism and equal rights [were] solved.”

Well, not so fast: Mirren adds one final, snarky beat: “At least,” she says, “that’s what the Barbies think.”

Thus Gerwig introduces the central tension that animates the movie: Handler set out to create a feminist toy to empower and inspire young girls. But we sitting in the audience in 2023 know that things worked out a little differently. In the intervening years, Barbie would come under fire from feminists and other critics for a whole host of sins: encouraging unrealistic and harmful beauty standards that contribute to negative body image issues, eating disorders, and depression among pre-adolescent girls; lacking diversity and perpetuating white supremacy, ableism, and heteronormativity; objectifying women; promoting consumerism and capitalism; and even contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.

And here is the core parallel between Barbie and Oppenheimer: Two iconic American creators who ostensibly meant well but whose creations caused irreparable harm. And two iconic American directors (Nolan is British-American) who set out to tell their stories from a very modern perspective, humanizing them while also addressing their harmful legacies.

But while Nolan obviously had the much harder task—no matter how much harm you think Barbie has done to the psyches of young girls over the years, there’s simply no comparison to the human toll of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the environmental impact of decades of nuclear testing, or the cost of the nuclear arms race—oddly enough, it’s Gerwig who ends up taking her job of atonement far more seriously.

As its opening scene shows, the Barbie movie lets the audience know right from the start that it’s self-aware. It knows that Barbie is problematic. And it’s going to go there.

And it does—almost to the point of overkill. The basic plot of the movie is this: Barbie is living happily in Barbie Land, a perfect pink plastic world where she and her fellow Barbies run everything from the White House to the Supreme Court and have everything they could ever want, from dream houses to dream cars to dreamy boyfriends (Ken)—the last of which they treat as little more than accessories.

But suddenly, things start to go wrong in Barbie’s happy feminist utopia, and to fix it, she is forced to journey into the real world—our world—accompanied by Ken, who insists on going with her. When she does, she realizes that contrary to what she believed (as Mirren told us in the opening scene), the invention of Barbies didn’t solve gender inequality in the real world. In the real world, Barbie is confronted not only with the dominance of the patriarchy (she discovers, for instance, that Mattel’s CEO is a man, played by Will Ferrell), but also with the fact that young girls seem to hate her.

In a crucial early scene, Robbie’s Barbie encounters ultracool Gen-Z teen Sasha (played by Ariana Greenblatt), who delivers a scathing monologue about everything that’s wrong with Barbie, the doll and cultural symbol—basically a checklist of all the criticisms lobbed at Barbie over the years, from promoting unrealistic beauty standards to destroying the planet with rampant capitalism. Barbie is crestfallen.

Meanwhile, there’s a subplot involving Ken’s parallel discovery of patriarchy, and how awesome and different it seems to be from his subjugated life in Barbie Land. Ken proceeds to go full men’s rights, heading back to Barbie Land and seizing power. He transforms Barbie’s dream house into Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House, where Barbies serve men and “every night is boys’ night!”

Barbie enlists the help of Sasha and her mom (played by America Ferrera)—a Mattel employee who secretly dreams up ideas for new, more realistic Barbies such as anxiety Barbie—to unseat Ken and restore female power in Barbie Land. Along the way, Ferrera’s character delivers the film’s other major feminist monologue, about how hard it is being a woman in the real world.

The monologues are unsubtle, as are the repeated mentions of concepts like the patriarchy. In every scene and nearly every line, the movie hits the audience over the head with the pro-feminism message. Gerwig knows what her job is—to atone for Barbie’s sins (and, yes, help Mattel sell more dolls)—and she makes sure everyone knows that she has fully understood the assignment.

But it’s in the film’s quieter, more tender moments that Gerwig’s background as an indie filmmaker and her true talent shine through, and where she’s able to communicate the message in a subtler, but ultimately more impactful, way. The scene where Barbie in the real world sees an elderly woman for the first time (old people and wrinkles don’t exist in Barbie Land, obviously) and is stunned at how beautiful she is, wrinkles and all. Or the scenes where Barbie talks quietly with her deceased creator, an elderly Handler (played by Rhea Perlman), who explains that the name Barbie was an homage to Handler’s daughter, Barbara, who inspired her to make the doll.

The overall result is a movie that, even if a bit ham-fisted in its over-the-top messaging, doesn’t shy away from the uglier parts of Barbie’s legacy. It looks them right in the face, wrinkles and all.

I said above that the Trinity test scene is the climactic scene in Oppenheimer, but that’s not really the case. For a movie about the complicated life and legacy of the man credited with creating the world’s most destructive weapon, it should be the climax. You might imagine it would follow with a denouement of the inventor confronting the reality that his creation is used to kill tens of thousands of Japanese civilians and sparks an arms race that threatens to destroy all of humanity.

These scenes are in there, but they are given short shrift next to the other story Nolan wants to tell: that of how Oppenheimer, once considered an American hero, was mistreated by his country in the postwar years. As McCarthy-era fears of communist infiltration grip the country, Oppenheimer’s previous ties to the Communist Party (he never joined the party himself, but he had close family members and friends who were members, and he supported various left-wing causes) are mysteriously brought to the FBI’s attention despite already being well documented. His security clearance is revoked, and his career working with the U.S. government on nuclear issues ends.

It is this storyline—not the apocalyptic destruction of two Japanese cities—that is given the most pathos. Much of the movie’s three-hour run time—and nearly all of its third act—centers on what we are clearly meant to see as the great evil that was done to this man who did so much for his country. The real climax of the film is not the Trinity test, nor even the bombings of Japan (which are not even shown in the movie), but rather the moment we learn who betrayed Oppenheimer by handing over his security file to the FBI.

This is the shocking revelation that is meant to induce gasps in the audience, not the images of charred and irradiated bodies. In fact, those images aren’t even shown to us, the viewers. In the scene where Oppenheimer and his team are shown photos of the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the camera stays tight on Oppenheimer’s face as he reacts to the images—a reaction that consists of him putting his head down to avoid seeing them.

It is an act of cowardice on Oppenheimer’s part, yes, but also on Nolan’s. Indeed, the only glimpses we get of the macabre effects of the atom bomb take place in Oppenheimer’s fevered imagination, and even then, they are brief flashes used for shock value: skin flapping off the beautiful face of an admiring female colleague; the charred, faceless husk of a child’s body Oppenheimer accidentally steps on; a male colleague vomiting from the effects of radiation. Of the Japanese victims, there is nothing. They remain theoretical, faceless.

Nolan has said that he chose not to depict the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not to sanitize them but because the film’s events are shown from Oppenheimer’s point of view. “We know so much more than he did at the time,” Nolan said at a screening of the movie in New York. “He learned about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the radio, the same as the rest of the world.”

But in reading the numerous interviews he’s given about the movie, it’s also clear that Nolan fundamentally sees Oppenheimer as a tragic hero—Nolan has repeatedly called Oppenheimer “the most important person who ever lived”—and Oppenheimer’s story as a distinctly American one. “I believe you see in the Oppenheimer story all that is great and all that is terrible about America’s uniquely modern power in the world,” he told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “It’s a very, very American story.”

That Nolan’s film devotes so much runtime to Oppenheimer’s point of view and how he was tragically betrayed by his country is partly due to the fact that the film is not an original story but rather an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the great scientist, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. That book also places Oppenheimer being stripped of his security clearance at its center. But that didn’t mean Nolan had to do the same in his adaptation. That was a choice. And the end result is what military technology writer Kelsey Atherton aptly described as “a 3 hour long argument that the greatest victim of atomic weaponry was Oppenheimer’s clearance.”

At a time when Americans are struggling to reckon with their country’s past and how it has shaped the present—from fights over how (or even whether) to teach children about the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow; to debates, including in these very pages, over the role (or lack thereof) of NATO expansion in Russia’s decision to wage war on Ukraine; to retrospectives on the myriad failures of the U.S. war in Afghanistan; and beyond—the fact that the two biggest films in theaters right now are attempting to confront the legacies of two American icons, the nuclear bomb and Barbie, is understandable and perhaps even impressive.

But the impulse to look away from the ugliest parts of those legacies remains strong, and Oppenheimer never fully faces them.

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denimbex1986 · 1 year

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'"It's a paradox, but it works." This one brief sentence gets at the heart of the new Christopher Nolan film "Oppenheimer," serving as a potentially accidental kind of mission statement. A movie about the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led the Manhattan Project during the latter years of World War II and who essentially invented a new form of warfare via the atomic bomb, is not impossible but presents a series of challenges to any filmmaker. Here is a man whose intellect was unparalleled, who rubbed shoulders with many of the most remarkable scientists to ever live, and whose importance to both American and world history is unquestioned. But here is a man whose intellect led to the death of countless thousands of innocent people in service of concluding a world war, and whose intellect then inspired other people across the world to pursue more violent means of warfare.

The paradox of "Oppenheimer" is that the man deserves a full accounting, but that full accounting does not flatter him or those around him; that the three-hour epic is populated by what feels like three-quarters of Hollywood with many actors appearing just for a handful of minutes; that in many ways, the film is centered around the Trinity Test, in which the atomic bomb was first successfully tested in the deserts of New Mexico, but is otherwise an intimate story in which different groups of men debate things in different locations, all presented in crystal-clear IMAX photography. But, to quote Oppenheimer, it works.

In spite of the fact that Nolan (serving also as sole screenwriter, working off the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography "American Prometheus") is dealing with only real-life characters and events for the first time in his career, he still manages to fiddle around with timelines, helping ensure that "Oppenheimer" is never less than propulsive, intellectual, and jittery in its pacing. There are two separate title cards (for the scientific properties of fission and fusion) that appear early in the film, meant to delineate one thread in which Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is brought before a faux-prosecutorial board of men curious to revoke his security clearances in 1954, and another in which politician Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.) goes through a contentious Cabinet confirmation process in 1959. But there's a third, slightly more straightforward thread throughout, in which we follow Oppenheimer for nearly two decades, from his college days at Cambridge leading up to the fateful morning in mid-July 1945 when the A-bomb was tested in the dark of night.

History as thriller

Headline aside, it's not really a spoiler to talk about American history, especially history of such gravity. It's to Christopher Nolan's credit that he's able to treat a couple of different aspects of the post-WWII downfall of J. Robert Oppenheimer as surprises akin to something in a suspense thriller, both regarding someone in the shadows coming out to speak against a key figure in a public manner. The 1954 hearing against Oppenheimer — which resulted in him losing his security clearance, and helped contribute to his falling out of the public spotlight after being celebrated across America for years as "the father of the atomic bomb" — hinges on a letter written to J. Edgar Hoover by William Borden (David Dastmalchian, 15 years removed from his feature debut role in "The Dark Knight") that calls out Oppenheimer for his left-wing political leanings and his connections to more strident Communists among the scientific community and in his personal life.

For most of the three-hour running time, it's technically an open question for a Senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich) to wonder who in the Atomic Energy Commission gave Borden the classified material to help accuse Oppenheimer. The eventual revelation that Strauss worked with a sour military man (Dane DeHaan) to give Borden the files feels less surprising than perhaps expected, if only because of how effectively Downey, Jr. captures in his performance the frustration and moral impotence he feels between himself and Oppenheimer, a man who he admires but is humiliated by in countless situations. The twist that does work more effectively occurs in Strauss' Senate hearing, as he attempts to win a place in President Eisenhower's Cabinet as Secretary of Commerce. Much hinges on the testimony of a scientist named David Hill, who we see only very briefly and silently earlier in the film. But since Oscar winner Rami Malek plays Hill, it's no surprise that he has a crucial moment in offering his testimony at the hearing, quickly making clear that he's essentially representing any and all scientists horrified by how the American government treated Oppenheimer after World War II, and accurately accuses Strauss of having spearheaded the attempt to discredit the eponymous scientist.

Haunted by visions

For any criticisms levied against Christopher Nolan in his career about being too cold or calculated as a filmmaker, there's a strong and intense undercurrent of emotion bubbling under the surface throughout every scene. The sequences featuring Downey, Jr. (those filmed from his perspective, both during the Cabinet hearing and in any flashbacks emanating from his remarks, are in black-and-white, a first for IMAX photography) are rife with jealousy, as Strauss desperately tries to be accepted by a scientific community that instantly understands his mental limitations and treats him as second-rate. Of the many recurrent images in the film, one that stands out and serves as the kicker for the story is that of Strauss watching from afar as Oppenheimer speaks with the legendary Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) on the Princeton campus, before Strauss tries and fails to make polite conversation with Einstein, leading the politician to assume the two scientists were speaking derisively about him. And Oppenheimer himself is both charismatic and tightly wound; from the start, when we see him as a young man, it seems clear that for all his remarkable intelligence, this is a man barely holding himself together and frequently coming apart at the seams.

When we think of films shot in IMAX — not just the ones presented on the towering screens — we think of action spectacles, such as Nolan's "The Dark Knight" or Tom Cruise scaling the Burj Khalifa in "Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol." But "Oppenheimer," though it does feature some jaw-dropping imagery meant to depict the visions of quantum mechanics and physics rattling around Oppenheimer's psyche (he dubs it being plagued by visions) before leading up to the Trinity Test, is largely focused on the man himself, both emotionally and literally. Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot this in a mix of IMAX and 65mm film (and if you are lucky enough to live near one of the 30-plus theaters in the United States presenting the film in IMAX and 70mm, you must run to get tickets if you haven't already procured them), and so much of what's presented are close-ups of actors' faces.

As much as Christopher Nolan is known for his ability to conjure up spectacle (like one of the magicians from his adaptation of "The Prestige"), he's an excellent director of actors, and the proof is in the six-story images littered throughout "Oppenheimer." Murphy, whose collaborations with Nolan extend to "Batman Begins" when he played the Scarecrow, is the obvious standout, doing so much with a man who managed to be both charming enough to win over the might of the American military and government as well as scientists across the world, while also repressing the very real guilt and trauma he felt at inflicting death and destruction upon society. The use of close-ups on Nolan's part, and the tautly expressive emotions running rampant on Murphy's face recall the silent-film masterpiece "The Passion of Joan of Arc" in which Renee Jeanne Falconetti delivered a masterful performance for the ages through her pained visage. "Oppenheimer" is not a silent film, and Nolan gives his leading man plenty of dialogue to work through, but it's in Murphy's cutting blue eyes and his tightly wound face that so much emotion bleeds through.

With a cast also including (deep breath) Emily Blunt, Downey, Jr., Matt Damon, Malek, Matthew Modine, Benny Safdie, David Krumholtz, Ehrenreich, Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Kenneth Branagh, and Casey Affleck (and many, many more), "Oppenheimer" is as impressively acted beyond the title role, with all actors making such powerful impacts that it's almost unfortunate how so many of them only make brief appearances. But that's the nature of the time-jumping, globe-trotting story.

A fatal humiliation

Of course, the central moment of "Oppenheimer," its true climax, is the depiction of the Trinity Test. Again, since history is history, it should not come as a surprise to anyone that the test works, because the A-bomb would quickly be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, swiftly bringing an end to World War II in August 1945. Much of the hour or so preceding the test has touches and inspirations from Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," as Oppenheimer re-embraces his scientist status after briefly donning a military uniform, setting up an old-fashioned town in the middle of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and all in the hopes of effectively creating an atomic bomb that brings together his theories of quantum physics. The nighttime sequence building up to the Trinity Test, with Oppenheimer nervy and edgy as the rest of the scientists as well as his military keeper (Damon), is remarkably tense in spite of the fact that (as noted above) the test clearly works. Perhaps part of the tension derives from the knowledge many viewers have: that Christopher Nolan, priding himself on eschewing CGI when possible, has stated that his film's replication of the Trinity explosion was accomplished with practical effects.

And though "Oppenheimer" is not an action film, Nolan is one of the finest filmmakers working today who can effectively and clearly create awesome and terrifying action-based imagery. The Trinity Test is no exception; he, van Hoytema, editor Jennifer Lame, and the entire production team have pulled off something here both weirdly beautiful and definitively horrific. That the test works is a validation of Oppenheimer's theories, and of his scientists' man-hours of work over multiple years and multiple billions of dollars. But it also represents — as noted to Oppenheimer by Niels Bohr (Branagh) — a new world, not just a new weapon. Oppenheimer, as intelligent as he is, is also hopelessly idealistic, presuming that by using the A-bomb, America would not only show off its power to the world, but ensure a longer world peace because of it. So when he approaches President Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) to share the concern that he has blood on his hands, he's gobsmacked by Truman noting (harshly but in some way correctly) that the Japanese care less about the man who made the bomb than the man (and thus, the country) dropping the bomb.

The ensuing horror Oppenheimer feels (along with the twin revelations of how William Borden got his hands on classified materials, and how Lewis Strauss will fail to get a Cabinet post) culminates in the film's final scene. As Nolan hops around in time throughout the swift three hours of "Oppenheimer," he keeps coming back to the image in Strauss' mind of how Einstein seemingly snubbed him after a brief conversation with our title character. But as Ehrenreich's Senate aide notes, it's always possible that they weren't talking about Strauss at all but "something more important." And aside from being a snide dig, we learn in the end that the aide is right. In the final scene, we get the objective truth of what happened in that side discussion, as Oppenheimer reminisces with Einstein about how the latter reviewed the former's calculations of what would lead to the A-bomb. Einstein noted in that earlier conversation that Oppenheimer could end up destroying the world if he wasn't careful, referencing a possibility that a single A-bomb explosion would lead to a catastrophic chain reaction of never-ending detonation and the world going up in smoke in an instant. Literally, that never happened. But metaphorically, "I believe we did," Oppenheimer intones quietly.

A devastating masterpiece

As devastating as "Oppenheimer" is, and as much as the final moments of the film visualize the terror in the man's mind at the notion of having destroyed the world (recalling the line from the Bhagavad Gita, "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds" that Oppenheimer used to refer to himself in real life), it avoids being overly didactic or polemical. There's little doubt that Nolan is not treating this man as a savior — perhaps the most disturbing scene of the film comes after the Trinity Test, as Oppenheimer gives a speech meant to rouse a crowd cheering on the end of WWII due to the A-bomb (thus cheering on the death of thousands), but envisions the crowd engulfed by the same bomb, with charred bodies and flapping skin — but he's treating the man with depth and honesty.

Christopher Nolan has made variations on the themes inherent in "Oppenheimer" before, from men rent asunder by warring internal motivations to the horrendous and awe-inspiring power the human mind can wield. But this film feels like an apotheosis for so much of the career leading up to this moment. As befitting its ideal presentation, this is a big, mammoth movie, boasting a career-best performance from Cillian Murphy, a whip-smart script, and other technical marvels. (Jennifer Lame's editing is particularly remarkable, ensuring smooth transitions from timeline to timeline, and sometimes from aspect ratio to aspect ratio.) "Oppenheimer" arrived with huge expectations, and has turned out to be a glimpse into American history that speaks with gravity and weight. This is one of the best films of the year.'

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xtruss · 7 months

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The site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where Robert J. Oppenheimer and his team developed the First Atomic Device in the 1940s is now a United States National Historic Park. It includes structures like this replica of the campus’s main gate. Photograph By Brian Snyder, Reuters/Redux

Trace Oppenheimer’s Footsteps, From New Mexico To The Caribbean

The Father of the Atomic Bomb Chased History—and Then Ran From It. Here’s How to Visit Places Important to the Influential Physicist, Including a U.S. Virgin Islands Beach.

— By Bill Newcott | March 06, 2024

As Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer reintroduces the “father of the atomic bomb” to audiences, there’s no better time to hit the road and retrace some of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s most momentous steps—from New Mexico, where the physicist’s dream of a nuclear weapon was realized in the Manhattan Project; to a Nevada testing ground, where his worst fears about the bomb were demonstrated; to a remote Caribbean beach where he could, at last, quiet the demons that haunted him.

Los Alamos: Birthplace of The Atomic Bomb

The Gadget, as the first atomic device was called by its creators, was born not at Trinity—the New Mexico desert site where it was detonated—but about a hundred miles north, in the sleepy mountain town of Los Alamos. It was there that Oppenheimer, who’d spent some of his teen years in New Mexico, commandeered a former boys’ school as his base of operations.

Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project campus, now a national historic park, is virtually unchanged from his time.

Strolling along the tree-shaded “Bathtub Row”—so named because these were the few houses on campus equipped with full baths—I walk past the squat bungalow Oppenheimer shared with his wife, Kitty, and their two children. At one end of the street, I nearly brush shoulders with a pair of life-size bronze statues: Oppenheimer—resplendent in his famous wide-brimmed hat—consulting with the project’s military head, General Leslie Groves.

Beyond them I push open the door to Fuller Lodge—the former school assembly hall, now an art gallery and community center—and I am transported into the most riveting moment from the film Oppenheimer.

You remember it: Following the bombing of Hiroshima, the scientist stands before a stone fireplace in this room and gives a victory speech to the Los Alamos staff. But even as he mouths words of triumph, Oppenheimer privately suffers searing visions of the devastation the bomb has caused.

And now, here I am, standing before that same fireplace, facing the long expanse of the room’s ponderosa pine walls and timbered ceiling. It is not hard to imagine Oppenheimer at this spot, in awe of what his team had accomplished in three short years; horrified by its implications for the rest of human history.

Trinity: Site of The First Atomic Blast

Most of the year, Trinity, the site of the first atomic blast, is still an active tract of the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico. On two special days, however—usually the first Saturday in April and the third Saturday in October—the U.S. Army hosts a Trinity Open House. (Due to what the U.S. Army called “unforeseen circumstances,” the 2024 April Open House has been canceled).

On those days, vehicles with plates from Alaska to Florida line up at the White Sands Stallion Gate, then bounce the 17 miles south to the circular chain link fence that encloses the spot where Oppenheimer’s Gadget ushered in the atomic age. They park in a seldom used lot and enter through a narrow gate, approaching the stark, black monument at the circle’s center with almost visceral solemnity.

Even in spring, it’s kind of hot here in the treeless, open-air oven the Spanish conquistadors called Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Dead Man)—but not as hot as it got at precisely 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, when a fireball half as hot as the surface of the sun scorched the earth of this basin.

Tourists at the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico, check out an example of the “Fat Man” bomb casing, built to contain a nuclear device. Here at the remote Trinity site on July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project successfully detonated the first atomic bomb. Photograph By Martin Specht, Agentur Focus/Redux

The 100-foot tower on which the Gadget was mounted is gone, but the Trinity crater remains: a broad, surprisingly shallow, plate-like depression. At its greatest depth the hole that Trinity punched into the desert floor measures only about 10 feet. The 100-foot cushion of air under the tower prevented deeper excavation.

“As a reminder,” a guide tells a clutch of tourists, “you are not permitted to remove anything from the ground.”

“Anything” would be samples of trinitite, the glass-like element that was created in the bomb’s searing blast.

Trinity is the main attraction on visitor days, but the curious can hop a bus to a small cabin, the old Schmidt Homestead, about two miles from Ground Zero. It was here, in the former dining room, where Oppenheimer supervised the final assembly of the Gadget.

With its bare walls and polished floors, the empty house looks as benign as a fixer-upper awaiting a redo by a resourceful real estate agent. But it’s not hard to imagine the team of scientists, just days before the blast, gingerly piecing together the Gadget: A sphere of 32 little bombs surrounding a softball-sized ball of plutonium.

All 32 bombs would be ignited simultaneously. And then, literally, all hell would break loose.

Nevada Test Site

After the war, the U.S. government continued to test nuclear devices of ever more harrowing capability—first in the Pacific, and then at the Nevada Test Site, about a hundred miles north of the then backwater gambling town of Las Vegas. (On the 26th floor of Binion’s Gambling Hall in downtown Vegas, you can still dine in the restaurant where tourists once watched their “Atomic Cocktails” slosh back and forth as nuclear tests made the building sway.)

There is no indication that Oppenheimer ever set foot on the Nevada test site, where more than a thousand descendants of the Gadget were detonated over a span of three decades. Still, the site is essential to Oppenheimer’s story in that it represents his worst nuclear nightmares.

“If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world…then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima,” he declared in 1945.

A hundred miles North of Las Vegas, the Nevada Test Site is where the U.S. and Britain continued to test Nuclear Devices after World War II. The site is open once a month for a free tour. Photograph By Karen Kasmauski, National Geographic Image Collection

“Basically, Oppenheimer was against nuclear testing post-Manhattan Project,” says Joseph Kent, deputy director and curator of the Atomic Museum in Las Vegas. “He felt the Manhattan Project was necessary, but when they started working on the hydrogen bomb, which was much more destructive, he wasn’t comfortable with that.”

We’re standing in the lobby of the museum, now in its 25th year, just a few blocks from the excess of the Las Vegas Strip. Near the door rests an enormous, bulbous “Fat Man” bomb casing, built in 1945 to contain a nuclear device like the Gadget I saw in New Mexico.

Primarily, the Smithsonian-affiliated Atomic Museum serves as a visitors center for the Nevada Test Site, officially known as Nevada National Security Sites (NNSS). Thanks to the museum’s continuing relationship with NNSS, once a month a busload of 50 or so history buffs leave from the museum’s parking lot to begin a free eight-hour tour of the site.

It begins with an hour drive up US 95, a trip that vividly explains why the site is here: The landscape is a mix of wide, flat valleys, perfect for bomb blasts, interrupted by occasional mountain ranges that would discourage unauthorized watchful eyes.

The highlight is a visit to Sedan Crater: a 300-foot-deep, 1,200-foot-wide crater blasted out by a 104-kiloton bomb to see if nuclear devices could be safely used to dig canals and sea ports. The answer, apparently, was “no, they can’t.”

Your guide will take a group picture at Sedan and send it to you later, but that is the one and only souvenir you’ll get: On the Nevada Test Site tour, you can’t take home rock samples and you can’t bring your camera along.

“Oppenheimer Beach,” St. John, USVI

On the eastern shore of Hawksnest Bay in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, a low-slung white structure sits on the broad, sugary sand. The building is a community center, but until just a few years ago, before a hurricane swept it away, a tidy wood cottage crouched there. It had been built in the 1950s by a quiet man who periodically arrived with his wife and family, keeping mostly to himself. In his later years, this is where Oppenheimer escaped the stresses of a world he’d helped create. And Hawksnest Bay is where he and his wife had their ashes spread out.

The sun sets over St. John, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Oppenheimer and his wife and family spent time at a cottage here on Hawksnest Bay in the 1950s. Photograph By Michael Melford, National Geographic Image Collection

Today, locals call the spot Oppenheimer Beach.

Walking this beach, Oppenheimer could wish away the daily reminders of a nuclear arms race, far from the politicians who had exploited his genius to build the bomb and then, as the Nolan film portrays, turned on him when he expressed regret over his accomplishment.

On St. John, “no one was going to harass him,” local historian David Knight, whose parents house-sat for Oppenheimer during his absences, told the BBC. “No one knew who he was or cared.”

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer Follows Man Who Lived Long Enough to ‘Become the Villain’

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Not everyone can die a hero. Christopher Nolan emphasized that point by even taking the mask away from Batman in The Dark Knight Trilogy, proving Bruce Wayne knows how to make an entrance and then be smart enough to plan an exit strategy. Exits proved vital to other Nolan projects as well, including the searing Dunkirk, a World War II epic highlighting the heroism of the common foot soldier and the British evacuation of France. Now his next movie will also be set during WWII, but it’s about an extraordinary man, who never forgave himself for building the weapon that ended the war, J. Robert Oppenheimer. There may be few historical figures who’d more readily wear Harvey Dent’s line, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

“I have become death, the destroyer of worlds,” the real Oppenheimer once said, quoting from The Bhagavat Ghita in an interview about creating the atom bomb. Nolan’s film will focus on the genius scientist’s role in its development. As a young man, Oppenheimer distinguished himself as a student under J. J. Thomson, who had been awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting the electron. After the start of World War II, Oppenheimer was invited by the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) to take over work on neutron calculations at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, also known as Berkeley Lab, which was struggling against the clock to develop an atomic bomb.

As the war and development progressed, the scientists needed more space. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the formation of the Manhattan Project on Dec. 28, 1942. Also known as Project Y, the Manhattan Project was formally established on Jan. 1, 1943. Oppenheimer was appointed scientific director. He directed the construction of the laboratories at Los Alamos and brought together the best minds in physics to solve theoretical and mechanical issues. Over 3,000 people worked on the project, including Albert Einstein, who first presented the military potential of an uncontrolled fission chain reaction to Roosevelt in the summer of 1939.

The first nuclear explosion was executed at a site on the Alamogordo air base, 120 miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico, July 16, 1945. Oppenheimer named it “Trinity,” and it had the explosive power of 20,000 tons of TNT. One month later, the bomb was used twice on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

Those nuclear explosions ended the war, but Oppenheimer had mixed feelings. There is, after all, a physics laboratory named after him at the Ethical Culture Society School where Oppenheimer enrolled in September 1911. Founded by Dr. Felix Adler as an outgrowth of American Reform Judaism, the society concentrated on social justice, civic responsibility, and secular humanism. After the war, Oppenheimer lobbied for international arms control as an advisor of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in 1949. Oppenheimer strongly opposed work on developing the hydrogen bomb.

The FBI had files on Oppenheimer, including a report of a January or February 1943 meeting where he heard about colleagues who were solicited for nuclear secrets by a shell oil employee on behalf of the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer failed to report it until August. The FBI furnished Oppenheimer’s files to his enemies. On Nov. 7, 1953, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover received a letter from William Liscum Borden, former executive director of Congress’ Joint Atomic Energy Committee, accusing Oppenheimer of being “an agent of the Soviet Union,” based on “11 years of minute surveillance.” The theoretical physicist’s phones were tapped, his office and home were bugged, and his mail was opened.

Oppenheimer’s security clearance was revoked 32 hours before it was set to expire in June 1954. Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” dredged up old Communist sympathies in testimony to the Oppenheimer Security Hearing in Washington. Army Counterintelligence knew about Oppenheimer’s associations with Communist Party USA members, which included his wife, when he was made director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in 1942, and when he became chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the AEC in 1947. The revocation stripped the renowned scientist of political power and made him a boogeyman during the height of the Red Scare.

In the fallout of his public exile from American government life, Oppenheimer established the World Academy of Art and Science in 1960, along with Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Joseph Rotblat. The scientific community never forgave the government for its treatment of Oppenheimer, and much of the findings of the committee were shot down under later scrutiny. Partially to right these wrongs, President Lyndon B. Johnson honored the scientist with the Atomic Energy Commission’s Enrico Fermi Award in 1963. Oppenheimer died of throat cancer in 1967.

Christopher Nolan is a courageous director who has never stopped taking risks, even after achieving mainstream success. A Nolan film is a brand, like a Martin Scorsese movie or a Hitchcock picture. Nolan is an auteur, writing and completely controlling every aspect of his films. From Memento to Inception, he has never stopped challenging audiences, nor has he ever pandered to them. Tenet was released while the pandemic was at its height and the film still grossed $363 million. Nolan is probably one of the few directors with the guts to make a bomb. The 1989 Manhattan Project drama Fat Man and Little Boy was blasted by critics and ignored by audiences, even with Paul Newman starring in it.

Nolan is best telling human stories with strong characters who are troubled by epic challenges and moral conundrums. Oppenheimer challenged and second-guessed his greatest achievements until the day he died, and seems like a natural choice to lend himself to Nolan’s recurring series of troubled protagonists.

This upcoming biopic has the power to set things right, and redefine how history paints the necessary ambivalence of scientists at war. Oppenheimer was called “the father of the Atom bomb.” He should have demanded a paternity test and be known as the founding father of the American school of theoretical physics.

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adriannabertie-blog · 5 years

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Trinity: The Start Of The Atomic Age

It’s early morning, July 16, 1945. A big steel globe nicknamed the ‘Gadget’ sits perched on high of a tower within the Jornada del Muerto desert, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Wires and cables are hooked up to every surface. All is silent. Immediately the site turns to day with an excellent flash of gentle and explosion unlike anything ever witnessed. The nuclear age has begun. The detonation of the world’s first nuclear bomb was code-named Trinity by J. If you enjoyed this post and you would such as to receive additional facts regarding anchor3 kindly visit the webpage. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist in control of ‘Project Y’, the group that designed and built the bomb. He later stated the title was partly inspired by his love of the poetry of John Donne. The Gadget is readied for testing by Norris Bradbury, head of the meeting and preparation team. The bomb continues to be connected the winch that raised to its check level - a tower 30 metres above ground. Not all of the scientists at Los Alamos thought it could succeed; some created a betting pool, guessing as to the actual explosive yield.

After a series of delays due to rain, the device was finally detonated at 5:30 am, 16 July 1945. The machine exploded with an vitality equal of about 20 kilotons of TNT. The gadget was a plutonium implosion bomb, using TNT to squeeze plutonium to a degree, known as vital mass, the place a chain reaction would start. The unbelievable quantity of energy launched from the chain response generated temperatures of about one hundred million levels Celsius, the same as the core of the Sun, and a shockwave sturdy enough to flatten buildings. As a result of sound travels slower than gentle, the initial explosion was silent for these observing it in shelters 10,0000 yards (9,one hundred metres) away from floor zero. Just a few seconds later a deafening bang and the shock wave arrived; it can be felt up to 160 km away. An electromagnetic pulse would also emanate, wreaking havoc with cables and frying gear. These high-speed photographs seize the fractions of a second after the bomb was detonated. Robert Oppenheimer with Lieutenant Normal Leslie Groves, the pinnacle of the Manhattan Project, stand at floor zero a few weeks after detonation. Oppenheimer, sometimes referred to because the "father of the atomic bomb", was a number one theoretical physicist who had develop into fascinated by the atomic bomb. He was selected by Groves to head the scientific work on the bomb, anchor3 with a functional weapon being delivered within three years of venture commencement. An aerial photograph of the Trinity site, highlighting the big area of floor that was seared by the unimaginable temperatures generated on the explosion site. Pressures and temperatures immediately turned the sand beneath the detonation site to glass, now referred to as Trinitite.

They had been all there. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the bomb; Edward Teller, the unique Dr. Strangelove; Enrico Fermi, creator of the primary nuclear reactor, was taking bets on whether or not the blast would ignite the ambiance and destroy the world. The scientists had been ready, nervously, for the morning to return. But Oppenheimer's brother Frank couldn't sleep. He was listening to the unusual sound coming from the edge of the Trinity camp in New Mexico on July 15, 1945, the evening before the atomic take a look at. The world was about to enter the atomic age, and Frank Oppenheimer was desirous about frogs. It had rained that night time. What Frank referred to as frogs were desert toads drawn up by the monsoon rains of July. These toads had spent much of their time burrowed underground to avoid the intense heat. When the rains hit they began a mad dash to procreate, calling and hopping by Trinity camp, oblivious to history or the designs of science and conflict. Frank Oppenheimer informed an interviewer in 1973 in regards to the toads. The subsequent day, scientists would efficiently check the first atomic bomb.

Within several weeks, the brand new bomb would be used to destroy the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 200,000 people and plunging the world right into a nuclear arms race that continues to today. Two years in the past, I traveled to the Trinity site at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. It was the middle of July and i had particular permission from the Military to come back to a small patch of ground called Base Camp, where I can be allowed to anticipate darkness and listen. It could be one in all several journeys I might take there as a part of my work for the Acoustic Atlas at Montana State University. For the past few years, I have been recording natural sounds from around the Western United States, including many frog and toad species. Base Camp was the default location for watching the Trinity explosion, and it sits about 10 miles from floor zero, the site of the blast. On the night time before the take a look at, there were a number of hundred individuals there.

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dakotakry · 7 years

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The Manhattan Project and its effects on the World

One of the most significant breakthroughs in science, some of the deadliest weapons ever made. Weapons that would forever change the world, and the weight of war. The Manhattan project, the United States of Americas push to the development of nuclear weapons. It"s terrible effects on the world then and now with issues of North Korea. The scientists regret and worry about the creation of weapons of mass destruction. As well as the urgency in fear of Germany creating Nuclear Weapons first during WWII. The effects of the Manhattan Project had terrible implications on the world then, and still to this day.

During World War II in the summer of 1939 of August, Albert Einstein wrote to the current president, Rosevelt detailing the possibilities of using nuclear fusion the create a weapon of massive destruction. He included the chance of Germany developing said weapons and the urgency of it. The weight of Albert Einstein's reputation helped heighten the seriousness of his letter and furthered the current president's actions.1

President Rosevelt, taking Einstein's letter very seriously, founded the Advisory Committee on Uranium to research the use of uranium (and Nuclear materials) as weapons. The Committee was renamed to the National Defence Research Committee in 1940 and finally settling on the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in 1941. Finally on December 28th, of 1942 the OSRD formed the "Manhattan Project" under the authorization of President Rosevelt, setting up research facilities across the United States and Canada. J. Robert Oppenheimer, often referred to as "the Father of the Atomic Bomb"2, was already researching nuclear fusion when he was appointed as the director of Los Alamos Laboratory on January 1st, 1943.

The development of the first nuclear bomb was finally finished, but without a test, there would be doubt in the use of the atomic bomb. On July 12th of 1945, the nuclear core was taken to the test site in the empty desert of Alamogordo, New Mexico. The rest of the device arrived a day later on Friday the 13th and was then raised on top of a 100ft firing tower. The codename for the test was the Trinity Test, and the time of the trial had been set for 4:00 am on the Monday of the 16th. Due to weather, the test would be further delayed to 5:30 am on the same morning. To break the tension during the wait between the scientists. Fermi offered a wager on "Weather or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world." showing just how fearful the scientists were developing the bomb actually where. Finally nearing the pre-arranged time of the test, a countdown was started. Nearing the end of the countdown, many of the physicist laid with their feet towards the blast and "At precisely 5:30 am on Monday, July 16, 1945, the nuclear age began."3

J. Robert Oppenheimer along with many other scientists of Los Alamos Laboratory developed two nuclear bombs. The "Little Boy" was created using uranium-235 and designed so that a sub-critical uranium projectile is fired through a gun barrel at the uranium payload causing the chain reaction to begin. "Little Boy" was roughly 3 meters in length with a diameter of about 0.71 meters and has the explosive force equivalent to fifteen-thousand tons of TNT. The "Fat Man" was a plutonium-based atomic bomb that used smaller bombs to impose the nuclear payload on itself triggering the reaction. "Fat Man" was roughly 3.25 meters in length, but also approximately 2 meters in diameter with an explosive force of about twenty-one thousand tons of TNT.4 Both nuclear weapons would be used in the war against the allies enemies.

With Germany closing to surrender along with the United States wishes to come to an end to the war, the military decided to use the nuclear weapons to force Japan to surrender. On July 26, 1945, The United States demanded that Japan surrender and create a government of peace and democracy or face "prompt and utter destruction."5 6 Due to the requested government that Japan form, the current emperor would have no power and as such did not wish to accept the request of the United States government. With Japan not desiring to surrender and the United States patience thining, the United States began to plan the use of the Atomic Bomb.

The Military planning the use of the atomic bombs decided that Hiroshima would be an ideal target because of the size as well as there were no known United States Army prisoners of war. Still with no surrender, on August 6th, 1945 the United States sent a bomber plane armed with "Little Boy" overtop Hiroshima, dropping the nuclear bomb, destroying and killing everyone and thing within an 8-kilometre square radius around the blast zone. Japan three days later, still with no surrender on August 9th, 1945 another bomber plan carrying "Fat Man" dropped the payload overtop Nagasaki destroying more than 4.8 square kilometres of the town, straight to the dirt. The total deaths of the bomb where roughly one-hundred thousand fatalities and destroyed two cities. Japan informed the United States of America of its plans to surrender on the 10th of August and formally surrendered on August 14th, 1945.7 All through the war was won, many scientists both involved with and bystander to the nuclear weapon displayed much disinterest in the continued use of atomic weapons.

After the war ended, J. Robert Oppenheimer became an advisor of the Atomic Energy Commission, trying to increase and create international arms control. Due to his stances against the use of nuclear warfare and the creation of the Hydrogen-Bomb, he developed enemies, and his security clearance was revoked, angering the scientific community for his mistreatment. He also along with Albert Einstein, Bertran Russell, and Joseph Rotblat the World Academy of Art and Science, and in 1960 was awarded the Enrico Award by President John F. Kennedy. Oppenheimer was not the only one worried about the use of nuclear weapons as Einstein and Russel sent a message to the world.

In the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, their message to the world, they plead to the government, citizens, and humankind as a whole to not use nuclear weapons, nor any weapons of mass destruction. They continued to state "We have to learn to ask ourself, not what steps can be taken to give military victory," but rather "what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which issue must be disastrous to all parties?". The document outlined the dangers of nuclear weapons and highlighted the lack of knowledge that the general public, as well as the government, have. It displays the capabilities of modern weapons, and how much more powerful they are from the ones in World War II. It also talks about nuclear fallout as "deadly dust or rain," and that for most "a slow touch of disease and disintegration."7 The Russel-Einstein Manifesto offers a resolution to the dangers of atomic warfare asking Congress and another scientist to urge all governments that their purposes cannot lead to another world war. The manuscript was signed by 11 professors across six different nations, United States, Poland, France, London, Germany, and Japan. The document was also notable the last thing Professor Albert Einstein signed before his death. Though these scientists plead was heard in the short term, there is still those today who do not understand the dangers and effects of nuclear war.

North Korea is one of the most notable modern day nuclear threats to the world. Having withdrawn from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in January of 2003, as well as having conducted multiple nuclear tests, clearly states their stance on nuclear warfare. Heavy sanctions have been placed on North Korea by the international community, but they have not affected North Koreas nuclear program.8 Although North Korea may be a clear modern-day demonstration of defying the scientist's warnings, there also stands the United States and Russes Nuclear arsenal.

The United States of America had at once 31255 nuclear warheads and Russa 45000 warheads at their peak. The United States current nuclear arsenal consists of 4717 last being discussed in 2015. Both the United States of America and Russia under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) of 1991, Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) of 2002, and the new START Treaty, they will both be limited to 1550 nuclear warheads.9 10 As such both countries will still possess large nuclear arsenals for use in warfare, and the dangers of Nuclear War will still be a threat to humanity.

The Manhattan project was created by the United States of America, after rumours of Germany starting a similar program. Their primary goal was the construction of nuclear bombs for use in the current world war. After the war, many scientists involved in the program went on to spread awareness of the dangers of nuclear warfare. A famous document called the Russel-Einstein Manifesto urged the world of the risks, and to avoid all use of nuclear bombs, notably the last thing Albert Einstein signed. Now even in modern day times, the use of nuclear weapons and total nuclear war is still always a threat. Not only is North Korea testing and developing more bombs than ever, the United States and Russia has some of the most prominent nuclear arsenals in the world. The Manhattan Project, although at the time seemed the best action in self-defence from Germany, the project still has had a disastrous effect on modern day society.

“German Atomic Bomb Project.” Atomic Heritage Foundation, 18 Oct. 2016, www.atomicheritage.org/history/german-atomic-bomb-project. ↩︎

“J. Robert Oppenheimer.” Atomic Heritage Foundation, www.atomicheritage.org/profile/j-robert-oppenheimer. ↩︎

“The Trinity Test.” Manhattan Project: The Trinity Test, July 16, 1945, www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1945/trinity.htm. ↩︎

“Little Boy and Fat Man.” Atomic Heritage Foundation, 23 July 2014, www.atomicheritage.org/history/little-boy-and-fat-man. ↩︎

History.com Staff. “Manhattan Project.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 2017, www.history.com/topics/the-manhattan-project. ↩︎

“The Manhattan Project - Its Story.” The Manhattan Project - Its Story, www.osti.gov/accomplishments/manhattan_story.html. ↩︎

Einstein, Albert, and Bertrand Russell. Russell-Einstein Manifesto. 1955. ↩︎ ↩︎

“North Korea.” The Nuclear Threat Initiative, www.nti.org/learn/countries/north-korea/. ↩︎

“Russia.” The Nuclear Threat Initiative, www.nti.org/learn/countries/russia/. ↩︎

“United States.” The Nuclear Threat Initiative, www.nti.org/learn/countries/united-states/. ↩︎

#manhattan project #nuke #history

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denimbex1986 · 1 year

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It’s one thing standing in line to watch the blockbuster film “Oppenheimer.” It’s another thing entirely queueing up in a remote desert to experience the location of the film’s most pivotal scene.

But if you’re a fan of atomic history and can swing central New Mexico this October, your pilgrimage through the Jornada del Muerto (Dead Man’s Journey) will be so worth the effort.

Saturday, October 21, presents a rare opportunity to visit not just one but two scientifically significant and movie-famous destinations on the same day – each occupying opposite ends of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Trinity Site is the national historic landmark that’s home to mankind’s first nuclear blast on July 16, 1945, where plutonium gamma rays lit up the night sky. It hosts only two open house events each year.

And while you’re in the area, an extraordinary bonus is a second, free-of-charge open house aimed specifically at Trinity Site adventurers who are willing to drive another 100 miles to take in a second mind-bending experience.

It’s the Very Large Array Radio Observatory (VLA), which was dramatized in the 1997 alien-life movie “Contact.” The VLA telescope can spread wider than New York City, able to capture the whispers of distant radio waves as they undulate across our cosmos.

Rare access to Trinity Site

Trinity Site opens only two Saturdays a year. Once in April, and lucky for “Oppenheimer” enthusiasts, again in October.

The exact dates are announced in advance each year by the US Army.

The site is a secure military installation within the forbidding White Sands Missile Range, where live weapons are regularly tested. The terrain is high desert plateau, dotted with creosote brush and not much else.

In our everyday crush of crowds, traffic and strip malls, the Land of Enchantment’s sheer miles of open landscape and soul-nourishing cobalt vistas inspire. Buzz Aldrin’s impression of the moon’s surface parallels Trinity Site, a “magnificent desolation.”

When J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” led his Manhattan Project team to Trinity, it wasn’t just for the isolation. He had history with New Mexico, attending summer boys’ camps during his youth. Because of the popularity of the movie “Oppenheimer,” a surge of visitors is expected on October 21.

The open house event, hosted by the US Army, is free but limited to the first 5,000 guests, on a first-come, first-served basis.

How to get there

From Albuquerque International Sunport airport, your best bet is a rental car for the two-hour drive south. It’s easy to get disoriented while navigating, so stick to the Army’s directions, as GPS instructions can be wonky. Take screen photos of the route mapped on your phone – as you may lose cell service – and have an actual roadmap as backup.

Aim to arrive at Trinity’s Stallion Gate before 8 a.m., when the gate opens. There will already be a line. Be early, and you’ll still have plenty of time for the day’s second adventure. Army officials will check your ID at the gate, and from there it’s a 17-mile (27-kilometer) drive to a parking lot located a quarter-mile walk from the reason you came – Ground Zero.

Trinity Site’s atmosphere during an open house is reminiscent of a small-town carnival from a bygone era. Vendors selling souvenir trinkets. Kids in strollers. Dogs wagging tails. Porta Potties. That’s until you notice the pop-up tent displaying Geiger counters. And another with radioactive Trinitite, the mysterious green-glass rock that rained down from the bomb’s blast.

Ominous fence signs remind guests that it’s against the law to remove any pieces of Trinitite they spy on the ground because ingested fragments retain enough radioactivity to be dangerous.

The famed 1918 McDonald adobe ranch house, where the bomb’s critical plutonium core was assembled in the master bedroom, survived the shock wave two miles away mostly intact. Buses shuttle visitors back and forth free of charge from the Trinity parking lot to the McDonald house.

Venture in farther to stand next to a life-size replica of Fat Man, the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945.

Visitors can pose for photos inside Jumbo, the 216-ton steel cylinder scientists contemplated detonating the bomb – nicknamed the Gadget – within to contain its plutonium core if the full detonation failed.

Experiencing Ground Zero

The moment arrives to approach Ground Zero, marked simply by a black stone obelisk that’s 12 feet (3.66 meters) high.

Step back in time to the pre-dawn of July 16, 1945. Glance north, west and south where Oppenheimer’s team hunkered down in three bunkers, five miles away. You stand where the course of humanity shifted. Where the boundaries of physics and possibility stretched.

Picture the 100-foot-high steel tower that stood where the obelisk stands now. A few feet away only nubs of the tower remain, the bulk annihilated in the blast.

See in your mind the mattresses hauled in and stacked high to cushion the fall should the chains snap as they winched the heavy Gadget high into the air. And young scientists rotated throughout the night babysitting the bomb as crackles of lightning threatened to strike.

Oppenheimer wrote the poem “Crossing” two decades before Trinity. His words contained the prophetic passage, “…in the dry hills down by the river, half withered, we had the hot winds against us.” He could not have imagined the heat to come.

Now close your eyes.

Ignore what you do see to imagine the history you cannot see.

The storms over the mountains. New Mexico Gov. John Dempsey is at home asleep, oblivious to when the blast will occur. Finally, the mists of rain clear. The countdown to fission begins. There’s a sense of dread, however remote, that Earth’s atmosphere might ignite in a cataclysmic chain reaction.

And finally, the detonation.

Man’s first nuclear genie shatters its bottle, unleashing the ferocity of the atom, with an explosion 10,000 times hotter than our sun. Thirty-seven minutes later, the wounded sky brightens again, to the dawn of man’s first atomic sunrise.

Reflect on the glaring omission that while the area surrounding Trinity was remote, it was not unpopulated.

Civilians termed “downwinders,” subjected to radioactive fallout fluttering down from the sky, were assured that the flash and fury some saw and heard was an ammunition explosion at nearby Alamogordo Air Base. After atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki the following month, they realized the stark truth.

Jim Eckles, an Army historian who oversaw decades of Trinity open house events, shared the site’s significance: “The ‘Oppenheimer’ movie resurrected concerns we’ve lost sight of. That thousands of nuclear warhead missiles are still out there, able to launch. We need clever intelligent people to deal with the sequence that began at Trinity.”...'

#Trinity Site #Jornada del Muerto #Dead Man's Journey #McDonald Ranch House #“Crossing”#Jim Eckles

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denimbex1986 · 1 year

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'Moviegoers who watch the closing credits of Oppenheimer may notice a familiar name. Writer and director Christopher Nolan's three-hour biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project during World War II to develop the atomic bomb, ends with a thank-you to retired U.S. senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

Unrelated to Leahy's appearances in Nolan's Batman trilogy, this cinematic shout-out is about righting a decades-old injustice. Vermont's longest-serving U.S. senator played a critical role in clearing Oppenheimer's name 55 years after his death. And longtime Leahy staffer Tim Rieser deserves his own screen credit for the role he played in that process.

The Norwich native worked for Leahy for 37 years, mostly as his senior foreign policy aide on the Senate Appropriations Committee. Rieser's political savvy and deep relationships in Washington, D.C., earned him a level of influence rarely achieved by Capitol Hill staffers. In one of his final acts before Leahy retired in January, Rieser helped right a grievous wrong that ended Oppenheimer's career — one that, as viewers of Oppenheimer now know, was based on a lie.

In June 1954, at the height of the Red Scare, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission voted to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance. The decision was influenced by Oppenheimer's past association with communists and justified with the baseless allegation that he was a Soviet spy.

In actuality, Oppenheimer's fall from grace was a political hit job motivated by his opposition to U.S. development of the hydrogen bomb. Denying the physicist access to nuclear secrets effectively ended his government career and left a stain on his reputation that endured long after his death in 1967.

Nolan's blockbuster movie, which is based on the 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird, chronicles much of that previously untold story. But viewers may leave the theater thinking that Oppenheimer was never vindicated.

In fact, Rieser, 71, spent years working with Sherwin and Bird to do just that. His motivation wasn't just to remove a black mark from the history of one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. As he explained to Seven Days, Rieser also wanted to affirm the ongoing importance of protecting scientists who express their political views from becoming targets of government retribution.

The cause was personal for the former Vermont public defender, who lives in Arlington, Va., but still owns, with his siblings, their family home in Norwich. Rieser's parents, Leonard and Rosemary Rieser, worked on the Manhattan Project, knew Oppenheimer and had tremendous respect for him.

"It was probably the most memorable year of their lives," Rieser said of his parents' stint in Los Alamos, N.M. "My father, my mother and everybody else there just revered Oppenheimer. He was larger than life for people their age."

Leonard Rieser was 21 in 1943 when he graduated with a physics degree from the University of Chicago, site of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. The following year, he got married, enlisted in the U.S. Army and, because of his knowledge of nuclear physics, was sent to Los Alamos.

The Riesers knew little about where they were going or what they'd do there. For more than a year, they couldn't disclose their whereabouts to family and friends or reveal their activities. While Rieser's mother ran the Los Alamos nursery school, his father worked alongside such scientists as Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi and Hans Bethe.

The Trinity test, the first-ever detonation of an atomic bomb, occurred on July 16, 1945, which was also the Riesers' first wedding anniversary. Leonard witnessed the blast from less than 20 miles away, face down in the sand.

After the war, Leonard took a teaching job at Dartmouth College, where he later became chair of the physics department, then dean of faculty and provost. When president Lyndon Johnson gave Oppenheimer the prestigious Enrico Fermi Award in 1963, Leonard invited the physicist to speak at Dartmouth and even hosted him at their home.

Tim Rieser, who was only 5 at the time, doesn't remember meeting Oppenheimer, but he grew up hearing stories about the Manhattan Project and still has his father's correspondence with the physicist.

He cannot recall his parents discussing Oppenheimer's blacklisting. "I can only assume ... that they must have been appalled," he said.

So were others in the scientific community. Shortly after the 1954 ruling, 500 scientists signed a letter urging the Atomic Energy Commission to reverse its decision. But it would fall to the next generation to take up that cause.

Bird related in his July 7 New Yorker article "Oppenheimer, Nullified and Vindicated" how Sherwin spent 25 years researching the Oppenheimer case before Bird joined him on the project in 2000. In 2010, with the Pulitzer under their belt, the two authors tried unsuccessfully to convince president Barack Obama's administration to reinstate Oppenheimer's security clearance.

Others made similar attempts. In 2011, senator Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) sent a 20-page memo urging Oppenheimer's vindication to secretary of energy Steven Chu, who was a scientist and cowinner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. Chu never acted on that memo, and Bingaman retired from the Senate in 2013.

Next, Sherwin and Bird approached Rieser, whom Bird had known for years. Their interest in the Vermont aide had nothing to do with his personal connection to Oppenheimer, of which neither was aware. (Coincidentally, Leonard Rieser had once hired Sherwin to teach at Dartmouth.)

The biographers' interest in Rieser was a political strategy: A seasoned Capitol Hill staffer, he worked for one of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate and had access to high-ranking officials in the Obama administration.

Rieser said it wasn't until he read American Prometheus that he grasped the scope of the miscarriage of justice done in 1954.

"Until then, I didn't know what had happened to Oppenheimer," he said. "I don't think many people did."

Uniquely Qualified

It's hard to imagine anyone else on Capitol Hill who could have brought to the task of clearing Oppenheimer the combination of political clout, governmental savvy, personal motivation and professional autonomy that Rieser did. Because Rieser had worked for Leahy since 1985, the senator knew his parents. After Leonard Rieser died and the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich renamed part of the museum in his honor, Leahy attended the dedication ceremony. And because the senator shared Rieser's view that Oppenheimer had been railroaded, he gave Rieser broad discretion on the project.

Rieser had earned a reputation as someone who knew how to get things done in Washington. He helped draft Leahy's 1992 signature legislation banning the sale of land mines. He was also an architect of the so-called Leahy Law, which outlawed the export of U.S. arms to countries that violate human rights with impunity — an effort that made Rieser the target of a character assassination campaign by Guatemala's then-president, Otto Pérez Molina. In her book Sweet Relief: The Marla Ruzicka Story, author Jennifer Abrahamson described Rieser as "the conscience of the Senate."

Rieser was known for his dogged persistence. In the New Yorker piece, Bird described him as "relentless."

After Alan Gross, a U.S. government contractor, was jailed in Cuba in 2009 and accused of spying, Rieser spent years using back-channel diplomacy to secure his release, making multiple trips to Havana and enlisting the help of Pope Francis. The effort succeeded in 2014. According to the New York Times, once the deal was finalized and Obama called Leahy to thank him, the Vermont senator told the president, "I could not have done it without Tim Rieser."

Rieser brought that same determination to the Oppenheimer cause. In the summer of 2016, he penned a letter from Leahy, cosigned by Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), asking Obama to reinstate Oppenheimer's security clearance. That letter landed on the desk of secretary of energy Ernest Moniz.

"He's a nuclear physicist," Rieser said, "so we thought, If there's anyone who would want to clear Oppenheimer's name, you would think it would be him."

But reversing a 1954 decision on the security clearance of a scientist who died in 1967 was more nettlesome than it looked at first. However corrupt and flawed that process had been, Rieser said, Oppenheimer had lied to a federal investigator.

At issue, he explained, was the so-called "Chevalier incident." Haakon Chevalier was a professor of French literature at the University Of California, Berkeley who met Oppenheimer in 1937. The two became friends, and, in 1943, Chevalier and his wife dined at the Oppenheimers' home.

That evening, Chevalier mentioned to Oppenheimer that the U.S. government wasn't sharing its nuclear secrets with the Soviets, who were U.S. allies at the time. When Chevalier told Oppenheimer that he knew of someone who could get that information to the Russians through back channels, Oppenheimer called the idea treasonous and ended the discussion.

Oppenheimer later disclosed that conversation to general Leslie Groves, the U.S. Army officer who oversaw the Manhattan Project, but he didn't reveal Chevalier's identity. When a federal investigator interrogated him about it, Oppenheimer concocted a fake story to protect his friend.

Why would such historical details matter decades after the fact?

"Moniz was afraid of creating a standard for Oppenheimer that was different from those seeking a security clearance today," explained Rieser, who has a security clearance himself. Though he vehemently disagreed with the Department of Energy's legal argument, Rieser understood why Moniz wouldn't want to set a precedent of giving preferential treatment to someone based merely on their public stature.

As a concession, Moniz renamed a DOE fellowship in honor of Oppenheimer, which wasn't at all what Bird, Sherwin and Rieser had sought. In the meantime, Donald Trump was elected president, at which point Bird and Sherwin essentially gave up the fight.

But not Rieser. He made little progress during the Trump years, which often had a skeptical, if not antagonistic, relationship with science and scientists.

"Generally, when I try to solve a problem, I do everything I can until I finally feel like I've exhausted everything I can possibly do," he said. "I also felt it was so outrageous what had been done to Oppenheimer. It was pure vindictiveness and politics."

Carrying the Day

To make his case, Rieser had to show the government why the Oppenheimer decision still matters — a quest with personal resonance. After the war, Rieser's father, like Oppenheimer, was conflicted about the way the atomic bomb had been used. Having visited Hiroshima, he devoted much of the rest of his life to advocating for strict controls on nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Also like Oppenheimer, he once chaired the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization devoted to controlling nuclear weapons and other new technologies that can negatively affect humanity. Rieser was incensed that the government could exact retribution against scientists merely for expressing controversial or unpopular views.

"So when [Joe] Biden got elected," Rieser said, "I decided we should try again."

In June 2021, Rieser wrote a second letter to the DOE, signed by Leahy and the same three Democratic senators. When two months passed with no reply, he called "this guy I knew" at the department.

Ali Nouri had worked in the Senate for about a decade and had once sold Rieser a Ping-Pong table through Craigslist. After leaving the Hill, Nouri went to work for the Federation of American Scientists before Biden tapped him to be assistant secretary of congressional relations at the DOE.

Nouri replied to Rieser a few days later.

"'I think you're going to get the same answer,'" Rieser recalled Nouri telling him. "So I said, 'Then don't answer it. I'm going to write a different letter.'"

The underlying problem, Rieser explained, lay in the nature of the request. He couldn't ask the DOE simply to reinstate Oppenheimer's security clearance, because that would require a new hearing, one that was fair, impartial and, obviously, impossible, given that Oppenheimer is dead. Instead, Rieser decided to ask the department to "nullify" the 1954 decision.

Beginning in August 2021, Rieser drafted a third letter to Biden's secretary of energy, Jennifer Granholm. This one not only detailed the injustices and illegalities of the 1954 proceedings but also highlighted why the decision should be nullified. It read, in part:

Government scientists, whether renowned like Oppenheimer or a technician laboring in obscurity, including those who risk their careers to warn of safety concerns or to express unpopular opinions on matters of national security, need to know that they can do so freely and that their cases will be fairly reviewed based on facts, not personal animus or politics.

After more than a year of working on the letter, Rieser and Leahy got 42 other senators to sign it, including four Republicans: Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Ala).

Even with such bipartisan backing, Rieser said, he feared that the endorsement of 43 senators might not be enough to "carry the day." So he asked Thomas Mason, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to pen a letter in support. Mason did so and got all seven surviving former directors of the Los Alamos lab to sign it, too.

Next, Rieser contacted the heads of the Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, American Physical Society and Federation of American Scientists. Though Sherwin had died of lung cancer in 2021, Rieser asked Bird and Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, to pen similar letters to the energy secretary. It didn't hurt that Nolan's Oppenheimer was scheduled for release the following year.

"What I've learned over the years in Congress," Rieser explained, "is, if you're going to take on a difficult problem, you have to use every ounce of energy you can muster and stick with it no matter how long it takes."

In late August 2022, Rieser compiled all the supporting materials into a binder, then bicycled down to the DOE headquarters and hand-delivered it to Nouri to present to Granholm.

"And then I waited," he said.

On December 16, 2022, Granholm issued a five-page order vacating the Atomic Energy Commission's 1954 decision against Oppenheimer. She wrote:

When Dr. Oppenheimer died in 1967, Senator J. William Fulbright took to the Senate floor and said "Let us remember not only what his special genius did for us; let us also remember what we did to him." Today we remember how the United States government treated a man who served it with the highest distinction. We remember that political motives have no proper place in matters of personnel security. And we remember that living up to our ideals requires unerring attention to the fair and consistent application of our laws.

"It had everything that I could have hoped for," Rieser said. "Granholm felt, as senator Leahy and I did, that this is as relevant today as it was 70 years ago."

Even after Oppenheimer's vindication, Rieser felt that his work wasn't done. Knowing that millions of people would see Oppenheimer, he suggested to Nolan, whom he knew through Bird and Leahy's Batman cameos, that he include an epilogue to that effect; he even suggested the wording.

Ultimately, Nolan didn't include it. While Rieser has no hard feelings about not getting thanked in the movie himself — Senate staffers are accustomed to letting their bosses take credit for their work — he wishes that viewers of the film knew the final outcome. As he put it, "It's important that people know there is another chapter, and an important one, albeit many, many years later."

Rieser, who now works as a senior adviser to Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) hasn't remained entirely in the shadows. In addition to being featured in last month's New Yorker piece, he will be in two forthcoming documentaries about Oppenheimer's life.

For one, Rieser was interviewed in the late physicist's New Mexico house. While sitting in Oppenheimer's living room, he remembers thinking, "If only my parents could have been here! None of us could ever have imagined that I would be doing such a thing. It's amazing how life does come full circle."'

#Tim Rieser #Oppenheimer #Christopher Nolan #The Manhattan Project #Atomic Energy Commission #American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer #Kai Bird #Martin J. Sherwin #Los Alamos #Haakon Chevalier #Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists #President Obama #Jennifer Granholm #Richard Rhodes #The Making of the Atomic Bomb

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denimbex1986 · 1 year

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'But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die (Gen 2:17).

High in the sky on August 9, 1945, two B29s circled above the southern part of Japan. One of them was getting ready to drop a plutonium bomb dubbed “the Fat Man.” But it had developed a malfunction with its fuel pump, so after cloud cover made the military target of Kokura impossible, it was becoming urgent to shed its payload. This is how the second nuclear weapon ever used was detonated right over the heart of the most Catholic area of Japan, Urakami, significantly north of Nagasaki city and the Mitsubishi plant that was meant to be targeted. The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, painstakingly built by descendants of the persecuted Christians at the end of the nineteenth century on the very site where their forebears had been interrogated, was destroyed. The spiritual heirs to the twenty-six sixteenth-century martyrs of Nagasaki, along with their non-Christian compatriots, were vaporized, scorched, left homeless.

In Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Oppenheimer, someone states that the first bomb must be dropped in order to show the enemy what America was capable of. But the second bomb would demonstrate the will to keep dropping them, if necessary. For a Catholic, the question nags: where does Just War Theory get to raise its hand in all this? The nobler motives of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project had to do with ending war, not perpetuating it. “Is it big enough?” Niels Bohr asks the director of the project, Robert Oppenheimer. Meaning: will it make a sufficient impression to end the war, once and for all?

From its first reference to Prometheus, punished by the gods for stealing fire and giving it to man, Oppenheimer is punctuated by mythical and religious references (the book on which the film is based is entitled American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer). Perhaps the most disturbing of these are the words from the Bhagavad Gita, spoken by Vishnu to the warrior Arjuna, with which the father of the atomic bomb is said to have marked the successful detonation of the first nuclear test at Los Alamos in July 1945: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” An article on the Los Alamos website insists that Oppenheimer saw himself not as the god, but as the stricken hero, reluctant to go to war but obliged to do so. “To uphold dharma, the power which upholds the cosmos and society, Arjuna must do his duty, which is fight.”

In Nolan’s film, the human representative of Lord Vishnu—his high-priest, you might say—is Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, played with gruff conviction by Matt Damon. It is Groves who, after corralling the country’s most brilliant minds in a two-year effort to build a nuclear weapon before Nazi Germany could, gives Oppenheimer an immovable deadline. They had to have conclusive evidence of the atom bomb’s viability before the Yalta Conference in July 1945. By now Hitler had been defeated. So, what was the purpose of continuing with the project? The ends that justified the means were already being reconfigured.

Batter my heart, three person’d God. It is said (and the film references this) that Oppenheimer chose the code name “Trinity” for the first atomic test because of the John Donne poem that opens with these words. The unconscious depths from which the name arose in Oppenheimer’s mind are not available to us; but the poetry of Donne, with its tension between the sacred and the profane, was something that he shared with his former mistress, Jean Tatlock. At the time Oppenheimer dubbed the world-shattering event in the New Mexican desert with this most Christian of epithets, Jean had been dead for eighteen months. She had committed suicide. The hold of Tatlock on Oppenheimer’s psyche is something that Nolan takes pains to point up. The first time the viewer hears the famous words from the Bhagavad Gita is during their early sexual encounter.

What do you do with the snake you find, after you turn over the stone? This image is first raised by Neils Bohr in Cambridge, where the youthful Oppenheimer has apparently tried to kill his tutor with a poisoned apple. Whatever the truth behind this strange episode (it is apparently a story Oppenheimer told against himself), Nolan presents his Promethean protagonist as an obsessive visionary. Cillian Murphy’s intense and often disturbing performance drives this home. “Gravity gets to swallow everything,” as Oppenheimer says of the imploding stars that lead to black holes.

Later in the film, prompted by Bohr’s words about the serpent unleashed, Oppenheimer tries to rein in the consequences of the discovery he has helped to instrumentalize. This does not sit well with Cold War exigencies. Enter Lewis Strauss (a subtly psychopathic Robert Downey Junior), in whom wounded vanity combined with political ambition compel him to use Oppenheimer’s leftist history to destroy him. He succeeds, but is then hoisted on his own petard.

By the time we get to the end of the film, we have been drenched in every kind of power-play imaginable. While Cillian Murphy’s performance conveys the conscience-stricken horror gradually unfolding in Oppenheimer’s mind, Nolan draws his narrative arc to a close with the man, and only the man. Simultaneously on the cover of Time magazine, whilst being mocked by President Truman for speaking about having blood on his hands, the story ends in the corridors of power. As Strauss puts it: “Survival in Washington is about knowing how to get things done.”

*** Back on the ground, between the sixth and the ninth of August 1945, more than a hundred and twenty thousand Japanese civilians died immediately as the result of those two bombs, which we see leaving Los Alamos in their wooden packing cases. Hundreds of thousands died later of radiation poisoning, then cancer and other diseases resulting from the nuclear fallout. Then of course there were the victims of the atomic testing itself. Chris Nolan has referred to the geographical location of the Manhattan Project as “the desolation of where they built Los Alamos.” In fact, this was not a totally unpopulated area. The fallout from the first atomic test, not to mention the subsequent ones, affected the seemingly invisible inhabitants of the New Mexico desert. Hispanic farmers who kept sheep on the land, Navajo Indians whose territory it actually was (there is a fleeting reference to this in the film when a chastened, more circumspect Oppenheimer suggests giving the area “back to the Indians”). Not to mention wildlife. All these suffered the consequences of the atomic tests—and the rural communities went, for the most part, without compensation.

There is another film that I watched in the same week as I watched Oppenheimer, which has a somewhat different take on how the powerless suffer at the hands of worldly power. This is Alice Rohrwacher’s 2018 Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro). The film depicts another isolated and impoverished rural community, enslaved as unpaid tobacco growers by the local land-owner (chain-smoking is the one thing that runs through both films).

It is only when the landowner’s son pulls out a mobile phone that we realize these serf-like peasants are not living in some distant historical period. Finally, they are “liberated” by the carabinieri, who transport them to the city, where they are oppressed in a different way, forced to live in a disused oil tank near the railway tracks. In one scene, people seeking work are invited to bid for casual employment by reducing the hourly wage they are prepared to accept. The first one to be taken on offers to work for just one euro an hour.

What makes Lazzaro Felice special is a magical realist atmosphere that somehow shifts the burden of indignity away from the obvious victims. More than anything else, the mysterious central character of Lazzaro embodies the very thing that is so disturbing in the ethos depicted in Oppenheimer. A seemingly simple-minded young peasant who never aggresses against a single creature, Lazzaro evolves into a holy fool over whom death and time have lost their grip. When he falls down a steep hillside and by rights should be fatally injured, the local wolves refuse to harm him, just as the wolf of Gubbio refused to harm Saint Francis. The motif of the wolf is one that Rohrwacher brings in again at the end of the film, a witness to the vulpine mendacity of “civilized” society. It is not intended to be a Christian parable (the Church comes out as badly as anyone else), but yet it is. Lazzaro, who ceases to age whilst everyone else does, ends up bringing warmth and hope to those his life touches.

In Nagasaki, there was a real-life holy fool who bears comparison to this. His name is Takashi Nagai. He was a highly intelligent doctor specializing in radiology; he was also a Christian convert. Just as Lazzaro’s innocence exposes the corruption around him, the scandalous hermeneutic of Nagasaki’s bombing is put in relief by Nagai’s response. He exhorted his compatriots to forgive the atrocity done to them, and to rebuild with faith and trust. The Franciscan thread reappears here too, for the Franciscan monastery near Nagasaki, founded by St. Maximilian Kolbe in the 1930s, was spared destruction by the sheltered position its founder chose for it: on the other side of a mountain, allowing the friars to give invaluable help to the victims of the bombing.

For his part, throughout the six years that Nagai lived on after the bomb had incinerated his wife and given him severe radiation poisoning, Nagai lived in a makeshift hut and simply tried to be of service to others. With his hospital, not to mention his health, in ruins, he carried on practicing medicine. He wrote books and counseled those who lived in despair. He embraced the Hibakusha whose keloid scarring made them the social lepers of their time.

Not far from where Nagai lived, close to the Sanno Shinto shrine that was destroyed like the Cathedral, there stands a strange architectural remnant. The ceremonial gate to the original shrine, known as a Torii: one of its legs was obliterated in the atomic blast, and its twisted lintel is supported solely by the remaining leg. A ritual gateway smashed by the bid for a knowledge that brings death in its wake, it has been wrought into something resembling a Franciscan Tau, or cross. Like the saints who occasionally lighten the darkness of our world, the maimed structure should not still be standing. And yet it is.'

#Nagasaki #Oppenheimer #Leslie Groves #Niels Bohr #Fat Man #Christopher Nolan #American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer #The Manhattan Project #Bhagavad Gita #Better My Heart #John Donne #Trinity #Matt Damon #Lewis Strauss #Robert Downey Jr.#Lazzaro Felice #Alice Rohrwacher #Cillian Murphy #Jean Tatlock

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denimbex1986 · 1 year

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'As war raged across Europe in 1942, a team of scientists on the other side of the Atlantic were brought together to work on a top secret project - the development of an atomic bomb.

The Manhattan Project was led by the United States but a number of prominent British scientists were transferred to work on it, including Scottish physicist Sir Samuel Curran.

A new film about the development of the first nuclear weapons - Oppenheimer - follows the life of the nuclear physicist who was the director of the laboratory that designed the bombs - J Robert Oppenheimer.

Although Curran does not make an appearance in the film he was part of a team that worked on an important aspect of the project - the separation of isotopes of uranium.

The atomic bomb would not have been possible without the process, which today is called uranium enrichment.

The team's leader, American nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence, is played by Josh Hartnett in the film.

Curran was born in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, in 1912 but moved with his mother to live in Wishaw, North Lanarkshire, shortly after his birth.

He studied mathematics and natural philosophy at the University of Glasgow, followed by a PhD on research into methods of detecting radiation.

From there he went to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge to study, where he met nuclear pioneer Ernest Rutherford, who would die later that year.

Rutherford had taught Oppenheimer some years before and was described as the "the father of nuclear physics".

It was under his direction that students would become the first to split the atom in a controlled manner.

When an atom is split a huge amount of energy is released and it is this reaction which makes nuclear weapons possible.

On the outbreak of World War Two, Curran joined the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) and worked on the development of radar and the proximity fuse for explosives which proved instrumental in the destruction of German V-1 rockets.

In 1940 he married fellow colleague at the RAE Joan Strothers, a physicist who he had first met while at Cambridge.

Early in 1944 they went to the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley in California to work on the Manhattan project which was already under way.

While there, Curran invented the scintillation counter, a device similar to a Geiger counter which is used in laboratories around the world to this day to detect ionizing radiation.

What was the Manhattan Project?

In 1939, US President Franklin D Roosevelt received a letter from German physicist Albert Einstein warning that Germany might be trying to build an atomic bomb.

The Manhattan Project was the code name for the American-led effort to develop its own nuclear weapon, starting in 1942.

Research and production took place at more than 30 sites across the US, UK and Canada.

The project's weapons research laboratory was located at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and that was where the bulk of the project's research was conducted, under the direction of Oppenheimer.

On 16 July 1945, the world's first atomic bomb was tested at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert.

Less than a month later the US dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed by another on Nagasaki just three days later. Thousands died in the devastation.

The Japanese Emperor Hirohito broadcast a surrender message to his people via radio on 15 August and later a peace treaty was signed ending the war.

Terrible loss of life

Scottish historian Sir Thomas Devine talked to Curran before he died in 1998.

The physicist told Sir Tom that they had no idea how far along the Germans were with their atomic project so they felt it was vital to build the bomb before the Nazis did.

Sir Tom said: "He much regretted the terrible loss of life in Japan but insisted dropping the bomb was essential to ending the war in the east."

After the war, Curran returned to Scotland to work at the University of Glasgow despite being offered a post at the University of California.

Although the success of his university department gained it an international reputation, Curran left in 1955 to work on the development of the British hydrogen bomb.

Much later in life he told former MP Tam Dalyell that he did not agonise as much as others about his part in making the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs possible.

"But I did wonder where the ultimate results of my work and that of my colleagues would lead," he said.

Returning to Glasgow, Curran turned his attention to training the next generation of scientists and was invited to become the principal of the Royal College of Science and Technology.

Under his leadership it was merged with the Scottish College of Commerce to become a university - the first new one in Scotland for almost 400 years.

"It was enormous for the birth of the new University of Strathclyde to have a scientist of his eminence at the helm," Sir Tom said.

In the early 1990s he interviewed Curran, who had remained principal until 1980, and described him as "a man of gravitas and intellect" but without "pomposity or side".

"He did not do much research in his later years as a university principal but his record of scientific eminence before then speaks for itself," he said.

Curran died in 1998. That year his wife Joan - a talented and accomplished scientist in her own right - unveiled a plaque in the Barony Hall in Glasgow in his honour.

Two things in life especially angered him, according to an account of his life on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography website.

The very low salaries paid to scientists by comparison with businessmen and the failure to recognise how science and technology had helped to win WW2.'

#Oppenheimer #Sir Samuel Curran #The Manhattan Project #Ernest Lawrence #Josh Hartnett #Ernest Rutherford

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