I actually got out and watched a movie in the theater on its opening weekend on Sunday. I hadn’t gone to movie theaters much for several years, but I made an exception for this one for several reasons. Many of the key events in the movie took place here in New Mexico. And much of the movie was filmed here. It has an outstanding cast and was directed by Christopher Nolan who has made some great movies. But also, it touched on many elements of my Air Force career as well as some historical reading I’ve done over the years. So that gave me extra interest and I wanted to see how Nolan’s work compared to my reading, work, and conceptions.
I delayed a few days in posting this so I could take a mental break and reassess my thoughts before posting it. Also I wanted to look at some other people’s reactions to the same movie and consider how their response might better inform my own. I won’t try a direct reaction to those people but I will offer some additional thoughts in a sort of postlude to the original article.
Personal Background
I’ve written about nuclear matters before, but my career gave me a lot of connections with the Manhattan Project and its consequences. While in the Air Force I did a little of everything nuclear. My first assignment was as Deputy Combat Crew Commander (DCCC) for a Titan II missile crew. After that, I was selected to go to the Air Force’s own accredited graduate school, the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), and earn a Master’s Degree in Nuclear Effects. As part of that, we took three courses on nuclear fission and fusion which we jokingly referred to as Bombs I, II and III. We did a field trip to The Ohio State University to run some experiments on their nuclear reactor. And I worked with some actual radioactive materials, electroplating sample slides with Polonium to use for measuring their Alpha particle spectra and analyze spectra from other radioactive elements such as Plutonium and Americium. I also took a health physics course which looked at the effects of nuclear radiation on the human body. Much of that was based on the unfortunate effects on the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After graduating from AFIT, I was assigned to what was the Air Force Weapons Laboratory (AFWL). I did analyses of the effects produced by nuclear weapons and how our military equipment, mainly aircraft, needed to be protected against them.
Then I was sent back to the University of Michigan for further graduate work in nuclear engineering. I completed the classes and earned candidate status, but didn’t have time to complete actual research before going back to military duty, this time with the Field Command of the Defense Nuclear Agency (FCDNA). That allowed me to participate in some of the last underground nuclear weapons effects tests done by the U.S.
I also got to observe the Misty Picture test at White Sands. This was an explosion of 4695 tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil (ANFO), equivalent to 3900 tons of TNT. It gave a blast effect equivalent to an 8 Kiloton nuclear explosion, about a third of the size of the Trinity test. I also got a chance to actually enter the Trinity site and look on the ground for little bits of trinitite, the crystallized mineral formed from the nuclear explosion.
Then I managed a small program using radioactive Cobalt-60 to test infrared detector (IR) arrays for use in space. I managed the safety and security program for one of our major nuclear weapons. In that role, I got to travel to central Nevada to observe a B-52 drop the bomb containers (with the nuclear packages removed) for B-61 and B-83 bombs.
I finished up by helping analyze the damage done by the radiation in the Van Allen belts to a satellite boosted from low Earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit. And I got to visit both the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), which is named for Ernest O. Lawrence. He features prominently in the movie and worked with Oppenheimer at the University of California in Berkeley. (The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory which I mentioned in the first version of this is a different organization at a different location.)
So I had a special interest and the movie did not disappoint. It was shot in 70 mm iMax film format. There are only a few theaters where you can actually watch it on film, the closest being in Phoenix and Dallas. So I had to settle for a digital iMax instead. But it was still enjoyable and an almost stunning experience, especially only four rows back from the screen. It opens with a visual of the roiling plasma surface of a star and Oppenheimer describes what happens to a star in its dying minutes and how a large enough star will collapse until space is so warped that even light can’t escape from it. He didn’t develop a full concept of a black hole, but he was making a start.
But the main opening scenes are actually set in the 1954 hearing that led to not renewing Oppenheimer’s Q Clearance and his departure from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Most of the body of the movie is set as a series of retrospectives about matters brought up in those hearings. Another key event later in the movie is the Senate hearing and vote in 1959 to confirm Lewis Strauss as Secretary of Commerce. Strauss had already met Leo Szilard but served in the Naval Reserve and was kept out of the Manhattan Project until he was appointed one of the first commissioners of the AEC in 1946.
A key factor throughout the movie is Oppenheimer’s relations with the Communist Party during the 30s. Communist groups were common on college campuses at that time. Many people were disenchanted with capitalism after the Wall Street crash in 1929 and the subsequent Depression. And there was a perhaps naïve thought that the American Communist Party was somehow distinct from the Soviet Communist Party.
In addition, the Spanish Civil War was being fought from 1936-1939 between the Republicans who included socialists and communists and were supported by the Soviet Union and the Nationalists who included conservatives and traditionalists and were supported by Germany and the Condor Legion. There was no “liberal democratic capitalist” side to support.
Also, even joining the American Federation of Teachers or the American Civil Liberties Union (which Herbert Hoover considered a communist front) could be a radical act. Oppenheimer’s brother and his wife and Oppenheimer’s first wife were party members. But Oppenheimer maintained a certain distance, refusing to intellectually commit to the party. But it opened the door for accusations later.
A crude analogy would be with the anti-war movement in the U.S. in the late 60s and early 70s. A lot of people had figured out that the Viet Nam War was not a good thing and anti-war protests, both large and small, were common on college campuses. Even those of us in the Army and Air Force ROTC programs likely had several classmates and acquaintances who opposed the war.
An early scene involves Oppenheimer meeting Ernest O. Lawrence in his lab at Berkeley shortly after Oppenheimer earned his PhD in Germany and returned to the U.S. Oppenheimer was not a good experimentalist, but he went on to collaborate with Lawrence on research using the cyclotron. Some of the lab equipment that I used in the 70s would have fit right into that lab. Other items were much more advanced internally (thanks to transistors) but didn’t look much different on the outside. Lawrence helped persuade General Leslie Groves to choose Oppenheimer to head up the atomic bomb project.
Oppenheimer who had a ranch in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico chose the site near the Los Alamos Boys School because it was isolated and had plenty of open space. The overall layout would have been much like the Mercury Base Camp on the Nevada Test Site where I stayed during the weeks while I was working there. That site was started in 1950, only a few years after the end of the Manhattan Project, and was active until 1992 when nuclear testing ended. And of course the Los Alamos lab was on top of the mountain, not looking up to the mountains.
Oppenheimer was able to use his national reputation and connections with scientists across the country to recruit people like Richard Feynman who had earned his PhD from Princeton in 1942 and married his childhood sweetheart Arline Greenbaum even though he knew she was seriously ill with tuberculosis. Oppenheimer found a place for her in a Presbyterian Sanitarium in Albuquerque and Feynman would take the train down to Albuquerque on weekends to visit her.
A big issue for the Manhattan Project was security. The project relied mainly on physical isolation and censoring communications. But the army attempted to impose more strict compartmentalization and that conflicted with the need for scientists to talk openly and fully about their problems and share ideas about how to handle them. Eventually Oppenheimer supported the scientists, at least within the lab. But facilities like Oak Ridge were so compartmentalized that the people building and operating the gaseous diffusion lines that enriched the U-235 content didn’t know what their equipment was really supposed to be doing. Feynman clarified some things for them on an inspection visit. In particular, he explained the safety risks of enriched uranium compared with natural uranium, how putting it in water could be really bad, and helped devise safety procedures. Feynman is played by Jack Quaid in the movie. I didn’t notice any dialogue for him, but there are couple scenes of someone playing the bongos and that is undoubtedly Feynman.
Another key figure is Dr Edward Teller whom I actually met on a bus tour of Kirtland AFB and the Sandia National Laboratory. Teller was a somewhat divisive figure at the laboratory. Feynman wrote about him coming up with 3 crazy ideas every day and the rest of them having to figure out whether any of them would work. Teller was initially in charge of the Theoretical (T) Division. But when he preferred to work on his idea for the ‘Super’, a fission-triggered fusion device, Oppenheimer moved him into his own group to focus on that.
The depiction of the Trinity event itself is excellent. The location certainly looks like the White Sands Missile Range, which includes the Trinity site. As usual, Nolan did a detailed recreation of the setup for controlling the detonation. Most of the top people chose to observe the test from the closest observation point. Richard Feynman wanted to see it directly, so he watched from the more distant location which the movie says was 20,000 feet or about 4 miles away. (I might be wrong about this location and will try to update it.) By my calculation, the shock wave traveling at the speed of sound would have arrived there in about 18 seconds which pretty well matches what happened in the movie. On a technical note, the fireball creates a huge volume of super-heated air that quickly rises into the sky. At the same time the blast wave from the explosion pushes the air out along the ground. When that dissipates, there is a greatly reduced pressure at the blast site and a second, weaker rush of air in the opposite direction comes back to equalize the pressure. I don’t think the movie included that.
A lot of the retrospectives over the years have centered on the morality of using such a terrible weapon and possible other options. Oppenheimer and the other scientists in the project were well aware of what they were creating. There was a wide range of emotions after the test, from elation to fatigue to relief to remorse. Many of the scientists left the government afterwards to advocate for controlling these weapons and avoiding using them again.
But many like Teller wanted to proceed with the H Bomb project to stay ahead of the Soviets, especially after they detonated their own device in 1949. Oppenheimer got into trouble mainly because he advocated against further expansion and for some sort of control. This plays out in the movie.
What really distresses me is how casually leaders like Trump and Putin can talk about using nuclear weapons seemingly with no concern for the consequences.
I second the thoughts of John Donne who inspired Ernest Hemingway’s novel set in the Spanish Civil War.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
References
For a thorough and well-researched look into the Manhattan Project, I recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It has been updated with a 25th Anniversary edition.
For more information on the life of Richard Feynman, I recommend his books.
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character
The movie was based on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Kat Bird and Martin Sherwin are given writing credits for the movie.
Additional resources
Watching this movie and various reviews and responses prompted YouTube to dig up some interesting older videos that provide additional background and let you hear some of the key participants speak for themselves.
- Manhattan Project Trinity stock footage
- Kai Bird (author of Oppenheimer) interview
You can hear Walter Isaacson, an outstanding biographer in his own right, talk with Kai Bird about Oppenheimer and his book. (The the author died in 2021.)
- Third Atomic Bomb Attack
I won’t directly vouch for the history but this gives a lot of information about what was happening inside the Japanese government leading up to and after the first two Atomic Bomb attacks through to the signing of the peace treaty.
- Oppenheimer’s Gamble – The Plutonium Crisis
There are several short segments of explosive tests conducted at Los Alamos as part of the program to develop the plutonium bomb (Fat Man) which was used in the Trinity test. The movie doesn’t give any specifics and the physics is a bit deep. But this gives a good overview of the design and testing that went into developing this device which is the basis for practically all nuclear weapons produced later.
- Robert Oppenheimer Interview CBS 1965
You can hear him tell a little bit in his own words. 20 years later, he was still much aware of how terrible these bombs were. But he still thought their use was necessary.
- Edward Teller interview 1990
This is VERY long and I only listened to the opening. I think Bennie Safdie does a good job portraying Teller. But, you can hear Teller’s actual accent was somewhat thicker.
- Richard Feynman lecture (audio only) ‘Los Alamos From Below’
I haven’t listened to this yet. I expect much of it is also written up in Feynman’s books.
I just discovered this discussion by an actual nuclear weapons physicist. I agree with most of his assessments. I have one quibble about Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP). What he refers to is a High-altitude EMP (HEMP), which happens with a detonation in near outer-space. This was detected in <a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime” >Operation Starfish Prime</a>.
A low altitude nuclear burst also produces a burst of EM. But it does not get the widespread interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field and is much smaller and localized in effect.
Overall Assessment
The movie is visually impressive. I love the northern New Mexico landscape and the outdoor scenes from around Los Alamos really show it off. The cast and acting are outstanding. Cillian Murphy completely looks and conveys the part of Robert Oppenheimer. Robert Downey, Jr. does an excellent job as Lewis Strauss. It took me a couple scenes before I recognized the actor behind the character. Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer and Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock bring both of their characters to life. Their screen time is limited but you get to see them as real and distinct people. Matt Damon holds his own as General Leslie Groves. And Josh Hartnett is good as Ernest O. Lawrence. Kenneth Brannagh has a short but important role as Niels Bohr. And Gary Oldman does a good bit part at the end as Harry Truman.
There are a lot of details and back-and-forth scene cutting but the movie kept me engaged for the entire 3 hours. There are some cinematic tricks a few times which help get you into the emotional response Oppenheimer has at some times. They can be a bit distracting, but mostly they work. I rated it a 10. It is currently running 8.7 on IMDB.d
Movie Experience
Judging from all the cars in the parking lot and the long lines for popcorn, the movie theater business is looking up a bit this summer. Oppenheimer came in at 82.4 million for the first weekend, behind Barbie at 162 million but ahead of MI Part One which I’ll probably watch some time and Sound of Freedom which I plan to avoid. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny had scored 60 million. Having two radically different movies premiere on the same weekend helped pique interest and many people chose to view them as a double feature.
Based on the trailers, there are several good movies coming up in the iMax format. It’s a much more intense experience for movies shot in that format. And Oppenheimer really shows off the possibilities of this format. If I watch another of these movies, I’ll try to get a seat further back from the screen and looking more directly at it. The fourth row was OK but still a bit awkward with the low viewing angle.
Postlude and critical afterthoughts.
I watched a few videos that were critical of the movie. I won’t try to directly answer any of them, but I will address some of their themes.
- This isn’t the movie they wanted to be made. In particular, it doesn’t present the suffering of the Japanese victims of the attacks or the residents of New Mexico in the Tularosa basin who were exposed to fallout. One could envision a movie about the final weeks of the war presented from both the Japanese and Allied/American point of view, somewhat like the movies Tora Tora Tora and the fist Midway movie which used both American and Japanese casts and film crews. But it would tell a substantially different story. And I don’t think it would give the same psychological insight into the feelings of the people who actually created these weapons, how they perceived the horror they caused, and how it drove their desire for a more rational and perhaps safer control of nuclear weapons.
- The movie presents a white European imperialist point of view. Again probably true. Although the scientists involved in the bomb project came from many different countries and a number f them were Jewish or of Jewish ancestry, there were no African-Americans or Asian-Americans who worked on the project that I know of. But we shouldn’t ignore that Japan was an Empire and had been fighting a war of conquest in China for many years even before the start of World War II.
- We should not have insisted on unconditional surrender and negotiated a peace with Japan. That option might have been locked out by decisions made at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences and was certainly beyond the control of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project. But what sort of government would have been left in place in Japan and how long would the negotiations take? The USSR invaded Manchuria on August 9, the same day as the Nagasaki attack. They had already been transferring troops and supplies to the east for three months after Germany surrendered. And they would certainly have proceeded with their attack even if the bombs had not been dropped. In that scenario, they would likely have conquered more of China and perhaps all of Korea before the end of the war. They were also considering invading the northern part of Japan.
- We should have used the bomb on Germany. That was never a real option because the bomb wasn’t yet available. And even if one had been completed in March 1945, there wasn’t really a good target to use It on. The remaining German war production was mostly in underground bunkers. German cities were already in rubble and Allied troops were fighting increasingly divided groups of the German army.
- America has blood on its hands dating back at least to the Indian Wars of the early 19th century which continues to this day. Bombing Japan was just another racist act. There was plenty of xenophobia and racism during World War II, especially with the internment of our Japanese immigrant citizens. And it is a problem that continues to this day and people of conscience have to continue to fight back against it. But despite two years of remaining neutral, we were caught up in this war. Using the bombs was not a good choice. But I think it was a necessary one. And I don’t think it was particularly a racist choice. At least it gave Emperor Hirohito justification to broadcast his surrender in spite of opposition from his own government and an attempted coup. And we don’t have to wait for a warmonger like Curtis LeMay or Vladimir Putin to go ahead and use nuclear weapons for us to know how terrible the effects will be.
Edit notes: Second edit posted 18 Aug 2023.
Creating the Future 