In a key scene of Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, addresses a crowd of foot-stamping scientists, engineers, and staff. The father of the atomic bomb exudes an uncharacteristic ferocity: “The world will remember this day. It’s too soon to determine what the result of the bombing are, but I’ll bet the Japanese didn’t like it. I’m so proud, so proud of what you have accomplished. I just wish we’d had it in time to use against the Germans.”
In a key scene of Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, addresses a crowd of foot-stamping scientists, engineers, and staff. The father of the atomic bomb exudes an uncharacteristic ferocity: “The world will remember this day. It’s too soon to determine what the result of the bombing are, but I’ll bet the Japanese didn’t like it. I’m so proud, so proud of what you have accomplished. I just wish we’d had it in time to use against the Germans.”
Filmgoers know what comes next—the blinding flash, the deafening roar, the carbonized corpse—victory turned to ashes in the cheering mouths of those who forged an artificial sun.
Oppenheimer is many things: a reminder that serious movies can earn billions of dollars, a testament to the power of biography to serve as allegory, a memorial to those who tapped the secret dynamo in the spaces between protons. Now, it has won the Oscar for Best Picture.
But the film leaves out a core part of Oppenheimer’s story.
From his resignation from Los Alamos in October 1945 to the revocation of his security clearance in June 1954, Oppenheimer worked to rationalize and humanize nuclear policy. Should the U.S. government condition its arms buildup on prospects for mutual restraint? To what extent should humanitarian principles shape weapons work? To whom should nuclear experts direct their appeals, government officials or the citizens in whose name they served? Those are still potent questions today—but ones Nolan’s telling doesn’t have the time for.
The film itself is an adaptation. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. In translating the book to screen, Nolan (perhaps unavoidably) lost its essence. “On no one,” George F. Kennan, author of the United States’ Cold War containment doctrine, declared in his 1967 eulogy for Oppenheimer, “did there ever rest with greater cruelty the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength.”
As cinema, Oppenheimer dwells on powerful themes, most notably what physicist Herman Kahn dubbed the “ultimacy” of thermonuclear war. As Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer reveals to Albert Einstein in the Delphic dialogue that bookends the film, “We were worried that we’d start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world. … I believe we did.” In this spectacle of all-consuming destruction, however, Oppenheimer’s real-life conviction that the nuclear revolution was amenable to reason and ethics is lost.
The film’s denouement traces Oppenheimer’s downfall at the hands of Lewis Strauss—chair of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1953 to 1958—a self-made insider whose every vanity is brought to life by Robert Downey Jr.’s pinpoint smirks. Yet foregrounding Strauss’s personal animosity toward Oppenheimer—who had a dazzling knack for condescension and self-sabotage—effaces the real policy disagreements that alienated the scientist from the national-security state during the early Cold War.
As the second half of Bird and Sherwin’s biography attests, however quixotic it may seem in hindsight, Oppenheimer was driven by a belief that nuclear weapons were manageable. At heart, within Oppenheimer’s post-1945 interventions inhered a powerful conviction that nuclear policy ought to reflect the values of the society that produced it.
This was apparent in three initiatives that Oppenheimer treats in passing: Oppenheimer’s plan to internationalize atomic energy, his proposal for a moratorium on the “Super” hydrogen bomb, and his appeals to democratize nuclear-policy debates.
Oppenheimer’s most famous contribution to nuclear policy was the Acheson-Lilienthal report (named after then-Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Tennessee Valley Authority Director David Lilienthal, to whom Oppenheimer’s expert panel reported), which proposed a scheme to transfer worldwide uranium and thorium resources, uranium-enrichment and plutonium-reprocessing facilities, nuclear reactors, and atomic ordnance to the United Nations. Oppenheimer’s aim was not the abolition of the U.S. stockpile of atomic bombs per se but “the discontinuance or transfer of [it] to the jurisdiction” of a U.N. Atomic Development Authority in whose hands would then rest “deterrents to the initiation of schemes of aggression.”
When then-U.S. President Harry Truman appointed Bernard Baruch, a New York financier with large holdings in mining companies, as U.S. delegate to the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission, the Acheson-Lilienthal report morphed into the Baruch Plan, which proposed preserving the U.S. nuclear monopoly and adding a provision excluding military interventions against suspected proliferators from the freshly negotiated veto held by permanent Security Council members (the Soviet Union in particular). With the Soviet nuclear weapon program well underway thanks in part to uranium deposits that far exceeded Oppenheimer’s estimates, then-Soviet Permanent Representative to the United Nations Andrei Gromyko made an equally implausible counteroffer: Ban the use and even the possession of nuclear weapons.
With Oppenheimer at its helm, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee (GAC) likewise offered measured, constructive, humanitarian alternatives to the quantum leap in the U.S.-Soviet arms race that the hydrogen bomb, or “Super,” would trigger. The film relates Oppenheimer’s widely shared doubts about the technical viability of a three-stage, fusion-powered device. After the Soviet nuclear breakthrough in August 1949, such doubts were augmented by the GAC’s judgment that the hydrogen bomb was only fit for use as a city-killer. Majority and minority reports were drafted. The former cautioned that the bomb “might become a weapon of genocide.”
In their minority opinion, physicists Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi (but not Oppenheimer) went further, declaring that the hydrogen bomb by “its very nature … cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide.” It was, in other words, “necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.” Fermi had married into a Jewish family with whom he fled dictator Benito Mussolini’s Italy in 1938. Rabi grew up in the Jewish ghetto in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. This was not an abstract issue for them.
Where the minority would have renounced thermonuclear arms altogether, under Oppenheimer’s influence the majority counselled restraint. It recommended that the U.S. government observe a moratorium, during which time it would greatly increase its stockpile of classic atom bombs. Again, Oppenheimer advised not unilateral disarmament but nuclear deterrence with a door to cooperation left cracked open.
Oppenheimer ends where it began: a spectacle of unquenchable flames across the darkened screen, Prometheus’s gift and curse to humanity. Punctuating Ludwig Göransson’s swelling string arrangement is, again, the staccato sound of stamping feet.
But has Oppenheimer rekindled public interest in the nuclear question, even as Russian President Vladimir Putin slings blustering threats against Ukraine and the West and every nuclear power modernizes its arsenal? There are signs of a renewed interest. The New York Times has launched a new opinion series, “At the Brink.” The estate of Marty Sherwin, a much-missed presence among nuclear historians, has endowed fellowships for emerging scholars in the fields of nuclear policy and history research.
Nuclear weapons have grown more precise, less genocidal, and fewer in number since the Cold War arms race peaked in the 1980s. By the same token, their use has grown more imaginable. Oppenheimer’s policy preference—battlefield and theater nuclear weapons rather than strategic bombing—has become, by dint of technological and strategic circumstance, an increasingly likely paradigm. The U.S. invasion of Iraq and Russian invasion of Ukraine, however incomparable legally and ethically, have both undermined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
The recently operationalized Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, meanwhile, has widened divisions between nuclear-armed states, allies that shelter anxiously beneath those states’ nuclear umbrellas, countries on the nuclear threshold, and the vast majority of states whose practical ambitions can never include a nuclear strike force. Both Russia and the United States have developed new low-yield nuclear weapons. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty has been effectively shredded.
In an era of rising nuclear disorder, Oppenheimer, alas, invites despair. As Bird and Sherwin’s biography reminds us, just as Oppenheimer’s human touch coaxed men and women to genius in Los Alamos, only when warmed by humanitarian feeling can cold rationality identify viable policies. On hearing Oppenheimer’s metaphor of the nuclear powers poised like “two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life,” then-U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower intuitively understood, later explaining to his closest aide that “atomic weapons strongly favor the side that attacks aggressively and by surprise. This the United States will never do … [and] we never had any of this hysterical fear of any nation until atomic weapons appeared upon the scene.”
Two years later, with Eisenhower’s complicity, the U.S. government ejected Oppenheimer from its advisory ranks. His final public appeal had been to better educate American citizens about the nuclear shadow under which they now lived. Following the failure of the Acheson-Lilienthal report and Truman’s decision to ignore the GAC report and build the hydrogen bomb, in 1953 Oppenheimer had addressed the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where he cast nuclear science and technology as “one ingredient of a shield: a shield composed also in part of the great industrial power of America, and in part of the military and, even more, the political weaknesses of the Soviet Union.” While U.S. arms might remain unmatched, neither its industrial strength nor the political weakness of potential adversaries can be taken for granted.
For Oppenheimer, these characteristics were mere outgrowths of deeper forces. “The political vitality of our country largely derives from two sources,” he elaborated before his elite audience at the Manhattan think tank. “One is the interplay, the conflict of opinion and debate, in many diverse and complex agencies, legislative and executive, which contribute to the making of policy. The other is a public opinion which is based on confidence that it knows the truth.”
Thankfully, decades have passed since the nuclear enterprise was so shrouded by secrecy. The pertinent facts are more available than ever. What remains needed is for a broad swath of the public to approach the subject with the same sense of possibility, not futility, that Oppenheimer himself so believed in.
The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense or its components, to include the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Nikkei Editorial
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
visit website
