- Yesterday I finally watched Christopher Nolan’s much-celebrated 2023 movie “_ Oppenheimer _.” (Cillian Murphy playing Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer.)
- The Manhattan Project, led by Dr. Oppenheimer, was begun in 1942, when Ayn Rand was finishing up “_ The Fountainhead. _” (It was published on May 7, 1943.)
- Though Dr. Oppenheimer eventually got acclaim as the “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” he was only the organizer of a collective effort of many dozens of scientists and engineers. Dr. Oppenheimer was a genius, and he was a theoretical physicist, but the film makes clear that he was by no means the sole or main inventor of the A-bomb.
- While watching this film, I was surprised how many Communists and Communist sympathizers there were among the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project.
- It’s almost as if Communists did invent the first A-bomb, except not in the USSR, but in Los Alamos, New Mexico!
- Dr. Oppenheimer was clearly a Communist fellow traveler, at least. His wife, mistress, and brother were all Communist Party members, as were most of his close friends.
- Einstein, whose theoretical work led to the A-bomb, was a self-declared Socialist.
- Klaus Fuchs, a scientist on the Manhattan project, was a Communist who relayed secrets of the A-bomb to the Soviet government.
- The building of the first A-bomb within 3 years’ time took a massive, Army-coordinated, collective government effort costing billions of taxpayer dollars.
- The movie seems to be mostly about showing us a contradiction within Dr. Oppenheimer:
- One the one hand, Dr. Oppenheimer longed for the fame, credit, and social esteem as the builder of the first A-bomb, and as a scientist who helped the Allies win the war.
- But on the other hand, Dr. Oppenheimer felt shame and guilt over providing humanity with a weapon by which it might destroy all of humanity or at least kill billions of innocent people.
- In this film, the character of Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey, Jr.) is the one who directly states this contradiction in the character of Dr. Oppenheimer.
- I can’t help but think about how, in our time, there are various Manhattan Project-like efforts (some are government projects, some are private business projects) to build the first machine capable of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) (i.e. a machine mind that far exceeds human mental abilities in all ways), since it is widely believed that whoever achieves AGI first could quickly rule the world.
- Elon Musk said a few days ago that there is a 10% to 20% change that AGI will cause the extinction of humanity, but he thought it was still worth the risk to create AGI, given the benefits it might provide.
- But plenty of other engineers and scientists have more serious qualms about creating AGI, just as Dr. Oppenheimer had qualms about building an A-bomb and the H-bomb.
- History repeats itself; it seems.
I think a more apt metaphor is that it rhymes. Like dropping multiple pebbles into a lake the ripples will have similar reoccurring paths but not identical.
LB,
Thank you for mentioning this film. We finally got to watch it last week.
Overall, I disliked it intensely. Every time they had a little opportunity to teach an elementary amount about quantum mechanics, they instead made the usual dumb-ass misleading metaphors, and when they wanted to give a window into Oppenheimer’s outstanding facility in mathematical physics, instead of offering any public education, they degenerated to the regular Hollywood casting of high effectiveness as shaman-like and “feel the force.”
During the first third of the film, the inter-splicing of the later AEC committee interrogations with the early life of Oppie leading to setting up the Manhattan Project was distracting, annoying, and spoiling of those earlier years in his story. They eventually diminished the shifting to the later proceedings and let the development and testing phase in NM go forward nicely as an unspoiled story. Oppie was in real life later torn over the decision they had made, and the line from the Hindu literature was thought of and mentioned by him in connection with the decision. I knew those things before this film. I did learn one thing from the film. I had always just assumed that Oppie was from Europe. He was a native New Yorker.
I hated the way they infused a darkness over every stage of his professional life. Even the later clearing of his name, and Johnson awarding him a medal, they covered with darkness.
I liked the character they created as Truman. True to all I’ve heard. My father, who was a civilian executive at a SAC base during the height of the Cold War, had great respect for Truman and the motto and model “The buck stops here.” My father had entered the Navy, finished basic training, and was shipping out of San Francisco when we dropped the bomb 8/6/45. So it was feasible, due to his continued life, for me to come about three years later.
Downey’s acting was fantastic in portraying the evil character.
The following is reported of Oppenheimer’s grandchildren:*
Quote
Dr. Dorothy Oppenheimer Vanderford, is a technical writer based in southern Nevada, where she works for the Nevada National Security Site, another nuclear testing facility.
Speaking to News 3LV, Vanderford said her family did not contribute to the making of the movie. After seeing “Oppenheimer,” she felt “positive about it.” She called her grandfather, whom she never met, a “real patriot.”
Charles Oppenheimer works in software and writes op-eds about nuclear power, in light of his grandfather’s work. His Twitter bio says he represents the “family of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” He has two children, per his website.
In an interview with J. Robert Oppenheimer’s biographer, Dorothy Vanderford spoke about living in New Mexico, and how that connects the generations.
“It gave me an appreciation for self-sufficiency and self-reliance, and I absolutely trusted my Dad in all areas to take care of us. When we would be driving through really deep snow and getting stuck, he could get us out of any kind of jam. I learned a lot about how to live on land and in nature. I absolutely appreciate that. I think that is something that’s passed down through my family, from Robert Oppenheimer, through to my Dad, to me. In my case, it may be ending with me,” she said.
Rand worked on a screenplay (for Hal Wallis) for a movie about the atomic bomb. She said in a letter that “it is the most difficult writing job I have ever attempted.” It required a lot of research, including interviews with Oppenheimer and Groves. She completed 70 pages of script (which I believe is most of movie script). The project was sold to another studio in 1946 and was never produced. Chapter 9 of the book Journals of Ayn Rand (1997)_ _shows her plans for a proper approach for such a film, which she communicated to Wallis. The working title for the film was Top Secret. I see in her jottings that she did not think the fascist and communist countries, the statist dictatorships, could in fact create the bomb. Only America and England attain high levels of the machine age. She is silent, in these notes, on France. She wanted the film, I say, to sing as: “Only in America, only in a free country, can there be such high accomplishments.” She did not think of the atomic bomb as a creation of the government, but a result of free cooperation of free men. I do not entirely agree with all that. Her theme was the mind against brute force, therefore what is right is freedom from compulsion, the methods of free enterprise against methods of the totalitarian state.
She evidenced that she had a good deal of knowledge of what physics developments had preceded and were necessary for creation of the bomb. Chapter 9 shows Rand’s prepared list of questions for Oppenheimer as well as her notes from that interview of him (1/8/46) and a second one. Oppenheimer mentioned to her that Hiroshima day was a Sunday, his brother called and they went for a ride (auto or horses?) and took the children swimming.
In a 1961 interview (by B. Branden, I expect), Rand recalled that “Oppenheimer set the character of Stadler in my mind, which is the reason for the first name of Robert. It’s the type that Oppenheimer projected—that enormous intelligence, somewhat bitter, but very much the gentleman and scholar, and slightly other-worldly. Even his own office was what I described for Stadler—that almost ostentatious simplicity.”
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I was disappointed in the movie overall because of the lack of science and a showing of the developmental work , especially ‘battling’ for time on the super cool new machines at Princeton . I appreciated some of the history of the personal stories, even while assuming a wide berth for ‘poetic license’. Not being familiar with the full story , the movie left me with the idea that I need to revisit or even visit for the first time the details of the Rosenbergs’ fate.
- I agree with those who were disappointed by the lack of science and engineering details in the Christopher Nolan film “_ Oppenheimer. _”
- The Manhattan Project scientists and engineers overcame some colossal technical challenges under a super high-pressure deadline involving super-high stakes (fear of the real possibility that the Nazis would end up ruling the world).
- The film does mention that the Nazi atomic scientists were focusing on heavy water, which Dr. Oppenheimer said meant that they had taken a wrong turn and so were behind the Manhattan Project in terms of being close to being able to build a working atomic bomb,