Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023) Toxic Grafity Reflections
9th August, 2023. Nagasaki Day
Those of us of the ‘Punk Generation’ grew up in the shadow of The Bomb. Perhaps more so, if it is not judgmental to say so, than those born after us. I had friends who had got seriously into self-harm and Class A drug addiction not because of personal or family issues, but out of living under that nightmare. Millennials and Gen Z can seem such forgetful generations. But perhaps more than that, us late Boomer and Gen X punks were also more aware of The Bomb, had our lives more dominated by it, those born before us too.
My late father Walter fought in the last year of the Second World War in Europe. Like many who had had that experience, he didn’t like to talk about The War. Unlike Britain’s reactionary nostalgic Little Englanders who drone on and on about a war they are too young to have known. I once asked him, back in the mid-‘80s when nuclear tensions were again at a height, what he thought when he first heard of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese surrender three weeks later. He said, ‘Do you want an honest answer, Lad?’ (He always called me ‘Lad’, even in my middle-age.) I said ‘Of course’, he replied ‘I thought Thank Fuck for That, now I know I have a life ahead of me!’ By that he meant that he had fought in the war in Europe, felt he was lucky to have survived that, but was convinced that had he been deployed to the Far East, to be part of what had been codenamed Operation Downfall, the Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands, he would have been killed. For him the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, from the perspective of a young conscript (in old age he wasn’t proud of how he had felt then), a reprieve from a death sentence. With the bombs, he knew he had a life ahead of him, which he went on to live to the full. For him, but not those people getting up about their daily business in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th August 1945, The Bomb brought life.
This summer’s Hollywood blockbuster movie Oppenheimer is perhaps the first serious feature film treatment of The Bomb since the UK TV movie Threads (1984), made at a time when NATO and the Warsaw Pact faced each other off during the endgame of the Cold War that had so shaped lives since 1948, deploying tactical nuclear weapons systems against each other in Europe (US Tomahawk cruise missiles vs Soviet SS20s, each single missile containing warheads about a hundred times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan in the summer of 1945). When Two Tribes Go To War.
They had seemed to me to have been going to (cold) war a long time. One of my earliest childhood memories was of my parents and grandparents watching a grainy monochrome TV set as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded (another was the Kennedy Assassination), why were the adults so anxious? My parents (they would now be called ‘aspirationals’, although it was easier to be ‘aspirational’ as the You’ve Never Had It So Good years melded into the bright light of the White Heat of Technology) moved out of south London to a well-to-do part of west Kent, close to Biggin Hill, where I went to primary school. Biggin Hill had been the main fighter base defending London during the 1940 Battle of Britain, and that battle was deeply embedded in the local culture. Back then, the now long-defunct RAF Biggin Hill was still an active airbase, I grew up to the sound of Lightnings, Phantoms, and Vulcans of afterburner. It was also a Cold War nuclear target, and the local newspaper, the Biggin Hill News, advertised the monthly tests of the three-minute warning siren in advance, so as not to cause alarm.
The cliche of Punk as being about mouthy pissed and speeding yobby punk rockers has, of course, much truth to it. But we were also quite autodidactic, this aspect of Punk remains quite ignored, but we were quite avid readers. A significant part of that reading was The War and The Bomb. Aside from the crude mass culture Second World War porn that was ubiquitous at that time and which still continued to shape, even dominate, emergent teenage masculinities in the 1970s, there were also quite readily available (if you could be bothered to look) excellent documentary and literary materials on The War and The Bomb. We read these quite avidly. Anarchist Punk in particular was especially focused on the darkest aspects of the Second World War, and what this bloody and genocidal recent history boded for what ever kind of future lay before us. No Future was more than merely a chorus to a Sex Pistols song. As Toxic Grafity went from being a bands and gigs review fanzine like many others to an anarchist-existentialist ‘zine attempting to capture the aesthetics and politics of anarcho-punk in words and image, A Reality Of Horror!, The Bomb grew ever more prominent in it. One issue carried two essays (one of six pages, the other of three), three poems, and several art works all ruminating and processing various aspects of nuclear annihilation. Like Cavafy’s barbarians, it seemed at once both a problem confronting us and a perverse kind of solution to our angst.
Because of all this, I looked forward to seeing the Oppenheimer movie in anticipation, dedication, and trepidation. Over the decades, I have sought to keep up with my reading on The Bomb as new scholarly perspectives emerged. For recent scholarship of the 2010s and 2020s I wholeheartedly recommend the blog of Alex Wellerstein, Professor of the History of Science and Nuclear Weapons at the Stevens Institute of Technology, at Hoboken, New Jersey. I’ve drawn on his insights in my reflections below, which seem to accord well with my admittedly amature readings on this topic:
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/about-the-blog/
Oppenheimer is an important movie for a forgetful age. An age where forgetfulness dulls the nightmare, the nightmare of existential dread that has haunted our waking and our sleeping since 1945. As forgetfulness’s fog descents upon us, the nightmare becomes something more like a vague fear or anxiety, and with that fading the likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used again in anger rises. Thus, as a reminder against forgetting, Oppenheimer is important and timely.
After 1918 the 1914-’18 Great War (1911-’24 in the Balkans and the Middle East) the Great War for Civilisation morphed into The War to End All Wars; it wasn’t either of those things, and a more 21 years after its conclusion the world was plunged into a yet more deathly and catastrophic conflict (as those wars recede ever deeper past living memory into the history of records it becomes possible to understand them as, perhaps different episodes of one long war: The Great War of the Twentieth Century). There are many answers as to how and why the world went to war again in 1939. A contributing factor might be that in 1918 people – the general publics of the combatant states, diplomatic, military, political, scientific decision-makers – understood intellectually the horrors of industrialised warfare, but didn’t feel it emotionally. For sure for those who actually fought in it the horrors of the Great War haunted their nightmares, dreams and daydreams, and PTSD flashbacks. But was that true more generally? The Great War of 1914-’18 had a purpose, had a point, if it was (vainly) understood to be The War to End All Wars, but was it felt to be that emotionally by those who didn’t fight? As Christopher Clark puts it near the end of his 2012 Sleepwalkers: how Europe Went to War in 1914:
. . . after 1945 . . . in the 1950s and 60s, decision-makers and the general public alike grasped in a visceral way the meaning of nuclear war – the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki entered the nightmares of ordinary citizens. As a consequence, the greatest arms race in human history never culminated in a nuclear war between the superpowers. It was different in the world before 1914. In the minds of many statesmen, hopes for a short war and fear of a long one seemed, as it were, to cancel each other out, holding at bay a fuller appreciation of the risks.
This is why I write of forgetfulness, and of Oppenheimer as a reminder. The nightmare is quite regularly evoked by the crude implied and explicit threats of evermore desperate Russian politicians bogged down in what is increasingly a war of attrition (and of choice) in Ukraine. Yet oddly we in the trans-Atlantic West seem not to imagine that nightmare when a publicly avowed willingness to ‘push the nuclear button’ is used by, say, British Prime Ministers and prime ministerial hopefuls as a kind of virility test – Theresa May went as far as to state that she would willingly consider First Use, undermining in one glib sentence the theoretical underpinning of nuclear deterrence. There was little public outrage. This is what I mean by forgetfulness, as the nightmare fades Use, first or otherwise, becomes thinkable, do-able. In this context, anything that reminds us of that nightmare is good.
Yet Oppenheimer is also a flawed film, in parts almost jejune: it reminds but it does not restore the nightmare. In part, that is because of the enormity of its topic. As with the Holocaust, nuclear devastation challenges the medium of film is perhaps past its capabilities by the thanatoid enormity of the events it seeks to treat. This is even more the case given the intensely monetised entertainment imperative of a Hollywood blockbuster. Movies can do more than merely entertain, and can be written, directed, and acted in ways that either transgress or transcend the grammar and rhetoric of the Hollywood entertainment movie. But who, today, would see such a movie? For a reminder with the power to awaken us from a lethal forgetting requires a mass audience, yet a mass-market reminder requires a level of funding and return on investment these days only attainable as a Hollywood entertainment movie, merely one spectacular commodity among many billions in late consumer capitalism’s galaxy clusters. This is the contradiction at the heart of Oppenheimer, a contradiction that permeates every aspect of this important but flawed movie.
It wasn’t always like this. Closer in historical time to the actual nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, On the Beach (1959) offered a bleak vision of the End of It All, the death-throws of the last dregs of a humanity that had just killed itself through hubris, carelessness and unknowing. We say ‘goodbye’ to the characters (in one scene via perhaps the most poignant love scene in the history of Hollywood) knowing there can be no happy ending. Like the characters, the audience understands it is doomed. Yet still the film stands as a warning: a shocking reminder that history is open until the moment events close it, that history is layers and intersects of radical conditionality, and that right up to the last moment we, all of us, have agency to interact with that conditionality in ways that change history, that history is not predetermined, however much it might appears to be. On the Beach is a warning, but it is much more besides: it is a spur to moral outrage and political action.
So too in a very different idiom is that darkest of black comedies Dr Strangelove (Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb) (1964) a spur to moral outrage and political action, while still being entertainment, while being darkly funny. It is a difficult trick to pull off. In contrast, Oppenheimer is merely a reminder. An important reminder, but merely a reminder nonetheless; a good movie (in both senses of ‘good’), but not a great one. But Beach and Strangelove come from a time when the movies were still the hegemonic moving media, and thus were able and willing to do more than entertain. Hollywood could dare to disturb and still turn in a profit. Not so now, where the cinema offers only the biggest screen of the hundreds of screens that dominate any given day of every individual’s quotidian life. True, the movie theatre still offers the only truly dream-like space, which is why audiences continue to relate to and to read the cinema screen differently to other smaller screens. But the ubiquity of screens makes an imperative of the spectacular (in both the Hollywood sense and Debord’s). One way of dealing with this is to individualise enormity, to make the world-thanatoid an individual’s story: like Schindler’s List (1993), Oppenheimer is a biopic and stands of falls as such.
Oppenheimer gets a lot right. The cinematography is superb, and the technique of distinguishing between events taking place in the 1940s and Oppenheimer’s memory of those events by switching from monochrome to rich, luminous colour (with a few deliberate anachronisms to show it’s memory, such as Second World War era flags with fifty stars), this works brilliantly: it’s very clever, in the good sense – it could be clever-clever, but it’s not, it succeeds. Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer is played with studied sensitivity. The film’s recreation of the Los Alamos, in effect it was a new town built on the mesas of the Pajarito Plateau of New Mexico specifically for the development and testing of the atomic bomb, is entirely credible and almost loving in its period detail. The movie in effect rebuilds it. Beautifully done. If beauty is an appropriate adjective here. Robert Oppenheimer’s somewhat complex personal life, and the relevance of that personal to his professional and political is explored with historical accuracy and emotional sensitivity. The few sex scenes are quite mild by today’s standards, and relevant to the development of the story. That didn’t stop India’s ruling party, the fascistic Bhartiya Janata Party, complaining about the use of the Bhagavad Gita in one scene, although that use is not gratuitous, is relevant to the plot, and is not in the original, sacred Sanskrit (Oppenheimer merely glosses for his lover in English what takes place in a passage): the BJP’s prudishness, like that of some comparable Islamic parties in the region, is surely an internalisation of a colonial Raj-era notion of respectability? Often in Hollywood movies that attempt history, love and sex sub-plots are pure entertainment, are exaggerated or indeed wholly fictitious, a distraction, or crude titillation. Not so in Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer’s flashbacks have a PTSD-like quality to them. It is not the case, I think, that the historical Oppenheimer had PTSD. Rather, that post-traumatic quality emphasises the crushing moral weight that the scientist carried for the rest of his life after August,1945. In one particularly poignant scene Oppenheimer is forced to justify himself to a McCarthy era tribunal against allegations that as a ‘suspected Communist’ he had been a security risk. He had committed security breach at Los Alamos when he left the site to visit his lover who was suffering deep depression. She had also been a left-wing activist. He stays the night with her. When she asks him to visit her again, he refuses. Shortly after she kills herself. Oppenheimer and his wife had talked this incident through privately and reconciled. But when Oppenheimer is forced to disclose this in detail at a public hearing his wife is reduced to tears of anger and humiliation. At that point Oppenheimer visualises himself sitting naked in his chair at the 1950s hearing, as a decade earlier he had sat naked in his lover’s armchair post-coitally. He then visualises himself and his dead lover fucking publicly face-to-face in the chair, before the tribunal, and before his wife. It is a moment of vulnerability, tender yet humiliating, a deeply human moment in its PTSD-like tension. Rather than being gratuitous, this sex scene adds depth and humanity to the story.
But as much as it gets right, Oppenheimer also gets a lot more wrong. In the first half hour or so it tries, perhaps too hard, to educate a non-specialist audience as to the historical and scientific contexts of the movie, but doing so it plays hard and fast with both scientific and historical accuracy; in places the result is quite a garbled mess. Most of this is attempted through dialogue, supported by some so-so FX, and comes across as a whirlpool of random Wikipedia facts. Murphy’s portrayal of Oppenheimer is superbly acted. But I have doubts about the casting of a non-Jewish actor. This point has been made already, it doesn’t help that one of the people who made it was David Baddiel, whose blackface lampooning of footballer Jason Lee during the ‘90s was vicious and overtly racist. Baddiel has recently reflected and apologised for this, including to Lee in person. However, Baddiel remains poorly placed to make this point. Nonetheless, the experience of anti-Semitism was very much part of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s story. For instance, on at least one occasion it held his career back, despite his brilliance: he was once refused a position at Berkeley’s Physics Department because it was felt ‘one Jew in the department is enough’, this was at a time when Anglophile American modernist poet T.S. Eliot could write in After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1933) that ‘The population should be homogeneous … and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable’. Oppenheimer was born in New York City to a relatively wealthy family of immigrants from Germany, trading in textiles. Upon his father’s 1937 death Oppenheimer inherited what in today’s money would be about five million dollars. Not a vast fortune, but certainly quite comfortably off. His family were ‘deed not creed’ secular humanist activists, very much the kind of ‘free-thinking Jews’ who so irked Eliot; and Berkeley. Oppenheimer was bilingual in English and German, with good Dutch and French. The film mentions in passing Oppenheimer, hardly a scion of the shtetl, not speaking Yiddish, a language he should have been able at least to follow. But Oppenheimer’s family were aspirant upper-middle class. They were also profoundly assimilationist, heirs of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment; they were secular humanists only recently established in the United States: they might well have looked down upon the vernacular language and culture as something they had sought to transcend. Scholarly and cultural engagement with the vernacular Yiddish linguistic, literary, political, folk-philosophical and mystical tradition had barely began. A similar point concerns Oppenheimer’s mysticism, his spiritual reference point was more the Vedas than Cordovero, he had acquired, as a hobby, sufficiently good Sanskrit and Pali (by then a long-standing focus of Volkisch German Aryan studies) to read the Vedic scriptures in the original languages. Oppenheimer was in some respects a deeply spiritual person, but not in a Abrahamic way. A Jewish actor who had had lived experience of anti-Semitism, and who could better locate Oppenheimer’s class position relative to the WASP elite with whom he had to interact professionally, and his class position relative to the wider American Jewish community who were prominent in left-wing US politics at the time, would have added greater depth to the portrayal, excellent though Murphy is in the role. The depiction of Einstein, a minor yet important character in the film because structurally he ‘frames’ (in the cinematic sense) Oppenheimer struck me as shallow and to a degree stereotypical. Flaws in casting and characterisation are not limited to Jewish protagonists: Gary Oldman’s depiction of President Harry S. Truman is a silly grotesque that grossly distorts Truman’s attitudes to ‘The Bomb’, and his role in its development, deployment, use against Japan, and its subsequent significance. I shall return to this later below.
Oppenheimer makes quite plain J. Robert Oppenheimer’s involvement in the left-wing politics of the mid third of twentieth-century America, but could and should have done more to establish where Oppenheimer stood in an American left that spanned the entire spectrum from anarchism, through social democracy and left New Dealers, to various forms of socialism and communism, through to outright Stalinism. How the politics of Oppenheimer and his associates change and develop across the timeframe covered by the movie, say in response to Stalinism’s role in the 1936-’39 Spanish Civil War, or the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, or the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, or the USA becoming an ally of the USSR when it declared war on Germany, Italy, and Japan in December 1942? There is, of course, only so much that an already long (by 2020s standards) film can cover and still work as ‘entertainment’, but this is a crucial aspect of twentieth-century American history, and crucial to Oppenheimer’s life and the movie. Interrogated over his left-wing leanings in 1954, Oppenheimer merely lost his security clearance, but the previous year Ethel and Julius Rosenberg had to the electric chair having been convicted on charges that were not dissimilar to some of the more extreme (and unfounded) accusations made against Oppenheimer, that he either had spied for the USSR, or that facilitated spying, or turned a blind eye to it. His interrogation did precipitate scandal, however, and Oppenheimer’s reputation as a public intellectual never recovered. This history deserves a more in-depth treatment than a Hollywood entertainment movie and aspiring ‘blockbuster’ status could attain. A TV mini-series that balanced the entertainment imperative with the moral imperatives to exploration and education, with perhaps eight to twelve hours to play with, would have in this regard been better. It could still be.
Is that it?
Director Christopher Nolan eschewed the use of CGI in the movie. In a different film, this move away from CGI would have been laudable. However, this decision compromises what is in many ways the climax of the movie (the subsequent material about Oppenheimer’s security hearing anti-climactic, it needn't have been, but it was): the ‘Trinity’ test at Los Alamos, humanity’s first nuclear explosion took place on 16th July 1945 (the Hiroshima bomb was 6th August that year, Nagasaki 9th). To simulate this Nolan used a combination of fuel (petrol and propane) and air mixture (a technique used today’s ‘conventional’ thermobaric ‘aerosol’ bombs) and magnesium and aluminium powder. Despite clever camera angles, the result is disappointing, as it looks exactly like what it is, a large chemical explosion. A festival or a local authority could do something similar as a special effect for a large event. The audience is short-changed not merely in terms of a spectacle, but also emotionally and morally. This is important because even a small nuclear explosion is qualitatively different (because of how it works), and quantitatively different to even the largest chemical explosion. The Trinity test yielded about 20,000 tons TNT equivalent energy release, Hiroshima 12kt, Nagasaki 15kt. By the mid-1960s thermonuclear weapons would give yields up to 60,000,000 tons TNT equivalent (60mt). In comparison, the chemical explosion, caused by a combination of accident and criminal neglect, that devastated Beirut Harbour on 4th August 2020 had an explosive force of about 0.9kt.
Li-Beirut
A principal justification for the dropping of nuclear weapons on living cities without warning in August 1945 was that giving Japan a warning about the bomb, or a demonstration of it on an unpopulated island, or even close to a city (Tokyo Harbour was discussed) would not have the same psychological effect, would not generate the ‘awe’, required to cause Japan to surrender (one is reminded of the ‘Shock and Awe’ aspect of the bombardment of Baghdad by conventional missiles in March 2003). Nolan’s directorial decision to use a chemical explosion to mimic the nuclear bomb denied the audience the opportunity to experience even a little of that awe. He could have retained his directorial integrity by continuing to eschew CGI qua CGI, but by using period footage of a nuclear explosion, of which there is a great deal. Perhaps the audience had already seen such footage, and that therefore, not being ‘new’ it would be less impactful? But such period footage could gave digitally remastered. This would be different to pure CGI, because it involves remastering a real footage of a real event. It would have been more impactful and ‘awesome’ it was real. As it stands, while the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated and irradiated to ‘shock and awe’ the Japanese government and military into surrender, the movie audience under-awed awed by a feeble simulation: short-changing all-round.
Another aspect of this short-changing is that Oppenheimer fails to make clear the distinction between ‘Little Boy’, the crude enriched uranium ‘gun’ type atomic bomb used on Hiroshima, and ‘Fat Man’, the technologically far more complex ‘implosion’ type plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki. This is no mere technicality, the difference has profound historical and moral implications. The ‘gun’ type bomb was never tested because Oppenheimer and his team were (correctly) convinced that it would work first time: Hiroshima was the first time that type of atomic bomb was ever used, there was no prior testing. However, the ‘implosion’ type bomb was tested at the ‘Trinity’ test that is the centrepiece of the Oppenheimer movie. The implosion bomb was pre-tested because Oppenheimer’s team were uncertain as to whether it would work. Even if it did work, they were uncertain of the he yield. In the case of a low yield, the Manhattan Project team were prepared to put weeks’ or months’ worth of further development into the implosion bomb before it could be used as a viable nuclear weapon. The moral problem arises because in so far as the atomic bombs did cause Japan to surrender (there are plausible arguments that it was not the decisive factor, or at least not the only decisive factor, behind the Japanese surrender of 2nd September 1945), it is likely that the Hiroshima bomb alone would have brought about the surrender. Once Japan knew that the USA had nuclear weapons it was clearly far more likely than not that they would have more than one of them. In so far as the atomic bomb was a cause or the cause of the surrender, it is likely the atom-bombing of Nagasaki contributed little or nothing to the decision. So why drop a second bomb, the ‘Fat Man’ implosion bomb, on a second living city only three days after Hiroshima? Suffice to say that at 20kt yield Trinity vastly exceeded scientific and military expectations of it at the time of the test. An explosion of between 2 and 5kt would have been considered a ‘success’ (the movie mentions 3kt). Even a low yield of 500 ton TNT equivalent would not have been considered an entire failure. Rather, the potential military uses of the implosion bomb would need to be re-thought, perhaps using it with greater precision against ‘hard’ military targets, while the implosion technology was further developed. However, once the Trinity test yielded 20kt, there was curiosity to discover how it would perform as a weapon dropped on at a city, even though the Hiroshima ‘gun’ type bomb had already made the nuclear point with its 12kt yield at the cost of over 100,000 mostly civilian Japanese lives. Perplexingly, Oppenheimer was at the forefront of those advocating a nuclear strike against Japanese target as the most effective way to awe the Japanese into surrender, rather than making a mere demonstration of the bomb on an unpopulated location, out at sea, or near a city but with minimal collateral casualties. Oppenheimer strongly advocated an actual nuclear strike, but had little or nothing to do with the actual targeting, which was treated as a purely military matter. Did Oppenheimer expect that the bomb would be use against a primarily military target? How did he feel when it was used against a living city? Was this what he had wanted? The film tells us little about these crucial questions, or about the alternatives to the use of the bomb per se (i.e. how plausible was it for the bomb not used at all and the war ended some other way), or alternative ways the bomb could have been used, alternatives to the dropping of two nuclear bombs within three days on two predominantly civilian cities. Such an alternative might have been some sort of demonstration. A film of over three hours duration about topic as grave as the atomic bombings should not have left these crucial questions hanging.
Oppenheimer had embarked upon the Manhattan Project with good moral and political reason: not only did he have the required scientific knowledge required of a Director of the project, but as a politically aware and politically active progressive he understood the consequences of a Nazi acquisition of a nuclear bomb. He understood the imperative for the Western allies to get there first. In the event, Nazi Germany never got close to producing a viable nuclear weapon. Partly because figures high up in the Nazi hierarchy were dismissive of what they called “Jewish science”; partly because Nazi scientists, notably Werner Heisenberg, made fundamental calculative errors; partly because the Western allies, in particular the RAF, had given a high priority to degrading experimental Nazi weapons programmes. Yet the potential risk of a Nazi bomb continued, and so long as it continued it justified the Manhattan Project. The Nazi high-ups who considered relativity and quantum to be ‘Jewish science’, were political figures, not scientists or military men: the prospect of impending defeat might well have caused them to reprioritise nuclear research. Heisenberg might have re-run his calculations, or been upstaged by a doctoral student or understudy. The air forces of the Western Allies had already began refocusing from the destruction of German experimental weapons research to the area bombardment and firebombing of German cities. So Oppenheimer’s concern over the development of a Nazi bomb was legitimate right up until the final defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945. But why, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, persist with the atomic bomb against Japan, a country that had no viable nuclear programme whatsoever? The Nagasaki question thus has profound moral implications for Oppenheimer as a human being, for the biopic Oppenheimer, and for history. The movie is notably weak on its treatment of Japanese suffering. While the movie is a biopic blockbuster, not a documentary about the 1945 nuclear strikes on Japan, at this point, ground zero at Nagasaki, it becomes morally and historically impossible to disentwine Oppenheimer from the death and suffering the bomb caused. How did Oppenheimer’s attitude to the bomb change after the defeat of the Nazis? What were his reasons for his insisting on its use against Japan? What did this mean to him as a human being, and as an agent in history? The movie Oppenheimer tells us surprisingly little. This is not the sort of film that can have goodies and baddies: Oppenheimer was not some tortured and misunderstood genius, nor was he Dr Evil. He was a highly intelligent human being caught up in the largest ever human expenditure of human effort, the Second World War. He became complicit in that war’s atrocities even as he sought humanely to end it in accordance to his progressive beliefs. We can only imagine the existential and moral weight of that, Oppenheimer provides us with glimpses of it at most. Yet more short-changing. That’s entertainment.
Graduation photo, Noboricho Elementary School, about one kilometre from Ground Zero, Hiroshima
In this way Oppenheimer functions to perpetuate myths. But does it? In a sense, if we are to define, with José Losada, ‘myth’ as a symbolic narrative which presents a storied version of a supreme or transcendent moral truth, rather than the everyday definition of ‘myth’ as something merely untrue (‘urban myth’), then a film such as Oppenheimer ought to be mythic, or at least have a mythic dimension. It doesn’t. So to what degree does the movie perpetuate ‘myths’ in the more quotidian sense of myths as mere untruths? Given the extreme moral and historical weightiness of the film’s topic, and the imperative to counter a growing historical forgetfulness, this question is crucial. Below I shall explore a number of ‘myths’ perpetuated in the film.
So, ‘myths’, why are they important? In large part they are important because the more profligate the myths, the greater the lack of public awareness over nuclear weapons, how they got to be used, and what the consequences were. The more these myths persist, the greater the chance that we shall see nuclear weapons used again in our lifetimes. Unfortunately, Oppenheimer does little to dispel these myths, indeed the movie reinforces some of them.
There is the myth that the only alternative to the use of the bombs as they were actually and historically used (that is to say two different types of bomb, a uranium ‘gun’ and a plutonium ‘implosion’ bomb on two different living Japanese cities three days apart) would have been Operation Downfall, the Allied invasion of Japan scheduled for late October/early November, which would have caused far greater loss of life (in some versions ‘American life’). The projected loss of Japanese life, military and civilian, was hight, at 500,000 to 800,000 American casualties, and 5,000,000 to 10,000,000 Japanese casualties. These figures dwarf the casualties from the atomic bombings, and if the bombs really did end the war and if those figures were accurate the bombs certainly did ‘save’ lives. But that is two layers of conditionality.
There were alternatives to the use of the bombs as they were actually and historically used, one was an accurate and credible warning to the Japanese. This could have been as simple as an extra paragraph added to the Potsdam Declaration (drafted at the inter-allied Potsdam conference in recently occupied Germany, mid-July to early August 1945). Such a warning probably would not have been heeded by the Japanese military, but for the sake of a few words it probably should have been attempted. Probably such a warning was not attempted because for electoral, political, and propaganda reasons in the USA, Japan was required to have been seen to have been punished for Pearl Harbour. As mentioned above other, alternatives to the use of the bombs could have included a demonstration of the bomb: on US soil with a Japanese delegation chaperoned by observers from mutually acceptable neutral nations, or a high-altitude air-burst over Japan, or a demonstration out at sea, or a demonstration on Japanese soil in a remote location, or a demonstration close to a city or major military installation, but at such distance to minimalize casualties. Apparently Oppenheimer was against these ‘demonstration’ options because to do so would have reduced the ‘shock and awe’ psychological impact of the bombs, although Oppenheimer’s direct and personal influence over the specifics of targeting was minimal to non-existent.
Then there is myth that the bomb incontrovertibly ended the Second World War: possibly it did, but possibly it did not. By the summer of 1945 Japan was effectively blockaded: little or nothing could have come in or out of the Japanese home islands, and very considerable Japanese military forces in China and South East Asia were entirely cut off and unable to support the defence of the home islands. The Imperial Japanese Navy had effectively ceased to exist. A blockade could have ended the war, but that could well have lasted well into 1946 or beyond, and ended with mass Japanese starvation that could easily have exceeded the death-toll of the bombs or even of Operation Downfall.
The combined high-explosive and incendiary bombardment of Japan, a ‘conventional’ strategic bombing campaign that created city-destroying firestorms (developed initially against Germany) preceded the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, took place between the two atomic bombings, and indeed continued after 9th August. Operation Meeting House, the 9th-10th March 1945 ‘conventional’ fire-storm bombing of Tokyo, killed more people than either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs), although that was in terms of ultimate casualties, not as a percentage of people in each city bombed, which was higher for the nuclear attacks. Had Japan not surrendered on 2nd September, this area bombing campaign would have continued in parallel to further atomic bombings (the US military estimated that they would have at least another seven atomic bombs ready for use before the commencement of Operation Downfall. The Allies were also preparing stockpiles of chemical weapons for use against Japan, and were even looking into biological weapons. In sum, the Allies were putting every asset they could muster into ending the Second World War in the autumn of 1945, the atomic bombs were a significant part of this, but not the only part. Then there was the USSR.
Much is sometimes made of a Japanese ‘peace party’ that was seeking to end the war before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such a ‘peace party’ (a faction in the civilian part of the Japanese administration, not an organised political party) did exist, but they were, at the time of the atomic bombings, highly marginal. Had the war dragged on further, they might have become far more influential. But in August 1945 they were marginal. Proof of this was that they attempted to negotiate a ceasefire with the Allies via the USSR, at that time the USSR had been an ally of the Western Allies against Nazi Germany, but were neutral against Japan. This was because a Japanese attack into the Siberian far-east could well have destroyed the USSR in 1942-3, as the USSR faced Operation Barbarossa, the all-out Nazi assault on the Soviet Union from the west. The Soviet leadership was therefore anxious to maintain peaceful relations with Japan for as long as possible, rather than risk fighting a war on two fronts, thousands of miles apart. However, Stalin had already agreed at Potsdam, unbeknownst to Japan, to attack the Japanese empire in Manchuria, Korea, and the Siberian far-east by August 1945 – areas of east Asia to be occupied by the USSR were discussed at length at Potsdam. Thus, the efforts of the ‘peace party’ were in vain. Reports of a February 1945 peace overture by Japan made directly to the US, the so-called ‘Trohan Memorandum’ after that journalist’s 19th August 1945 newspaper article, is highly likely to have originated from disinformation originating from US anti-Truman, anti-Communist far-right sources.
The entry of the USSR into the endgame of the Second World War in the Far East was, arguably, as much or maybe more a cause of the Japanese surrender than were the atomic bombings, the firestorm campaign, the blockade of Japan, or the threat of Operation Downfall. Soviet forces attacked the Japanese Empire on 7th August, the day after the Hiroshima bombing and two days before Nagasaki, but this was not a spur of the moment reaction to Hiroshima, as the necessary troop movements and logistical preparations would have taken a few weeks, and was in accordance with what had been decided at Potsdam with the Western Allies (at Potsdam Stalin was aware of the success of the Trinity test before the allies informed him of it). Soviet forces proved highly effective at rolling back Japanese resistance in the far east. There was a problem regarding a Soviet invasion of the Japanese home islands in that unlike the USA or the British Empire lacked an effective amphibious capacity, but: the potential to deal a death-blow to Japanese forces in Manchuria and Korea was sufficient to concentrate the minds of the Japanese leadership. Further, the Western Allies had already contributed matériel constituting 20-25% of the Soviet war-effort to the fight against Nazi Germany, so Soviet use of Western amphibious capacity in an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have been possible had the Soviet Union been unable to field its own amphibious force.
The Japanese military leadership had decided to throw nearly all of its remaining capacity against a projected Western Allied invasion in the south of Japan, defending Japan’s southernmost home islands of Kyushu and Shikoku, with very little else to spare. This strategy built on the dogged Japanese defence of the more minor islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, which was intended to make the Allies reflect on the high blood price they would have to pay for an invasion of the Japanese home islands (in fact bloody defence Iwo Jima and Okinawa helped make evolving US military plans to use the atomic bomb against Japan that much more acceptable to the US civilian administration). However, this ‘southern’ strategy would leave the home islands of Honshu and Hokkaido almost completely defenceless to a Soviet invasion from the Siberian far-east across the sea of Japan. Arguably, the threat of a Soviet invasion against which Japan had little or no defence as much or more of a factor leading to the Japanese surrender as were the atomic bombs, the fire-bombing, the threat of Downfall, or the blockade;
There is also the myth that the USA used the atomic bombs atomic bombs to forestall a Soviet invasion of the Japanese home islands, or to use them as a ‘demonstration’ of the power of nuclear weapons to deter the USSR post-war. This has become something of a myth on the political left, although between 1945 until 1948, the year the Soviet Union first acquired nuclear weapons, it was more the creation of the isolationist anti-New Deal American far-right that wanted to return to isolationism, the USA having been barely touched by this global conflict. Stalin knew full well of the Manhattan Project even before the success of Trinity was made know to him at Potsdam. There were no surprises there. Churchill (a deeply problematic figure, but I shall give him his due here) aside, the leaders of the Western Allies were perfectly prepared for an array of domestic reasons for the USSR under Stalin to make territorial gains either in central Europe or in the Far East, so long as that resulted in the Second World War ending before the end of 1945. The Allies threw everything they could at ending the war by then, part of that was the atomic bomb, but a projected Soviet invasion of Japan was also part of that: East and West Germany, North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam all lay in the future. In the late summer of 1945 the priority was to end the war, a purely hypothetical North and South or East and West division of post-war Japan did not figure that prominently at that time. For sure there were senior figures in the US administration who were concerned about this, notably US Secretary of State James Byrnes, but their views do not seem to have gone as far as shaping policy.
A further myth is that there was a ‘decision’ to use the bombs in the way they ended up being used, and that that decision was taken by Harry S. ‘The Buck Stops Here’ Truman. Truman had very little, if any, oversight into the technical aspects of the Manhattan Project or the bombs that resulted from it (he was only officially informed of the project upon assuming office following the death of Roosevelt in April 1945), nor over the strategic and tactical aspects of the deployment and use of the bombs or their targeting. He was ‘in the loop’, as it were, but only tangentially. There is strong evidence to suggest that he was convinced (or allowed himself to be convinced) that Hiroshima was a predominantly military target, and that he was profoundly shocked when shortly after the bombing the mainly civilian nature of the city became clear. Truman gave an ‘in principle’ go-ahead to the use of the bomb, but the targeting was almost entirely a military matter of which Truman was ignorant, Truman delegated targeting to the military and tried to not overly concern himself with the details of it, until the consequences of this, that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were predominantly civilian cities, became clear. After that, any further use of nuclear weapons were to have strict civilian authorisation from the President. No nuclear weapons have been used in anger since, so in that sense the policy ‘worked’. Although the spectre of what might happen in the case of a deranged President hovers over the 2020s like a spectre;
It is a myth that is was universally understood in the Summer of 1945 and until 1948 that ‘The Bomb’ ushered in a new era, that is was qualitatively different to any previous weapon, that it was potentially an existential threat to humankind, and thus it ushered in a new way in which human beings related to each other and to the universe. Almost nobody in the military saw it this way until 1948, and few did on the technical side either. For the military it was largely ‘just another weapon’, a very expensive weapon, for sure, but a perfectible weapons system that allowed a handful of bombers to destroy a city in moments whereas hitherto that had taken 500-1,000 firebombing heavy bombers a full day and night to do so (at Hiroshima and Nagasaki three B-29s were used: a weather reconnaissance and targeting aircraft that flew ahead and confirmed whether to strike the primary, secondary, or tertiary targets depending on visibility (Nagasaki was a secondary target); an aircraft packed with scientific data-gathering instruments, and; the aircraft that actually carried and dropped the bomb). The military attitude, long committed to the firestorm destruction of Japanese and before that German cities, predominated in all deployment and targeting decisions: scientists and political decision-makers tended to get quite general, post-decision briefings. As much as J. Robert Oppenheimer supported use against a military target against a mere demonstration of the bomb, his thinking would have been guided by military briefings. Nevertheless, he did, as a scientist, understand the epoch-changing significance of nuclear weapons. Truman’s War Secretary Henry J. Stimpson also understood the bomb in those terms (he had, unusually for a politician, a long and in-depth interest in the Manhattan Project), and his thinking closely aligned with Oppenheimer’s. After Hiroshima, Truman, quite possibly genuinely shocked by the use of the atomic bomb against living, civilian cities, aligned closely with Stimpson’s and Oppenheimer’s view, framing the bomb in a way that ensured that it endured in the consciousness of decision-makers and general publics as a line that should never be crossed. This is not to say that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ‘right’; clearly, like Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden, and Bremen they were atrocities; merely it is to say that the senior American political decision-makers of the Summer of 1945 did not get everything wrong. Oppenheimer makes none of this history clear, indeed it obscures and distorts it, and its depiction of Truman is reprehensible.
Contrary to the Oppenheimer movie, Secretary of War (that old terminology is so much more honest than today’s ‘Defence’) Stimson did not ‘spare’ Kyoto because he had ‘spent his honeymoon there’. He had visited Kyoto with his wife, and was enchanted by this beautiful city, but in the 1920s, when he was in his late fifties and they had been married for decades, and then as part of a months-long diplomatic mission that took him all over the Asian Pacific Rim. In Oppenheimer, that line is played for laughs, as if the mere whim of an old man decided which city was destroyed and which as spared. This was not so, and playing it this way, for a laugh, distorts history. Kyoto most certainly was on the list of nuclear targets (all of them cities that hitherto had been un-bombed or only lightly bombed, the better to assess the effectiveness of the two types, ‘gun’ and ‘implosion’ of the new nuclear bombs), and several figures in the military were quite keen to bomb Kyoto. But Stimson fought long and hard to ensure Kyoto was not bombed, and the city was almost literally ‘scrubbed’ from the list of nuclear targets only very late in the day. Why? Kyoto, before Tokyo the ancient capital of Japan, was rightly considered to be the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual heart of Japan. Until very late at Potsdam, the US, largely under the influence of Secretary of State Byrne, had insisted on the ‘unconditional’ surrender of Japan; the suggestion, or rather the hint, that the Japanese imperial system might be preserved post-war was only included in a late draft of the Potsdam Declaration. This concession was made almost through gritted teeth because it was (probably rightly) thought that including it in the declaration would hasten Japanese surrender so that that took place before the end of 1945. This was a war-weary world. Yet this concession in effect precluded a further concession: an explicit warning of what the US had in store for Japan over the coming weeks – the Atomic Bomb. Kyoto was spared because the retention of Japan’s imperial system and the preservation of its spiritual capital were seen as different aspects of the same concession. Looking ahead post-war, the US was anxious that a defeated Japan would nevertheless become reconciled to the US and the Western Allies, and conversely that a resentful post-war Japan would not emerge that, because the US had bombed its heart out, might be more sympathetic to the USSR, even if the Soviets remained across the Sea of Japan in Manchuria. In this sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki died so that Kyoto might yet thrive. By suggesting that Kyoto was ‘spared’ on the nostalgic whim of an elderly politician, and compounding that by playing it for laughs, Oppenheimer tramples on history.
It would of course be absurd to expect a movie, or even a series of movies, to explore the very complex history I’ve attempted to sketch above. Oppenheimer is a biopic and a stand-alone, not a series of a franchise; it is made for entertainment, and to make money, and enhance the careers and reputations of those involved in making it. But still. A movie that aims at seriousness over such a weighty subject should not perpetuate such ‘myths’, Oppenheimer does so the omission, commission, and occasional, sometimes apparently wilful distortions. Why is this important? In part because of the moral and historical weightiness of the topic: in a sense we owe a debt of veracity to those who died and those who suffered. We also, I think, have a responsibility to history. History is never closed until the events that have become historical happen. At every point before that there are layer upon layer of contingency; in the case of the atomic bombings, there was moral, political, and military responsibility, sometimes accepted, sometimes shirked. The principal historical actors had great agency in deciding how events emerged. Often that agency was constrained, either by objective or subjective forces, often by an overwhelming complexity and opacity of communication that compromised individual agency: nevertheless, the agency was real.
Quite probably, the two nuclear attacks had a lower butcher’s bill than the projected Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese home islands scheduled for the Autumn of 1945. But those two nuclear attacks and a full-scale invasion were never the only two options available. By reinforcing the myth that these were the only two options, Oppenheimer does our understanding of history harm. It’s not even clear that the two nuclear bombs were decisive in ending the Second World War. Even as Emperor Hirohito prepared to surrender, a group of pro-war junior officers attempted to stage a coup aimed at continuing the war, either out of a thanatoid fixation with war and death, or more prosaically (and probably more likely) because they imagined that prolonging the war yet further would earn Japan better surrender terms. Even as the soil of Hiroshima was still cooling, military scientists digging close to Ground Zero discovered that the heatwave only penetrated about a foot down and concluded (with some justification) that an effective counter-measure to a nuclear airburst was to dig bunkers. The bombs almost certainly hastened the Japanese surrender, but to what extent? Historians differ. Why are the questions important? Because apart from any debt we might owe either to the dead or to history, the fact remains that we live in a nuclear-armed world. As the nuclear attacks drift over the edge of living human memory they become not only historical but also mythical. As mentioned above, there are at least two different ways to understand ‘mythic’, and the wrong kinds of myth can induce a forgetfulness over history. That kind of forgetfulness can make the future use of nuclear weapons more conceivable, perhaps even more attractive or desirable. Oppenheimer serves as an important historical reminder, but it is a flawed one, a good film not a great one.
Barbie probably wins out over Oppenheimer in the blockbuster of summer '23 stakes: while Barbie is a glorified product placement cum relaunch of the Barbie brand for the '20s and beyond, it has unexpected philosophical depths, whereas Oppenheimer, by 'philosophical director Christopher Nolan only disappoints.
Implicit in some of the analysis above is the idea that the American political decision-makers got certain things ‘right’. For example, Truman was instrumental in framing nuclear weapons as epoch-making, a potential existential threat to humanity, a Rubicon that should not be crossed carelessly, indeed never should be crossed again. In short he helped establish the ‘reading’ of The Bomb we still have today, and he did this in the teeth of opposition from military figures who saw it as ‘just another weapon’ to be used while the US still had a monopoly of it. This reading of the politicians of that time (which I do not entirely agree with) seems to go against the grain, since so often they are portrayed as cynical and self-serving, as Truman is, quite shamelessly, in Oppenheimer. I don’t stress this point out of ‘Trumanism’, some sort of personal attachment to Truman or political attachment to his strand in US Democrat politics. Merely, my concern is to redress the imbalance created by the movie by restoring to Truman something of his political agency in the matter of The Bomb. Certainly there were some self-serving motives why Truman took the stance that he did: concern for his posterity, the assuaging of guilt, the desire to differentiate American mass-killings from Nazi ones, and to present the Second World was as a just war won by righteous victors. But we need to be careful here, the politicians of Truman’s generation for all their very real faults were probably more skilful politicians, better leaders, and more diligent public servants than the leaders and aspirant leaders we have today in the 2020s, in a world replete with many thousands of nuclear weapons held by at least nine states, a world very different from Truman’s world, where one state, the USA, held a handful of small nuclear weapons. We must be wary, however, of falling for the line that The Bomb Kept the Peace: the world has been in a more or less constant state of war since 1945, and still is. This history has seen genocides, wars of aggression, and crimes against humanity, precisely the crimes for which German and Japanese military and political decision-makers hanged after the Second World War. Some of these wars have killed millions a piece, and often they have been waged by the powerful victor states of 1945 (or their proxies) upon far weaker, developing countries. Modern ‘conventional’ weapons can approach the destructiveness of nuclear weapons, certainly of the nuclear weapons of the later 1940s, but can be used without the moral opprobrium that the First Use of nuclear weapons. It would be more accurate to say that nuclear weapons have prevented an all-out war between the victor states of 1945: in the meantime, the Third World has had to endure a Third World War of eighty years duration.
In places Oppenheimer makes much of the idea that scientists thought that detonating a nuclear weapon might initiate a chain reaction that would in turn ignite the oceans and atmosphere, destroying the world, but took a calculated risk in setting of the atomic bomb anyway. This is nonsense, it was well-known at that time that this was an utter impossibility. But at the near the end of the movie Murphy has Oppenheimer and Einstein in conversation, ‘We thought we might destroy the world’, ‘Perhaps we did?’ The planet is then engulfed in a sheet of flame. Global heating, in large part fuelled by the First World post-War consumer boom, might yet kill us: that we will be consumed by The Boom, not The Bomb. In all our decadence people die. In suggesting this, Oppenheimer is prescient, and is giving a clear warning to the forgetful; although as with war the global poor are taking the brunt first.