The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still have the power to shock: In an instant, the US killed more than a hundred thousand people. But even if the director Christopher Nolan fictionalized some of the story Oppenheimer, his biopic of the scientist behind the Manhattan Project, the film may spark a new conversation about a history many of us studied in high school, but that often fails to resonate as it should.
The reality is that 78 years after the first atomic bomb was tested at Trinity Site in New Mexico, we are living in a dangerous nuclear moment. Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons over the war in Ukraine. China has expanded its own once-small nuclear arsenal, even as it has declined to engage in arms-control treaties with the US, which itself will spend about $750 billion over the next decade revamping its nuclear weapons. Countries in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, are vying to create civilian nuclear programs, partially in response to Iran’s efforts in developing nuclear technology.
Can Oppenheimer remind us of these dangers and push us to think critically about how the Manhattan Project has led to this reality? I put that question to Alex Wellerstein, a historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey and the author of Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States.
Wellerstein told me that Oppenheimer accurately portrays its subject’s personal complexity, unlike previous historical films about him. But the movie also falls into the trap of outdated scholarship in how it dramatizes President Harry Truman’s ultimate decision to use Oppenheimer’s creation on Japan.
One question that Wellerstein often asks his students is, “What are the conditions that you think it would be acceptable for the United States to deliberately burn 100,000 civilians alive? That’s a really ugly question, right? Like, that really gets you into really dark territory. But…
Read the full article here