How does one represent what is beyond representation? In the film, Nolan recreates the intensity of the Trinity test with color and sound, following the bright flash with a pause and then the deep rumble and roar of the explosion and the clap of the shock wave. Lifton, an expert on the psychology of war, violence and trauma, called the Hiroshima survivors’ experience “ death in life,” an encounter with the indescribable.Ī Japanese soldier sits amid the rubble of the city of Nagasaki, flattened by the U.S. Only weeks after the test, atomic bombs flattened the previously bustling cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mathematician John von Neumann acerbically observed, “Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin.” Describing the indescribable There really was no individual “father” of the atomic bomb. In fact, the bomb was the product of a gigantic scientific, engineering, industrial and military operation, one in which scientists sometimes felt like cogs in a machine. As a spokesperson and symbol of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer sometimes seemed to encourage the idea that it was his personal creation and responsibility. The contrast between their accounts speaks to the duality in Oppenheimer’s public image: a technical expert forging a weapon, and a poetic humanist burdened by the bomb’s moral significance. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Army on July 16, 1945, as a result of the Manhattan Project. The first detonation of a nuclear device, conducted by the U.S. “ The physicists have known sin,” he remarked two years after the attacks, “and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” But he conveyed a sense of anguish – scripting his own tragic role, as I argue in my book about him. government’s justification of the atomic bombings: that they saved lives by preventing the need for invasion. Intense interest in Oppenheimer’s life and his ambivalent feelings about the bomb have turned him into almost a myth: a “tortured genius” or “tragic intellect” people try to comprehend because the terror of the bomb itself is too disturbing.įor the rest of his life, Oppenheimer gave the U.S. In American culture, however, fascination with the man behind the bomb often seems to eclipse the horrific reality of nuclear weapons themselves – as if he were the welder’s glass allowing viewers to safely look at the explosion, even as it obscures the blinding light.
It’s little wonder that Christopher Nolan’s new film, “Oppenheimer,” tells the story of Los Alamos through this single life – or that Oppenheimer is the focus of so much writing about the bomb Oppenheimer’s life provides a human-scaled way to talk about an otherwise overwhelming topic. Under his directorship, scientists at Los Alamos Laboratory, where the bomb was designed and built, forever changed how people view the world, adding a new sense of precariousness. Oppenheimer had many achievements in theoretical physics but is remembered as the so-called father of the atomic bomb. Robert Oppenheimer’s triumph was his tragedy.
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