By Barton J. Bernstein
I think we should not attempt a plan [to develop the weapon for radiological warfare] unless we can poison [enough] food to kill a half a million men.
J. Robert Oppenheimer to Enrico Fermi, 25 May 1943[1]I can hardly believe my eyes when I saw a news release said to be quoting Oppenheimer, and giving the impression that there is no radiological hazard [in the A-bombed Japanese cities]. Apparently all things are relative.
Radiologist Dr. Robert S. Stone to Lieutenant Colonel Hymer L. Friedel[l], 9 August 1945[2][C]redible evidence exists which tends to show that Dr. Oppenheimer was a member of the Communist Party [in 1941] . . . This evidence [because of the source employed] is not available for use in court.
Assistant Attorney General Charles B. Murray to Attorney General James P. McGranery, 12 November 1952[3]Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer said [in his speech] that he has ‘no doubts’ [that the US‘s] development of the H-bomb was the right course.[4]
Palo Alto Times, April 1960The people who know nothing [about Oppenheimer] are going to get the wildest ride [in the “Oppenheimer” film]. . . they need to know, because, you know, he’s the most important man who ever lived.
Christopher Nolan[5]
The forthcoming “Oppenheimer” film, on the once- famous J. Robert Oppenheimer, reportedly received a large budget for the 2023 movie—about $100 million for the making, and about $100 million for the marketing. Directed by Christopher Nolan, whose earlier films have reportedly grossed more than $5 billion, the movie is likely to be a blockbuster.
Rather ironically, it is likely to rival the “Barbie” film at the box office. Some critics, undoubtedly, will discuss American culture in the framework suggested by the two very different movies. “Barbie” has multiple, and profitable, product tie-ins with various items and firms. Such could not reasonably be the case for the “Oppenheimer” film, dealing heavily, as it does, with nuclear weapons.
A widely admired director, Christopher Nolan has won laurels for his work, and his movies are often used as models in film-making classes. His “Oppenheimer” film was voted by a Hollywood critics group as among the most awaited summer movies. It is scheduled for release on July 21. It has already been discussed in various publications, and the publicity blitz may be near. The “Oppenheimer” film is apparently in many ways a joint project by Nolan with his wife, Emma Thomas, who served as the producer. “She’s the best producer in Hollywood, without question,” according to Nolan.[6]
Nolan’s new movie is starring the gifted Irish actor, Cillian Murphy, as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was often described, and greatly celebrated, as “the father of the atomic bomb.” The cast includes, among others, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, head of the A-bomb project, Robert Downey, Jr. as Lewis Strauss, an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chief and Oppenheimer foe, and Emily Blunt, as Kitty (Katherine) Oppenheimer, Robert’s wife. It is a distinguished cast.
It’s revealing to read in some newspapers, as part of the Hollywood-generated publicity, of the committed preparation by the hard-working Cillian Murphy for his central role in “Oppenheimer.” Murphy stated, as the New York Times reported in Murphy’s words, “We are going into this guy’s [Oppenheimer’s] head, you have to be immersed in the essence so strongly that you carry the audience with you.”[7]
The movie reportedly leans heavily on a major and justifiably well-respected, but sometimes also dismayingly flawed, book on the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had directed the wartime and early postwar Los Alamos laboratory, later headed the AEC’s General Advisory Committee (GAC), and became in 1947 the longtime director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.[8]
After Oppenheimer’s impressive wartime work directing the secret Los Alamos laboratory in developing the two kinds of atomic bombs, he became, in the postwar period for a near-decade, an influential adviser on the US’s nuclear-weapons and related defense policy. Aside from the iconic Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer was probably the best known, and generally the most respected, US-based scientist.
But he ran afoul of severe problems. Because of serious accusations, including charges of disloyalty, by a former high-level, Congressional staffer, Oppenheimer’s security clearance was suspended, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in late 1953. Distressed and pained, Oppenheimer decided to seek a special hearing, as permitted by law. That hearing—more like a trial than an inquiry—went badly for him. After that nearly four-week hearing in spring 1954, Oppenheimer’s clearance was not reinstated by the Atomic Energy Commission, because he was judged “a security risk.” He became, in many ways, a broken man, though he was also treated by many as a liberal martyr.[9]
There is much of tragedy in his life, and of rich and often puzzling complexity. The hearing and the AEC’s finding underscore those matters. But despite the AEC’s negative judgment, Oppenheimer remained the well-paid, respected director of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study. His colleagues there, including some who had earlier quarreled with him, generally supported him.
In addition, a number of luminaries in physics—including, among others, Nobelist I. I. Rabi and future Nobelists Hans Bethe, Eugene Wigner, and Julian Schwinger—publicly rallied behind Oppenheimer. Rabi and Bethe, with a small galaxy of other prominent scientists, had previously testified for Oppenheimer in what had been the closed AEC loyalty-security hearing. But shortly after the hearing, the transcript of testimony, with various redactions ostensibly for security, was released in a published volume.[10]
Whether the AEC’s negative “security-risk” judgment in assessing Oppenheimer in 1954 was reasonable, justified, and defensible was a sometimes heatedly contested issue in the mid-1950s, and it is sometimes today. For the most part, the pro-Oppenheimer forces at the time seemed to carry the day in the liberal media. Their own “verdict”: Oppenheimer was basically innocent, he’d been viciously pilloried, and his enemies had unfairly done in him.
Complicating matters, that complex judgment, with its undergirding assumption that Oppenheimer was basically innocent, when now re-examined, is often reconsidered by also employing new materials. They include some letters, a key memoir, an important diary, and Soviet intelligence documents; mostly these sources became available only in the 21st century. They overwhelmingly establish that Oppenheimer, contrary to his wartime and postwar claims, had been a secret Communist Party (CP) member for a period.[11]
That rather new evidence also leads to a reassessment, and thus taking far more seriously, much negative evidence on Oppenheimer, dating back to about the 1940s, that many historians (including myself), often unwisely in about the 1970s-2002 period, minimized or disregarded. Hence, the interpretive situation—with the use of long-available and also relatively newly available evidence—has markedly changed.[12]
It is no longer possible, or reasonable, to comfortably conclude, as had many liberal interpreters (including myself), that Oppenheimer in the 1954 hearing was candidly forthcoming about his late 1930s and early 1940s politics. He was not. He lied, and he sought to deceive.
That suggests that many scientists at the time, and scholars and other writers then and later studying Oppenheimer, and the loyalty-security case, had—for many years—seriously erred. They had trusted him.
That seems to be the situation for Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who rather recently got involved in assessing the loyalty-security case, and rejected the 1954 results. Unfortunately, her 16 December 2022 public statement explaining her decision to vacate the AEC’s 1954 negative judgment on Oppenheimer ignored much of the relevant unsettling evidence and some key publications on Oppenheimer. She somehow disregarded all materials on his Communist politics and on his related Communist Party affiliations. That included Granholm’s fully ignoring, without any explanation or even acknowledgment, all the unsettling FBI files and related Truman Library records on Oppenheimer for the 1940s and 1950s. Secretary Granholm also ignored important parts of the substantial 21st-century scholarship on Oppenheimer and on the Oppenheimer loyalty-security case.[13]
Called on to explain her decision, and her ignoring powerful evidence, she has been silent. Neither Secretary Granholm nor her office has officially responded to any of the five queries to her since late December 2022 on her “vacating” decision and on her greatly flawed, and fundamentally errant, December statement involving Oppenheimer’s loyalty-security history. Nor has the Biden White House, despite four separate queries since late December, responded on this subject.[14]
Minor Troubling Errors
Judging from at least one feature newspaper article, in the May 28 New York Times, on the forthcoming “Oppenheimer” film, there may be some serious problems in that movie involving accuracy and probably some omissions. That rather enthusiastic, and comfortably uncritical, Times article, with a half-page picture, took up one-and-a-half pages in the “Summer Movies” segment.[15]
Contrary to actor Murphy, who was quoted in the Times article, it’s incorrect that J. Robert Oppenheimer “existed on martinis and cigarettes.” That is a significant exaggeration, as his brother (Frank) and various Robert Oppenheimer colleagues, from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, declared in 1970s-80s interviews. Robert Oppenheimer usually ate actual meals and also snacks, but he was, apparently by temperament and desire, generally a light eater. He was also a chain-smoker, or nearly so, and he proudly made a mean martini. According to various colleagues, he did not, however, normally drink during working hours, and he generally reserved martinis for evening hours and parties.[16]
Unmentioned apparently in featured articles on the publicized film, Robert Oppenheimer did unfortunately and unwisely also help his wife, Kitty, who was basically an alcoholic, to drink heavily. Whatever Robert Oppenheimer’s understanding of her condition, he in effect acted recklessly in contributing to her severe drinking problem as an apparently undiagnosed alcoholic. It was not simply that he drank with her in the evening. He also often made martinis for her—a subject that published biographers may not have discovered or otherwise ignored.[17]
How, if at all, Robert Oppenheimer giving Kitty drinks will be treated in the film will be interesting. The main book, reportedly used by Nolan, does not include such information, though the book substantially treats Kitty’s alcoholism. Robert Oppenheimer, himself rather indifferent to food, also generally ignored the terrible strains in their Princeton home when Kitty, to make their chubby son Peter lose weight, often refused to feed Peter. A cousin—in what is unreported in the published biographical literature—painfully recalled, many years later, Peter coming to his mother in the evening for dinner, and being denied any food that night. She sent him away hungry, and crying. But Peter, when privately queried about this well after his mother’s death, refused to comment.[18]
Because the particular tales of Kitty’s harsh treatment of Peter and denying him food do not appear in the published literature, that particular subject—of Kitty’s marked unkindness with Peter on food—is probably not in the film. It would have required the film-maker, or a member of his team, to do research. Contrary to the apparent assumption indicated by actor Matt Damon, who plays the Manhattan Project director, General Leslie Groves, in the film, Groves was not a lieutenant general during WWII. Erring on Groves’s rank is surprising, but also minor.
Contrary also to Damon’s reported implications, Groves and Oppenheimer, the director of the then-secret Los Alamos laboratory, did not frequently work together in person. Of the Los Alamos lab’s approximately 865 wartime days from April 1943 to August 1945, Groves probably made only about 22 wartime trips there over the course of those two-and-a-half years, averaging under 10 visits—each generally for only a few days each time—during each year.[19]
The most dramatic event, involving the two men together, undoubtedly was the A-bomb test (dubbed “Trinity” by Oppenheimer) in mid-July 1945. It was an uneasy time—with a rain storm just before—and a worried Oppenheimer, with Groves reportedly seeking to calm him down, before the Alamogordo test. That will undoubtedly be a major event in the film. The lightning, the over-wrought Oppenheimer, and the considerate but worried Groves are all undoubtedly the stuff of stunning photography, of dramatic sound effects, and of sensitive acting.
But unlike in that set of events at Alamogordo, the two men, over the two-and-a-half years, primarily communicated not physically in person, but rather through memos and phone conversations with a large distance physically separating them. The occasional transcripts of their phone conversations, and the greater number of the texts of their memos sent back and forth, probably do not easily yield to a dramatic film.
The likely omission of Robert’s giving Kitty drinks and of Kitty’s mistreating their son Peter on food merits brief consideration. Inclusion of such personally revealing, and troubling, matters might deepen the film in understanding Kitty, Robert, and the dysfunctional family. But in a film—even a three-hour film—much has to be omitted, and probably this revealing information was not known to Nolan.
Admittedly, the other subjects mentioned in this section are all comparatively minor issues: how much Oppenheimer lived on cigarettes and alcohol, the nature of Groves’s actual rank, and how often they met in person to confer. But cumulatively these matters, though small, do indicate some troubling errors in understanding the often rather puzzling, and sometimes the agonizing, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Even to mention these minor problems, in this brief essay, may seem churlish. Some may judge such critiques as aesthetically insensitive, and as thus not appreciating the art form of film; but those problems seem important to note because they suggest more significant problems in the film’s likely treatment of Oppenheimer’s life and politics. Those very large matters warrant focused concern.
Significant Problems
Based on the available evidence from the film’s publicity, one therefore wonders, and justifiably worries, about the film’s likely accuracy, and possible omissions of crucial evidence, on very large matters.
They involve what Nolan, in his recently published interview with Streshinsky in WIRED, sees as central in Oppenheimer’s life and apparently in Nolan’s own film. As Nolan put it, “Oppenheimer very much saw the role of scientists . . . as being the experts who had to figure out how to regulate this power [nuclear weapons] in the world. And when you see what happened to him, you understand that was never going to be allowed to happen. It’s a very complicated relationship between science and government, and it’s never been more brutally exposed than in Oppenheimer’s story.”
Such, in large measure, Nolan indicated, is much of the purpose and the focus in his much-awaited film. Given his statement, it seems appropriate to discuss some of these events, and concerns, in Oppenheimer’s life and the challenges they constitute to the movie.
That could mean dealing with the substantial evidence on, and the importance of, a significant number of interrelated subjects and events. But because of the desire at this time to limit the length of this essay, only four sets of such matters will be discussed here.
They involve the atomic and hydrogen bombs, his thinking about those weapons, and about the relationship of science and scientists to weaponry, and his own political difficulties and what he concealed, over many years, about his own Communist political past. Here, in numbered fashion, but not to indicate any rank-ordering of importance, are the four sets of concerns selected for discussion:
● Important, and undoubtedly of crucial importance, is dealing in depth, and in detail, with the very complicated subject of how Oppenheimer felt after the atomic bombing about the use of the weapon on Japan. That subject could easily, in print, take up many pages, and any discussion would have to acknowledge his apparent shifting perspectives, and even substantial inconsistencies.
Such would undoubtedly be the opportunity for the wonderfully gifted Cillian Murphy, as Oppenheimer, to speak many of the lines from the sources providing Oppenheimer’s words. But determining which sources are reliable, and what Oppenheimer actually said in writing, in conversation, and in public addresses, can complicate the problems. Noting when he addressed the issues, and to whom, or in what forum, can further complicate matters.
But certain materials should definitely be used in the making of the film. Among them, notably, is the transcript, available in the Manhattan Project records, of the recorded conversation between Groves and Oppenheimer on 6 August 1945, when the general informed Oppenheimer of the successful atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
“I’m proud of you and all of your people,” said Groves. “It went all right?” promptly asked Oppenheimer. “Apparently it went with a tremendous bang,” said Groves. “When was all this, was it after sundown?” asked Oppenheimer, apparently eager for details. “No . . . in daytime,” replied Groves. To which, Oppenheimer stated, “Right. Everybody is feeling reasonably good about it and I extend my heartiest congratulations. It’s been a long road.” “Yes,” said Groves, and “it has been a long road and I think one of the wisest things I did was when I selected [you as] the director of Los Alamos.” To which, Oppenheimer replied, “Well I have my doubts, General Groves.”[20]
While readers ponder that dialogue, and consider what Oppenheimer was saying and what he meant, it seems reasonable to conclude that he was satisfied with the reported results: the bomb created at Los Alamos greatly worked, and the bombing mission was highly successful. There was no utterance by him of regret, and certainly no mention of those who had been killed or injured by the A-bomb.
To term Oppenheimer’s response, in that recorded conversation, cold-blooded might be extreme, unfair, and unkind. To term it insensitive, however, does not seem inappropriate.
Three days later, on August 9th, in response to a request from a major US news service, asking him for a public statement on the “beneficial rather than destructive uses of the bomb,” Oppenheimer apparently replied rather quickly. He did not demur. He did not say that such a reply, by emphasizing only benefits, could be one-sided, distort matters, and perhaps be intellectually and ethically dangerous. Such a statement, he presumably understood, could, in effect, limit understanding.[21]
He stated for publication, not surprisingly, what he and many others truly and understandably thought: “We believe that the use of this weapon . . . might help to shorten [the] war and be a benefit to the world for that alone.” He seemed to have no doubts, and he probably—at that time, and given what he believed he knew—had no substantial reason to have doubts.
He did not stop with that statement. Significantly, he added far more. He chose at length to dilate upon what he deemed and described as a great likely benefit: “[T]his rather spectacular development [of the A-bomb], and the assured development of far more terrifying future developments, would force upon the people of this country, and all the war-weary peoples of the world, a recognition of how imperative it has become to avert wars in the future.” Thus, ideally, the peoples of the world could be brought together, and science would have helped to accomplish that result.
Such, he indicated, could be the benefits from the present, and more so the future, produced by terrifying weapons: forcing, and pushing, statesmen and nations to overcome differences and to cooperate, in order to avoid war. The result could be, he suggested, massive peace. It could be, one can say, a heady hope, or a dangerous justification for the A-bomb, or both. In 1945, only one nation—the United States—knew how to make atomic bombs. And only the US, in a carefully designed monopoly, possessed such weapons. His statement avoided emphasizing such matters—of the US’s unique, and uniquely powerful, situation.
These two sets of statements—of August 6 and 9—from the first few days in what was the post-Hiroshima world, express no regrets. He seemed to welcome the bomb’s use, and to find great benefit in its terrible power and its remarkable capacity for great destruction.
● A second concern, warranting attention in the “Oppenheimer” film, is that Oppenheimer helped General Groves downplay in 1945, to the US public and thus also to the international public, the strong evidence of substantial radiation-caused injuries and deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulting from the two atomic bombings of Japan. Oppenheimer made a quoted public statement on August 8th that basically seemed to dismiss the concerns. His words appalled radiologist Robert Stone, who headed an A-bomb project medical research team. Adding to difficulties, Oppenheimer later disregarded relevant evidence in his own files on dangerous A-bomb radiation in Japan, and in September 1945, he helped lull American journalists into a false understanding of A-bomb radiation matters.[22]
If the public’s understanding of science and technology is important, as Oppenheimer in his life periodically emphasized, his dealing in the post-Hiroshima months, in publicly explaining and downplaying A-bomb radiation matters, did not serve the public interest. He helped block, and to impede, informed understanding on the subject.[23]
● Undoubtedly far more important, in terms of his own self, Oppenheimer repeatedly lied during and after World War II to the US government. He thereby concealed his secret Communist Party (CP) membership, of about 1939-1941, and participation in a party cell. The evidence of such CP membership is overwhelming, and that means he also committed perjury on at least a few occasions over a number of years.[24]
That subject could be discussed in great depth, and at considerable length. What follows however in the next eight paragraphs, is only, basically, a quite brief summary of much of the overwhelming evidence. While some pieces of that evidence might be challenged, as Bird and Sherwin briefly sought to do in their 2005 book and in their 2005 essay, the total evidence, contrary to their unconvincing efforts, is now overwhelming: Oppenheimer had been a member of the Communist Party.
Haakon Chevalier, once Oppenheimer’s friend, informed him in 1964, in a private letter, that Chevalier was writing, in his forthcoming book, of their much earlier Communist Party past. Oppenheimer, bristling, denied that claim that he had ever been a CP member, and he even considered legal action to block Chevalier from making a public charge involving such membership. Chevalier did not make such a public charge, but years later, Chevalier confided in Oppenheimer analyst Jon Else, basically a filmmaker—that Oppenheimer had been a Communist Party member.[25]
Over the years, other evidence, and strong evidence, also emerged supporting that claim. Barbara Chevalier, though long divorced from Haakon and often contemptuous of him, independently provided her own recollections, in a 1984 diary entry and in 2000s interviews with two separate historians. She corroborated that both Haakon and Robert Oppenheimer had been CP members years earlier. She placed that membership in about 1938-1941.[26]
The two Chevaliers’s claims, despite their acting independently, in their recollections of Robert’s CP membership, might be doubted or perhaps dismissed as very frail evidence and thus even suspect. Building firm conclusions on the two Chevaliers’s sets of claims might not be convincing to many who want to understand, and to assess, the relevant evidence on Oppenheimer and CP membership.
But far more substantial evidence also became available. It was provided by a longtime historian (Gordon Griffiths), who was no longer a Communist, and who had broken many years earlier with the party. He had crafted in the 1990s a personal memoir, basically for his family. He was not red-baiting, and his personal memoir, in his lifetime, remained private and probably only in family hands.[27]
What Griffiths revealed in that unpublished, but thoughtfully crafted, memoir was very significant: He had been for a few years, apparently mostly before Pearl Harbor, a secret CP liaison to a small clandestine CP cell in Berkeley; that cell included both Oppenheimer and Chevalier. Griffiths wrote, “Nobody carried a party card,” and Griffiths was sure that both men—Oppenheimer and Chevalier—had “considered themselves to be Communists.” Griffiths’s recollections—not intended for public consumption, and by a man who was writing when still on the American left—constitute powerful evidence. He stated, “[T]he time has come to set the record straight.”[28]
Griffiths’s statement on Oppenheimer’s CP membership, even if taken alone, cannot be discounted, or dismissed. Added to the independent and basically corroborating evidence from the two Chevaliers, Griffiths’s memoir becomes even more powerful, and greatly persuasive, on the CP membership issue. His memoir statement seems, especially when carefully read and thoughtfully assessed, to clinch the case: Robert Oppenheimer had been a CP member.
But significant added material—quite substantial material—involving Oppenheimer and the CP, drawn from former Soviet sources, later became available. Used primarily by historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, that significant material, often quoted by them in their important 2012 article, seems even further to tighten an already very substantial case: Robert Oppenheimer had been a secret CP member for a few years.[29]
The implications of that warranted finding for understanding Oppenheimer, his foes, and the loyalty-security case, are significant. That finding about Oppenheimer can help, and often should, shape important interpretive conclusions about Oppenheimer himself and about that case, and sometimes even about his foes.
● There is also at least a fourth major concern, involving Oppenheimer, warranting attention in the film: Oppenheimer’s great shifts on the US’s pursuit of the H-bomb. In 1947 and somewhat past mid-1949, he supported the US’s quest for that weapon, but then (after the USSR’s first A-bomb test in August 1949), he opposed that US H-bomb quest. Not surprisingly, nor unreasonably, Oppenheimer’s reversal, coming after the Soviet Union’s surprising, and alarming, A-bomb breakthrough, puzzled some powerful H-bomb supporters who came, in part for such reasons, to mistrust Oppenheimer.[30]
Closely examining Oppenheimer’s shifts over time on H-bomb research and the quest for the weapon, and his stated reasons, can also allow a subtle analyst to discuss critically Oppenheimer’s statement, in November 1945, in basically his valedictory departing address at Los Alamos, when he spoke of the scientists producing the A-bomb. He said: “[W]hen you come right down to it the reason we did this job [developing the A-bomb] is because it is an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing . . . it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values.”
That significant statement, emphasizing an organic necessity, embodied important assumptions about scientific ethics, moral responsibility, and the inter-connections between the US nation-state, other nation-states, and rank-and-file citizenry, in the development of massive, and lethal weapons, which had very recently killed many thousands of Japanese, and some thousands of others, in two Japanese cities.[31]
How much critical-minded research have Nolan, Thomas, Murphy, and Damon done on these four sets of significant matters? How, if at all, will the film director, perhaps also involving producer Thomas, and the two actors, deal in the film with all four sets of troubling problems?
Do those four people know what are the large issues in the substantial Oppenheimer scholarship, and of the significant evidential problems on these large issues? Or have these four people perhaps unduly trusted one set of sources (mostly a major book), and generally ignored substantial unsettling contrary, and complicating, evidence? To ask such questions of actors Murphy and Damon, and possibly also of Blunt, may seem unfair, because there are probably limits to how much such actors, in playing parts in this film, should seek to learn and know about the actual individuals they are playing, along with their history and experiences.
But to ask these significant questions of director Nolan, who has the responsibility for defining and crafting the “Oppenheimer” movie and perhaps of producer Thomas, who is often described as his full partner on his films, seems both fair and appropriate. In reaching well beyond the book on which Nolan (probably with Thomas) reportedly relied substantially, did Nolan or Thomas also send researchers into the archives to check on the book and to reach beyond it? Did Nolan or Thomas, and possibly some of their aides, seek to read widely in the relevant literature? If so, what did they do about conflicting evidence and interpretations? Did Emma Thomas, as the producer, consider such significant matters as sourcing, accuracy, and omissions? Is that part of her responsibility in the making of such a film?
All this constitutes a set of crucial issues—admittedly, a challenging set of issues—for film-maker Christopher Nolan, who reportedly largely crafted his movie’s script, and possibly for producer Emma Thomas, too. How these four significant matters—Oppenheimer’s August 6-9 statements on the atomic bombing and the meaning of the bomb; his A-bomb radiation statements, his CP membership and his deceitful denials, and the H-bomb issues—are treated in the film is very important. If one or more are not treated, that, too, merits great concern.
Ideally, all should be dealt with in the “Oppenheimer” movie in a deeply informed way. To an audience, such an approach can help provide questions, and possibly some suggestive answers.
The Roles of Robert Oppenheimer, Strauss, and Kitty Oppenheimer
How should Murphy present Oppenheimer, at critical moments in the film, if Murphy assumes that Oppenheimer was badly wronged in the hearing, and that suspicions of Oppenheimer having been a Communist were outrageous and incorrect, and even part of a McCarthyite conspiracy? But what if, instead, Murphy, acting as Oppenheimer, correctly assumes—as Murphy should—that some of the key suspicions about Oppenheimer were warranted and accurate?
And for Robert Downey, Jr., who plays Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s enemy, there are similarly related questions. Should Strauss be played more sympathetically if indeed, as was the case, Strauss was somewhat correct in suspecting Oppenheimer? Strauss was devious, thin-skinned, mean-spirited, and even vicious in helping to do in Robert Oppenheimer. But on some important matters—in even somewhat suspecting Oppenheimer’s political past—Strauss was not unreasonable.
Because Kitty Oppenheimer knew about Robert’s CP past, how should the actor Emily Blunt, if dealing as Kitty with this subject, present Kitty’s responses to the loyalty-security hearing and to the AEC’s negative judgment? Does it matter that Kitty was engaging in a substantial cover-up, one undoubtedly concealed from Robert’s attorneys and others? Shouldn’t Blunt as Kitty indicate, in the film, uneasiness, anxiety, and fear—that the cover-up might unravel?
Kitty was already a heavy drinker before the loyalty-security case erupted. Did her drinking, as might be suggested, further increase not simply because of that case, but also because she knew that Robert and she were dangerously involved in a substantial cover-up involving his CP past? Communicating that, in skillful acting, could be demanding, but skillful actors can do that.
The Challenges and the Test
Even as a Hollywood-made movie, with perhaps some claims of license for “creative interpretation,” the much-publicized movie is, by its explicit title and purposeful focus, on J. Robert Oppenheimer himself. He is not a fictional character. Focusing explicitly on Oppenheimer, in a film, seems to create a strong obligation—which should be fulfilled—for the film-maker to seek to maintain fidelity to the crucial evidence and to demonstrate a commitment to a probing understanding of the important interpretive problems involving Oppenheimer. To do less does not seem adequately responsible to history, to Oppenheimer, and to Nolan’s movie audiences. In particular, the matter of Oppenheimer’s CP membership may be especially troubling. But the other interpretive issues should not be ignored.
The ultimate test, and the appropriate measure, will be the film itself. Will a likely very dramatic, and exciting, movie on a major historical personage be intellectually, and factually, accurate and responsible? Will the critics, in assessing the film, generally understand the crucial major issues involving evidence, and most strikingly about Oppenheimer’s secret CP membership? That could be a crucial matter.
The Lurking Threat of a Perjury Investigation
To deal substantially with that subject of Oppenheimer’s CP membership is not to engage in a latter-day McCarthyism. It is, instead, in the quest for responsible interpretation, to recognize Oppenheimer’s unacknowledged politics and beliefs for a period. That means accepting the powerful evidence of his repeatedly lying about that complicated subject.
All that means that an analyst, and an actor portraying Oppenheimer, might well suggest interpretatively the great emotional strain that Robert Oppenheimer, himself, in sometimes committing unprosecuted perjury, must have felt. Oppenheimer was somewhat lucky. No one in authority, who mistrusted him, had the essential evidence—of his perjury—that could be legally submitted to a court. The evidence was heavily from wiretaps and similar surveillance, and presumably not legal, so it was not admissible in court.
Oppenheimer had significant enemies. At least one, AEC chairman Lewis Strauss, might well have been happy to have Oppenheimer firmly caught by others, and then prosecuted for perjury. Perhaps FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who had sometimes provided secret evidence on the subject, felt similarly. But neither Strauss nor Hoover could find the useful, and legally acceptable, proof for what they believed, and apparently concluded, they knew about Oppenheimer.[32]
It seems unlikely that the film recognizes, or even considers, this set of issues. If so, however, was a painful, and revealing, problem missed? Would not close attention to history, and to sources, have yielded different drama in the movie?
Might such an approach, in that film, have even probed, deftly and subtly, in explaining why Oppenheimer, normally so articulate and forceful, fell apart and seemed to crumble when testifying in the 1954 hearing? In that hearing, Robert Oppenheimer was under great self-inflicted pressure, and undoubtedly he had reason also to fear that the “prosecutor” (Roger Robb) had more damning evidence (suggesting perjury) than Robb used in the hearing.
There was probably also, for Oppenheimer, the likely continuing danger, well after the 1954 events, that such evidence (involving perjury) might be deployed, by Robb, or Strauss, or Hoover and the FBI, or by others, later against him. Robert Oppenheimer was a very vulnerable man—far more vulnerable than many of his supporters most likely understood.
That is a situation that the “Oppenheimer” film, and that director Christopher Nolan and that most of his main actors, and perhaps also involving producer Emma Thomas, might have sought to suggest in skillful, and subtle, ways. In doing so, their movie, as Murphy seemed to promise in his New York Times interview, might have asked such questions without giving answers. They are important questions, and there can be important unsettling answers.
[1] Oppenheimer Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter LOC).
[2] Manhattan Engineer District (hereafter MED) Records, Record Group (hereafter RG) 77, National Archives (hereafter NARA).
[3] “United States v. Joseph W. Weinberg,” Harry S. Truman Library.
[4] The date of the article was probably 16 April 1960.
[5] Maria Streshinsky, “How Christopher Nolan Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI,” WIRED (July-August. 2023).
[6] Streshinsky interview with Nolan, WIRED.
[7] Roslyn Sulcas, “The Man with Oppenheimer Eyes,” New York Times, 28 May 2023.
[8] Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). The two co-authors were already my longtime friends, and Sherwin was so until his death, and Bird remains a friend. On the volume’s jacket, I provided justifiable praise, but also, even before its publication, I had greatly faulted the book, (in multiple conversations with Bird and Sherwin, and in a lecture-essay), for the volume’s unsatisfactory treatment of the Oppenheimer CP membership issues and for much of the book’s dubious explanation, and assessment, of the Oppenheimer loyalty-security case. Privately, I had recommended their volume for the Pulitzer Prize, and still believe that the book, despite faults, merited that prize. Their volume is, by far, the best single study on Oppenheimer, but the book should not, on many matters, be uncritically accepted in its interpretations. After about 2005, neither scholar, in much later years, addressed in any publication the post-2005, critical scholarship on the Oppenheimer CP membership issues, or the loyalty-security case. The 2005 Bird-Sherwin interpretation on those subjects did, however, receive general support in Priscilla McMillan, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (New York: Viking, 2005), though she had conducted her own work independently and probably she did not know about, and thus did not address, much of then newer evidence on CP membership matters and what was then, in 2005, the very recent 2004 Berkeley symposium (with Bird and Sherwin, Gregg Herken, and myself) on these issues.
[9] Atomic Energy Commission (hereafter AEC), In The Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1954). A later more accessible republished version, edited by Philip Stern and issued by MIT Press in 1970, appeared with a slightly different title, but (despite some typos) has the same pagination for the hearings. The Personnel Security Board (PSB) opinion, with the dissent by chemist Ward V. Evans, is on page 999-1021 in the MIT edition, and the AEC opinion, with concurring negative opinions by some commissioners and the lone dissent by physicist Henry D. Smyth, is on pages 1049-1065.
[10] Rabi and Bethe testimony are on pages 451-73, and 323-40 in AEC, In The Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Among other luminaries testifying for Oppenheimer were James Conant, the former Harvard president; Lee DuBridge, the Caltech president; and Vannevar Bush, the former head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development; and the brilliant mathematician/physicist John Von Neumann; as well as two former AEC chairmen, David Lilienthal and Gordon Dean. In prestige, the pro-Oppenheimer group far outweighed the few anti-Oppenheimer individuals who testified. The name index in the MIT edition provides the page numbers for the testimony. Rabi quietly had tried to head off the AEC’s negative judgment. Rabi to AEC chairman Lewis Strauss, 14 June 1954, Rabi Papers, LOC.
[11] See Gregg Herken, “Was Robert Oppenheimer a ‘Closet Communist’? The Debate and the Evidence,” and Bernstein, “The Puzzles of Interpreting J. Robert Oppenheimer, His Politics and the Issues of His Possible Communist Party Membership,” in Cathryn Carson and David A. Hollinger, eds., Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections (Berkeley Papers in History of Science, Volume. 21, 2005), 51-56, 77-112. Also see Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 30-32; John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 39-58, and especially. 41; and Haynes and Klehr, “J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Spy? No. But a Communist Once? Yes,” Washington Decoded, 11 February 2012, and especially the text related to endnotes 13-14 and 31-32, and thus to the Vassiliev notebooks. See also Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 242-50. My own position, as Haynes and Klehr apparently hoped, in note 26 in their 2012 article, has become far more definite on the CP membership issue. Bird and Sherwin, drawing on their Oppenheimer volume, provided in “Robert Oppenheimer and the Communist Party,” in Carson and Hollinger, eds., Reappraising Oppenheimer, 57-76, a distilled version of their longer argument which is in their American Prometheus.
[12] See, for example, Richard G. Hewlett and Jack Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 73-112; Bernstein, “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, Volume 12: Number 1 (1982), 195-252; Bernstein, “The Oppenheimer Conspiracy,” Discover (March 1985), 22-32; Bernstein, The Oppenheimer Loyalty-Security Case Reconsidered,” Stanford Law Review 42 (July 1990), 1383-1484; Peter Goodchild, J. Robert Oppenheimer: Shatterer of Worlds (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981); and Richard Polenberg, ed. In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Security Clearance Hearing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), xv-xxxii.
[13] Granholm’s five-and-a-half page statement, 16 December 2022, is taken from the Department of Energy website. So far, there has not been, in the published literature, any focused, substantial critique of her stated Oppenheimer history. Alex Wellerstein, “Oppenheimer: Vacated but not Vindicated,” in his blog on 21 December 2022, briefly seems to suggest some problems, but he also concludes, very strongly, that the case against Oppenheimer was fully unjustified and that the publicly stated motivations were “a sham.” Wellerstein dealt briefly with the case and issues of Oppenheimer’s relationship to the Communist Party in Wellerstein’s important book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 257-69 and 478-79. For a different perspective, and brief critique of Granholm’s stated Oppenheimer history, and a challenge to director Nolan, see Bernstein, “Oppenheimer’s ‘Hollywood Ending,’” New York Sun, 6 February 2023. Many news publications erred, and reported, incorrectly, that Granholm’s December 16 decision had reinstated Oppenheimer’s clearance. She did not. On 8 August 2022, a bipartisan group of 43 US senators, including Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, Patrick Leahy, and Edward Markey, among many others, had sent Secretary Granholm a letter urging her to vacate the AEC’s 1954 negative decision on Oppenheimer, and to issue an apology. That letter—though apparently not critiqued, to date, in any published literature—was remarkably ill-informed on many historical matters involving Oppenheimer and the loyalty-security case. Significantly, the senators’ letter ignored all the contrary publications, by at least five scholars and involving at least six articles or books since about 2002.
[14] All my correspondence to Secretary Granholm, to her office, to President Biden, and to the Biden White House was by US mail. Letters were also sent, by me, to a half-dozen US senators who had called for such a Granholm vacating decision, but none of those senators, or their offices, ever responded to the issues. My letters went by US mail and by email to, among others, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA.), my state’s senior (though reportedly impaired) US senator, Senator Edward Markey (D-MA), and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ).
[15] Sulcas, “The Man with Oppenheimer Eyes,” New York Times, 28 May 2023. Asked by Sulcas how “he [Murphy] understood the character of Oppenheimer,” Murphy, according to her report, “said that he wanted to let the movie speak to that.” In his own words, as she quoted them, “The best films ask questions and don’t give answers.”
[16] Interviews with Frank Oppenheimer, Robert Bacher, Edward Teller, John Manley, and Freeman Dyson, referring (from their experience) at different times in Robert Oppenheimer’s life. Frank referred to Los Alamos, and the many years beyond, until Robert’s severe illness and then 1967 death. Bacher addressed the Los Alamos period, and a handful of years after. Teller, mostly Los Alamos. Manley, Los Alamos and a few years after. Dyson, generally on Robert’s years in Princeton from about 1948 to 1966/67.
[17] The sources, rather uneasily addressing the subject, are Frank Oppenheimer and Freeman Dyson. In an interview, Dr. Judy Oppenheimer, M.D., with less knowledge, seemed to agree. Cf., Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 408-410.
[18] The main source is Dr. Judy Oppenheimer, who visited her uncle and aunt (Robert and Kitty) in Princeton when Judy was a youngster. The subject of Peter, Kitty, and food is treated less fully, in Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 413. They never interviewed Judy Oppenheimer, nor, she indicated, in my interview with her, had any other historian (other than Priscilla McMillan) dealing with her uncle, Robert. Peter did not respond to various letters.
[19] The tally of 22 days was communicated, via a Los Alamos researcher (Tom Kunkle), from a Groves family member (his grandson, Richard Groves), who possibly relied substantially on the use (mostly by Groves biographer Robert S. Norris) of General Groves’s wartime diary, kept by Groves’s secretary. The estimate of the average length of visits is based on the partial use, and then counting, from the Groves diary. Groves probably made more wartime visits to the Boston area and Oak Ridge (than to Los Alamos), according to Richard Groves.
[20] Groves-Oppenheimer Transcript, 6 August 1945, 201 (Groves) file, MED Records, RG 77, National Archives. Bird and Sherwin (American Prometheus, 315) quote this dialogue, but without comment.
[21] Oppenheimer to All Division Leaders (Los Alamos), 9 August 1945, Robert Bacher Papers, California Institute of Technology. Bird and Sherwin (American Prometheus, 317-18) do not mention this document, or even this theme (terrifying weapons forcing nations to choose peace to avert war), in Oppenheimer’s thinking in that period. Critical work may well raise unsettling questions about the reliability of two statements allegedly made by Oppenheimer: “I feel I have blood on my hands” (to Truman in October 1945); and “I am death, the destroyer of worlds” (at Trinity on 16 July 1945). For Oppenheimer’s worrying before Hiroshima about “those poor little people” (the to-be A-bomb-killed and injured), there is good reason to doubt whether Oppenheimer ever uttered those words. Cf. Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 313-314.
[22] Groves Diary, 8 August 1945, used in Groves Papers, RG 200, NARA; War Department Press Release, 8 August 1945, and War Department Press Release, 11 August 1945, both in Bureau of Public Relations Press Branch, MED Records, RG 77, NARA; Dr. Robert S. Stone to Lieutenant Colonel Hymer L. Friedel[l], 9 August 1945, DOE Open-Net; and Los Angeles Times, 12 September 1945. See also Oppenheimer to Brigadier General T. F. Farrell and Captain W. S. Parsons, 23 July 1945; V. Weisskopf, P. Aebersold, L. H. Hempelmann, and F. Reines to G. Kistiakowsky, “Calculated Biological Effects of Atomic Explosion in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” 1 September 1945; and G. B. Kistiakowsky to J. R. Oppenheimer, “My Activities During Your Absence,” circa 1 September 1945, all three documents in Los Alamos National Laboratory Records and provided at various times under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). For other analyses on the 1945 A-bombs and their radiation, see P. S. Henshaw and R. R. Coveyou, “Death from Radiation Burns,” to H. J. Curtis and K. Z. Morgan, 24 August 1945, DOE Open-Net. Some useful background on this subject briefly appears in Bernstein, “Doing Nuclear History: Treating Scholarship Fairly and Interpreting Pre-Hiroshima Thinking About ‘Radioactive Poisoning,’” Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Newsletter, Volume 26: Number 3 September 1966, 17-36, and in Sean Malloy, “‘A Very Pleasant Way to Die’: Radiation Effects and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb against Japan,” Diplomatic History, Volume 36: Number 3, June 2012, 515-545. An important set of Groves’s documents are the transcripts of his 25 August 1945, conversations with surgeon Charles Rea, a lieutenant general at Oak Ridge, in Groves (201) file, MED Records, such as this transcript.
[23] J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Open Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), a collection of essays and lectures, intermittently deals with science and the public. For an earlier statement, albeit briefly and somewhat elliptically on the subject, see J. R. Oppenheimer to All Division Leaders, 9 August 1945. That statement, in speaking of the A-bomb, describes science as beneficially bridging cultures. To many Japanese, Oppenheimer’s statement, if known to them, might have been greatly distressing, because of the atomic bombings.
[24] See the sources cited in note 11.
[25] Much of this is discussed in Bernstein, “The Puzzles of Interpreting J. Robert Oppenheimer.” The three major documents are: Chevalier to Oppenheimer, 23 July 1964; Oppenheimer to Chevalier, 7 August 1964; and “Telephone Call from Mr. Garrison to RO [Robert Oppenheimer],” 18 March 1965, all in Oppenheimer Papers, LOC. Else discussed with me his conversation with Haakon Chevalier on Oppenheimer’s CP membership.
[26] Herken shared Barbara Chevalier’s diary entry with me, and Barbara Chevalier also provided a copy and spoke firmly, in at least one phone interview with me, of Oppenheimer’s and Haakon’s CP membership.
[27] David Griffiths, now an emeritus physics professor at Reed College, discussed his father’s background, politics, and purposes in various conversations with me since about 2005, and most recently a few times in 2023.
[28] Gordon Griffiths, Venturing Outside the Ivory Tower: The Political Autobiography of a College Professor (unpublished), 28-29, available at LOC.
[29] Haynes and Klehr, “J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Spy? No. But a Communist Once? Yes,” Washington Decoded, 11 February 2012. They energetically, and at some length, disagree with the Bird-Sherwin interpretation. Neither Sherwin nor Bird ever responded in print to the Haynes-Klehr essay. By 2012, and actually starting some years earlier, both Bird and Sherwin were engaged in other projects.
[30] Peter Galison and Bernstein, “In Any Light: Scientists and the Decision to Build the Superbomb, 1952 [1942]-1954,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, Volume 19: Number 2, 1987, 267-347; Bernstein, “Four Physicists and the Bomb: The Early Years, 1945-1950,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, Volume 18: Number 2 (1988), 231-263; Bernstein, “The H-Bomb Decisions: Were They Inevitable?, in Bernard Brodie et al., eds., National Security and International Stability (Cambridge, MA: Oelgeschlager Gunn & Hain, 1983), 327-356; and AEC, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (MIT edition), 1009-1011 (PSB opinion), 711-722 (physicist Edward Teller), and 771-789 (physicist Luis Alvarez). A valuable book on the H-bomb decision is Ken Young and Warner R. Schilling, Super Bomb: Organizational Conflict and the Development of the Hydrogen Bomb (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), but unfortunately, in its brief attention to the loyalty-security case, the book basically ignored the scholarship concluding that Oppenheimer had been a CP member. More than four decades after 1954, the DOE in two separate batches—more than a decade apart—declassifed more segments of the 1954 hearings, including pages on H-bomb issues. Many nuclear-history writers had not known, and seem still not to know, of that first batch from the 1990s. They have concluded, errantly, that there was only one batch, which was released in 2014. See New York Times, 12 October 2014.
[31] Speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists, 2 November 1945, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and also published in Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner, eds., Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 317. Cf. Nolan, in WIRED (July-Aug. 2023) for his dubious conception of science and what is natural, as indicated in his statements on “splitting the atom,” and “[we] didn’t create it [splitting the atom].” Nolan’s conception of science, drawing upon that interview and extending at least to his “Oppenheimer” film, may well warrant sustained analysis.
[32] See, for example, J. Edgar Hoover to Major General Harry Hawkins Vaughan, 28 February 1947, Truman Library. Lewis L. Strauss reportedly confided in his secretary, Virginia Walker, and in others, about his strong similar suspicions. Interviews with Walker and with Lewis H. Strauss, the son of Lewis L. Strauss. General (ret.) K. D. Nichols, the AEC general manager in 1954, revealed years later, in an interview, having similar suspicions in 1953-54, and after. The problem presumably of not being able in court to use illegal wiretap or similar surveillance-gathered evidence was discussed, obliquely, involving a perjury case of one of Oppenheimer’s former PhD. students. Assistant Attorney General Murray to Attorney General McGranery, on Weinberg case, 24 November 1952, Truman Library. For earlier, though oblique, protection of Oppenheimer, but not explicitly on possible perjury, see President Harry S. Truman to Attorney General James P. McGranery, 26 August 1952, with AEC chairman Gordon Dean to Truman, 25 August 1952, Truman Library. This involved Oppenheimer and contested claims about his having held and attended a CP meeting in 1941 in his Berkeley house. On the Weinberg case and that alleged Oppenheimer meeting, see Harold Green, partly involving his personal recollections, in his “The Oppenheimer Case: A Study in the Abuse of Law,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Volume 33: Number 7 (September 1977), 57-58. See also Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 454-61, and 698; and McMillan, Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 147-50 and 338. Bird and Sherwin had not interviewed Green, who had been an AEC attorney, but McMillan had—and repeatedly. My own interviews with Green involved his reaffirming his contentions (stated in his Bulletin article) on the Weinberg-Oppenheimer-perjury matter.
Barton J. Bernstein is a Stanford University emeritus history professor, who has conducted research and written on Oppenheimer and on US nuclear history and policy since the 1970s. That work has included, on these intertwined subjects, more than 50 interviews, research in a few dozen archival collections in the US and UK, issuing more than a dozen-and-a-half interpretive publications, and giving more than two-hundred guest-lectures and seminars in the US and abroad. He is also a member of Washington Decoded’s editorial board.The essay is the outgrowth from a larger, unfinished project of possibly multiple studies involving Oppenheimer historiography, the historiography on the Oppenheimer loyalty-security case, and the issues, evidence, and disputes about Oppenheimer’s Communist Party membership. I have benefited from discussions over the years on Oppenheimer issues with other scholars: Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, P. S. Herr, McGeorge Bundy, Jon Else, Gregg Herken, David Holloway, Priscilla McMillan, Herbert York, and Alice K. Smith and Charles Weiner. I have also benefited from various assistance from M. L. King, from William Burr and from the National Security Archive, for their very generous help in providing documents, and from Tony and Tanna Kienitz in their providing me with a recently issued interview with Christopher Nolan.
©2023 by Barton J. Bernstein
It should be noted that the context within the recorded conversation between Groves and Oppenheimer following Hiroshima was that the bomb dropped then had not been tested, so Oppenheimer was genuinely concerned whether it would work. I’m not sure of his involvement with the design of the uranium gun device, but the Trinity plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
Posted by: John Semrad | 13 July 2023 at 07:52 PM
Censorship discredits this author…what a fraud.
Posted by: Jayne | 30 August 2023 at 06:39 PM