Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer is the blockbuster biopic about Robert Oppenheimer, one of the giants of 20th century physics, and the man the government put in charge of the Manhattan Project to design and build the first atomic bomb.

Just to lead with my overall reaction to the movie: This is one that I was more impressed by than enjoyed. That is, I was aware throughout that this is top flight moviemaking—huge budget, solid acting including from famous stars, an undeniably historically important story, etc., just a big deal film all the way—but, subjectively, I often had to work to stay interested and I only got into it modestly, though I suppose I did like it a bit more in the end, when I could see it as a whole and think back on the issues it raises.

It’s three hours long, and frankly feels like it. Generally I don’t have a problem with long movies. Especially if it’s a biography or true story of some kind, if anything I’m typically more frustrated that a movie isn’t even longer; I don’t like that so much has to be left out due to time constraints. But I’m pretty sure Oppenheimer could have had a half hour or even an hour trimmed from it, and I would have enjoyed it as much or likely more.

I also am not crazy about the way the film jumps around chronologically. It’s not like it’s horribly confusing in that regard, but it’s an artsy gimmick that I could have done without.

You can think of the film as being about three major areas: Oppenheimer’s personal life, Oppenheimer’s political life, and the story of the making of the Bomb. Which is not to imply that they’re somehow completely separable; obviously they’re interrelated. Of the three, I was least into the first—keeping track of, and caring at all about, the various women he dated, married, had affairs with, etc., and his kids (that are mentioned, but barely appear in the film). The second—his early flirtations with Communism, his ongoing run-ins with McCarthy-type anti-Communists, etc.—held my interest a bit better, but still not as much as I’d like. The third—the bringing together of the physics Dream Team to figure out how to come up with an atomic bomb before the Nazis, with bonus points if they could do so without setting off a chain reaction that destroys the world—I would say was the most compelling of the three.

We see a little bit of the younger Oppenheimer, studying abroad, proving to be something of a klutz in the laboratory but a savant when it comes to theoretical physics, and meeting major figures like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Almost all of the movie, though, takes place when Oppenheimer was an established heavyweight in his field.

He’s presented as in some ways the obvious choice to head up the Manhattan Project, at least in terms of his qualifications as the nation’s top physicist—the doubts were instead on the political side.

(What about Einstein instead? Wasn’t he an even bigger deal physicist? Well, he’s in the film actually, in a couple of brief scenes. But as of this time his groundbreaking work was several decades in the past. By now he was more the respected elder statesman, figurehead type, not someone who was any longer doing cutting edge work in the field. His early work kind of set the stage for quantum mechanics, but then he was never able to fully embrace it, for a time seeking some less bizarre alternative explanation consistent with the evidence, and then gradually fading into irrelevancy. He was, though, a co-author of a letter to President Roosevelt letting him know that an atomic bomb was theoretically plausible, and urging that the U.S. explore the possibilities before the Nazis figured it out. But he didn’t propose that he have any actual role in such an effort, beyond getting the ball rolling by suggesting it.)

Oppenheimer evidently never joined the Communist Party, but he was what’s derogatorily termed a “fellow traveler.” His family and social contacts, among them his brother and sister-in-law and one of his wives, included many Communists and former Communists. He attended Communist-led parties and events. He donated money to the Party for specific causes of theirs that he believed in, including support for the Spanish Republic and support for certain unionizing efforts.

This was a level of association with Communists that, as anti-Communist fervor ebbed and flowed in the U.S., at times was maybe mildly suspicious but no big deal, and at other times was the kind of thing for which people were actively persecuted to an extreme that ruined careers and lives.

The government—represented in the film by a colonel (soon general) who recruited him and who then functioned as his handler—wasn’t thrilled about this, but decided his value to the Manhattan Project overrode their security concerns.

Then after the project got off the ground—in the equivalent of a new city built from scratch by the military in the New Mexico desert near some property Oppenheimer owned, where not only all the physicists but also their families and the support personnel could live—Oppenheimer was approached at least once by a friend who casually let him know that if by chance he ever felt an urge to communicate to the Soviets (our wartime allies, but former and assumed future enemies) any information about what he and his colleagues were doing, that he “knew a guy who knew a guy” who could provide an opportunity to do so. Oppenheimer didn’t take him up on it, and there’s no indication that he seriously considered doing so, but it took a while for him to report the incident, and when he eventually did so he lied about certain details to protect the identity of his friend, though he did come clean and tell a truthful version to the general who was his Manhattan Project handler.

There was pressure here and there during the Manhattan Project—e.g., the handler pushed for “compartmentalization,” meaning most participants in the project would work on and know only a small part of the overall project so that there would be a limit to what they could leak if they turned out to be Soviet or Nazi spies—but mostly Oppenheimer had leeway to run things the way he believed gave them the best chance at success.

The scientists were highly but not fully confident of the theoretical aspects of the project, but one factor that slowed things down considerably was how time-consuming a process it was to generate the necessary fissionable material.

Indeed, once they finally had enough for a modest amount of testing plus two bombs, the war was nearly over. Hitler was dead and the Nazis were within days of surrendering. Japan was clearly defeated, though intelligence indicated that they would likely fight on, meaning many more Japanese and American military casualties and Japanese civilian casualties.

Remember, the whole rationale for the Bomb had been to get one before the Nazis did, to avoid the nightmare scenario of the Nazis being able to use such a weapon unilaterally and force the surrender of their enemies. There was zero evidence that the Japanese were working on such a weapon.

But because the weapon now existed, a new rationale was found for using it. If dropped on Japan, it was theorized, it could bring about a Japanese surrender with substantially fewer casualties than would otherwise occur.

This proved more controversial in certain circles than the original purpose of countering a Nazi atomic project. Some of the Manhattan Project scientists protested, circulating a petition urging President Truman not to use the bomb. Truman used it anyway.

There is plenty of room to argue with the decision to bomb Hiroshima, but the decision to then also bomb Nagasaki seems even harder to defend. But the argument for it was that one bomb alone might not force a Japanese surrender, that they might be able to convince themselves that only one such weapon existed and the Americans had already used it, whereas dropping at least two sent the message that perhaps the U.S. had a high number of such weapons available (though in fact there were only the two), making things seem more obviously hopeless to the Japanese.

In any case, we’re obviously getting farther and farther afield from the original rationale. (Incidentally, the Nazis never came remotely close to developing an atomic bomb before their demise. Their research was more into nuclear power—like for reactors. I read that Hitler had been told that even if atomic power could be used for a bomb, that it would be impossible to predict and control what and how much it would destroy and where the radiation would spread, and so he dismissed it as too impractical to devote resources to.)

Oppenheimer was ambivalent about the use of his atomic bomb on Japan, but to some degree was able to rationalize it. After that, though, he more consistently opposed atomic warfare. He urged international cooperation in preventing nuclear proliferation, and came out against the development of his colleague Edward Teller’s hydrogen bomb (many, many times more powerful than an atomic bomb—Teller had been pushing for it as a superior alternative to the atomic bomb even during the Manhattan Project).

This international peace and cooperation/world government/limits on further weapon development stuff was considered vaguely left wing at the time, which made Oppenheimer some enemies, and which caused them to then move against him. (Though the film makes the case that personal motives were at least as important as political motives, in the person of Lewis Strauss, an original member of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and later Eisenhower Cabinet nominee, who had a long-running grudge against Oppenheimer due to their giving conflicting testimony over the risks of supplying isotopes to allied nations, where Strauss felt Oppenheimer had made a monkey of him.)

The idea wasn’t to put Oppenheimer in prison or anything like that, but just to damage him and his reputation enough that his opinions expressed as a public figure would no longer carry any weight. At the secret behest of Strauss, a hearing was held—closed to the public and the press, so that Oppenheimer wouldn’t have an opportunity to make public statements and generate positive publicity for himself—which rehashed Oppenheimer’s supposedly suspicious expression and associations from years and decades ago, resulting in Oppenheimer having his U.S. government security clearance withdrawn.

It wasn’t clear to me exactly what the implications of the loss of this security clearance were, though it’s implied that it was a big deal. If it just meant that he would no longer be eligible to work on a Manhattan Project type project again, then that hardly seems worth worrying about, since that was a one shot deal in very unusual emergency circumstances (not to mention if somehow such a situation did arise again, and the government deemed his physics expertise invaluable, there wasn’t anything stopping them from reinstating his security clearance).

Did it instead make him unemployable, because universities need their physics faculty members to have security clearances since they work so much with the government and military? Was it purely a reputational thing: Once it became known he had lost his security clearance, people would infer that there must be something untrustworthy if not traitorous about him and so they wouldn’t listen to him anymore?

Anyway, like I say, the drama of the conflict between him and Strauss, the controversy over his political opinions, the ups and downs of his reputation and career, etc. I found at least modestly interesting, but not enough to keep me fully engaged for three hours.

But what I found myself thinking most about at the end was just what overall picture emerges of Oppenheimer as a man. And I don’t think the film provides a clear and simple answer to that, which I’m inclined to find more realistic and admirable than unsatisfying.

It doesn’t—as far as I can see—make him out to be a simple hero for leading such a difficult and complex effort for his country when it was fighting a war with existential risk. It doesn’t make him out to be a simple villain for introducing atomic weapons into the world. It doesn’t claim that he was purely an innocent martyr as far as the government coming after him and stripping him of his security clearance. It doesn’t paint him as a great crusader for international peace. He’s neither wholly in the camp of those who insist the development and use of the atomic bomb was clearly justified, nor in the camp of those who came to believe it was wrong to develop and use it. In his personal feelings on matters related to atomic weapons and his involvement therein, he’s neither close to saintly nor utterly lacking in conscience. It doesn’t claim that his political associations were a hundred percent justified and on the up-and-up, nor that he was a pathetic dupe or conscious supporter of the nation’s enemies. He wasn’t a heroically humble, egoless person in his leadership style, nor an atrociously “bad boss” focused solely on his own aggrandizement—I think he liked being the big shot given credit for doing something so historically important, but not to a creepy extreme. In his personal life, including his relationships with women, he was neither above criticism nor an unredeemable cad. He manifested a certain amount of integrity, a certain amount of courage in standing up for what he believed in and taking the consequences, but not to a heroic degree.

The thing is, he was all these things, just not completely any of them.

In the end I suppose you could say that even after three hours he remains an enigma. But I think that’s realistic, I think that would be true of just about anyone.

Looking at Oppenheimer and his career, it’s all complexity, nuance, ambiguity, ambivalence, etc.

He often tried to steer a middle course. Most notably, when some of his colleagues on the Manhattan Project came out against the proposal to use the Bomb on Japan, he neither stood with them nor opposed them. Instead, he saw his role as leader of the project as requiring him to pass along to the powers-that-be “both sides,” the fact that some participants in the project favored using the Bomb to hasten the end of the war and save lives, and some believed using an atomic bomb was not justified in the present circumstances.

There are a couple of scenes that particularly stood out to me in assessing Oppenheimer and his character, or at least how he was perceived by others.

In one, Strauss makes the point that while neutering Oppenheimer politically served his purposes, in its way it served Oppenheimer’s too in that it provided him an opportunity to play the martyr, which is what he wanted anyway—to withdraw from effective political involvement but in a way that allowed him to see it as forced rather than his choice. Like, “Well I did what I could to offset my role in developing atomic weapons by opposing their use, until I was prevented from doing more, and so my conscience is clear.”

In the other, Oppenheimer is shown meeting with Truman in the Oval Office after the war. At first the President is quite jovial and grateful in chatting with Oppenheimer and lauding him for his contributions to the Manhattan Project and the war effort. But when Oppenheimer starts opening up about his ambivalence over his role in it all, and about how history will remember him and whether he needs to do more to lessen the likelihood that atomic weapons will be used again, Truman angrily cuts him off with a classic “the buck stops here” moment, basically telling him to stop his drama queen bullshit about the ramifications of all this on him and his conscience and reputation. No, when all is said and done, no one will give a shit about him and what he did or didn’t do when it comes to the atomic bomb; it’s Truman himself who will always get the credit and/or blame, he’s the one who will forever have to live with it, it’ll be his legacy, because he’s the President—not Oppenheimer—and he’s the one who had to ultimately make the call on whether to drop those bombs.

He dismisses Oppenheimer from his office, and you hear him disgustedly remark to his aide not to “let that crybaby back in.”

So I don’t know what all to think about Oppenheimer. I come away from the film seeing him as admirable to a degree, but only to a degree. Life, and his extraordinary scientific abilities, put him in an extremely rare position to influence human history (sort of—actually, had he never existed, the world would surely still have nuclear weapons, just by a slightly different path and maybe with slightly different timing), and he did a decent but not heroic job of handling that, probably as good as the overwhelming majority of us would have managed.