Amid Raves, A Critical View from Downwind

Plus my piece today.

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “Hiroshima in America,” and the recent “The Beginning or the End,” and has directed three documentary films since 2021, including two for PBS (plus award-winning “Atomic Cover-up”). He has written widely about the atomic bomb and atomic bombings, and their aftermath, for over forty years.

My latest “Oppenheimer”-related piece just published online and in print today by the Los Angeles Times. It’s a swift read, a mini-survey of Hollywood movies about the making of The Bomb and its use against Japan. There have been just four, starting with the movie about which I have devoted an entire acclaimed book of the same title, “The Beginning or the End.”

MGM launched the first Hollywood film to address the attacks, “The Beginning or the End,” in the autumn of 1945, weeks after the bombs were dropped. It was directly inspired by warnings from atomic scientists — not including Oppenheimer — about the further development of nuclear weapons.

Soon, however, both the Truman White House and Gen. Leslie R. Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, were granted script approval. They ordered dozens of revisions that barred it from questioning the attack on Japan or America’s plan to continue down the nuclear path. President Truman even ordered a costly re-shoot to portray his decision to use the bomb more favorably, and MGM fired the actor playing him after the White House complained that the original performer lacked “military bearing.”

Oppenheimer considered the script weak and its characterizations “idiotic.” Nevertheless he signed a release, for no fee, allowing the movie to depict him as a major character and narrator. As for that rival project over at Paramount, for which Ayn Rand wrote a script she described as “a tribute to free enterprise”? After reading her first 55 pages, producer Hal B. Wallis dropped out of the race for the first A-bomb movie.

But I close with this important analysis:

Hollywood has never given Americans an honest chance to confront that vital question in a world with thousands of nuclear warheads still on hair-trigger alert. Now Christopher Nolan has his chance, and his movie, which I saw at an advance screening, does provoke profound emotions about this threat today. But considering the Hollywood history, it’s no shock that even he chose to spend more time on the testing of the first bomb than on what happened when it was used against two cities.

Coincidentally, the L.A. Times published yesterday a piece on a subject that I started raising here a week ago: “‘Oppenheimer’ extols atomic bomb triumph but ignores health effects on those living near test site.” Oppenheimer himself helped downplay and keep secret radiation dangers that emerged from the Trinity test, which goes unmentioned in the film. He even co-led a press junket to the site with Gen. Leslie Groves a little more than a month after Hiroshima (see photo above) with the aim, as the Pentagon frankly put it, to “put lie to” claims of radation effects on human comings out of Japan.

The movie about a man who changed the course of the world’s history by shepherding the development of the first atomic bomb is expected to be a blockbuster, dramatic and full of suspense.

On the sidelines will be a community downwind from the testing site in the southern New Mexico desert, the impacts of which the U.S. government never has fully acknowledged. The movie on the life of scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the top-secret work of the Manhattan Project sheds no light on those residents’ pain.

“They’ll never reflect on the fact that New Mexicans gave their lives. They did the dirtiest of jobs. They invaded our lives and our lands and then they left,” Tina Cordova, a cancer survivor and founder of a group of New Mexico downwinders, said of the scientists and military officials who established a secret city in Los Alamos during the 1940s and tested their work at the Trinity Site some 200 miles away.

Cordova’s group, the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, has been working with the Union of Concerned Scientists and others for years to bring attention to what the Manhattan Project did to people in New Mexico

Yesterday, I posted here links to about fifteen just-published reviews of “Oppenheimer.” Most were raves. How it does at the box office is another matter. My local mall has plenty of tix available this weekend, although the IMAX showings appear popular. I wonder if people tweeting about sold out shows do not reflect the reality, as they may have been referring to these IMAX screenings. We will see.