Fallout from the "Oppenheimer" Oscar Wins

New critiques and reflections on previous nuclear apocalypse films.

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “Hiroshima in America,” “Atomic Cover-up,” and “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” He has directed documentary films since 2021, including three for PBS (watch online award-winning “Atomic Cover-up”). You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free.

On the post-Oscars “the day after” (to reference the classic nuclear holocaust flick, see below), numerous articles hailed “Oppenheimer,” though a few new ones offered critiques—my beat since last July—or at least context. And someone tweeted, as I recall, “Finally an Oscar went to a film that explored the horrors of nuclear war from the point of view of its victims—’Godzilla Minus One.’”

Here are a few samples:

—An opinion piece at The New York Times by one of its editors, Ariel Kaminer, detailed her military/musician uncle’s exposure to 1950s nuclear tests and subsequent cancer diagnosis. She makes clear this criminal exposure was common in our postwar testing period. Then she sizes up “Oppenheimer”:

As for the bomb’s effect on American bodies, the sight of those unprotected scientists is the closest the film comes. The scene plays like a metaphor for how naïvely optimistic the nuclear program was, how unprepared the nation, or even the world, was for the terrors it would unleash. After the test, when the Army guys crate up the remaining bombs and drive them away, Oppenheimer tells Teller, “Once it’s used, nuclear war, perhaps all war, becomes unthinkable.” Equally unthinkable, I suspect, would have been the idea that the United States would intentionally inflict some of the bomb’s harmful effects on its own service members.

If “Oppenheimer” were a more traditional film, Japan’s surrender might have been the climax. But the movie continues for another hour, turning its attention to Oppenheimer’s struggle to retain his security clearance, a fight that plays out in parallel with a Washington insider’s struggle to secure a cabinet post. It’s possible to leave the theater with the impression that, in the United States at least, the main victim of the bomb was Oppenheimer’s career.

For my uncle, the fallout came later. For some other atomic vets or their families — or for people living near test sites such as those in Nevada and the Marshall Islands and of course for people in Japan — it may yet be in the future. The film honored at the Oscars told a very specific story, but countless other lives trace back to that day, too. In one way or another, no one emerged untouched. We are all living downwind of that first momentous blast.

Plus, here’s a new BBC piece on “Oppenheimer” and the Downwinders.

—Last week, I recommended a close read of the Times’ lengthy, Web interactive series titled “The Brink” on vast nuclear dangers today. It then appeared in the Sunday Times print edition, covering five full pages. The writer, a Times national security specialist, W.J. Hennigan, popped up again online on Monday with an “audio essay” and transcript with a full dissection of several influential “nuclear” movies, such as “Dr. Strangelove,” “Fail Safe,” and the aforementioned “The Day After,” which are decades old but still serve as warnings for the present.

A few highlights:

When you ask somebody in the nuclear weapons world about what their favorite films are, “Dr. Strangelove” is almost always the answer….

It was less than 10 years later before we started introducing arms control measures that would start restricting the numbers of nuclear weapons and the things that you could do with them. And more than half a century later, we’re approaching a world in less than two years where there will be no limitations on nuclear stockpiles here in the United States, or Russia, or anywhere else.

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My second recommendation is “Fail Safe,” directed by Sidney Lumet, from the same year, 1964. This is sort of the strait-laced version of “Dr. Strangelove.” This film shows that even though these intricate, specially designed methods and systems, even if the foremost minds in our world are trying to ensure the fact that something bad can’t happen — it shows human error is always looming overhead….

I don’t think that a lot of people understand that nuclear weapons are essentially the president’s weapons. There is no other aspect in the U. S. military that operates like the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Only the president has that authority, and he or she does not need to consult Congress or the courts or anyone else in making a decision to use nuclear weapons.

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Nuclear war is not something that you can really wrap your mind around because of the unnatural horror that’s involved in it. And “The Day After” puts it on in full display.

A narrative that the film does well is that it takes you from the vantage point of average people….

It was deeply researched, and not only is it told from the ground level, but it also has the science to back it up of the dramatic effects of living in an irradiated world….

Not only did it have this cultural impact, but it also swayed policy. Ronald Reagan, famously, after watching “The Day After,” softened his stance and rhetoric surrounding nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union, and indeed, his administration had major breakthroughs in arms control and de-escalation efforts with the U.S.S.R. in the years afterward.

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Finally, Michigan State historian Naoko Wake, an authority on the varied victims of the Hrioshima and Nagasaki bombs, offers this assessment which may surprise many (I did get to interview Korean survivors in 1984 in Hiroshima):

More than 200,000 people perished, and the lives lost included not only Japanese civilians but also Koreans who had been in Japan as forced laborers or military conscripts.

In fact, 1 in every 10 people who survived the bomb were Koreans, but the U.S. government has never recognized them as survivors of U.S. military attacks. To this day they struggle to get access to medical treatment for their long-term radiation illness.

Moreover, about 3,000 to 4,000 of those affected by the bombs were Americans of Japanese ancestry, as I have shown in my book about Asian American survivors of the bombings. Most of them were children who were staying with their families, or students who had enrolled in schools in Japan prior to the war because U.S. schools had become increasingly discriminatory to Asian American students.

These non-Japanese survivors – including many U.S.-born citizens – have been known to scholars and activists since at least the 1990s. So it feels surreal to watch a film that depicts the bombs’ effects purely in the context of the U.S. at war against its enemy, Japan. As my work shows, the bombs didn’t discriminate between friend and foe.

Meanwhile, the first poster, below, for the belated opening of “Oppenheimer” in Japan at the end of this month. And a new piece on worries in Hiroshima.

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “Hiroshima in America,” “Atomic Cover-up,” and “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” He has directed three documentary films since 2021, including three for PBS (plus award-winning “Atomic Cover-up”). You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free.