What's Missing in "Oppenheimer"

Plus: I talk about it with Amy Goodman.

I’ve just returned home after appearing with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! (TV and online) this morning. You can watch here or above. It went so well she kept me another half hour or more for bonus “after show” chat that will be posted shortly. I talked about my book and many of the issues I’ve raised here in the past ten days. Thanks to all of my new subscribers at this new daily free Oppenheimer newsletter. (And if you wish, check out my popular main newsletter here on music and politics.)

As I noted, my problems with the well-made movie is not so much what’s in it but what is omitted. Over the past 12 days here at this new bloggy newsletter, I have explored some of them, so to supplement the Democracy Now! segments (and my articles in recent days in the L.A. Times, Mother Jones, LitHub) here are some of the highlights. As I noted yesterday on the Site Formerly Known as Twitter, “More people here upset over a movie about a doll than a movie that kind of soft-pedals the extermination of 160,000 or more civilians and radiation dangers that followed for decades in USA.”

»>The Nolan film belatedly, and in just a three-second snippet, refers to this: Oppenheimer, who liked to claim he just directed the creation of the bomb, not using it, also helped pick its targets. His involvement in the decision to use—and how, and where—has often been glossed over in previous films. Nolan at least mentions it, albeit too briefly and in the middle of a shouting match.

The first key meeting for Oppenheimer, as an advisor to the official Targeting Committee, even took place in his office at Los Alamos. A Dr. Stearns presented five Japanese targets mainly on the basis that they were good-sized cities and had not already been vastly damaged in our conventional air raids, so they’d provide a nice canvas.  Among the choices were Yokohama, Kokura, Niigata, and the old city of Kyoto.  Then there was Hiroshima, which had “an important army depot… There are adjacent hills which are likely to produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage.”  This effect would only arise if the weapon was dropped over the center of the city, not over the “army depot,” which was not so situated.  

Attendees agreed that “obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan” was the goal, no matter how many civilians (mainly women and children) were killed. This was a bustling city of maybe 300,000 people.   The official notes for the meeting suggested that everyone knew this, as a key heading included these telltale quote marks:  Use Against “Military” Objectives.   What followed:  “It was agreed that for the initial use of the weapon any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb.”

There is no record of Oppenheimer objecting to this at that meeting or in subsequent ones. Within three months, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would suffer at least 200,000 deaths, with about 85% of them civilians.

»>As I had feared, the movie, despite dwelling on the first test at Trinity, does not depict or even refer to what happened after that blast—a radioactive cloud drifting over nearby settlements. Oppenheimer had worried about this but did nothing to stop it and agreed to keep records secret afterward.  True, Nolan had to leave a lot out of his story, but in general the radiation, secrecy and cover-up components in the tragedy surrounding what happened in 1945, and in the nuclear era that followed, is unfortunately underplayed in the movie.

Many “downwinders,” soldiers, workers, and millions of average American citizens would suffer for decades.

»>But how does the movie tackle some of the issues surrounding the decision to drop the bomb?   The major failing is in not challenging the entrenched “Hiroshima narrative” that holds that the use of the bombs, and only the use of the bombs, ended the war.  Now, this may not have been a priority for Nolan, who also wrote the generally effective script.   What he no doubt set out to accomplish--and mainly he succeeded--was in picturing the development of Edward Teller’s “Super” (or H-bomb), which Oppie mainly opposed, as the true nuclear turning point, and how this haunts us today.  

Nolan’s mind is more on 2023, not 1945.  That’s fine in most ways, but I would argue, as I have for almost forty years now, that you can’t lower the chances of a nuclear attack in the future without truly coming to terms with the two times we have already used the bomb. As long as we endorse these exceptions—it’s easier for more to be made. Much more in my book.

> >For the longest time, there is no mention of the Nagasaki bombing. This is nothing new, as long ago I dubbed it “The Forgotten Bomb.” But in the latter part of the movie, it suddenly gets cited three or four times, though always in an awkward, after-thought way.  That’s better than nothing, but you’d never know that even many hardline historians who back the Hiroshima mission have strong qualms about Nagasaki—a kind of war crime—and we’d never know why from the movie.  So consult my article here. (I didn’t write the headline but it is apt: “America Killed 90,000 People for No Good Reason, and Then Just Forgot About It.” ) The downplaying of Nagasaki in the movie is surprising in that, in real life, it was the emerging death toll from the second bomb that sparked Oppenheimer’s regrets about the military use of the bomb.

The man most responsible for the unnecessary 75,000 civilian deaths there, General Groves—a rather sympathetic Matt Damon in the movie—gets a complete pass, as he does in several other key areas, such as his strenuous and effective efforts to cover up, with Oppie’s help, radiation hazards connected with the new weapon.

Well, Hollywood has made some progress. In the first atomic movie, from MGM, that I explore in my book, Nagasaki was not even mentioned once.

»>Then there’s this: I warned awhile ago that it looked like in this movie there would be no images of what happened at the other end of the bomb in Japan. And, indeed, the movie does not deliver any of that. 

After Oppie is informed that Hiroshima has been bombed, his fellow scientists cheer and chant his name, and he reluctantly, then happily, celebrates in a brief address at Los Alamos, all accurate.  He even comes to claim that the Japanese are not feeling too good right about then! Then he starts to tremble a bit and see visions (as he does elsewhere in the movie). He very briefly imagines a young woman with a partly burned or melted race.  Amazingly, Nolan cast his own daughter in this role.

Staggering now, Oppie seems to step in a black mass on the floor about the size of a basketball.  When he lifts his shoe some of the black covers it. Now, this is handled so unclearly—there is much racket and vibrations (he is having a vision)—that I had to ask my wife later if my interpretation was correct: that this was supposed to represent a charred Japanese body.  Like some of the other very good references in the movie (audio or visual), it goes by too quickly and, I’d imagine, hard for even someone experienced in nuclear imagery to identify. 

The only other coverage of what might happened on the ground in Japan, as I recall, comes in another short scene where Oppenheimer, in what we assume is a Los Alamos or military screening room, stares ahead at some footage, which we don’t see, and betrays a bit of emotion,  as a narrator refers to what we have to guess is a scene of death and destruction in one of Japan’s atomic cities.  We only see Oppie from the side, with no shot of the screen. And this ends quickly.

And that’s it for a visit to the other end of the bomb. Omitted: what I explored in my recent documentary….

And for those who came, or come, out of Oppenheimer thinking that he eventually felt the use of the bomb against Japan was wrong or not necessary—here, in 1965, shortly before his death, he utters a strong, if sad, endorsement.