Revisiting Oppenheimer: The Most Important Film Of Our Times

On 19 December 1938, two scientists Otto Hahn, and his assistant Fritz Strassman working during the Christmas vacation, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, Germany, successfully split an atom of uranium defying all known laws of physics. Hahn later realized his shocking discovery could create the most powerful weapon known to humankind. The world suddenly stood on the precipice of a new era. 

On 1 September 1939, a secret program called Uranverein was launched by the Nazi regime to produce an atomic bomb. Coincidentally the Second World War also began that day and within a year the Nazi army marched from one victory to another, subjugating most of Europe, building concentration camps, unleashing the Holocaust, and threatening global domination. This was a terrifying period of history when humanity came face-to-face with the darkest evil.

Across the Atlantic, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, two eminent scientists who had fled persecution by the Nazis to live in America, co-authored a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning that breakthroughs in nuclear fission in Germany promised “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” Subsequently, on 6 December 1941, Roosevelt signed an Executive Order authorizing the creation of the $2 billion top-secret Manhattan Engineering District program to draw power from the very building blocks of the universe and make an atomic bomb. The next morning, following the massive surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan, the nation was thrust deeply into WW2. 

The world was now in a race to develop a nuclear weapon believing whoever had the bomb first would win the war. 

On 15 March 1943, Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer, the thirty-eight-year-old brilliant Professor at Berkeley arrived at a remote site in New Mexico in America with a mission to beat the Nazis in building a nuclear weapon. One of the top theoretical physicists of the world he had been selected as the Scientific Director of the critical atomic weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, part of the Manhattan Project, on 25 February 1943 and subsequently issued a security clearance on 20 July 1943. The son of wealthy Jewish immigrants Oppenheimer was disturbed by the treatment of Jews in Europe and had donated three percent of his salary to fund families fleeing Nazi atrocities. 

On the day Oppenheimer reached New Mexico in March 1943, the final assault on the Jewish population of the Krakow Ghetto in Poland was underway. Nazi Commander, Julian Scherner, the dreaded SS officer had ordered the liquidation of the inhabitants in Krakow. The SS went ahead and killed approximately 2000 women and men and then transferred about 8,000 members of the Jewish community to the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. About 2,450 were later murdered in the gas chambers. 

In America from that moment onwards Oppenheimer had become embroiled in the greatest of human dramas. Though he did not possess a Nobel Prize, he tirelessly crisscrossed the country to put together a first-rate team of scientists that included many Nobel laureates. Some of the finest minds and giants in the American and European scientific community including, Kenneth Bainbridge, Hans Bethe, Niels Bohr, James Chadwick, Arthur Compton, Joan Curran, Otto Frisch, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, James Franck, Klaus Fuchs, Cynthia Hall, Joseph Hirschfelder, Ernest Lawrence, John von Neumann, Rudolf Peierls, George Placzek, Isidor Rabi, Robert Serber, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf and Eugene Wigner, were diverted from their academic affiliations. 

Oppenheimer, who was at ease with both quantum mechanics and ancient Indian scriptures, over the next months inspired a force of nearly 6,000 scientific and military employees at the Site Y – Los Alamos. Major General Leslie Richard Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers who had built the Pentagon in record time and under budget, was put in charge of the unprecedented scientific enterprise. Together they had to solve the biggest problem in the largest military conflict of history as millions of combatants and civilians perished in the war that raged in Europe and Asia. Under a shroud of secrecy, they were tasked to create and perfect a weapon more powerful than any the world had known. 

The scientists were aware of the Nazi’s secret superweapons program. They recognised that Germany was the birthplace of modern physics and possessed adequate intellectual resources, raw materials, an industrial base, and the political control of military science to produce a bomb. The Nazis also had the services of Werner Heisenberg, the world-renowned Nobel Prize-winning physicist and one of the twentieth century’s principal scientific minds. Intelligence reports suggested that the Nazis already had a six-month head-start and put the Manhattan Project a distant second in the race. Earlier in April 1942 Soviet physicist Georgy N. Flerov posted as an Air Force Lieutenant in Veronezh had observed that articles on nuclear fission were no longer being published in Western physics journals. 

He figured out that research on nuclear fission was now classified – a signal that physicists in Germany and America were working on a nuclear device. Alarmed he wrote directly to General Secretary Josef Stalin insisting that “we must build the uranium bomb without delay.” Soon the Soviet Union intelligence service had a codename for the Manhattan Project – ‘Enormoz’. Simultaneously fearing espionage by foreign governments, the Federal Bureau of Investigation of America tapped Oppenheimer’s phone, wired his office, and monitored his mail.

Twenty-six months later, by May 1945, the Nazis had been crushed. 

Notwithstanding that, on 16 July 1945, at 5:29 a.m. a blinding flash lit the hills in the New Mexico desert and outshone the Sun. This was followed by a hundred-mile-deep shockwave as a roar engulfed the landscape. Finally, the mushroom cloud rose in the sky. The improbable partnership of the extraordinary group of scientists had pulled off the greatest scientific feat of the twentieth century. 

The world was changed forever on that fateful dawn. Humankind was ushered into the atomic age. An excerpt of a conversation between Lord Krishna and Prince Arjuna from the Bhagavad Gita echoed in the mind of Oppenheimer, “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”.

On that day American President Harry S. Truman was meeting General Secretary Stalin and Prime Minister Winston Churchill to negotiate lasting peace at the Potsdam Conference. In an excited tone, Major General Groves conveyed the success of the project, “For the first time in history there was a nuclear explosion. And what an explosion!... The test was successful beyond the most optimistic expectations of anyone.” Truman, as Commander-in-Chief, wanted to end the war in the Pacific without an invasion of Japan, which would have possibly cost over a million American lives. He took the contentious military decision to employ the two nuclear weapons - “the Little Boy and the Fat Man”.

On the morning of 6 August 1945, in one of the defining moments of history, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and it unleashed hell. It pulverized tens of thousands of people and the deluge of flames and ash engulfed the city destroying everything in sight. 

Of the 76,000 buildings in Hiroshima, almost 70,000 were wrecked. The existence of a weapon of mass destruction was finally revealed. The ten captured scientists from Germany including Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg were secretly interned by the Allied forces at Farm Hall, near Cambridge in Britain. After the BBC news broadcast revealed the war’s greatest secret and the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima, the hall fell silent. The scientists were shocked to learn about the detonation as they were certain that their nuclear effort was way ahead of the Manhattan Project.

The subsequent bombing of Nagasaki confirmed that Oppenheimer’s team had outclassed the competition by also successfully enriching uranium and mastering the nuclear reactor technology to produce a plutonium device. The American scientific intelligence unit - Alsos Mission also reported that the Nazis did not possess any nuclear weapons. The Nazi nuclear dreams had eventually amounted to nothing. In the weeks to follow Otto Hahn had trouble sleeping as he lived with the knowledge that the atomic catastrophe was recognizably connected to his scientific breakthrough in December 1938.  Later that year the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Hahn “for his discovery of the fission of heavy atomic nuclei”. 

The atomic bombing was the last act of WW2, and it became the first act of the Cold War. Unexpectedly nuclear physics became a global geopolitical game-changer. In Moscow, Stalin distressed by the shift in the balance of power, instructed Russian physicist Igor Kurchatov, the Scientific Director of Laboratory 2, to end America’s atomic monopoly and speed up ‘Tykwa’, the codename for the Russian nuclear weapons project launching yet another race.

On the evening of 14 August 1945, in Washington D.C. Truman received the message the White House had been waiting for – Japan had surrendered. For the rest of the world, this was America’s finest hour. Oppenheimer was hailed as a national hero. Historian Arthur Schlesinger noted, “Without Oppenheimer’s totally remarkable leadership at Los Alamos, the atomic bomb would not have happened, and World War II would have ended very differently”. 

Under Oppenheimer’s direction in just a few years, nuclear technology had progressed from infancy to the global stage. However, in the post-war years though Oppenheimer was proud of his technical achievements he remained guilty of its effect on humanity. He knew that the colossal power of the atomic bombs had changed the course of life on Earth forever and the nuclear weapons had drawn a line between the world as it used to be before and after Hiroshima. The publicly admired “father of the atomic bomb” called it an evil thing and claimed he had blood on his hands. 

On 12 April 1954, the nation learnt that the charismatic leader of the Manhattan Project faced charges of violating national security. Hounded by the McCarthyites for his communist connections and his opposition to even more deadly nuclear devices Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance on 29 June 1954. This marked an end to his involvement with national policy. The man who had given his best to America now stood publicly disgraced. On 20 September 1959, he entered the luxurious Grand Hotel de Salines on the banks of Rhine in Rheinfelden, Switzerland to address a conference sponsored by the Congress of Cultural Freedom. 

Even though he was just fifty-four he had aged considerably after being victimized in the witch-hunt. The extraordinarily gifted scientist with the temperament of an artist spoke about, “… a dedication to ‘ahisma,’ the Sanskrit word that means doing no harm or hurt…”. Till the time Oppenheimer’s allotted time on Earth came to an end on 18 February 1967, he continued to struggle with the thought that he gave humanity the means of its own destruction.

In July 2023, eight decades from the year Oppenheimer took charge of the Los Alamos lab, a mega biopic directed by Christopher Nolan, was released globally. Oppenheimer has been the subject of many feature and documentary films in the past including, a BBC miniseries and Roland Joffé’s Fat Man and Little Boy, however, Nolan’s version is a masterclass on how biopics need to be made. Based on the Pulitzer prize-winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (2005), it is at once a narrative tour de force and a cinematic experience as powerful as its subject.

Applying the Rubic-Cubish non-linear format of cinema, Nolan retells Oppenheimer’s life story by shuffling back and forth through different periods of his life ranging from classrooms in Berkeley and romantic liaisons to the courtroom session and the scientists in the lab and finally to the Trinity test bomb site. The three-hour nine-second long densely packed film shot in 65 mm and IMAX 65 mm film includes all of Nolan’s cinematic signatures – cerebral theme, fascination with the superhero, complex scriptwriting, and an outsized non-CGI radioactive hellfire nuclear big bang scene.

Combined with Ludwig Göransson’s pulsating score, ace cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema’s all-encompassing IMAX lens, and the razor-sharp editing of Jennifer Lame, Oppenheimer captures the journey of one of the most influential figures of the 20th century in a captivating cinematic form. 

The near-perfect casting has, Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer the brilliant, tortured, complicated man, Emily Blunt as the alcoholic but sharp-witted wife Kitty Oppenheimer, Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock the ill-fated lover, Matt Damon as the jovial General Leslie Groves, Tom Conti as the imposingly restrained Einstein, Kenneth Branagh as Oppenheimer’s Danish mentor Niels Bohr and even three recent Best Actor Oscar winners Rami Malek, Gary Oldman, and Casey Affleck in supporting roles. Robert Downey Jr. playing the duplicitous and tormentor Lewis Strauss, is the real standout performance and a show stealer.

The multiple Oscar nominations for Oppenheimer, together with a box office of over USD 1 billion, are further proof that Oppenheimer is Nolan’s most impressive achievement to date. Through an intense examination of Oppenheimer's life, Nolan’s cinematic contribution has raised profound ethical questions around the world. The film has woken up the residents of our planet to the clear and present danger presented by nuclear weapon technology. 

We are compelled to examine our responsibilities in shaping the future of the generations to come. A key dialogue from Nolan’s film script, attributed to Oppenheimer’s friend and a fellow scientist Isidor Rabi, sums it up, “You drop a bomb, and it falls on the just and the unjust. I don’t wish the culmination of three centuries of physics to be a weapon of mass destruction.” The major takeaway to absorb from Nolan’s Oppenheimer is that our planet must be made safer in the twenty-first century from nuclear weapons.

And for that reason alone, Oppenheimer remains the most important film of our times.

The writer is the biographer of Subhas Chandra Bose and Har Dayal and is the author of India on the World Stage. He can be reached at writerlall@gmail.com.