#1558 How Accurate Was the Oppenheimer Movie?

You can read more about that listening to LT.America.

Org. I not only have a review of the film there and a video, but also a personal account of why I love this character. More than Thomas Jefferson, more than Meriwether Lewis, more than Theodore Roosevelt, more than John Steinbeck. David Dick Henry is so interesting because he was going on this trip with his son Dominic to the heart of the Teton Mountains. And I didn't know he would be home for the opening of the film. Frankly, I didn't think about it, but he texted me and said he was on his way to see the film.

I had just come out of it and so when he was done, he said, we have to talk about this. So we set up a special edition of the program, Listening to America, and had a great and wonderful conversation. My friend, my new friend, John Gowans portrays Dr. Ward Evans has still not seen it.

This is Sunday, the 23rd of July 2023.

Dr. Ward Evans, one of the three members of the advisory panel, the security hearing panel. The one person who voted for Oppenheimer to exonerate him from the spurious charge of having been disloyal to the United States being a security risk. I interviewed John Gowans a few weeks ago before the film came out, now I've seen it before, he has.

It's all crazy because of all sorts of stuff going on in L.

A But he will have seen it this week and we will have a conversation about that. So, you know, how do you decide why a film is a great film? I try to think of the films that I most admire in my life. If someone said, What are the you know name? the greatest movies that you know of?

2001 A Space Odyssey. Certainly, I think The Deer Hunter is one of the great films that I've ever seen. Citizen Kane, of course, stunning. Antonioni's the passenger I truly love.

Doctor Strangelove, which is in some ways related to this film, certainly top five films that I've ever seen, but this film really does stand out. Because I love this subject and have portrayed Oppenheimer, and I'm eager to do more in that character. In fact, I ordered a new 1940s gray suit for my pork pie hat and my pipes. I have a couple of Oppenheimer performances coming up later this summer and fall, and I'm excited about that.

And I'm going to write an essay now about this. It's going to be about John Dunn, my poet from the 17th century, who gave the name Trinity to the test site at Alamogordo in New Mexico. Oppenheimer loved the poetry of John Dunn I love the poetry of John Dunn. I'm going to write about that because Dunn is a metaphysical poet, by which we mean. He used scientific terminology and scientific thought doctrine as poetic conceits, as metaphors and similes in his poetry and in his sermons.

But if ever there were a metaphysical conceit, it's the detonation of atomic device. In which, as the film says in its opening, Oppenheimer became Prometheus, the Greek god who stole fire from the Gods and gave it to humans. And was punished forever by having his liver eaten out by vultures by day, and the liver would then grow back to be tortured again overnight. So I'm going to write about John Dunn and death, which is one of the great.

Especially his sermons, how people reacted to the atomic device, particularly at Alamogordo. Because, of course, there were few witnesses at Hiroshima, they were army or air force officers in the air. They didn't see what the scientists, including Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller and Kenneth Bainbridge and George Kistiakowsky and Hans Bethe, etc. saw at the test site on July 16, 1945. So I'm going to try to wrap all of these things into one essay about why metaphysical conceits are important. Some things can't be understood without straining and stretching the metaphor beyond its usual signification, beyond its usual boundaries, and that's what a metaphysical conceit is.

Dunn was my first love when I was at Oxford. Many, many, many, many, many years ago now. I studied John Dunn in the 17th century. At one time, I knew more about John Dunn than I now know about Jefferson. And I studied the sermons of Dunn. 160 of them, which are regarded maybe as the greatest sermons of the Renaissance and Reformation in England, and some of the best English prose ever written. So I feel that I've been too far, let's just say, too far, too long away from that primary subject of my concern.

So I'm going to return to it now and try to write up something that I think has real, I hope, insight about atomic weaponry. And playing with the levers of the cosmos, you know, when you crack open the very internal leverage that fuels the sun, that fuels the cosmos. And prove with this astonishing test that E does equal MC2. That energy is equal to mass times, the speed of light squared. If you release even a little bit of mass and turn it into energy. Because it multiplies by 186,000 miles per second, it becomes essentially infinite. And that's the basis of this, you know? A tiny coffee cup full of uranium can fuel a submarine for two or three years. And a piece of plutonium the size of a hollow softball can kill a hundred thousand people instantaneously at Nagasaki. And how would it be to be the person who crafted, who created, who was the father of this device? Of course, Oppenheimer would be the first to say that if he had never been born, there still would have been atomic weapons. But that doesn't really exonerate him in his own mind.

In his own mind, he was responsible, or partly responsible, for creating a weapon of mass destruction and seeing it used on innocent Japanese people. You know? Of the several hundred thousand killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fewer than 10,000, I'm sure, were involved in the military struggle between the empire of Japan and the West. So I love this character, he's my favorite character. If you haven't read American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, you must read it. Also, I very highly recommend Peter Goodchild's book, J.

Robert Oppenheimer The Shatterer of Worlds and I recommend Mark Wolverton's book, A Life in Twilight The Final Years of J. Robert Oppenheimer. All three are stunning. You read essentially like a novel. It's not dry history at all, so let's go to the show.

You'll hear more about this because I will be interviewing John Gowans as soon as he finally gets to see his own film. And so we are going to stay on this story and I'm excited to know how you respond to this film. Oppenheimer. I'm going to see it for the second time in about an hour and a half. And then on Saturday, I'm heading towards my annual Lewis and Clark trip, this time on the salmon.

And I'm going to stop in Billings because they have an IMAX theater and I'm going to see it for a third time in IMAX. Because I've been told that this is one film that if you can see in IMAx, you absolutely must, so thanks for listening, we'll see you next week. Here is the program, The Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America with Clay. Across from me, at least virtually, is my great friend Dave McCandry, formerly the executive director of the Washington State Historical Society. The author of several books, including two on Lewis and Clark and one so far, on Captain James Cook. You know, Dave, you're our enlightenment correspondent. Something really interesting happened yesterday, on the 21st of July 2023. I went to see Oppenheimer here in Bismarck, North Dakota, wanting to be one of the people, at least in this zip code, to see it.

And then, a couple of hours later, you informed me that you and your wife, Chris, had been to see it in your part of the world. Yes, thanks, Clay good.

About that a little bit during our conversation, because, you know, you can kind of read what an audience is reacting to. It was a very meaningful experience and I'm looking forward to.

I was so nerdy, Dave, that I went at 11.

15 to the Metroplex was still locked up and I stood in line with about 40 people, the great majority of whom were there to see Barbie. But I was still there and I got the first ticket for Oppenheimer, and I was the first person in the theater. And eventually there were about 20 or 25 other people and I sat wrapped through all three hours. So just in a minute or two, start by giving me your overall impression of this film.

In terms of the actual film itself, I think what I found so powerful, I mean, it's not really a sentimental film, it's not a tearjerker. But I found myself Clay, kind of emotionally struck, I'll say, by the storytelling achievement that Christopher Nolan pulled off in this the script. As someone with some pretensions to writing. I was just awestruck by his ability to pull that narrative together. And, of course, not only to do it in a narrative sense, but correspondingly and with the film score. It was a great package, a tour de force.

As we get later into the program, I'm talking with my dear friend Dave McCandery, who saw Oppenheimer yesterday in Washington State. When I saw it in North Dakota State, I was worried that it wouldn't live up to its hype. And I really didn't like the previews, the trailers that I saw. As a historian, I feared that I was going to be unhappy by the choices that Hollywood almost invariably makes in such a situation, but I wasn't unhappy. I was thrilled, Dave.

As a historian, what did you see being completely faithful to the perceived story, and what did you see at variance?

I went with some skepticism because I've been involved in several Hollywood productions, I've seen what can happen. I remember when my mother and I went to see the Last of the Mohicans. She was a big fan of the leatherstocking tales, and she shook her fist at the screen in the center of the theater in Dickinson, North Dakota.

She got up and shook her fist at the screen. I kept saying, Mother, it's an adaptation. I get that films are not history, and history is not film. But here's the thing, Dave. I didn't see any errors in it. I have some concerns about some of the characterization, but those are largely quibbles.

But from the point of view of historical accuracy, it was splendid. The story is really three things it's the story of the making and the use of the atomic bomb 1942 to 1945. It's the story of the life of a troubled genius, of an extraordinarily brilliant man who had some quirks, the quirks of genius which came back to haunt him. It's the story of the security hearing of the McCarthy era, when Robert Oppenheimer was subjected to a Soviet-style show trial in Washington, D..C. And his security clearance was stripped by the Atomic Energy Commission.

It's all three of those stories, it's also the story of Louis Strauss, who was the nemesis of Oppenheimer. From a historical point of view. I have two concerns. One is that the hearing, although it sort of dominated the film, was not quite set up correctly. Because I want to make sure we all understand a couple of things. It was meant to be a hearing turned out to be a kind of a trial.

Oppenheimer's attorneys were not allowed to have security clearances, so they couldn't see the documents that were being used by the other side in any fair trial. There's something called discovery, and each side gets to see all of the pertinent data. This was not the case. There were recordings of Oppenheimer, there were transcripts of earlier interrogations and interviews.

There were documents that he had produced with a security clearance, which he no longer had, and so his attorneys were not allowed to do the work. That you must be able to do to defend somebody. When the other side has documents that they're using to entrap Oppenheimer in statements they had made 15 or 20 years ago. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, there was a little bit of that in the film. But they tapped his phones during the trial, surveilled his conversations with his counsel, which is also not accepted in due process. Your conversations with your counsel are sacred and private. They opened his mail.

They tailed him everywhere they went. So they used techniques that would be thrown out by any U.s appeals court as intrusive, violating his civil rights. You know, he was told it was going to be a hearing and it turned out to be this display of government arrogance and power to destroy him. So I thought that they handled that a little too lightly.

I think the audience would have felt even deeper bitterness about what happened to Oppenheimer if they had known how the thing was rigged in. SO.

I thought one of the faults of the film, Strauss's motivation, needed greater explanation and delineation. To me, Oppenheimer making a joke about isotopes at a hearing didn't seem sufficient warrant for the revenge that Strauss apparently undertook. So I thought that was maybe the only weak point of the entire production. It just didn't seem plausible that such a relatively minor thing. And if there was more to the explanation of his motivation, it wasn't really presented very comprehensively.

He was a thin-skinned, proud, defiant, self-made.

No question. And he did hold grudges, and that was one of them, and he was karmically rewarded at the end. When he was not confirmed by the United States Senate for a position as the U.S Secretary of Commerce.

It broke his heart, so he broke Oppenheimer's heart, karma came back, and his heart was broken over this. You're absolutely right, Dave, about motive. So yes, that was an issue.

And they made a big thing out of a chance encounter with Einstein. Turns out that in his, Louis, Strauss misread the content of a frown that he saw in Einstein when he walked past him. At the Institute for Advanced Studies. I think one of the weaknesses of the film is that they too personalized this. Strauss had legitimate concerns about Oppenheimer's reliability when the country was in the Cold War needing to build a hydrogen bomb, terrified that the Soviets would get there first.

Oppenheimer did sort of discourage his acolytes from participating in the H-Bomb project. There were legitimate concerns in the air Force, in the National Security State and elsewhere. That Oppenheimer, for whatever reason, had gotten off the train and was having too much influence on scientists. And that does come up in the film, so that's part of it, I think. Strauss also Strauss was confused by Oppenheimer's genius.

And you'll remember that teller. This is also very accurate. In his testimony before the hearing, said, You know, he's complicated, I find him confusing. I would be a little bit more satisfied if I were working with someone whose mind I could understand a little bit better, who didn't, who wasn't so complicated. I think that, you know, Oppenheimer is spouting Sanskrit, and he's quoting T.s Eliot, and he's quoting Baudelaire in French. And he learned Italian in order to read Dante's Divine comedy.

And he names the test site Trinity after a sonnet by my favorite 17th century poet, John Donne. And so Strauss is a self-made man, not particularly well-educated, but very powerful. I think he has the sort of self-made man's deep antagonism to the pretentious, over-learned person.

There was, for the benefit of those viewers who aren't as intimately familiar with the Oppenheimer story. I thought there were. There were some missed opportunities for greater introduction of character at a point in time where it would have been more meaningful to the viewer. To come to mind. When Oppenheimer meets Heisenberg in Germany, you and I immediately recognized that name, but, you know, I'm guessing that might've gone over the heads of a lot of people. And when Fuchs is first introduced to the term to the team at Los Alamos, that that might be a little bit of a cliche on my part. Because maybe everyone knows about Klaus Fuchs. But I thought, you know, for someone who's really tuned into the Oppenheimer story, it was okay, but I think it might've led some viewers, might've mystified some viewers unnecessarily.

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. Dave McCandry is sitting virtually across from me. So yes, I think to pick it up where you left off just before the break. I wonder how the public will react. It's going to get great critical acclaim. I think the public might find it drags a little bit, it's a little bit too abstract at times that it'll be hard to follow.

Heisenberg of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle Who was the chief instrument of German bomb project? Klaus Fuchs, a trader who infiltrated Los Alamos. And while they were thinking that Oppenheimer might be a security risk, Fuchs was carrying suitcases of information through the gates of the secure facility at Los Alamos. So there are many references that you sort of have to know the story to enjoy in their fullness. I think the film works, I don't think there's anything that requires a footnote, but it works better if you know some of the background to the story and particularly the security clearance. I think when people think, Oh, let's go to see this about the making of the atomic bomb, there's an awful lot on the security hearing that probably a lot of people think, well, that's not what, really. That's not exactly why I came to this film.

Blast. And he's sitting in his lawn chair. Everyone else, of course, he's farther away than the people up close. He's got a sunscreen or some kind of lotion on his face, he's got his goggles. It was, and I think it was, a gesture to one of my other favorite movies, Dr. Strangelove.

He's the father of the hydrogen bomb, absolutely amazing human being, but such darkness in his soul. He had a Hobbesian soul, and Oppenheimer didn't. He was an eccentric, he was, he was a master piano player.

And so at Los Alamos, he would play these concerts, both alone, in his house or for others. He was a loner in many respects. And so at the test. Everyone else is putting on their goggles and getting their smoke glass, and he's lathering himself with sunscreen. And it happened. But the way they handled it was definitely a reference to Dr.

Strangelove. Without question. They made him as Darth Vader-y as it's possible at that moment, and also a comic buffoon figure at the same time. Teller's story is part of what I learned.

That was kind of a revelation to me.

He thought he was superior to Oppenheimer, he didn't like Oppenheimer's complexities, or his love of the humanities and Sanskrit and T.s Eliot, and so on. He couldn't understand him, He found him hard to pin down.

And he almost immediately came up with the idea that if you use fusion, not fission, you can create a much more potent weapon than you possibly can fusion. So, instead of breaking the atom and releasing its energy, E equals MC squared, you fuse atoms, and this creates another form of release of energy, which is a thousand times more powerful. And Oppenheimer's view was, Can we just stick? Can we stay focused on the thing where we have to do, which is to win the war? And he, Finally, there's a scene and they do it accurately.

He finally says, Look, teller, just do your own thing. just do your own thing with me once a week.

And then Clay, in the single most powerful moment of the film. From my vantage point. The bomb. The bomb has been dropped on Hiroshima, maybe, and Nagasaki. By that point in time, that might be a point you can elucidate. But Oppenheimer comes before the full assembly of the team that's been assembled at Los Alamos. And when he, when he first comes on in front of the group on stage as it were. But more particularly Clay, when he walks out, the sound is just deafening. The scenes of exhilaration on the faces of the people who were working at the site, all completely disjointed from Oppenheimer's own sense of remorse, regret, and a kind of personal disappointment. I mean, the divergent juxtaposition couldn't have been more powerfully made.

It was absolutely first rate, so he gives.

And he knew that because of that, in the. In the short term, a couple of hundred thousand people died, and in the long run, it could end humanity altogether. And I want to come back to that point in a minute. But I'll tell you, I didn't really know the work of Chilian Murphy. But he has the most expressive eyes you can imagine. And there were times when he was so downcast. I burst into tears twice during the film. The first time was when he quoted John Donne, because John Donne is my guy.

And I'll tell you it was a sad thing. I don't want to go into it, but I had this flashback to my first days at Oxford. The exhilaration of being a young intellectual. The sense that the world is all before you. The confidence you have when you're that age, about the capacity, your capacity to understand things, the newness of everything. I remember getting my first job, getting the keys to my first office, getting my first IBM Selectic typewriter. You know, I remember those days and I burst into tears because of the loss. That. And I went into the men's room afterwards because it's a three hour film, and I looked in the mirror and I saw this old man.

And I was so, I was so struck by that. So that's the first time I burst into tears, and that's about me the second time. But they did a great job in showing the formation of Oppenheimer the troubled years before he became the famous Berkeley physicist. The other time I burst into tears was when he's all alone and he's deeply burdened.

And he's looking down and the camera lingers for five or 10 seconds, and you just see this unbelief, the tragedy. It's a tragedy, this story, because in a tragedy, remember, Aristotle says, the protagonist has to be partly responsible for his own fall. It's not a tragedy. If a bus goes cliff, that's a horrible thing. It's a tragedy. When the character of the hero is also part of what brings about his fall, his demise.

And that's certainly true with his arrogance, his offhandedness, the security breaches that he did. I mean the Gene Tadlock affair, especially the Chevalier affair, and we can clarify some of that. But he sort of handed to his enemies the hammer with which they destroyed him. And he did upset Strauss, and he upset other people too, with this sort of glibness, his razor-like wit. And so both of those. I thought that Gillian Murphy's capacity to act while not speaking was extraordinarily beautiful.

I'll tell you who I didn't like Jason Clarke as Roger Robb and two reasons. First of all, in the first part of the hearing, Robb was a bulldog throughout. But at the end, there's this. You remember? The scene where he goes kind of loses it, and he's slathering, he's almost drooling, he's shouting, he's gesticulating. That wasn't. That's not the nature of Roger Robb.

And they missed one key moment. Remember when Oppenheimer is kind of twisted up and in knots about the Chevalier affair and he says, I was an idiot? Roger Robb went home that night and said to his wife Today, I saw a man destroy himself.

So Groves is asked the question, when it's all said and done. Now, 15 years later, would you give Oppenheimer that authorization? In my heart, I'm wanting him to say, yes, dammit, yes, I would, but of course he doesn't.

He said With these regulations today, as you have now written them, I could not now approve his security clearance. In other words, you've changed the rules. I'm a smart guy. I get that he wasn't saying that, that, in retrospect, he wouldn't have chosen him.

He's saying the rules are now such that a man like that probably couldn't pass muster.

In one of the great scenes in all the films I've ever seen.

He was a kid at the time and so here's what he would do. He'd go out the gate, the security gate, say good night, everyone. They'd say good night. And then he'd go around and cut a hole in the perimeter fence and come back through.

And 10 minutes later, go out the gate and say, Good night everyone. And then he'd go back until they finally went nuts. And he also went into people's offices where they had safes for all the documents. He'd crack the safes and put the documents on their desks overnight. And so that could have bred some well-needed humor.

But let me go back to Kitty Kitty. Is Oppenheimer's wife a troubled, high-strung, alcoholic woman? I don't think they'd made enough of her alcoholism in the film. It became a real problem. But when she finally takes the stand in the hearing, Emily Blunt handled that so well because Roger Robb starts to really pick on her.

And it looks like she's just going to go numb and not be able to answer. And then suddenly, incredible strength of response comes. And I was just filled with my throat, was choking at the power that Emily Blunt brought to that moment. Of course, you have to give credit to the director of photography and the lighting and the music. I want to ask you about that.

And, of course, the direction by Christopher Nolan. So let me ask you this question. The soundtrack, it was a bombarding soundtrack, and bombarding because it's about the atomic bomb. But if you just listen to that on a CD, you'd be overwhelmed.

Caruso, Vincent Caruso. It's on at six o'clock here on Friday nights. He plays symphonic movie themes, and we listen to it religiously and two or three times. I just nudged gently over towards Chris's direction and I said, I see a Vincent Caruso.

Recapitulation of Oppenheimer here. The sound effects The score was great, I thought the sound effects are pretty intense. It would be interesting to see this in, you know, the big screen and clay. I guess this is testimony that I said in one of my opening comments.

This is one of the few movies that I would want to go see again within a short period of time.

I thought, no way am I going to wait two days to see this film? And you know, I know we're gushing here. But you know, you have to put this in the same category as the sound of music, and I mean, films that define an era. And you know, one question I have is, Where did this come from? I've read American Prometheus, it's a superb book.

Oppenheimer's an interesting guy. We're living through another atomic moment here, when the doomsday clock has been closer to midnight than ever before. Because of the way that Vladimir Putin is saber rattling with atomic weapons and so on. But it kind of comes out of nowhere and you wouldn't think that. A film about a complicated physicist who brought quantum mechanics to the United States, who conducted a highly successful laboratory project called the Manhattan Project. And who went on to have a.

Nagasaki Life. You wouldn't expect that to become a great and blockbuster film. So what, why is this, are we, are we wrong, that we're just two knuckleheads who love history? Or is this film going to be one of the big films?

And I've been to the Hanford site, maybe we can talk a little bit about that. Because I thought the physicists, they got their ample coverage. But the plumbers, the people who built the B reactor, or the people at Hanford or at Oak Ridge, they're kind of left out of the story. They're not as dramatic a figure as Oppenheimer, but there's a lot more to the story. So no, I think this is a truly historic film, you know? In his most optimistic phase, we might be coming up close to a break here.

Oppenheimer opines that one of the reasons to proceed is that maybe this will end war. It doesn't clay, it didn't. We know that we're still, you know, the atomic, we're getting closer to midnight.

It bounces back and forth.

That if we can hold it to two, and humanity steps back from that brink and realizes this must never happen again, then we have a chance. But if a third one occurs. And that's why what Putin is doing is so profoundly dangerous, and what we're doing, too frankly, that that would bring about the end of the world. And he said, As everyone said, then the Third World War will be fought with thermonuclear weapons, and the fourth with sticks and stones and clubs. We need to take a short break. I'm speaking with my great friend Dave McHenry.

We're gushing over the Oppenheimer film for all sorts of good reasons. We'll be back in just a minute. You're listening to listening to America.

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. I'm Clay Jenkins and, across from me, Dave McHenry Dave. You know, you made a good point as we went to break that this was not just Los Alamos. That's where the sort of the command module was. But we built an industrial plant that only the United States had the capacity to build.

In fact, Britain was ahead of us of an atomic weapon, and their scientists came to help us from the Maud project. But Britain didn't have the industrial plant or the wealth to do the thing. So when we finished this in 1945, we had built an industrial plant the size of the entire automobile industry of the United States. Oak Ridge was refining uranium 235. The other fissile material was plutonium. And it was largely made at Hanford, which is on the Columbia River and is a toxic military reservation to this day.

And Hanford only came into being because of the dawning awareness that if there should be an accident at one of these reactors, it just could have devastating consequences. On the home front. So Groves, on its own terms, it was a brilliant tactical decision. Decided to build a facility in what was perceived to be out in the middle of nowhere, which is the Columbia Basin. Not far from what? The confluence. In fact, it's right at the confluence, suspectively of the Snake River and the Columbia River, which would be worthy of remark. It's also on the Lewis and Clark trail, another favorite topic?

They were getting nostalgic and they wanted to memorialize their contribution there. And they approached me about what to do. I said, what needs to happen? There needs to be a.

Matt Damon plays Leslie Groves. He does a great job. He's Matt Damon. I love him. I like his work a lot, especially the Martian, but I like all of it.

He was too nice. Groves was an sob. people who worked with him said. He's an sob. He's maybe the greatest sob I've ever met. But he was gruff, mean, arrogant, condescending, pompous, a bully. They swallowed the moment at Alamogordo. When there's a thunderstorm and they're not sure they're going to be able to do it in the morning to set it off.

The weatherman was there and his name was Allison, Groves said. You better make sure there's going to be good weather in the morning, guys. I said, Well, I think so, and he said, if not, I'll have you hanged. He was that guy.

And even towards the end, he gets kind of sentimental and nice and so on. That star power, refusing to play the character for all of the malevolence and arrogance it took to make this thing happen. I'm a great admirer of Groves, but you don't want to soften him as much as Matt Damon did. Or maybe it was Christopher Nolan, I don't know, you know, it's interesting.

Oppenheimer goes in to see Truman. Truman can't concentrate. Oppenheimer looked down on Truman as a lightweight. He eventually gets upset and says, We've got to do something after all, I've got blood in my hands.

Truman basically throws him out of the Oval Office. And then he said in the film, he says, I don't want to hear, don't let that crybaby back in. But what he actually said also was, don't bring that fellow around here ever again. He may have built the thing, but I'm the one who set it off and so this was a great scene. Like, because it's Oppenheimer.

So here's the problem. Truman is right, and Oppenheimer is irrigating to himself, a responsibility that he doesn't ultimately hold. And if he does feel that, that's fine, one can feel that.

But you don't say that to the president of the United States because that's putting yourself in a position that you don't actually hold. So that takes me to the argument of the film, I want to talk a little more, so the argument of the film is this. Remember? At the end, we find out what really happened in the scene at the Institute for Advanced Studies, when Einstein and Oppenheimer and Louis Strauss are all there.

And what Oppenheimer said to Einstein that Strauss didn't hear and misunderstood was this, he said. You know, we understood that it takes a chain reaction to build this thing. Then, he said. I think we have created the chain reaction, in other words, by creating the atomic weapon and detonating it twice, we have brought a chain reaction. Which is maybe going to bring about the end of the world. That it's almost inevitable that at some point, some Putin, some person, some Iranian despot, some third-party stateless actor. Maybe it's Kashmir and Pakistan, but somebody is going to detonate this thing and then all bets are off.

And maybe what I have done, maybe what we have done is to set a chain reaction that will end life on Earth. And the film really stresses that point at the end. They want you to take that away with you. Dave, I'm not sure that that's really the right read.

First of all, Oppenheimer never said it so far as I know. That's argument one of the film, argument two of the film, and I want your reaction is that Oppenheimer self-destructed to be the martyr so that he?

Of what comes after that, his culmination was Alamogordo the Trinity Test as a physicist, and that after that it got into the political sphere. And he is largely innocent of its applications, and particularly of the exaggeration of nuclear energy in the hydrogen bomb and in the Cold War. So that he, in a sense, it was a career suicide. So that he would become a public martyr and would be able to ethically distance himself from the very thing that he had done.

And of course, my answer to that question, just looking at it as objectively as I can, is that, in a way, Oppenheimer's treatment at the hands of the people who dropped the bomb. In the case of the incident at the White House, or the later denial of the security clearance was a form of expiation. That was his penance for his involvement in all of this. In other words, for him to have endured would have only made his situation worse in his own mind. In other words, he's paying the price for having gotten his hands bloody, as he said in that scene with Truman.

And we're meant to see J. Robert Oppenheimer as the American Prometheus, which, of course, comes from the Pulitzer Prize winning book, too. In a sense, he's willing it by not fighting, and I thought of this as I left the film. If he had really geared up and gone right after Roger Robb, who knows how that hearing would have come up?

Probably the same, but we don't know. But instead, he was a largely passive figure during the security hearing and everyone thought, why won't he fight? why won't he defend himself? So maybe this is penance.

And they suggest that the war could have been won eventually with Japan, which is Alperovitz's theme. And so therefore, the bomb wasn't dropped to end World War II. It was actually, if you will, clay, the first shot in the Cold War. Which, if you buy. This hypothesis, means the cause of the Cold War isn't Russian domination of eastern Europe, it's the Americans dropping. Certainly the second atomic bomb, if not both of them, on Japan, in order to make an impression not only on the Japanese, but on the Soviets. Yes, so that's true.

And you know, there were estimates that we saved a million lives and so on and so forth. That's a contested statistic, but Japan was on its knees. There's no question about that, and we were pushing for unconditional surrender.

And then we didn't exact unconditional surrender, so who knows what would have happened? I don't think he can be argued definitively that the war would have gone on endlessly if there had not been those two detonations. And my concern, and this isn't the time to talk about this, we should do this again, but my concern is not Hiroshima, mine is Nagasaki.

Three days later, that's not enough time for Japan to understand even what had happened. It was not meant to be on the 9th of August, it was meant to be later. But bad weather was coming to the Japanese islands. And so we pushed it forward to make sure we got it in before the bad weather set in. Which would have made delays of, who knows, I feel that that has some suspect ethical integrity. Three days.

And I think as an argument, as a view of an important sequence of events in world history. I think on balance, that's where Nolan comes out with the film. Nolan's take on the dropping of the bombs is not revisionist in the Alperovitsian scheme.

And that inevitably must include civilians, because otherwise we won't know the perimeter of the thing. We won't be able to teach the world how awful it is. Unless it incinerates a large enough number of innocent women and children of civilians. And so, and he was on the citing committee and he pushed for it. And he didn't want to warn the Japanese, he didn't want to do a demonstration project, he wanted to drop it on. A so far not very much bombed, large Japanese military complex with a large surrounding civilian population.

And so the idea that he was kind of reluctant about that just doesn't bear up.

And one of the key ones, apparently, is young John F. Kennedy, who's trying to name. And this is why clay just a little piece for the audience of Listening to America, this is why, not necessarily that moment, but when we do our most underrated, overrated presidents. With Lindsay Shcherbinsky-.

Number two, I love the scene with the Picassos. And the other, the modernism, where it's clear that young Robert Oppenheimer was caught up in modernism, in painting, in music, in poetry. Quoting T.

S Eliot All the time I love that because that really set the tone. Here's something I didn't like. The film gets an R rating.

Maybe it would have anyway, but I think that Gene Tatlock's breasts did not need to be in this film. And I'm not a puritan in any way, but I want the whole country to see this film. And I don't know if it got an R because there are several scenes of nudity with her.

That was a mistake because I think that if it were PG or PG-13, millions more would be likely to see it. So that upset me quite a bit. I think, yeah, go ahead.

This is in the hearing and they're going into his womanizing. And Nolan is framing it so that Oppenheimer's girlfriend is looking at Kitty Oppenheimer. I can't begin to describe the scene, but then Nolan cuts it to Oppenheimer's reaction to it. And you see the actor Murphy sitting in the chair in the hearing room, naked clay. That is just brilliant filmmaking.

We'll see you all next week for another important edition of Listening to America.