Oppenheimer: The Most Personal Review You Will See
“Now I am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds,” the famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita that Dr. Robert Oppenheimer claimed to have described his feelings after the creation of the atomic bomb. Upon seeing the film, I couldn’t help but be immersed in most personal feelings toward the movie. In fact, more than most people, I am deeply intertwined with this film.
Iral B. Johns moved to Los Alamos in 1943 to work on the new age of warfare: the A — bomb.
Originally educated in America’s heartland, Iral had always been successful. He went on to obtain his Ph.D. in Chemistry and began teaching at Iowa State University (Iowa State College, at the time). His importance in relation to the Manhattan Project cannot be understated. The story starts with the Ames Project which acted as a research center for the creation of the Atom Bombs. Frank Spedding, another Iowa State professor, was assigned to direct the Metallurgical Laboratory’s Chemistry Division. Johns was then appointed by Spedding as the head of the Plutonium Division. As development on the project continued, Johns took part in the move to Los Alamos, New Mexico, and was a witness to the famous Trinity bomb test.
The personal aspect for me is the fact that Johns happens to be my great-great-grandfather. I also happen to attend Iowa State University, where I get to walk around and feel a deep sense of legacy and accomplishment. To this day, my elders pass down stories of Iral and the relatively mysterious nature of him. Truly, he lived the later parts of his life isolated from the rest of the family, teaching and living out the fruits of his labor in Massachusetts.
If you have not seen the film then you will not understand when I describe this movie as being nothing short of a masterpiece. A unique and candid description and portrayal of a brilliant mind. A troubled one as well. Oppenheimer the womanizer, the egoist, the persuader, and the charmer. Christopher Nolan brings you through the tribulations of being a genie for the United States government, designing them a weapon powerful enough to destroy the world, and in the end, they attempt to dispose of you as a Communist sympathizer simply for your stance against the development of hydrogen bombs. These accusations were a serious threat. Everything that Robert Oppenheimer worked on would be at stake.
Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “in the first place, a man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with masts and rigging gone.” In fact, this is an in-depth description of Plato’s idea of humans as beings that are in a “continual Becoming and never Being,” (Schopenhauer 21).
For Oppenheimer, this seems to be the dilemma at hand. Nothing was too small for a scientist such as him, but he wasn’t unlike the scene of science at that time (or ever). Similarly, this same egotistical race exists in practically every academic discipline. It was clear from the beginning that the US government would use Oppenheimer and his team as a tool that could be disposed of if needed. However, the scientific feat of designing a bomb clouded the perception of the scientists, as they wanted to be at the forefront of history. Adding to what Schopenhauer said above, the completion of the bomb is truly what the scientists wanted to avoid. Oppenheimer can only be described as “shipwrecked” after the bomb was weaponized against Japan. However, this was only sometime after the bomb had dropped. Initially, it was a cause for celebration. Loud chants and beer and big bright American flags, waving high in the air were the premature reactions to a more prolonged pain; one that would last long after that fateful day in 1945.
Schopenhauer added the insight that “any incident, however trivial, that rouses disagreeable emotion, leaves an after-effect in our mind, which, for the time it lasts, prevents our taking a clear objective view of the things about us, and tinges all our thoughts: just as a small object held close to the eye limits and distorts our field of vision.” (Schopenhauer 41).
This was certainly true of Oppenheimer in the moments following, which Christopher Nolan depicted in a masterful way.
In the film, the news from Japan began to flood the airways, and as described before, the initial feeling was an uncontainable joy. However, as the movie progresses, Oppenheimer’s realization is the moral duality between Good and Evil. To protect your country or to protect humanity? That is the central question of this whole event.
And as time wore on, the lasting wounds began to reveal things and the pictures of the remnants of two wasted Japanese cities weighed heavy on the minds of all around the world. But this bigger issue was what it inspired. Internationally, the Manhattan Project shifted human history, offering the first realistic ability and world-ending war. Only through a single device. And this device threatened other nations into designing similar weaponry (AKA an arms race).
But this was worth it for the United States due to information that this race had already begun, particularly with the Soviets. Something larger and more destructive would prove victorious and the United States had to be the ones to create it. The H-bomb was on the horizon.
The H-bomb cut deeper into the wounds that were left by the A-bomb. It showed the scientists, particularly Oppenheimer, that your country only needs you for so long. Once your services have been expended, and your opinion runs contrary to theirs, then you will be disposed of in brutal fashion.
Oppenheimer was targeted as being a security threat and a suspected Communist simply for his views against the development of the H-bomb. A reasonably ethical, yet paradoxical moral stance from the so-called “Father of the Atomic Bomb.”
It wasn’t a desire to drop a bomb on the Japanese for Oppenheimer as much as it was an attempt to advance a field of physics (theoretical physics) and expand the frontiers of scientific possibility. Oppenheimer put this quite succinctly himself. He says, “It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them,” (Rhodes 12).
In all, this film was truly one of the most important pieces of art to emerge this century. Almost a perfect movie if I dare say. Nolan depicts the triumphs of the project and also clearly displays the lowest of the lows. Everyone should watch this movie, regardless of personal interest. It not only teaches us but draws out a drastic sense of urgency that if we do not begin to make progress politically, we are doomed at the fault of our own hands. For all the feats humanity achieved, the invention of the atomic bomb should concern us all. We’re inching closer to a world in which no other time period is comparable.
Works Cited
“Ames Project.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ames_Project. Accessed 26 July 2023.
“Iral B. Johns — Nuclear Museum.” Atomic Heritage Foundation, https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/iral-b-johns/. Accessed 26 July 2023.
Rhodes, Richard. The making of the atomic bomb. Simon & Schuster, 1986.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. Suffering, Suicide and Immortality: Eight Essays from The Parerga. Edited by T. Bailey Saunders, translated by T. Bailey Saunders, Dover Publications, 2006. Accessed 26 July 2023.
Thank you all so much for reading this. I hope you were able to take value from it. If you enjoy my work, feel free to give me a follow to support my writing.
Below is a link to another piece that you may like and my page on the Iowa State Daily, where I am a columnist
Best regards,
Caleb
