Universal Pictures
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s film
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist, piloted the Manhattan Project to its completion of the first atom bomb. In the cinematically stunning and passionately observed film Oppenheimer, based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus, writer and director Christopher Nolan captures women and men realizing human destructive capability at its most terrible for the first time. Along the way, he tells the story of Oppenheimer’s journey from anointment as a heroic member of America’s elite to consignment to history’s doghouse. The film, though cluttered and in places reflecting customary creative license, is not the hagiography it might have been. It is admirably complicated.
With virtuosic nuance, Cillian Murphy portrays Oppenheimer as a set of paradoxes—dutiful and self-indulgent, humble and arrogant, self-loathing and conceited, measured and impulsive, savvy and naïve, even brilliant and dumb—and thus a kind of stand-in for a mid-century United States unaccustomed to global power but embracing it as its destiny. The immediate stakes were also high, as the genocidal Nazi regime was working on an atomic weapon under the leadership of Werner Heisenberg, Germany’s greatest physicist and a pioneer of quantum mechanics. The drama is heightened by the fact that Oppenheimer revered Heisenberg as a graduate student in the interwar years and feared him as an adversary. Having leavened their task with the thought that they were simply inventing a “gadget” to end the war, he and his team confronted the horror of their work only after the bomb has been tested in July 1945, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, when he famously remembered a line from Hindu scriptures: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
In the event, of course, the Allies ended the war in Europe without the bomb. Although there is little doubt that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs hastened Japan’s surrender, historian Gar Alperovitz has argued they also essentially constituted the first step in the Cold War, dropped mainly to increase the United States’ leverage over the Soviet Union in shaping the postwar world order. That they certainly did do, which made it psychologically and politically difficult for the United States not to countenance nuclear weapons as legitimate tools of war, at least provisionally, and to develop ever deadlier ones.
At first, this meant contemplating Hiroshima and Nagasaki as harbingers of future armed conflict. With harrowing images of nuclear explosions and aftereffects tormenting its protagonist, the film imparts how difficult it must have been for a conscientious scientist with intimate knowledge of nuclear war to live with that view. Deployed nuclear weapons are durably frightening, like a rack of Chekhov’s guns waiting to be fired. Implicitly, the film asks why, over the course of nearly 80 years, nuclear dread hasn’t produced greater alarm and more potent and open critiques than it has.
The short answer is that nuclear deterrence has worked. Inchoate in the 1950s, the theory progressed from dangerously destabilizing “massive retaliation,” which left room for a pre-emptive first strike, through the counterintuitive concept of “limited nuclear war,” to “mutual assured destruction,” or MAD, which hinged more sensibly on a devastating second-strike capability that would foreclose a first strike. Though tantamount to hostage-taking, and conducive to arms races and capability overkill, it worked. Combined with a numbingly technocratic approach to force planning, effective arms control, and détente, MAD squelched fundamental debate about the utility and morality of nuclear weapons. Even near misses like the Cuban Missile Crisis were ultimately reassuring: Cooler heads had prevailed and would in the future.
Ed Westcott/Department of Energy
J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Guest Lodge, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1946
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan disrupted this sense of calm, proclaiming the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Yet at heart he was a nuclear abolitionist. His fanciful Strategic Defense Initiative, known as “Star Wars,” whereby missile defense would supposedly render America invulnerable to nuclear attack, was at bottom protective rather than aggressive. He proposed mutual nuclear disarmament at his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik in 1986, but the meeting adjourned with no agreement. An acute sense of peril persisted due to Reagan’s dogged anti-communism. Abolitionist protests and the nuclear freeze movement gained traction.
The world looked poised for a reinvigorated debate about nuclear weapons. In late 1987, however, moving forward from Reykjavik, the United States and the Soviet Union concluded the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. This was one of the great arms control accomplishments of the Cold War, eliminating all intermediate-range nuclear missiles. A reassuring vibe of nuclear self-control returned. Then, unexpectedly and fortuitously, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended without a single nuclear bomb having been dropped in anger.
The moment of maximum danger seemed to have passed. The fact that the Cold War stayed cold suggested that nuclear deterrence had become a refined and precise craft that had foreclosed actual use. Nuclear abolition yielded to the nuclear powers’ evolved assumption that knowledge and know-how could not be spirited back into the bottle and nuclear capabilities had best be left intact. Arms control agreements, an end to active targeting, and the United States’ unprecedented military and economic superiority seemed sufficient to lift the dread of self-annihilation. Some even came around to the view that it was all a charade anyhow—that nuclear war was so awful that, for all their high-tech posturing, military decision-makers were simply self-deterred.
While Oppenheimer might have questioned the feasibility of deterrence, he believed in pursuing it. Oppenheimer stresses his undeniable mistreatment by those who had once exalted him and the terror of his guilt. Its more submerged revelation is that Oppenheimer was no nuclear abolitionist. He sought to use his prestige as the “father of the atomic bomb” to limit the potential destructiveness of war in more calibrated ways. First, he argued for international authority over nuclear power to regulate proliferation and arms races. Second, he opposed the development of the exponentially more powerful hydrogen bomb, known as “the Super.” Some of his fellow physicists, notably Edward Teller, strongly advocated the pursuit of the H-bomb, but Oppenheimer characterized it as a militarily useless “weapon of genocide.” Third, he believed the United States should instead invest in lower-yield fission weapons of the kind tested in Alamogordo and used on Japan for tactical use, especially to offset the Soviets’ conventional military advantage in Europe.
Despite the sophistication of Oppenheimer’s overall position, his stance against the H-bomb and the broader worry that he might inconveniently bring his reputational clout to bear on other areas of U.S. strategy led to his downfall. Several officials in the military-security bureaucracy, stoked by McCarthyist paranoia as well as personal resentment, brought him before a closed Atomic Energy Commission proceeding, which resulted in the revocation of his top secret code word security clearance. Ostracized by much of the defense intellectual elite he once bestrode, Oppenheimer died hollow and despondent at age 62 in 1967. Although credible evidence has emerged that he had secretly been a member of the Communist Party, the Department of Energy vacated the AEC’s action in 2022, having reviewed the records and judged Oppenheimer loyal.
Universal Pictures
Cillian Murphy, center, in a scene from ‘Oppenheimer’
The success of deterrence notwithstanding, the present state of international security would make Oppenheimer nervous about its stability. Arms control is moribund: China has shown little interest, Russia has suspended its participation with the United States in the New START treaty on mutual nuclear force reductions, and Russia and the U.S. have invalidated the INF Treaty. Further, the United States has ended strategic ambiguity on Taiwan, indicating that it would defend the island against a Chinese attack in a conflict that could escalate to the nuclear level. All three superpowers are upgrading their nuclear arsenals.
The Russia-Ukraine war has raised the nuclear specter more dramatically. Now that it is the West that has the conventional military advantage, the Russians have ostensibly embraced an “escalate to de-escalate” concept, publicly endorsed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, whereby they could use battlefield nuclear weapons to reverse tactical losses. Oppenheimer himself might have credited the military logic of this position. Yet Putin’s actions have reflected more restraint than his incendiary rhetoric suggests. Deterrence has worked as expected in Ukraine, confining the conflict to conventional means and geographically containing it. Nuclear peace, albeit a more fragile one, goes on.
From this perspective, Nolan’s film is not a wistful lament about a better world that might have been. A planet without the hydrogen bomb would have been safer, but probably wasn’t achievable. Be that as it may in retrospect, Oppenheimer—ultimately recognizing that it takes time for humans’ ethics to catch up with their technical achievements—bravely deviated from the standard line and paid a price. Oppenheimer explores the difficulty of challenging cherished orthodoxies in trying circumstances, especially if undertaken by qualified scientists. Nuclear deterrence is one such orthodoxy, while skepticism about climate change and perhaps sanguinity about artificial intelligence are newer ones. With its spectacular images of nuclear destruction, a crucial question the film stimulates is whether MAD, stripped of arms control and regular diplomacy and under the pressure of a major war involving nuclear powers, can still work.
In the end, Oppenheimer is about the danger of complacency. How widely it will resonate remains to be seen. While 1960s movies like Dr. Strangelove, The Bedford Incident, and Fail Safe ended with a nuclear strike as an existential coup de grâce, their successors of the early 1980s such as The Day After and Threads, spurred by Jonathan Schell’s ominous 1982 book The Fate of the Earth, upped the ante by looking as well at the grisly aftermath. Robust arms control followed by the Cold War’s abrupt end and America’s extended unipolar moment soon made them seem moot. But Oppenheimer rivetingly revisits the terrible origin story of nuclear weapons when their salience is rising, assaults on conscientious scientists are continuing, and America’s relative power is diminishing. At the very least, Nolan’s timing is perfect.
