Fact Checking Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer'

[aum]

Unless you hate movies, you know this weekend was "Barbenheimer" - two highly regarded, very different films were on track to smash some records. And they did. "Barbie" did over $150 million while "Oppenheimer" did $80 million, a combined total unmatched for two competing opening weekends and "Oppenheimer was the first time a movie had exceeded $50 million when another opening went past $100 million.

 

I couldn't see both, my teenage sons had little interest in "Barbie" but we saw "Oppenheimer" on an IMAX screen to get the full Christopher Nolan treatment. I know that history is about 80 percent made up - past writings are Wikipedia with even less fact-checking and then modern historians write their own fan fictions based on that - but some things are documented accurately because they seem unimportant. Using those you can converge on some idea of the truth.

 

But for a movie you need to be entertaining so here is how the film stacks up to the real world of the time. 

 

A staged photo, of course, the aging legend and the next generation pretending he was learning something.

 

Oppenheimer was not the best theoretical physicist in America.

 

He came up in a Golden Age of theoretical physics, when it was still possible to understand the world according to natural laws using just math. There was a debate about Steady State thinking versus the Big Bang to such an extent that the Big Bang was a derisive term, much like God  'playing dice' with the universe. Only a few decades later the field would become science-fiction speculation like String Theory, Superdeterminism, and the multiverse. But in the 1930s it was where the action was.

 

Oppenheimer was smart, but had done nothing truly exceptional except try to poison his tutor.

 

Yet it's not always a good idea to have the top person in a narrow field in charge of a project. Patton was a better tactician than Eisenhower but it took an Eisenhower to manage an allied invasion of Vichy France in World War II. Oppenheimer was a fine thinker but a great jack-of-all-trades. He had good conceptual knowledge and that helped him ask important questions and he had the temperament to manage scientists who were more 'a mile deep and a yard wide.' 

 

Most importantly, Oppenheimer wanted the job. There were three other labs, though, in Washington, Tennessee, and Illinois. It was called the Manhattan Project because it started on the 18th floor occupied by the US Army Corps of Engineers at 270 Broadway, in the Tribeca neighborhood. 

 

You can't have Fermi working in Chicago and claim you are the best. But journalists will do it for you, and then, like now, they know they are creating history.

 

General Leslie Groves was an agreeable facilitator?  Oppenheimer's boss, General Leslie Groves, played in the film by Matt Damon, was a Major when he was tasked with construction of the Pentagon building. The Army does not turn over construction of the largest office building in the world, one for the military, to a "company-grade" officer unless he is the one mostly likely to get things done.

 

But a project manager was not how he saw himself. When he was told to take over the Manhattan Project in 1942 while still running the Pentagon, he was disappointed. "Oh, that thing," he said. Then, as now, you want to have a combat assignment on your CV if you intend to progress through the ranks. He wanted one. He did not get it, but because he was going to deal with scientists who liked titles, he was made a General.

 

But unlike in much of the film, he was not just showing up to wave his hand and spend money. People lived on the Oak Ridge, Tennessee site they wanted, he had it all condemned. Tennessee Congressional Reps tried to hold an inquiry but Roosevelt was a guy willing people in concentration camps if they had Japanese names, he wasn't letting farmers in Tennessee stop anything. Less than three months after he took over, armed US Marshalls had cleared the entire area.

 

He met with Oppenheimer at Berkeley and liked that he was more broadly knowledgeable than other scientists with better standing. He didn't care about the lack of a Nobel prize.

 

To buy the uranium they'd need from the Belgian Congo, Groves created a secret slush fund unknown to the Treasury Secretary. To create plausible deniability. That is not an agreeable facilitator, that is a guy who pretends to be agreeable if that will get you to do what he wants.

 

After the war, he was given a Distinguished Service Medal, an award postponed after he bullt the Pentagon because they didn't want to draw attention to the Manhattan Project. General Eisenhower was named Army Chief of Staff met and with Groves after the war, and noted complaints about his rudeness, arrogance, insensitivity, and contempt for the rules.

 

Which is exactly what they needed.

 

After the war, he knew combat veterans returning from overseas were going to get the promotions and opted to retire. By a special act of Congress, they made him a Lieutenant General (3-star) retroactive to the date of the Trinity atomic bomb test.

 

Ernst Lawrence was a supporting player? Before there was a Manhattan Project, Lawrence already had a Nobel prize. He is in the Periodic Table of Elements. More than anyone in American history, he showed government that academia could do things that mattered. He set off the Big Science era of federal funding that still exists today and paid individual scientists salaries that were the entire budget of physics labs elsewhere. He has two national labs named after him.

 

Without his electromagnetic separation of uranium-235, all of the writing on a chalkboard doesn't matter.(1)

 

In the film he is just a pretty agreeable engineer who acts as the voice of reason when Oppenheimer was mixing with communists.

 

Oppenheimer is more sympathetic because he was left-wing and that does well with Hollywood studios (until left-wing union employees go on strike, anyway) but Lawrence was the real driver of all of the practical science that led to the atomic bomb.

 

Oppenheimer was a communist?  General Leslie Groves did boot Leo Slizard, who along with Einstein was instrumental in making the case for an atomic bomb. Groves was right to do so because academic sympathy to Soviet communists - under the guise of 'science knows no borders' - was almost as strong then as academic assistance to Chinese communists during the Obama administration.

 

Then, Communism was not yet known to be a delivery mechanism for mass murder, the way we now know the USSR and communist China killed 700 percent more innocent people than Germany. Groves touches on the cultural shift occurring after the war when he is asked if he would approve Oppenheimer's security clearance using current Atomic Energy Agency standards. He says he wouldn't approve most of them. 

 

Oppenheimer may have been just intellectually open to communism but his wife had been a communist. His brother was. His sister-in-law was. His mistress was. During the Spanish Revolution, where Spanish Nazis fought Spanish communists, America stayed out of it but he sent money to the communists.

 

The concern was valid. No one with a brain trusted the USSR. Stalin had signed a deal with Hitler to split Poland and only became an 'ally' after Germany invaded Russia before Russia could betray Germany - which Stalin was planning to do. Russian spies were using communist sympathizers in the science community to learn about the atomic bomb and that period was when Russians invented the term 'useful idiots' for Americans who sympathized with them.

 

He wasn't in the communist party and spying can't be blamed on him. Government is a leaky bucket now and it was even leakier then.

 

The Trinity Test. This part of the film is pretty compelling. For testing in 1945, the concern was that nothing would happen and they'd lose years worth of uranium, or, because we're dealing with theoretical physicists, that the sky might catch on fire.(2) The giant red button does not set off the bomb, as in most movies, it is to prevent it.

 

We watched the movie in an IMAX theater and when the bomb flashed, I nudged my son and put my fingers in my ears. I knew what that dramatic silence meant. 

 

"While the light from the explosion would have been visible immediately, it would have taken about 30 seconds for any sound, and the associated shock wave, to arrive,” says Kevin Pitts, PhD, Dean of the Virginia Tech College of Science and former chief research officer at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

 

Strauss was denied confirmation in the Senate due to his treatment of Oppenheimer? This was plain old politics. It's great story but just a story. In 1949, Oppenheimer did ridicule some Strauss, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, claims about what isotopes could do in foreign nations - but if you read the justification that President Clinton and Senator John Kerry used to dismantle nuclear energy in 1994, they got a lot more wrong than Strauss did. They just didn't have any scientists willing to ridicule them, the way Strauss, a Republican, had.

 

Strauss did seem to think Oppenheimer was a Communist. His brother, his sister-in-law, his mistress, and his wife were or had been. During the Spanish Civil War, where Spanish Nazis opposed Spanish Communists, America stayed out of it, but Oppenheimer sent money to the Communist party. Oppenheimer was later denied a security clearance renewal but during the Cold War, a whole lot of scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project would have been denied. And a number of them were giving American secrets to the communists.

 

In 1959, Strauss was denied confirmation as Commerce Secretary but the correlation to Oppenheimer is mythological. The Senate had shifted to 64 Democrats and 34 Republicans and Democrats wanted to stick it to a 'lame duck' Republican president before the 1960 election. Strauss was the perfect way to flex political muscle yet despite Democrats having 30 more Senators than Republicans, he only lost confirmation by 3 votes. And Republicans decided it. Two Repubvoted against him and one abstained. The film makes it sound like a new idealistic Democratic Senator didn't like the way Strauss treated Oppenheimer but John F. Kennedy was in his second term and preparing his Presidential run.(3)

 

Did President Truman call Oppenheimer a crybaby? In the film, when Oppenheimer met with Truman to discuss his hesitance about a hydrogen bomb, he said he had blood on his hands. Truman reminded him that the Japanese had no idea who Oppenheimer was, they blamed the guy who gave the order to kill 100,000 of them; “Hiroshima is not about you.”  The film version is a distilled take on lots of things Oppenheimer said on the matter.

 

In later re-tellings, Truman said he offered a handkerchief. He actually gave Oppenheimer a presidential citation and Medal for Merit but Oppenheimer was basically out of the decision-making after he made repeated speeches telling the public that atomic research and development was a bad idea.(4)

 

Did Oppenheimer quote the Bhagavad-Gita? Later on, Oppenheimer said he thought of the Bhagavad-Gita, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” but at the time he and others said he uttered a simple "It worked."

 

But on Barbenheimer weeked it makes for a great t-shirt.

 

NOTES:

 

(1) In the 1960s, Berkeley led academia in lurching to the left, despite one Democrat starting the Viet Nam war and his successor escalating it, and then those left-skewiing universities co-opted a Republican's concern about the military-industrial complex. That has diminished his brand in pop culture, but a story about Lawrence is more compelling. I am no Christopher Nolan, though, so it may never happen.

 

(2) It sounds funny, but when the Large Hardon Collider was about to kick on, there was a lawsuit to stop it, claiming it might create a black hole and swallow earth. The source was a theoretical physicist.
 
(3) Kennedy had been in the Senate since 1953 and in the House prior to that, he was not making any decision based on Oppenheimer and he was never a swing vote - he missed about 300 percent more roll call votes than the average so he had the perception of being an unreliable party guy.

 

He has coasted because his father was a pillar of the Democratic party who had been Chairman of the SEC, Ambassador to the UK, and a friend of President Franklin Roosevelt. JFK knew politics inside and out. He would win one of the most controversial elections in US history, 1960, because his father pulled enough strings to get tens of thousands of dead people in Daley's Chicago and Lyndon Johnson's Texas to give him Texas and Illinois and the electoral votes he needed.

 

He was not denying Strauss anything for Oppenheimer, he couldn't risk being seen as soft on communism. He needed to be seen as reliable for his 1960 Presidential campaign.

 

He did have Oppenheimer visit the White House in 1962 where the theoretical physicist received an apology for the AEC security clearing hearing and an award, but even by then he must not have known much about him. The award he gave him was named after Enrico Fermi, who created the world's first nuclear reactor and had reported to Oppenheimer during a brief stint at Los Alamos. Kennedy gave Oppenheimer an award named after his Manhattan Project employee.

 

(4) It is often the case that a manager has to tell a star employee to quit crying while making them feel better, but too much insolence won't be allowed. Truman also fired America's greatest active General, Douglas MacArthur, one of only five 5-star Generals in history and a Medal of Honor recipient, for the same reasons as Oppenheimer was sidelined. He wouldn't shut up. Truman suffered from MacArthur more than Oppenheimer, though. A few months after he forced the General to resign, during the UN conflict Truman had endorsed, his approval rating was at 22 percent and he decided not to run for re-election. 

 

Source

Edited July 25, 2023 by aum