{"id":43204,"date":"2023-07-25T12:45:46","date_gmt":"2023-07-25T20:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=43204"},"modified":"2023-08-01T07:31:28","modified_gmt":"2023-08-01T15:31:28","slug":"when-oppenheimer-named-names-and-another-untold-story-the-nuclear-testing-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2023\/07\/25\/when-oppenheimer-named-names-and-another-untold-story-the-nuclear-testing-tragedy\/","title":{"rendered":"When Oppenheimer Named Names, and Another Untold Story: The Nuclear Testing Tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

My appearance on Democracy Now!<\/em> yesterday morning led to a lot of social media interest and links and inquiries. Happy to continue to talk to old and new audiences as (maybe) Oppenheimer<\/em> drives fresh interest and (maybe) compelling activism. On one zoom chat with about 75 antinuclear activists and experts one of the attendees was the daughter of Stanley Kramer, director of the earliest big-budget Hollywood movie (Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner) depicting the end of the world due to nuclear bomb blasts, On the Beach<\/em>. Nice that I got another invite from Amy Goodman, as I had been on the show just a couple of months back around my PBS film Memorial Day Massacre<\/em> and book.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s a new audio interview<\/a> with me just posted at the great books site, LitHub. Also got a couple of nice shout outs from my old Nuclear Times <\/em>colleague (1982-1985) David Corn at Mother Jones<\/em> in his newsletter today, don\u2019t miss it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Yesterday I posted the 14-minute segment<\/a> from the Democracy Now!<\/em> show but we kept talking post-show and now they\u2019ve published that 41-minute bonus<\/a> which delves deeper but also much wider.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In one of those segments, I mentioned my Atomic Cover-up <\/a><\/em>book and film<\/a> and I received quite a few inquiries about them afterward. For more on that, go here<\/a>. It\u2019s the story of what happened at the other end of Oppie\u2019s bomb that really first got me obsessed with the atomic bombings (and aftermath) back in\u2026.1982.<\/p>\n

My complaints about omissions in Oppenheimer have circulated and been discussed widely on the intertubes since I saw the screening ten days ago and started my postings here. My media appearances yesterday sparked a new round. Some, of course, are rather week while others have some, or a lot, of merit. But to point to two here:<\/p>\n

\u2013 There is the claim that the reason we don\u2019t see any images of the dead or damaged in Japan is because the film is told exclusively from Oppie\u2019s perspective or \u201cthrough his eyes,\u201d as Nolan himself has put it. The Father of the Bomb was not in Japan to witness any results so the \u201ctone\u201d would be wrong to show them.<\/p>\n

Now there are at least two problems with this: 1) much (actually far too) of the movie actually focuses on Robert Downey\u2019s Strauss, with Oppenheimer far off stage, at least physically, and 2) we do<\/em> see Oppie viewing footage from the atomic cities but from the side and we don\u2019t see the screen at all. If the movie was really \u201cfrom his perspective only\u201d or \u201cthrough his eyes,\u201d Nolan could have easily swung the camera behind him to show us what he was looking at and slightly reacting to. David Corn also writes about this today.<\/p>\n

My hunch is that Nolan and his team thought long and hard about this decision. Did they believe that gruesome footage would stand as too much of an indictment of Oppenheimer and undercut the audience\u2019s sympathy for him? The absence of the Japanese dead in <\/i>Oppenheimer<\/em> reinforces their position as the Other.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2013 Another popular counter is that movie is a bio-pic, \u201cnot a documentary.\u201d It\u2019s about his entire life. And: \u201cread the title.\u201d Nolan himself has called Oppenheimer the most important man who ever lived. But question: What makes that true (if it is true, or even close to it)? Hint: Maybe something he helped invent? It sure wasn\u2019t his affair with Jean, or struggles with Strauss or losing his security clearance. So wider exploration of what that invention destroyed or produced (e.g. radiaoactive fallout), and that tragic legacy, would seem in order. Especially in this \u201cbio-pic.\u201d<\/p>\n

I have praised the movie for accuracy in most cases but did you spot the flags being waved in this celebration \u2013 with 50 stars when there were only 48?<\/p>\n

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My wife found this weekend a fascinating new article at the venerable New York Review of Books<\/em>. It\u2019s fully behind a pay wall so I\u2019ll have to describe it and excerpt it here. It\u2019s written by Martin Filler, a cousin of I.I. Rabi, who has a key role in the Nolan film (played by beefy David Krumholz). Rabi was a winner of the Nobel Prize (which eluded Oppenheimer), who refuses to work on the bomb but advises his old pal Oppie throughout and witnesses the Trinity test. Filler even attends a screening with one of Rabi\u2019s daughters. Has to laugh at this, and agree:<\/p>\n

Although similarly short \u2013 five-feet-six to Rabi\u2019s five-feet-four \u2013 he\u2019s much heavier than our compact and sturdily built relative ever was. And although the actor schvitzes too much at dramatic junctures, he does convey Rabi\u2019s earthy directness and puckish vitality. At least the role didn\u2019t go to Jonah Hill or Seth Rogan.<\/i><\/p>\n

In a more serious vein:<\/p>\n

The fact is that Oppenheimer was not the high-minded martyr of personal conscience \u2013 a modern-day Thomas More \u2013 that his legend would have us believe. Late and soon he craved establishment validation\u2026.During the proceedings he compounded those suspicions by naming names of suspected Communists to the very body that was unjustly purging him. He rationalized the betrayal by claiming he had originally concealed their identities to protect them. He thereby blighted the lives of several people \u2013 including a German refugee physicist, Bernard Peters, who had been in Dachau, and Haakon Chevalier (played by Jefferson Hall), a fellow Berkeley professor with whom he established the school\u2019s branch of a teachers\u2019 union before World War II.<\/i><\/p>\n

Oppenheimer even posthumously implicated Tatlock, a Communist psychiatrist whom he met in Berkeley in 1936 and who was, according to a mutual friend, his \u201ctruest love.\u201d In 1944, a year after they resumed their affair during his marriage to Kitty, Tatlock committed suicide at twenty-nine. At the hearing he threw in for good measure the names of her friends who were Communists or fellow travelers. It was only because his security clearance was revoked at the end of the show trial that he is now seen principally as a victim of McCarthyism, and thus escaped obloquy akin to that heaped on the theater and film director Elia Kazan, who had informed on colleagues to the House Un-American Activities Committee two years earlier. Oppenheimer notes, in voice-over, the damage done by the physicist\u2019s revelations, and we briefly see clips of his erstwhile friends wandering around absentmindedly, but that slighting acknowledgement seems almost offensive in its brevity.<\/i><\/p>\n

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Seventy-seven years ago this week, and little more than a year after Trinity: Our second nuclear test in the Pacific, \u201cBaker,\u201d was set off underwater. Of the ninety-two \u201cjunked\u201d vessels nearby, all but two either sank, were damaged, or suffered heavy contamination. A six-thousand-foot column of radioactive water sprayed observer ships and their crews; some likened it to \u201ca witch\u2019s brew.\u201d Vice Admiral W.H.P. Blandy, who was in charge of the operation, declared the bomb \u201ca form of poison warfare\u201d after he was unable to inspect many of the ships due to the wildly clicking Geiger counter that accompanied him.<\/i><\/p>\n

In a sign of things to come, radioactive particles were detected over San Francisco a few days later, and after that over Paris, bringing this \u201cfallout\u201d threat to wide public attention for the first time. Also endangered were the forty thousand U.S. sailors and soldiers who had been crowded cavalierly nearby, or who mounted the ships later to inspect or clean them \u2013 with safety guidelines widely ignored \u2013 and were exposed to troubling levels of radiation.<\/i><\/p>\n

Testing, One, Two, Three\u2026and then\u2026<\/em><\/h3>\n

Time-lapse of every atomic\/nuclear explosion starting in 1945\u2026<\/p>\n