Oppenheimer

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Kelsey Atherton 0:24

I am Kelsey Atherton, joining Jeffrey for this conversation. I am a defense technology journalist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. New Mexico serves as the Evocative background setting for the film we are discussing today.

Jeffrey 0:39

Yes. So Oppenheimer said he wished that he could combine, at least he says this in the film, I don't know if this is in fact true, but that he wished he could combine physics and New Mexico. And boy, howdy did he.

Kelsey 0:52

They are inextricable. I grew up in New Mexico. It's shaped my entire understanding of the whole defense technology beat. To have Oppenheimer's delightful... Place for retreats and horseback riding is now synonymous with the nuclear, the advent of the nuclear age and the nuclear enterprise. And it's a wild thing to see on film just stated clearly as I would like to be here when I do the secret stuff.

Jeffrey 1:25

Yeah, so I thought we would have a series of guests. We'll probably end up doing a couple of podcast episodes on Oppenheimer because it's really fascinating to me. There is a conversation to be had about Historical accuracy of the film and the meaning of the film, but then there are just other conversations to be had about all of the discourse surrounding the film, because boy, I, I love the attention to the field that I care about so much, but God, it's strange that people have opinions. Fascinating. I've certainly had to like

Kelsey 2:07

Take some distance with the usual film podcast I listen to. It's like, alright, they're going to love it as a cinematic masterpiece, but do they know any of the history going in? Did they know any of the history going in? Is this the new baseline popular history that I will have to assume my readers have going forward and do I have to pay hyper attention to what I feel the movie didn't handle particularly well or what misconceptions it put into the future before I go writing about this as I try to explain the state of nukes at various places.

Jeffrey 2:42

Yeah, I think it has to end up as the baseline, right? No one is going to read American Prometheus as wonderful as it is. I mean, it's long. I have this long-running joke that the best way to hide a piece of information is to put it in a book. That way it's safely secured from any prying human interest.

So I think the way that people will know about Oppenheimer will come from this movie. And I'm not sure what I think about that. So I guess my initial question is, I am fascinated to know what you think about the film. And then maybe we can argue about it or agree violently. I don't know.

Kelsey 3:20

I certainly look forward to some of your future conversations. I watched with a nuke-savvy crowd, so it was a very interesting experience in the theater in New Mexico.

Jeffrey 3:29

That's got to be Cheryl Rofer and Marty Pfeiffer.

Kelsey 3:31

Just Marty. Cheryl watched at a different screening, but we've certainly all been chatting about it.

Jeffrey 3:36

Ah, New Mexican Friends of Home.

Kelsey 3:38

Cheryl has this great note that Los Alamos feels so weird in the movie because they filmed it at Ghost Ranch. And in Ghost Ranch, the mesas are gently sloping. And in Los Alamos, they're sheer cliffs. So... That suddenly clicked why everyone I was watching was like, this feels weird. Did they green screen this? It's like, no, it's the wrong Mesa.

It's almost right and just wrong enough to feel surreal. But more than that, I'm actually, it's good to film in New Mexico. I have to be a booster for that for my state. But I thought the film's script made choices. I was somewhat baffled by to try and build a, towards a Yeah, I suppose here I should warn listeners that we will probably

Jeffrey 4:44

Not really try to avoid spoilers because, you know, this happened. It's like like you can you can go read. And actually, I reread an unreasonable portion of the now declassified security hearing, including, I might add, Edward Teller casually mentioning that you could use reactor plutonium in nuclear explosives, which was originally excised. And then they put that back in.

You know, it's done in a very dismissive, teller way, right? But yeah, spoiler alert. I mean, I don't know how you would describe it, but I was talking to Aaron Stein, who has not yet seen it. And the way I look at it is you've got these... Multiple stories. On one level, you have the story of Oppenheimer's life from about the time that he goes to Europe to study physics up through Trinity.

And those are largely flashbacks told in the context of his appeal of the denial of his security clearance in 1954. And so that, I think, is told largely from his perspective. So you have the story leading up to Trinity. You have the story of the appeals process, or at least the kangaroo court that adjudicates his appeal. And then you have the story of Louis Strauss, who is the protagonist.

You have the story of his confirmation battle, which allows, I think, other perspectives to flash back to both the same period and to the immediate post-war period. So that's like three movies from four or five different perspectives all going on at once, which is like, you know, a lot.

Kelsey 6:36

And it's something that is... So before going in, I had expected that with all the hubbub around, oh, he managed to recreate the explosion without CGI, that we were going to culminate on Trinity. Trinity hits the test, an explosion, in what I think is probably the film's most successful sequence, but I'm curious to hear if that resonated with you.

But there's a 20-minute sequence that's basically setting up... Setting up Trinity through the explosion. And then there's two, there's an hour of movie after that, which is wrapping up his hearing, his clearance revocation hearing, and then Strauss's confirmation hearing. And then it circles back to Oppenheimer having a conversation with Einstein in 1947 at the Princeton Institute, which is, Is the most involved use of imagery and timeline stuff beyond the explosion.

And so it builds to an end, but it's a very weird thing to sit through all that and like, well, now that we have the bomb, what are we going to do? And like, oh, it's a full-on hour about the Red Scare.

Jeffrey 7:47

Yeah, I don't know if you're a film buff generally, but I was thinking of, I imagine trying to show this to Akira Kurosawa, who filmed Rashomon. And I just imagine Kurosawa looking at a script like this and being like, oh, I'm probably the greatest director ever, but I can't do that. That's just too hard for me. That's too many storylines.

And it's like, oh, no, no, no, but you can use color and black and white. And I think Kurosawa was like, no, no, I'm out. No, thanks.

Kelsey 8:16

Well, and with that, you're using it to build to it. And here, I think what's sort of frustrating is if you tell the story linearly, and Nolan doesn't like to do this anyway, but if you tell a story linearly, you have a pretty clear rise and triumph, and then you have this whole, like... Nine-year period where Oppenheimer is this tremendous public figure with clear ideas about how the world should handle atomic weaponry and nuclear power.

And then you have his downfall as enemies he has made for slights or policy choices, or often both, sort of conspire in this big Red Scare moment. And then he's sort of a diminished figure after that. And we lose that nine-year window, really, that doesn't happen, and so it becomes pretty unclear until it's, because that's told in flashbacks, in several flashbacks, and framed largely as Straw's personal animus, which is certainly, the man had personal animus, but the man also had policy disagreements, and I don't think the movie does a great job of disentangling them or showing them as parallel strands.

Jeffrey 9:31

Yeah, I'm picking on the structure of the film a little bit because I have pretty clear priors about what the important parts of this story are. Because I actually teach a portion of the story that's dramatized in the film as a full week in my class on U.S. decisions about nuclear weapons. And so there's maybe, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes of film on a period that I spend a week on.

And I am really torn because, and as we move to kind of what we think the film says, part of me feels like Nolan says all the things I want him to say. He has all the characters make the arguments that I believe are the interesting questions about what the bomb means for life in this era. It's absolutely unclear to me whether any viewer is actually going to understand that or get that.

You know, so my my son, I took him to it and he's, you know, fairly precocious 13 year old. And I kind of gave him like a little bit of the background so he could follow it. At the end, he was like, I liked it. It's a good movie. But it was just like wild. Way too long and there were way too many characters and half the time I didn't know what was going on and I realized I was doing things like one of my pet peeves which we'll talk about is Leo Szilard gets appointed in the movie to be the head of the Met Lab in Chicago which he wasn't and like They mention Szilard in passing a couple of times and you see him once, but he's there and he's gone.

And I mentioned that to my son and my son's like, yeah, I don't even remember who that was. I imagine most people can't in that three hours process all the characters they're seeing and as people arrive and depart.

Kelsey 11:19

Yeah, there's a joke going around online of like they should have just introduced every scientist, every cast member with a little name card explaining who they are, what they are. If I hadn't picked up on like the bongos or read the part of American Prometheus where Feynman sits in the car, I wouldn't have known who's this guy sitting next to Lawrence during the test.

Jeffrey 11:39

I missed that, too, until I saw the bongos. And I was like, oh, that must have been Feynman. Oh, OK. Like, Jesus, that was fast.

Kelsey 11:46

I will say, for a movie that is a lot of talking and a lot of hearings, it manages to move fast and hold tension fairly well. I think a lot of the performances are pretty incredible. I think Benny Safdie as Teller I found particularly stand out. He comes across as just this very... Strange entity in Oppenheimer's life, this very disgruntled, nose-better underling who then ends up wielding the dagger later.

The performances are great, the structure is so weird, and I was left with the movie, and this is sort of the heart of my critique and my dissatisfaction with it, is I was left with a film that was more concerned about what happened to Oppenheimer's Clearance and reputation than it was about what happens when an atom bomb falls onto human beings yeah we should now discuss this because I have both

Jeffrey 12:54

Sympathy for that argument and a defense of the artistic choice, and it comes to what I regard to be the most important part of this story, which is dramatized only very briefly. So I don't know if we'll agree or disagree, but say more, because I think that is in fact an extremely deliberate so

Kelsey 13:22

Yes, so one of the things that... So we never see the atomic dead. I know after I saw the movie, and I discussed with friends and had lots of thoughts about it, and then I watched The Day After Trinity, which is a phenomenal documentary, under 90 minutes, really gets to the point. I found Criterion did a very smart thing by making it free to see in timing with Oppenheimer, but One of the things, and I was just struck by this, I went in and was like, okay, well maybe they won't show that the uranium came from the Congo, but maybe they'll show the New Mexican uranium miners.

Maybe they won't show the downwinders, but they'll show the New Mexicans who did the labor, the hazardous, the grunt work at the labs, the people who were brought in as unskilled labor for this massive undertaking. And there's none of that, and there might be none of that because it's told from Oppenheimer's perspective, and he might not have Have this that's certainly a durable argument but one of the things that was really striking Oppenheimer has a vision when he's giving a victory speech he has a vision of what the atom bomb does to bodies and it's happening he's seeing it as though it is happening to people in the room with him at the assembly hall in Los Alamos and that's Effective imagery, and that's the closest we get to seeing it on screen.

The other moment where I feel was a really missed opportunity is when we see a film strip brought in, or there's a film strip that Oppenheimer is watching, Recorded by Manhattan Project scientists and the army, I believe, of the devastation afterwards, and it's being shown in Los Alamos. And during that, we have the audio description of what is on screen, the narration of it, and the camera remains firmly focused on Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer's face.

And so you get to see his reaction. It's very much about how he feels about The bomb. I think Nolan made a very good movie about how Oppenheimer feels about the bomb. I don't necessarily think he made a good movie about what the bomb does.

Jeffrey 15:40

I want to say two things about that because I have very mixed feelings about that choice, and they are extremely similar to a set of choices that I had to make when I wrote my novel about a nuclear war with North Korea. So I am certain that the decision to keep the horror largely offscreen is a concession to audience taste.

It's interesting that you did not think that the Wait, did you think that the depiction of Trinity was particularly moving or no?

Kelsey 16:23

I thought it was well done. I certainly saw the scientist's reaction to it and the feel of it was done well.

Jeffrey 16:33

So I asked because a dear friend of mine thought it was not done well. And that prompted me to go look at what Christopher Nolan had said about it. And it was so clear how a filmmaker thinks about artistic choices and how an audience responds, right? And his argument was that CGI just feels a little too slick and it wouldn't convey the power of the bomb.

And he was very... Clear in drawing a particular parallel, which is between what he was doing and why CGI doesn't work in another category, which is horror. And the only other time I have heard someone make that kind of a parallel between writing about nuclear weapons and writing horror was in the context of my novel, as I had to write a chapter about what happens when these nuclear weapons go off.

My agent, who served as a voice of sanity throughout that entire project, told me to think about that chapter as horror, writing horror. And so I, just given the way he talked about it, I think it is certainly the case that they decided to leave the visuals off screen. But the second piece of it, which is bringing me a little closer to my kind of substantive feelings about the argument of the film, is there is a way in which I think this is accurate.

Because when I teach this decision in my class... The main thing that I have to disabuse my students of is the idea that the debate about whether or not to do this had any humanitarian aspect to it at all. And the way that I read all of the historical debates is people like Oppenheimer were not worried about what they were going to do to Japanese civilians, because we were doing that already, and we were doing that with great gusto.

And what I think they were worried—and this is why I like the scene where he gives the victory speech so much more than the briefing, where they're getting the bomb effects— Is the conscience, the scruples that they have. And they hint at this so many times or they say it or they get at it, but I don't think it comes through, which is why I complained at the beginning so much about the structure.

The scruples they had were for themselves. They realized that what they were doing would rebound in terms of threats to us. And so... He didn't care until it occurred to him that what he was doing could happen here. And I think that's ultimately what that last Einstein remark is, where he says, you know, you gave the party for yourselves.

That all people are fundamentally thinking about themselves and their own well-being. And then that's what prompts Oppenheimer at the end to make that argument that he realizes that he had, in fact, in a manner of speaking, ignited the atmosphere.

Kelsey 19:54

So one of the things, I think I really, the strength of the movie is how it ties that together at the very end. And in talking about this, one of the things that occurred to me is that Oppenheimer in the film and probably in real life is primarily concerned. Once we leave August 1945, he is concerned about future atomic victims.

His advocacy is, and this is something Prometheus hammers home, which you can do in a 700-page book. You have the time to do that. You can say that he was really adamant about the distinction between the A-bomb and the H-bomb That you could be sufficient in a nuclear deterrent with A-bombs that you could meet needs there. He goes so far as to suggest tactical nuclear bombs, which is a whole tangent not to get into, but he suggests tactical atomics as an alternative to H-bomb development as a way to show the U.S. is serious and capable of doing these things.

And what motivates that is the scale at which an H-bomb happens. You can't really make them Smaller it's very easy at least to make them big and it certainly was easy at the start to make them very big and so one of the things that is baffling is the moments where we see the h-bomb effect discussed on film is there's this scene with the aec and straws is there and the whole the whole gang is there they're all talking it's in black and white there's a wonderful Use of a centerpiece that's too big on the table and protecting everything.

It's great, but they pull out the map, and you see them drawing with compasses the radii of A-bomb blasts and H-bomb blasts, and that puts it, it's in there, it's on the screen, but it's really the horror of the scale of the H-bomb that motivates a lot of his work, his advocacy, and his public His public persona and view on how we should manage atomics after 1945.

And to the extent we see it on screen, we see it in flashbacks as this is what he's doing. That's pissing straws off.

Jeffrey 22:14

Right. And so, see, I don't think this argument, even though it's present, comes through in the movie. So for me, it is actually defensible to ignore the humanitarian consequence, because I think that is a faithful reproduction of those men's mindset. Now, it's not a moral mindset. It's not a mindset I approve of. But if you're trying to understand the debate over whether to use the atomic bomb in 1945, no one in any of those rooms is going to come up and say like, oh, well, you know, won't you think of the children?

I think those scruples all come later. And so for me... That idea that what's continually happening is the scruples are emerging because people are realizing that we're now going to be in this arms race with the Soviets, that it's going to lead us to this place with these extremely destructive nuclear weapons, and these might be used against us.

It's just, that to me is the thing that is frustrating about the movie, is I see those, I see the arguments there, I see the words, it's almost like when I'm editing a, I don't want to say it's a bad script, because it's not a bad script, but when I edit bad scripts for other things, I'll often say like, well, this isn't really coming through, and it's like, well, the words are there, and it's like, yeah, but the words are there, but the There are other words there and the other words distract or the depiction, it just doesn't come through.

And I think that's, that's right. I mean, there's even this point in the security clearance hearings where they're hammering home on like, well, when did these scruples emerge? Right. Because the implication is that he's somehow changing his position and And it feels to me like the answer is freaking obvious that the scruples emerge with thermonuclear weapons precisely because he is worried about the arms race and the risk it poses to himself and the people he knows and loves.

But it doesn't come through, I think, in the film. So I'm there adding it, going like, oh, almost, Chris, almost.

Kelsey 24:19

There's the part where he is able to first dismiss... And Teller shows up disinterested in the designs. It's a great nose more back of the class slacker who thinks he's smarter than the professor moment where he walks up. It's like, why aren't we building the super? Why aren't we building the super? And Oppenheimer has the people that we walk through it.

We're looking there. It's like, all right, we don't have the material we need to build this bigger, less known version. We're going to do what we can. And one of the things that the movie... I don't know if the movie hits on it, or I've just been thinking about the movie constantly for a week, but you can get the sense that Oppenheimer is in control when it's a technical problem.

And certainly during Manhattan Project, he is in control of rejecting the H-bomb because it's a technical obstacle. And when it becomes a moral or a civilizational concern, when he has to move from a lab director overseeing making choices over resources under his command to A public figure making a case to policymakers and all behind closed doors about what should be done, he loses that fight.

He loses the fight over the H-bomb because it's waged on moral and political grounds that he's trying to put technical weight on. But you don't That's you see glimpses of that at most in the film. I went in with, I listened to half of American Prometheus before the movie finished, the rest after, and so I, I could put that together, but it's the evidence of it is in the script, but it's not really what the emphasis is given to

Jeffrey 26:01

So that is actually the thing that I teach in my class, that Oppenheimer is a terrible political actor, that he is at some fundamental level naive, that the interpersonal skills that he famously lacks, you know, that cause him no end of trouble throughout his life leading up to this period, they don't improve. And so he... You can actually, I would argue, you can see the seeds of his failure to stop the H-bomb and his mishandling of the politics that allow him basically to be put in the position of the security clearance denial.

In the debate about whether to use the bomb at all. Because in 1945, there is only one moment where there is the possibility of dissent. And this is what I spend a whole week teaching my class on. That moment presents itself, that The arguments that are made are correct, right? The people who are saying, you know, if we do this, this is what the world is going to look like, and we're not going to like that.

And it's Oppenheimer who succeeds in, well, I shouldn't say succeeds, who participates in stifling that dissent because he thinks he's this, I would argue, he thinks he's this supreme political operator, and he f***s it all up. And I'm happy to go through it, but it is dramatized not fully in the movie, but it really turns on this idea of his advocacy for trying to inform the Russians prior to the test.

He sacrifices everything for that. Only to not understand that at the end of the day, when he thinks he wins this debate and he gets Henry Stimson to advise Truman to tell Stalin, By the time it goes from Oppenheimer and the scientific panel who make that recommendation to Stimson to Truman who executes it, it resembles nothing at all like Oppenheimer is imagining, right?

And so he's fundamentally, he's acceded to the direct use of the weapon. And we can talk about how they stifle the dissent of the people who I would argue were right about what kind of world we were entering. But he accedes to it because he thinks he's so much smarter than they are, and that he's going to avoid this arms race by getting Truman to engage in a serious way with Stalin on this issue.

Having no practical understanding of how a meeting between Truman and Stalin would look, how Truman would execute that kind of thing. And, you know, reportedly, when Oppenheimer understands how it's done, he's outraged because it's not at all what was agreed. And it's like, well, you know, poor sweet summer child, what did you think was going to happen?

And it's like, yeah, that's the guy, right, who alienated a lot of his colleagues at Berkeley, right? And that's the guy who's going to be high-handed throughout the 50s. I'm on his side politically, ideologically, but that's the guy whose straws is going to work over.

Kelsey 29:32

It's really – he places it all on a bet that he can win a game of telephone, which is a wild gamble to make and that it can be controlled easily. Afterwards, and it's also something where he doesn't understand what his power is, because as the director who can speak on behalf of the entire scientific, or he can speak as an avatar for, there's dissent, but he can speak as an avatar for the entire scientific community that the government needed to do this, and he doesn't grasp that.

That community comes to his defense later, and we see that the film actually covers well The reaction of the scientists defending his actions, but Oppenheimer didn't have a grasp of what his power was other than his own intuitive reasoning and understanding. And he makes arguments, but he doesn't make arguments with the backing that anyone could, say, take home and sell to constituents, or even acknowledge in a public hearing.

And we also... It leaves him vulnerable. There's a lot of the strong McCarthy purchase, and it also has a lot of the various personal choices he made through the 1930s are hugely emphasized in the film. We see them. We see this sort of web of his fellow traveler-ness coming at him as someone who Didn't ever even apply for anything in D.C., just lived with enough people who were applying for clearances.

It was so absurd to see that this is how you could go about your life if you assumed government was at all in your future.

Jeffrey 31:17

Yeah, I mean, it's funny because, you know, famously, and who knows if any of these things are true, but after Oppenheimer tells Einstein about the appeal... Einstein says, you know, don't do it. And Oppenheimer says he's going to do it. And the famous quote is, as he walks away, I guess Einstein says, there goes a fool. And I think that that to me is one of the most important aspects of his personality from a policy perspective, because again, I teach students.

The Manner in which dissent was stifled in the summer of 1945 was elegant and clever, done by people not Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer's price for participating in this was naive and ineffective and blew up on him. And so You know, if you are trying to understand how to affect policy change, to me, the story of Oppenheimer is extremely valuable because you have a person who has all of the technical expertise one could want.

He has all of the public profile one could hope for. And, you know, he squanders it.

Kelsey 32:45

And he squanders it, and I think the film is really effective at showing him squandering it through, and there's a lot of it that seems sort of a strand through the film that he is punished for his sins, that he is punished for the sins of his affairs and his rudeness to underlings and his inability to recall per conversations the same or report things late on clearances.

There's a lot, we get a lot of what Exists as sort of concrete evidence that the security state can point to. I think one thing American Prometheus does delightfully to add to all this is they point out whenever the wiretaps are unwarranted on him, but still end up in the dossier against him. So you see this sort of guy who's going through life with an accumulation of flaws ends up in this position.

And then also from that position, Stakes out a very bold policy claim. We don't even get to see his most explicitly lefty ideas of what to do with the atomic weapons afterwards. It's just, oh, we should have an international body to which we cede control of all fissionable material and atomics. And only cede control of that. That's the one thing, is we create a world government that only has atom bombs, which is a wild thing to put forth as his opening arms control gambit, and then devolves really into his consistent fight for at least maybe we don't develop the H-bomb, or we create a pact to not develop the H-bomb.

And he adapts as a political actor, but we don't really get to see that adaptation on... Screen we see someone who had this tremendous skill set and knowledge and had a particular view of what should be done with it and then kind of get destroyed before he can put much of that in motion. We do the one thing that again I wish there's The balance of what scenes we get is so weird.

If we had gotten a little bit more of the scorpions in a bottle speech, maybe that's the only line we need. Maybe the only line we need is him saying the Cold War is a death match from which we are unlikely to escape. But even if he has the part where he explains the nuclear complex without divulging secrets to it, could grasp sort of what the stakes are.

But... We get a very good movie about the Red Scare, we get a very good movie about Oppenheimer's 1930s life and the development of the bomb, and we don't... A policy debate is in there, you can see the bones of it, you can see the traces of it, it's not like Nolan forgot it. But the movie isn't about the policy fight, the movie is about this duel between two characters.

Jeffrey 35:36

Yeah, it's a little challenging for me because I do think that for me, who, again, is concerned fundamentally with how policy gets made, I care a lot about... What bureaucratic debates look like. And to me, what's really interesting is what causes people to go along to get along. A lot of people, particularly in Washington, make arguments that are decorations.

But that the real motivation is you want to be on the winning side of debate. You want to be on a popular side of the debate. You want to stick with your friends. And I think that has a lot to do with... And understanding why Oppenheimer ultimately really gets destroyed. And it's not just all of these. It's not just his background.

It's he takes the wrong side on the big debate. And, you know, there are going to be repercussions for that. One of my favorite examples of this, which I tell in the class and I will sanitize here, is I... A friend of mine once recounted a particular policy issue where a very senior Republican statesman was going to support something in testimony, and the only question he had prior to supporting it was, is it going to pass?

Because he was fine with it. He was for it. But he didn't want to be for it if it was going to fail, and it would confirm, therefore, he had no power. But if he was for it and it passed, people might conclude that he had persuaded people And this is not a terrible person. This is a person who's just mindful of the accumulation and preservation and expenditure of power.

And I think that's just not J. Robert Oppenheimer. And I feel like the movie does that a little, right? I mean, Strauss is that guy. But I think one thing I didn't like about it, I feel like it's a ripoff of Amadeus or Mozart and Salieri. I feel like they basically were like, ah, we need a trope for these two dudes.

And they were like, you know, that's a good one. And then they just grabbed it and they slapped it on them. Because I'm not sure Strauss had any affection whatsoever for or, you know, any admiration whatsoever for Oppenheimer.

Kelsey 38:04

You do see it, though, I think the moment in the film that really captures that is when Lawrence tells Oppenheimer to stop. That the technical problems aren't actually the problem, where Oppenheimer is still making an argument against the H-bomb on technical grounds. It's the scene where they're sitting at – it's that scene with the big centerpiece, and Strauss walks in and they show him, we have the reading of the Soviet atomic test.

We know that Russia has the bomb. Truman said they would never build it. Everyone else thought – Oppenheimer thought was clearly going to happen. What do we do about the H-bomb? And Lawrence is like, we can't stop saying it can't be technically done. The Russians are going to try and we should. And Oppenheimer loses one of his early supporters and strong backers, especially one who could make his case to people who weren't already predisposed to him in that moment.

So it's really, it shows that level of Of Machination, that's also the same scene, right, where I think it's I.I. Robbie who does the drawing on the map of the radio to show, no, you can only use a hydrogen bomb to destroy swaths of countries. There are targets too small, and the country, like... And so it has its merits.

There's a lot that the movie does really well and captures really well, and I do think for... Film sold to American audiences about the atomic bomb. It's certainly a world better than when you had to argue that it was inherently justified because of the invasion. It's sort of, we get to see the, no, it's going to happen.

What are the people feeling about what happens after what it's a, it's a movie well positioned. And this is, Something that's come up a lot when we see certainly nuclear disarmament or nuclear control organizations speaking, it's a movie well positioned to watch in the early moments of an arms race, which we can debate about how early we are in this arms race, but I think it's certainly, that's a merit of seeing it and certainly a merit of it being the dominant atomic text in public consciousness right now, even if I think it has some profound limitations.

Jeffrey 40:15

Yeah, I don't think it's intended to be a parable of our current age, but I think it's going to work out that way.

Kelsey 40:25

Yeah, I think it's well put. Again, it's very well acted. It's very well shot. And it's such... I wanted to ask about one scene in particular. We talk a little bit around it, but there's the scene where Stimson is picking, where Stimson is going through the target list.

Jeffrey 40:48

Oh, yes. This is, I teach this meeting. I teach this very meeting, May 31st, 1945. It's an extremely crucial meeting and many meetings have been crushed into this meeting, but it is so important.

Kelsey 41:03

So, if I'm not mistaken, it certainly felt like this is the closest we get to a cinematic depiction of what the actual, to the extent that there was a decision to drop the bomb and not just an assembly line that was going to start with bombs and produce corpses at the end of it, this feels like the moment that captures that and the one that's closest to where it is In history, even if, as Wellerstein points out, the honeymoon bit is a bit of an exaggeration.

Jeffrey 41:31

The honeymoon bit is an exaggeration, but it is the thing everyone focuses on. I teach that meeting because that meeting is the almost last moment. What's so interesting about that meeting is that Most of the participants have talked about that meeting, and many of them have lied about it. And in particular, the reason I got annoyed that Leo Szilard was promoted in the movie to being the head of the Met Lab in Chicago is actually this guy named Arthur Compton.

And Compton plays an absolutely crucial role in suppressing dissent. So at that meeting, which was a meeting of what was called the Interim Committee, it was the Interim Committee because no one wanted to really piss off Congress when Congress found out there was a committee to make decisions about the bomb that they had not funded and created.

So it was interim until we tell you, we promise, it's only interim. They invited... Four scientists to participate in the discussions of the committee. So the scientists were not members of the committee. They were just there by invitation. And it was Compton, who was the head of the Met Lab in Chicago. It was Fermi. It was Oppenheimer.

And it was Lawrence. And fascinatingly, Some memoirs imply that at that meeting there was a discussion of whether we should do this or not, or whether we should just do a demonstration. And Compton in his memoirs lays it on thick, like it's all their idea. And so the way Compton tells it is they go away, the four scientists, they try to come up with a demonstration, they can't.

And so they submit a document which says a demonstration is not going to work, but you should probably tell the Russians. And they completely write out the role of what actually happens. This is all a fiction, as far as I can tell. And the dogs agree with me. I think this is all a fiction. What really happens is, after that meeting, which they decide they are going to use the bomb with no warning.

You know, there may have been some cursory discussion of a demonstration, but that is not a serious conversation. You can look at the minutes. It's not in the minutes. You can look at the summary sent to Stimson after the meeting. It's not in the summary. It's just we're going to use it in a military fashion immediately with no warning.

What really happens is a group of scientists at the University of Chicago, right? This is the so-called Frank Report written by James Frank and others. They give Compton this memo that says, you know, we're going to start an arms race if we do this. And this threat that we are posing to the Japanese, the Soviets will pose to us.

So this is like not a great idea. You should do a demonstration. And Compton, you know, just the classic sleazy self-interested administrator is like, of course, I will make sure your important memo gets a full hearing with the Secretary of War. And then he is immediately on the phone with the staff of the committee, and they agree that the best way to kill this thing is for the four scientists who are invited to do a report on how a demonstration's not possible, which I always say is the classic bureaucratic example of picking reliable people and the right people to kill an argument.

Because actually the question is, would a demonstration end the war? Why would you ask four scientists? What do they know about Japanese decision-making? But what the four scientists say is we can't propose a demonstration. Well, if the four scientists can't propose a demonstration, then I guess that's the end of the discussion, right? And that's the context in which Oppenheimer, I think, in exchange for agreeing to this argument, it's in that context that Oppenheimer says, but you have to tell the Russians.

And they make that their first recommendation. Tell the Russians, but definitely use it right away. And so to me, that is just that is the wonderful naivete of Oppenheimer. He thinks he is so much smarter than the guys in the Frank Report. He thinks he is close to power. He's moving the levers. He's making deals with the Lawrence and Compton.

And I think Fermi just wanted no part of this. You know, see, Fermi thought this was all political and like none of his business. And he's just wrong. Right. And so that the dramatization of that meeting is frustrating to me because actually the They don't discuss a demonstration. The idea of a demonstration, I mean, they may have, you know, briefly, but really the impetus for it comes from the Chicago scientists.

And what they do discuss in that meeting is all of the bureaucratic arrangements for after the war, which is to say how much money and power and influence these men will all have, which I think clearly shapes what Compton's thinking about, and how to dispose of undesirable scientists. So, you know, to me, that moment neatly ties together all of these threads.

What it means to be practical. What it means to be on the inside. What concessions you have to make to power. What... Selfish aspects you have in terms of maintaining your own power, prestige, authority, budgets, and ultimately how little room you have to maneuver and change people's minds when something is really already on its way. And so to me, and I will stop pontificating, but you asked a professor about his favorite class.

The Oppenheimer who misjudges The political moment in terms of a demonstration by arguing, you know, well, the way to avoid this arms race is to tell the Russians. And who blows that? He's the same one who misjudges the political moment when support gets up behind the H-bomb. As Einstein said, there goes a fool. Although, American Prometheus, better title than American Fool.

Local Berkeley lefty, bad at politics.

Kelsey 47:45

As well as someone whose whole state exists on the whim of atomic funding. Not quite, but certainly it's a very weird relationship. In New Mexico, I think one of the things that the movie does, and that American Prometheus does, and that isn't quite... It's certainly a choice, and it should be seen as a choice in how to tell the story, is that Oppenheimer, especially by appealing the hearing, chose...

Martyrdom, which was an avenue for influence and reputation laundering that you can do. There's the line in the film, I believe it's Strass who tells him that now he gets to be remembered for Trinity and not Hiroshima and I think To a large extent, I think that's kind of where the public consensus has landed. He did this thing and the generals took their bomb and they did general things with it because that's who had it.

We don't really see affirmative civilian control of stop bombing until after Nagasaki. It helps that there weren't More bombs immediately ready to go to have all of these things. But I think one of the things that really stands out in how the movie does it is we get Oppenheimer the martyr, and we don't get Oppenheimer the fool, and maybe it's in parsing.

Those two you can really get to. Here's what happens when a scientist is thrust into and also leans into a policy...

Jeffrey 49:25

Spotlight and doesn't particularly maneuver it that well, even if the merit of their ideas is ultimately vindicated. Now I'm going to be too cynical, your front, but you know, that's the same skill set appealing to a certain group of people, even at the cost professionally, that allowed him to, you know, pick up so many young ladies in Berkeley I mean, that's ultimately what he's good at, right?

He's good at charming a certain type of people who are dazzled by his brilliance and moved by his artful displays of conscience. And again, I think that works great in Berkeley. That probably works great in New York City. And, you know, that's going to leave a lot of blood on the floor in that sad little office building in D.C., It sounds like I don't like Oppenheimer.

It's a travesty what happened to him. He's a total victim of McCarthyism. I just, you know. Oh, if we on the left only had more practical heroes. Well, I mean, we did have one, Lyndon Johnson. We don't like him. Ultimately, you know what? That's, that I will say, that is where, that is the difference between the Nolan movie about Oppenheimer and the Robert Caro books about Johnson is, I think Nolan still wanted to make a, wanted to make a biopic.

He wanted to make a biography. Caro has always said he's not interested in a biography. He's interested in the use of power. I like the latter. And if, if that will be my closing thought, I guess, that if, if the one thing that the movie doesn't quite capture, I think it's, it's, It's the accumulation, expenditure, and wielding of power.

Kelsey 51:20

For my closing thought, I think the thing it does, by form and choice, it really shows... The ramifications of Oppenheimer's own choices as colliding with the security state he did not understand, that was also built up around him. The security state, the FBI predates it, but the AAC certainly doesn't. He's disbarred from a clearance that he was granted by an agency that existed after He was already building the bomb.

And so we get the sense of the ramifications of the security state, the Red Scare, to him, and what it means for him and what he has unleashed, potentially, in the world, and we don't really get any look at what these actions mean. Mean for the whole rest of people who exist either contributing to or suffering from the nuclear enterprise.

And as much as I think it's a better baseline place for the median American public understanding of the atomic age and atomic weapons, there's still a lot of ground Uncovered that I think would be tremendously helpful for people to know as we contemplate what it means to have plutonium pit production restarted at Los Alamos.

Jeffrey 52:46

I hate to be reductionist, but we're hitting our, we're hitting our time limit. And my fundamental question is, do you want to Siskel and Ebert this to get a thumbs up?

Kelsey 52:57

Sure. I think I'm a thumbs down, but I expect people to see it anyway.

Jeffrey 53:06

I'm a thumbs up. I think it's a work of genius. But like a lot of beautiful art, I'm not sure it needs to exist, and I don't think it's going to change anything. Kelsey, thank you so much for joining me on the Arms Control Wonk podcast.

Kelsey 53:29

An absolute delight.

Jeffrey 53:30

And listeners, if you like what you heard here, you can support us. We have a wonderful program that for $5 a month, $3 a month if you are a student, you can join our community. You can support the podcast and you can get access to our Slack channel where there are all kinds of discussions like this happening on a constant basis involving not just me but large numbers of other people who are arguably considerably more interesting.

So if you're at all interested in supporting the podcast, you can go to patreon.com forward slash ACW podcast. So again, thanks to Kelsey and thank you for listening.