http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-real-history-behind-christopher-nolans-oppenheimer-180982529/? [this is the beginning of an absolutely superb article from Smithsonian Magazine about the real J. Robert Oppenheimer

HISTORY | JULY 18, 2023 7:15 A.M.

The Real History Behind Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’

The “father of the atomic bomb” has long been misunderstood. Will the new film finally get J. Robert Oppenheimer right?

Cillian [pronounced KILL-e-ann] Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s new film Universal Pictures

Andy Kifer

Since the end of World War II, historians and artists alike have been fascinated by the brilliant, enigmatic J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project laboratory that developed the atomic bomb. Beginning as early as 1946, documentaries, television miniseries, plays, books, graphic novels, feature films and even an opera have explored the scientist’s life, work and legacy. In recent years, however, much of that complexity has been reduced to a single popular image: the broken genius, haunted by his own invention, reciting a line from the Bhagavad Gita in a 1965 NBC News documentary. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” Oppenheimer intones.

But Oppenheimer’s life was about far more than regret. “[He] was interesting as the father of the bomb,” says Kai Bird, co-author of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. “But the real arc in the story is the tragedy.”

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer,which opens in theaters on July 21, will be the first feature-length film to tackle the scientist’s life in its entirety, and it promises to be spectacular. Starring Cillian Murphy of “Peaky Blinders” fame in the title role alongside an ensemble A-list cast, the film (which uses American Prometheus as its main source material) will reintroduce the scientist and the top-secret bomb project he helmed to a new generation of Americans. Oppenheimer provides an opportunity to revisit this charismatic, contradictory man and reconsider how previous attempts to tell his story have succeeded—and failed—at fathoming one of the 20th century’s most fascinating public figures.

Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project

Born into a secular Jewish family in New York City in 1904 and educated at Manhattan’s Ethical Culture School, Oppenheimer graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in just three years. If Harvard was easy, growing out of his awkward adolescence was harder. He struggled with mental health issues while pursuing a graduate degreeat the University of Cambridge—“I was on the point of bumping myself off,” he later recalled—and ended up on probation after lacing an apple with chemicals and leaving it on his tutor’s desk. But by the time World War II broke out in 1939, Oppenheimer had transformed himself into a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “He was sort of a caricature of the eccentric professor,” Bird says, an intellectual omnivore who read Sanskrit, loved Elizabethan poetry, rode horses and made a great martini.

He had also fallen in love with Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh in Nolan’s film), a dues-paying member of the Communist Party who awakened his interest in politics. Oppenheimer was “likely sympathetic to … communist goals,” according to the nonprofit Atomic Heritage Foundation, but he never officially joined the party. (“Any attempt to label Robert Oppenheimer a party member is a futile exercise—as the FBI learned to its frustration over many years,” wrote Bird and co-author Martin J. Sherwin, who died in October 2021 at age 84, in American Prometheus.) But many of his closest friends and family were party members at one point or another: his brother, Frank Oppenheimer; his friend Haakon Chevalier; and his future wife, Kitty Oppenheimer. These associations would cast suspicion on the physicist himself later in his life.

Oppenheimer’s political leanings didn’t prevent him from being recruited, in early 1942, for a secret project authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that was drawing scientists from all over the country. Three years earlier, Albert Einstein had written a letter to Roosevelt warning that breakthroughs in nuclear fission promised “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” Now, the race was on to figure out how to build one of these bombs before Germany did.

In the summer of 1942, Oppenheimer organized a series of secret seminars at Berkeley, where the United States’ top physicists roughed out the outlines of a possible bomb. As it turned out, Oppenheimer was a natural manager. “I don’t know how he had acquired this facility for handling people,” said Edward Teller, a colleague who would later testify against him. “Those who knew him well were really surprised.”

That September, General Leslie Groves (played by Matt Damon in the new film), an Army engineer who’d previously overseen construction of the Pentagon, took over as head of what was by then called the Manhattan Project, after its inaugural offices in lower Manhattan. Groves knew construction but not physics, so the charming Berkeley physicist caught his eye. “Oppenheimer was the first scientist Groves had met on his tour who grasped that building an atomic bomb required finding practical solutions to a variety of cross-disciplinary problems,” wrote Bird and Sherwin. He wasn’t an obvious choice—“He couldn’t run a hamburger stand,” said a Berkeley colleague—but in October 1942, Groves named Oppenheimer the project’s scientific director.

The government operation brought hundreds, and eventually thousands, of scientists, civilians and Army personnel to a mesa in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Their ranks eventually included Teller, Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, Seth Neddermeyer, Robert Serber, Kenneth Bainbridge, Enrico Fermi and many others. (Nolan’s film portrays each of these figures and, judging by the full cast list, more or less recreates the entire field of theoretical physics in the 1930s and ’40s, including Kenneth Branagh as Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr.) The scientists reported directly to Oppenheimer, who, at 38, was learning on the job how to run a lab.

Oppenheimer’s lab was only one part of the Manhattan Project. Built on the site of a former boys’ school, Los Alamos was one of three “secret cities” seized and transformed by the U.S. government in late 1942 and early 1943. The other two—Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington—accounted for the vast majority of the manpower, expense and industrial scale of the project, which employed an estimated half a million people between 1942 and 1945. At Oak Ridge, uranium was refined at the largest factory in the world, newly built for that purpose. In Hanford, an area half the size of Rhode Island was cleared of residents, their houses bulldozed to make way for reactors to produce plutonium. “I told you it couldn’t be done without turning the whole country into a factory,” Bohr said to Teller in 1944. “You have done just that.”

At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer came into his own as a gifted leader. “[He] had a very distinctive voice that was very soft,” says Bird. “You had to listen very carefully, but he was magnetic.” That magnetism kept the lab productive even after an initial design for the bomb, known as Thin Man, had to be scrapped in July 1944. Ultimately, the scientists settled on two workable designs for a bomb, which they called Fat Man and Little Boy. At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, almost three years of work culminated in the first nuclear detonation in history. Known as the Trinity test, it lit the hills of the New Mexico desert.

Oppenheimer, already famously thin, had lost weight during the project, and during the countdown, he reportedly barely breathed. Later dramatizations had the scientist reciting the line from the Bhagavad Gita during the moment of detonation (Oppenheimer himself later claimed the line had come to him then), but he reportedly said something closer to “It worked.”

After the test, Oppenheimer was transformed by relief. “I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car,” fellow Manhattan Project scientist Isidor Isaac Rabi later said. “His walk was like High Noon … this kind of strut. He had done it.”

On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, Bockscardropped Fat Man on Nagasaki. Estimates of deaths from the two bombings vary widely, from a contemporary figure of around 110,000 to a later estimate of closer to 210,000. On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender.

The battle over the bomb [click on the URL above for the rest of the article]

Andy Kifer | READ MORE

Andy Kifer is an ex-New York City literary agent who works as an independent book editor and freelance writer.