Nothing in this column should be read as an effort to lessen the achievement of Christopher Nolan’s new film, Oppenheimer. My wife and I sat through this long film — and it is very long — without any slackening of attention, even though we had to endure two brief pauses because of load shedding that afflicted the theatre where we were watching it. 

As so many others have already written, it is an extraordinary work that can (almost) make the ideas of quantum physics and the technological challenges of atomic weapons construction seem understandable to the layperson. 

Despite Nolan’s cinematic oeuvre that includes an array of popular speculative fiction works such as Interstellar, in truth, at least to this writer, Nolan’s storytelling nous really seems most visible when he tackles the sweep of a broad historical story, as with Dunkirk and, now, most recently, with Oppenheimer. 

This storytelling mastery comes into clear focus with seemingly small, quotidian events and hints that illuminate the much larger picture until an entire historical tapestry is set out for his audiences.

Typical of Nolan’s approach, in Oppenheimer he weaves together several storylines from different circumstances and times, cutting back and forth between them, rupturing any simple continuity of time and space. That could sound pretentious, but it works, and it makes Oppenheimer a forceful, coherent narrative. 

However, some acquaintanceship with American leftwing politics in the 1930s and ’40s, US official decision-making during World War 2 and afterwards, and the complex ideas of modern physics might come in handy in fully comprehending all of Nolan’s story.

Christopher Nolan’s Jungian tropes 

Key interwoven strands include J Robert Oppenheimer’s early physics education in Britain and Germany at the beginning of modern quantum physics and his initial intellectual triumphs as a scientist.

There is also his sympathetic engagement with the American left and the many communist front organisations in California, as well as his internal drive and intense focus to manage much of the vast scientific and technological effort that was the ultra-expensive, ultra-secret Manhattan Project that delivered an atomic bomb that could (and did) end World War 2.

Central to the film is Oppenheimer’s internal torment over his desire to put his science to work on the bomb, even as he realises that particular atomic genie can never be put back inside the bottle. But then there are also his entanglements with a federal bureaucracy determined to root out from the government and society every leftist, communist and Russian sympathiser, by fair means or foul.

In setting out this story, Nolan echoes a storytelling device of Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa in his novella, Rashomon, (later turned into a stage play and a film) that explored a crime through the memories of several different witnesses and participants in the crime.

For Nolan, his flashbacks and loopbacks all illuminate different aspects of Oppenheimer’s driven personality, his effects on those all around him, but then, too, how a strange naivety about government’s workings results in his downfall from the heights of national influence. Oppenheimer’s story thus is a modern retelling of the ancient tale of Prometheus.

In Oppenheimer’s story, Nolan recapitulates that legend. (Prometheus could have served as a subtitle for the film and it was in fact the title of the Oppenheimer biography —“American Prometheus” — by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin that served as the launching pad for the film). 

Prometheus was the titan who gave humanity the gift of fire, despite Zeus’ prohibition of such an act, and who conferred its benefits and disasters to humanity. It is easy to see this modern version in Oppenheimer’s delivery of atomic power to the world — for both destruction and energy. 

Having transgressed a forbidden threshold, Prometheus’ punishment was to be chained to a mountainside while a huge bird of prey perpetually tore at his liver. Oppenheimer, for his part, plagued by self-doubt and remorse over what he has done, is simultaneously pursued by those who grant or withdraw security clearances. His is pulled and without one he could no longer work on the projects he had been associated with in his professional life.

What does the film leave out?

What the film does not focus forcefully enough on, perhaps, is the larger social milieu of Oppenheimer’s engagement with the political far left as he ran the scientific and technological aspects of the Manhattan Project, let alone the circumstances of the spying that did take place in the Manhattan Project. Similarly, the callow anti-semitism woven into the pursuit of communists and fellow travellers in government is glossed over.

In truth, there was significant penetration into the Manhattan Project by spies operating on behalf of the Soviet Union. That nation had built a network of individuals who could provide them with information about the technology being created, the theoretical considerations being worked through, and the actual construction of the nuclear devices. The USSR had its own atomic project and even without the espionage, probably would have achieved the scientific breakthroughs just a few years later than it actually did.

By the beginning of World War 2, physicists in many nations had already been engaged in the theoretical work that would lead to the self-sustaining splitting of the atom — an essential part of creating a fission reaction for a nuclear weapon. Albert Einstein — now in the US after fleeing Nazi Germany, as the world’s most “famous” scientist — in 1939 had written his letter to President Franklin Roosevelt about the possibility of a German atomic breakthrough, and his letter was the impetus for the Manhattan Project.

Einstein and many others knew that German scientists like Werner Heisenberg were on the trail of creating a sustainable atomic reaction and that such efforts would inevitably point towards the creation of a nuclear weapon if sufficient time and resources were made available.

Fortunately for the Americans (and the British and Canadians who also participated in the Manhattan Project), a whole roster of top-tier European physicists had, over the past few years, fled Europe as it increasingly came under the control of Hitler’s Germany. Once the Manhattan Project was under way, many of those emigres were recruited to join the highly secret project. 

At that point at the beginning of the project, scientific nous was deemed more important than an impeccable security clearance or problematic leftwing personal histories, let alone the possibility of even conducting a security clearance investigation when an individual’s records and references might only be accessed in German-occupied Europe.

An irony of history

It is an irony of history that many of the best minds had fled Europe for America and so the German atomic effort stalled, partially due to ineffective mathematical modelling, weak theoretical understandings, and, perhaps crucially, the destruction of the deuterium plant at Telemark, Norway by a British-Norwegian raid.

Deuterium was Germany’s element of choice for moderating nuclear chain reactions rather than graphite, in contrast to the Americans’ preference for the production of plutonium. Plutonium was the fissile material used in the second device that exploded over Nagasaki, while the first bomb used an isotope of uranium.

One of those brought into the project was Klaus Fuchs, a physicist from Germany who had previously fled to Britain and Canada and who eventually became a significant figure in the project. However, Fuchs had also been a Communist Party supporter from his youth in Germany and he had a relationship with Soviet espionage agents working in the US (building on his prior connections in Britain). Accordingly, he undertook to supply them secretly with highly classified materials.

Beyond Fuchs (the son of a Lutheran pastor), other potential recruits were often non-practising Jews among the technical staff. These included such people as David Greenglass and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They had all supported leftist causes over the years and, deliberately or as a result of their sympathies and circumstances (the Soviet Union and America were allies in the war, after all), assisted in the larger espionage net run by Soviet operatives. 

The extent of conscious participation varied among such people and many still argue that the Rosenbergs’ role had been significantly exaggerated so as to find some obvious scapegoats once it became clear the Manhattan Project’s secrecy had been compromised. 

The Soviets knew something important was going on and they were clearly eager to gain information about it, especially since they were not invited to join it during the war.

While Oppenheimer could not directly be blamed for the inclusion of such people in the project, given the thousands employed throughout the nation and his (and the government’s) highest priority at the time was the creation of a successful nuclear weapon. Nevertheless, his own long-time, leftist associations brought his personal political circumstances under an increasingly harsh light. 

Once Soviet espionage in the project became clear, Oppenheimer’s position became increasingly precarious and led to a kangaroo court-style security hearing that caused the revocation of his top-level security clearance. That made his participation in the government’s atomic programmes impossible.

The basilisk role of Joe McCarthy

While the film glosses over it, one key trigger for what became a major effort to hunt down a real or imaginary Soviet influence in the arts, entertainment, education, government and the military was the role of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.

His presence loomed large over various investigating congressional committees as well as a much more intense security screening process across the government. In addition, committees set up in Hollywood also interrogated writers, actors and directors — also often non-religious, leftwing Jews — in order to root out the presumed agents of Soviet influence.

In such circumstances, the term “witch hunt” for what was happening became popular in America for the first time since the original 17th-century Salem, Massachusetts witch trials.

Those hunts for disrupters of the American way of life now have unsettling parallels to the ideas and actions of the Maga crowd and its political leaders in their efforts to root out those that theoretically would destroy American society as purveyors of “wokeness” and other ways of subverting the innocent.

In 1951, at the height of McCarthy’s influence (his accusations often contained wildly varying charges of the numbers of Russian agents in the US government, and usually included little or no corroborative detail), the Wisconsin senator argued, “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.

“A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men… What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence… The laws of probability would dictate that part of … [the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.”

In fact, some in the country have often been susceptible to accusations of such grand conspiracies threatening the nation. (They have not, obviously, all been entirely imaginary; witness the actual spies in the Manhattan Project, although necessarily among Hollywood’s screenwriters or directors.)

Although that communist menace has evaporated with the collapse of the old Soviet Union, the sequential threats of an unstoppable Japanese economic superpower, transnational radical Islam, ethno-nationalist Russia, or a resurgent China in the 21st century have all loomed on the horizon instead since the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

The paranoid style in politics

Putting this fear in a broader context, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote back in 1964 that what he had termed “the paranoid style in politics” had “been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it – and its targets have ranged from ‘the international bankers’ to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers. American politics has often been an arena for angry minds…

“I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind…. the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.” 

And, it seems, here we are, yet again.

The events in Nolan’s film took place amid one such wave and people like Robert Oppenheimer, as well as a whole generation of actors, writers, directors on Broadway and in Hollywood, found themselves out of work as a result of it. The fact so many of them were leftist Jews who had largely found their god in socialist humanism or communism made it that much easier for accusers to point to them as a kind of outsider menace, despite the country’s recent acquaintanceship with the actual horrors of Nazi Germany.

A controversy over the depiction of the bomb

Nolan’s film has drawn some criticism for failing to show the actual destructive effects of the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki — let alone focusing on the still-lingering controversy over whether or not the bombs had been needed to provoke a Japanese surrender. But these criticisms largely miss the point and power of the film. By now, virtually everyone who will have seen the film or even read about it is aware of the baleful impact of even a “modest” nuclear blast — and mushroom clouds have virtually become cinematic cliches.

Already by 1946, with the publication of John Hersey’s extraordinary reporting from Hiroshima — a work that initially filled an entire issue of The New Yorker and was then reprinted as a best-selling book — the bomb’s real impact had first seriously penetrated America’s consciousness. 

Subsequently, novels and films such as Dr Strangelove, On the Beach and Failsafe, just to name a few (and more recent made-for-television docudramas on the Manhattan Project), have made this understanding ever more deeply rooted.

Americans who went to school during the 1950s and ’60s practised “drop-and-cover” drills that were designed to somehow protect students from a nuclear blast when it came, by having students cower under their school desks and close their eyes. The building of backyard fallout shelters became something of a national mania, depicted in various what-if stories on the television show, The Twilight Zone. 

And, of course, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis brought home to an entire generation just how possible a devastating nuclear exchange might be if international relations spun out of control.

Recent scholarship making use of previously inaccessible Russian archival material has highlighted just how close the crisis was to getting out of hand and leading to an actual nuclear weapons exchange. That crisis was, fortunately, the impetus for the first nuclear treaties between the US and the USSR and hopefully can again become a model for nuclear limitation treaties that would bring together the US, Russia and China.

A final thought

If Oppenheimer does nothing else, provoking an understanding of the possibilities of warfare via nuclear weapons (the fear of such a thing looms over the current Ukrainian war as Russia continues to hint at the possibility of using such weapons), then the film will have made a serious contribution to our world.

But if you have not yet seen it, go see it, too, for the power of its storytelling and the quality of its acting. DM