Here's What 'Oppenheimer' Gets Right--and Wrong--about Nuclear History

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Scientific American

Science

4.3 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2023

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

Here’s what a historian who has studied J. Robert Oppenheimer for two decades has to say about the new Christopher Nolan film on the father of the atomic bomb.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Picture this, static cars, idling engines, angry horns, now picture you, zooming past
0:12.4	it all, light and breezy, ah, the sweet feeling of whizzing past traffic, book your train
0:21.6	journey via AvantiWestcoast.co.uk, AvantiWestcoast, feel good travel.
0:30.1	This is Cosmos Quickly, and I'm Lee Billings. In this episode, we're talking with a nuclear
0:42.4	historian about the new Christopher Nolan blockbuster, Oppenheimer, a film about one of the most
0:47.4	complex and tragic figures of the early atomic age. I'm very pleased to welcome Alex Wellerstein
0:57.1	to Cosmos Quickly. Alex is a nuclear historian and professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology
1:02.1	in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the author of the 2021 book Restricted Data, the history of nuclear
1:07.6	secrecy in the United States. And Alex, welcome to the program. Yeah, I'm really glad to be here.
1:13.2	We're going to be talking about Christopher Nolan's new film, Oppenheimer, which Alex and I both
1:17.8	saw at a pre-screening event a few days ago and blew our socks off in more ways than one.
1:22.9	Should be a fun conversation. Tell us a little more about what you know about Oppenheimer,
1:28.6	what your relationship to Oppenheimer is and how that influenced how you viewed this movie.
1:35.1	I've been sort of thinking about Oppenheimer as a person and his history for about 20 years,
1:41.3	and so it's a little odd to watch a movie about someone you've spent a lot of time reading their
1:49.6	letters, their FBI files, their security hearing transcripts. I take some credit for essentially
1:57.5	finding the unredacted versions of the security hearing transcript, which had been mislabeled and
2:04.5	misfiled by National Archives, and I found them on a lucky check. Yeah, I've been thinking about
2:13.0	Oppenheimer a long, long, long time and trying to make sense of him. I'm not a biographer of
2:18.5	Oppenheimer, so I'm not in love with Oppenheimer. I haven't sort of internalized him as my hero subject.
2:25.2	I think he's a pretty complicated character, and I'm interested in him as a complicated character,
2:30.0	and it is part of the sort of complicated times. Complicated times. And just to be clear,
	...

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