Oppenheimer: The Man, the Movie and Nuclear DreadOppenheimer (American film), Christopher Nolan, director and writer. Distributed by Universal Pictures, 2023.

Abstract

AbstractChristopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, centred on the eponymous American physicist who steered the Manhattan Project to completion of the first nuclear bomb in 1945, captures scientists reaching their own destructive capability at its most terrible. It prompts viewers to wonder why, over the course of nearly 80 years, Oppenheimer’s nuclear dread hasn’t been embraced with greater alarm, and informed praetorian critiques haven’t been entertained more openly. The short answer is that nuclear deterrence has worked. But the movie comes at a moment when it is being tested. With its spectacular suggestions of nuclear destruction and its intense examination of early anxieties about nuclear weapons that have never been satisfactorily addressed, Oppenheimer prompts a crucial question: whether mutual deterrence, shorn of arms control and regular diplomacy and under the pressure of a major war involving nuclear powers, can still work.Key words: Atomic Energy CommissionJ. Robert OppenheimerManhattan ProjectMcCarthyismmutual assured destruction (MAD)nuclear abolitionnuclear deterrencenuclear peaceOppenheimer Notes1 See Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).2 See US Department of Energy, ‘Secretary Granholm Statement on DOE Order Vacating 1954 Atomic Energy Commission Decision in the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer’, 16 December 2022, https://www.energy.gov/articles/secretary-granholmstatement-doe-order-vacating-1954-atomic-energy-commission-decision; and Barton J. Bernstein, ‘Christopher Nolan’s Forthcoming “Oppenheimer” Movie: A Historian’s Questions, Worries, and Challenges’, Washington Decoded, 11 July 2023, https://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2023/07/bernstein.html.3 See, for example, Andy Kifer, ‘The Real History Behind Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer”’, Smithsonian Magazine, 18 July 2023, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-real-history-behind-christopher-nolans-oppenheimer-180982529/.4 See Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).5 See, for example, Daryl G. Kimball, ‘“Oppenheimer”, the Bomb, and Arms Control, Then and Now’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 29 July 2023, https://thebulletin.org/2023/07/oppenheimer-the-bomb-and-arms-control-then-and-now/.6 Quoted in, for example, Richard Rhodes, ‘Robert Oppenheimer: The Myth and the Mystery’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 18 December 2018, https://thebulletin.org/2018/12/robert-oppenheimer-the-myth-and-the-mystery/.7 ‘General Advisory Committee’s Majority and Minority Reports on Building the H-Bomb: Majority Annex’, 30 October 1949, available from Atomic Archive, https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/hydrogen/gac-report.html#Minority.8 See National Security Council, ‘NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security’, 14 April 1950, https://irp.fas.org/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68.htm.9 See generally Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 3rd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).10 See Philip Green, Deadly Logic: The Theory of Nuclear Deterrence (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1966).11 In poking fun at national somnolence, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, another summer 2023 movie set in the southwestern United States in the 1950s, may capture the prevailing American Cold War attitude. No one bats an eye when mushroom clouds from aboveground nuclear-bomb tests appear on the horizon. The Cold War is revealed as a cynical absurdist artifice, executive control of science as a joke.12 See Gordon Barrass, ‘Able Archer 83: What Were the Soviets Thinking?’, Survival, vol. 58, no. 6, December 2016–January 2017, pp. 7–30.13 See Jonathan Stevenson, Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable: Harnessing Doom from the Cold War to the Age of Terror (New York: Viking, 2008), pp. 165–6.14 See, for instance, Nikolai N. Sokov, ‘Russian Military Doctrine Calls a Limited Nuclear Strike “De-escalation.” Here’s Why’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 8 March 2022, https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/russian-military-doctrine-calls-a-limited-nuclear-strike-de-escalation-heres-why/; and Dave Johnson, ‘Russia’s Deceptive Nuclear Policy’, Survival, vol. 63, no. 3, June–July 2021, pp. 123–42.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJonathan StevensonJonathan Stevenson is a Senior Fellow at the IISS, managing editor of Survival, and author of Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable (Viking, 2008) and A Drop of Treason (University of Chicago Press, 2021). This essay was adapted from the author’s ‘Why Oppenheimer Matters’, which was published in American Prospect on 28 July 2023, and an earlier version that appeared in German in the August/September 2023 issue of Aufbau.