Blinded by his own light, Oppenheimer illuminates our own dilemmas

Oppenheimer is at once threatening and spectacular, tragic and terrible, moving and unsettling. Made with the ambition and secrecy and star power of a government nuclear project, the movie itself is constructed like a nuclear device, tightly compressing real people and stranger-than-fiction details from the life of the father of the bomb into a propulsive three-hour countdown. Shot beautifully in Imax (and without CGI), the movie leaps across time and space to capture J. Robert Oppenheimer’s dramatic trajectory, from dazzling physicist to leader of the Manhattan Project, from conflicted hero to tragic figure. Nolan’s meticulous version of history comes mostly from Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird’s 591-page biography American Prometheus, but like the paradoxical scientist himself, it’s a mix of things: thriller, mystery, romance. In 2023, with our own diabolical inventions and dilemmas—a scorching climate, risky AI, the escalating threat of nuclear war—it’s also a horror movie, one we’re living in.



Writer and director Christopher Nolan, speaking after a recent screening, was quick to see implications for today’s would-be AI Oppenheimers, be they devising ways to replace actors or nuclear-war planners. “We have to hold people accountable for what they do with the tools that they have,” he said. “This is a movie about consequences.” As for Oppenheimer himself, Nolan is careful to not say too much, though he pointed to “a motif” in the film: “There’s a lot to do with what he won’t look at—with him closing his eyes.”



There’s a lot that we also don’t see. Told from Oppenheimer’s perspective (Nolan apparently wrote the script in the first person), we see him navigating stormy visions of the subatomic world and a series of poor personal calculations—in love, in politics, in moral ambivalence. We see Oppenheimer trying to direct the nation’s postwar nuclear developments and defend himself from anticommunists; in black-and-white scenes, we see the Congressional confirmation hearings of his nemesis, Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss. But there is little of the devastation unleashed at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. There’s a reference to the people who had to be relocated to build the lab at Los Alamos, but no mention of how the testing impacted them. We hear numbers from Japan—tens of thousands dead—and see brief, terrifying visions: friends burning, faces melting. During a brief slideshow of the victims, Oppenheimer looks away.



Nor is there ever any serious deliberation about building or dropping the bomb—many reservations about how it might be used, or, as nuclear documentarian Greg Mitchell points out in Mother Jones, any number of key facts that raise questions about the wisdom of the bombings. Oppenheimer says, as he actually did, that the bomb was used against “an essentially defeated” enemy. But during the scenes with the generals, the prevailing wisdom comes as a given: that the bomb was necessary—to prevent an invasion, save thousands of American lives, and end the war. All of that accepted narrative is still up for debate; but from Oppenheimer’s perspective, audiences may get the sense it isn’t, and the idea that nuclear barbarism was bound to happen.



That sense of inevitability radiates through the movie. Stunning close-ups of spinning loops, rippling waves, and exploding particles form a core visual and psychological motif, propelling the story forward with a breathless intensity: the revolutionary physics in the scientist’s head, pulsating like a ticking clock toward their logical, terrible conclusion. “I don’t know if we can be trusted with the weapon,” Oppenheimer tells a colleague at one point in the film, “but we have no choice.”



The father of the atomic bomb, with his pipe and porkpie hat and love of Sanskrit, has long been a mythical figure, alternately reviled and hailed for what he did. Later, for opposing the development of Edward Teller’s “super” hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer became a martyr, the cultured intellectual battling a right-wing military-industrial complex. He was persecuted by the government for his Communist affiliations (but really for opposing the H-bomb) and punished by his own sense of “sin” and his inability to control the thing he’d built. (The decision to remove his security clearance, due to what the hearing called his “defects” of character, was finally rescinded last year.)



Nolan’s masterful script and Cillian Murphy’s uncanny performance succeeds at complicating the mythic image of Oppenheimer, even as it revels in that myth; in interviews, Nolan has called him the most important person who’s ever lived. But the movie Oppenheimer—monumental, troubled by visions of a hidden world, unavoidably romanticized—also complicates how we understand the creation of the world’s most horrific device. What might seem like the logical outcome of physics and war and genius was actually the result of choices by brilliant, well-intentioned, and blinkered people. Understanding how Oppenheimer made those choices means looking just outside the frame of Oppenheimer.







Oppenheimer was a contradictory person—charismatic, difficult, ambivalent; a cipher, at times, even to himself. He was horrified at the  scale of the “inhumanity” in Japan, but he never publicly renounced the decision to build or use the bomb. And while he had opposed the H-bomb, he later testified at his security hearing that his reservations were technical and strategic. In any case, he said, he had eventually come to see it as too “technically sweet” to resist. If something works well in theory, “you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”



Oppenheimer’s later take on the H-bomb—not mentioned in the movie, which quotes from other parts of the hearing transcripts—reveals a critical aspect of his philosophy and moral ambiguity when it came to the Manhattan Project too: the notion that their work was inevitable. Despite whatever misgivings they had, Oppenheimer and his colleagues saw a political and moral imperative: They were determined to beat the Nazis to the bomb, save countless American lives, and reasoned that the devastation of the bomb would prevent its further use. It might, they hoped, even end all wars.



Moreover, Oppenheimer embraced a scientific imperative: Whatever could be done would be. Once fission was realized, building a bomb, he seemed certain, was a duty of discovery. “If you are a scientist, you cannot stop such a thing,” he told his peers at Los Alamos in 1945. In a magazine article around the same time, he addressed the question of whether it was good to give the world the power of fission: “Because we are scientists, we must say an unalterable yes.”



You can hear the same sense of obligation and fatalism in Oppenheimer’s legendary response to seeing the Trinity test, in the early morning of July 16, 1945, staring into nuclear fire for the first time.



I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.









Since an old, gaunt Oppenheimer said this in a haunting 1965 television interview, one line in particular—“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”—has practically become his catchphrase; we hear it multiple times in the film. (What Oppenheimer actually said after the test, according to his brother Frank, was “it worked.”) The way we typically hear these chilling lines, including in the movie, aligns Oppenheimer and the scientists themselves with death and destruction.



But was that what he actually meant? Reading that passage of the Gita in context (recited by Oppenheimer in the movie lovingly, but in a way that has raised some hackles in India) makes his quote more interesting, and more revealing of Oppenheimer and why he did what he did.



The Bhagavad Gita takes place on the edge of battle, and in 700 verses describes an encounter between a warrior prince named Arjuna and his charioteer, who turns out to be Lord Krishna, an avatar of the supreme being Vishnu. The prince is uneasy at the thought of having to go to battle, and as Krishna tries to convince him, he teaches him about his dharma, or sacred duty, to fight. And he explains that only Krishna can determine the prince’s fate, and that he must have faith in Krishna if he wants to save his soul. The prince then asks Krishna to reveal his godlike form. Krishna obliges. From a translation by Oppenheimer’s Sanskrit teacher, Arthur Ryder:



A thousand simultaneous suns Arising in the sky Might equal that great radiance, With that great glory vie. . . . Amazement entered [Arjuna]; his hair Rose up; he bowed his head; He humbly lifted folded hands, And worshipped God. . . .



Taking on his terrible, multi-headed form—like “the radiance of a thousand suns”—Krishna explains what he came to do:



Death am I, and my present task Destruction.



Dazzled and humbled, Arjuna agrees to join the fight. Read the passage next to Oppenheimer’s recitation, with his sad, remorseful demeanor, and he starts to look less like Vishnu and more like the prince—hesitating about his own awful duty, ultimately persuaded by his dharmic duty and the ferocious power of scientific “progress.” Amid the firestorm of his own moral reservations, the Gita, wrote biographers Sherwin and Bird, “seemed to provide precisely the right philosophy” for Oppenheimer. Science, like war—like fate—was out of his hands; who was he or any scientist to defy duty or destiny?



Oppenheimer’s paraphrase of the Gita is “one of the most-cited and least-interpreted quotations” of the nuclear age, the historian James A. Hijiya wrote in a 2001 essay, “The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” which pursued this idea at length. In 2014, Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian, also saw the sense of destiny and duty in Oppenheimer’s quote.



“It isn’t a case of the ‘father’ of the bomb declaring himself ‘death, the destroyer of worlds,’ in a fit of grandiosity or hubris,” he wrote. “Rather, it is him being awed by what is being displayed in front of him, confronted with the spectacle of death itself unveiled in front of him, in the world’s most impressive memento mori, and realizing how little and inconsequential he is as a result. Compelled by something cosmic and terrifying, Oppenheimer then reconciles himself to his duty as a prince of physics, and that duty is war.”



Listen to today’s inventors—especially in the lightning-speed “arms race” of AI, which is also premised on attaining geopolitical superiority—and you can catch a strong whiff of that same fatalism and inevitability, and all the fuzzy accountability it suggests. But amid a number of global AI “Manhattan Projects,” a growing chorus of researchers and others—including the “Godfather of AI” himself, Geoffrey Hinton—have been trying to remind the world that invention doesn’t just happen; it’s done by certain people, for certain uses. And if you know anything about humans and the real world, you know those uses are not going to be pretty.



When builders of AI describe their potential existential risks—like the Manhattan Project scientists musing on the possibility that the first nuclear test would ignite the atmosphere—it’s hard to know if they’re not feeding their egos, hyping their own achievements, or distracting themselves (and us) from more immediate threats. It’s also hard not to wonder: If they’re so worried AI could destroy us, why are some AI researchers working so hard not only to build it, but also to deploy it nearly everywhere they can.



The prevailing attitude in defense and venture-capital circles alike might recall a line in Jurassic Park, about how the Manhattan Project researchers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could build an atomic bomb that no one stopped to consider whether they should. In fact, many of Oppenheimer’s colleagues did question the building of the bomb and its eventual use, and wanted President Truman instead to detonate it over an uninhabited place as a demonstration to Japan. Shortly after the Trinity test, we even hear Teller (played by Benny Safdie) wonder aloud to Oppenheimer: “Would the Japanese surrender if they knew what was coming?” This idea is shot down by the Pentagon, and by Oppenheimer himself, who says such decisions should be up to political leaders.







In retrospect, we now know that American intelligence showed that the Germans were never close to developing the bomb; and intercepted Japanese cables suggested that Tokyo was preparing a conditional surrender before Hiroshima. Years after the bombings (a process that, as we see in the film, Oppenheimer helped guide), he admitted thinking that the scale of devastation probably wasn’t necessary. “I think that Hiroshima was far more costly in life and suffering, inhumane, than it needed to have been, to have been an effective argument for ending the war,” he told a TV interviewer. “This is easy to say after the fact.”



Some Manhattan Project physicists, like Teller, would try to insist that inventors have no idea how their inventions will be used. But recognizing their own role in the slipstream of science, technology, and war, some at Los Alamos would refuse to “do their duty.” Some were troubled by a potential U.S. nuclear monopoly, and a gripping new documentary by Steve James, A Compassionate Spy, excavates the story of one of them: Ted Hall, the youngest physicist at Los Alamos, whose concerns led him to pass secrets to the Soviets.



Others would simply walk. Joseph Rotblat, a Polish physicist who worked with the British Mission to the Manhattan Project, was determined to stop the threat posed by Hitler. But after learning at a dinner in March 1944 with General Leslie Groves—director of the project (played by Matt Damon)—that the bomb was intended to subdue the Soviet Union, Rotblat soon departed in disgust. He spent the rest of life working on nonproliferation, and in 1995, shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.



“When it comes to nuclear weapons,” Rotblat said in his Nobel lecture, quoting Lord Zuckerman, a longtime scientific advisor to the British government,“it is the man in the laboratory who, at the start, proposes that for this or that arcane reason it would be useful to improve an old or to devise a new nuclear warhead. It is he, the technician, not the commander in the field, who is at the heart of the arms race.”



Having dutifully unleashed the genie, Oppenheimer would learn how hard it would be to reign it in. As Oppenheimer testified at his security hearing: “I felt, perhaps quite strongly, that having played an active part in promoting a revolution in warfare, I needed to be as responsible as I could with regard to what came of this revolution.”



Not unlike the fathers of AI, Oppenheimer’s response to building the bomb was to call for regulation, with the guidance of the science community—efforts that went only so far at the height of the Cold War. He resisted the hydrogen bomb—not by pushing for an end to nukes, but by pushing for smaller ones. That and the McCarthyite campaign that followed would not only dislodge him from his pedestal as a scientist hero, but ironically put a chill on the very engagement between ivory-towered science and the society that the Manhattan Project had seemed to broker. Ultimately, the hearing found that Oppenheimer wasn’t really a Communist, but a security threat nonetheless, in part because he had gone “beyond the proper function as a scientist.”



Meanwhile, since “the Gadget,” as that first bomb was ominously called, scientists’ moral dilemmas have only grown more complicated. As civilian science funding shrinks and basic science grows more expensive, physicists continue to depend upon national security funding for their research. In fiscal year 2021, the Department of Defense received $17 billion for science and technology research alone; the National Science received $8.5 billion in total. Most physicists would likely choose not to build bombs, but their government-funded research may be powering weapons systems nonetheless. This too is part of the fallout of the Manhattan Project, one suggested by another physicist’s memorable reaction to Trinity: “Now we’re all sons of bitches.”



Along with terror, the nuclear age awakened in many a renewed sense of responsibility, and it arrived along with ideas about how other technology might help. In July 1945, the same month as the Trinity test, Vannevar Bush published his essay “As We May Think,” describing a brighter future, in which personal desktop computers would let us follow a “web” of “associative trails” across the breadth of human knowledge. A presidential science adviser who helped organize the Manhattan Project (and portrayed in the movie by Matthew Modine), Bush envisioned a new kind of information technology that could enhance human understanding and responsibility. Some of his networked vision came true, but he didn’t imagine the deadening impact of social media and the deadly threats of artificial intelligence. What does human responsibility even mean in the AI age, when our inventions operate autonomously from us, when their behavior is unpredictable, and when their inner workings are a mystery even to their creators?



The fire Oppenheimer started hasn’t gone away. Perversely, we still rely on the terror of nuclear war to keep global peace. Nine countries now have 12,512 warheads, a number that’s down from a Cold War height of 50,000, but steadily growing again, and in the absence of any meaningful arms control agreements between the US and Russia, who have the largest arsenals. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—and growing talk of the use of the tactical nukes that Oppenheimer supported—are helping to further normalize nuclear weapons.



But nukes are no more normal than they were inevitable. They were a result of new physics but also old human foibles: hubris, indifference, faith, and blindness. Far from “Death, destroyer of worlds,” another line from the movie stuck with me, a comment by Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission: “Genius,” he says, “is no guarantee of wisdom.”