Screen
The fallout
Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ is the latest film to consider the atomic bomb— but the bomb detonated itself across our culture decades ago
by MATTHEW D’ANCONA
Our critics
The atomic bomb was always destined for stardom. Its cultural shadow was long, even before the first mushroom cloud rose from the American desert.
At Los Alamos, New Mexico, the scientists of the topsecret Manhattan Project seemed to intuit that this was so. When they weren’t conducting the most dangerous experiments in history, trying to beat the Nazis in the race to create a nuclear weapon, they immersed themselves in creative performance. As the countdown ticked away to the decisive (and successful) Trinity Test of the so-called “gadget” on 16th July 1945, the scientists filled their evenings with song, amateur dramatics and performance.
J Robert Oppenheimer, the director of this $2bn mission, put on a production of Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace. In the Fuller Lodge dining hall, Edward Teller—the Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who would go on to become the father of the H-bomb and Oppenheimer’s mortal foe—played on his Steinway grand piano. Otto Frisch, an Austrian-British scientist and world-class pianist, would also entertain his colleagues in the evening.
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By day, the team’s work— depicted in Christopher Nolan’s epic new movie Oppenheimer (in cinemas from 21st July)—sent its prodigiously talented members hurtling towards the deadliest recesses of quantum physics and the production of a bomb that might, conceivably, set fire to the Earth’s atmosphere. Small wonder that they relished cultural distraction when they were off-duty.
Yet there was always more to it than that. The powers with which they were experimenting would test the very limits of the imagination. The bomb was the most terrifying thing in the world. It was also the most transfixing spectacle ever seen by humankind.
“This is the greatest show on earth,” Captain Harold Kinne told his men in 1953 at the Yucca Flat testing site in Nevada. “Relax and enjoy it.”
As crass as such fairgroundattraction language sounds, Kinne was on to something. The atomic bomb could not be contained by science, politics, military strategy or the espionage of the Cold War. It drilled deep into the human psyche, demanding an audience. It exploded culturally, as well as physically.