Oppenheimer: The Man, the Movie and Nuclear Dread

Abstract

Christopher 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.