I once lived downstairs from an Air Force Officer who was at Hanscom. He had participated in the detonation of the first nuclear explosion in 1945. He was an AF tech type person, engineer not physicist. To understand Oppenheimer in reality one must understand 1945 and people at Los Alamos. They were driven both by German brutality as well as the grossly inhumane acts by the Japanese. The Germans recorded their, the Japanese just beheaded theirs, no film or detailed records.
In later July 1945 the US forces were preparing for invasion of Japan. An anticipated loss of life was approaching one million. I had the opportunity to speak with dozens of men and one woman Marine from that time. Their mindset was not anywhere near what we see in 2023 Hollywood. In fact it is unlikely that anyone in Hollywood would even deign to speak with such people as those who fought in WW II.
Thus a film like Oppenheimer is what Hollywood would like to have seen in 1945. A collection of the selected woke versus the evil empire of war mongers. In reality the loss in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was on a par with the bombing of Tokyo, brutal, but it led almost instantly to a cessation of the conflict and the saving of millions of lives.
That mindset is devoid of any space in the current Hollywood mind. Oppenheimer did a brilliant job of herding a collection of genius cats. Yet Groves did even more in assembling the materials and infrastructure to effect that. Now the casting of Groves by a Hollywood A lister get us to focus on the current person not the genius of Groves. Without Groves there would never have been an Oppenheimer, and likely I would have become fatherless!
Posts
