The Day After Trinity

I came to look at this television documentary shortly after seeing Christopher Nolan's OPPENHEIMER (2023). The principal difference in the story is that in Nolan's movie, he tries to mislead the security forces about his sources concerning Russian spying at Alamogordo, and is later surprised to discover that it centered around Haakon Chevalier; in the documentary, he is the source for suspicions about the man.

It's not enough to change the story about Oppenheimer, but with the same set of facts, one can construct many stories. Nolan's movie is much more about Oppenheimer's personal life, and begins much earlier. This offers a viewpoint of his activities after the war, to control and limit the damage caused by his work. Each takes advantage of considerable hindsight to reach very different conclusions, both of which seem impeccable given the facts chosen by each. Based on having seen both within a short period of time, I can only conclude that they are both brilliantly done, and both badly lacking in completeness.

Can't wait for Nolan's 'Oppenheimer', so decided to see this docu. Quiet old but the story itself is pretty amazing. No wonder Nolan picked this story. Guess even without an advance in Germany with the allied troops, this is where the Nazis lost. Innovation is key! Glad Hitler and the Nazis didn't invest much in it. Got me curious how Nolan will use this powerful story of the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer to his weird but entertaining storytelling.

"The physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."

What makes this documentary of J. Robert Oppenheimer outstanding is the number of interviews it conducts with those who knew him as a friend, those who worked with him on the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, and the locals who witnessed the bomb's testing first-hand. While Oppenheimer had passed away 14 years earlier, the number of people who were still alive, including his brother and many other leading physicists, really brought the archival footage to life. It's horrifying to hear of the unknown range of outcomes over the first testing in July, 1945 at the so-called Trinity site, with Enrico Fermi "taking side bets on the possibility of incinerating the state of New Mexico," and another scientist commenting on the speculation that they might "explode the atmosphere, in which case the world disappears." It's even more horrifying to see the devastation and loss of life at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which while certainly not new information, hits differently after having been taking on this journey of the country's finest minds working on this immense problem to create what they referred to as the "gadget."

The picture the documentary paints is incredibly conflicting: the scientists (including Oppenheimer) were aghast at the rise of fascism in Europe and for the most part liberals (if not sympathizers with communism), and believed they were working on something that would prevent the Nazis from ushering in a period of darkness that would set Western civilization back 1000 years. After V-E day the project was swept along by inertia, and the film touches on the arguments for and against using the weapon on Japan three weeks after the first successful test in New Mexico. It's not a deep dive but it certainly raises the moral question at a time when Reagan was president and patriotism was on the rise, and points out that upon understanding that hundreds of thousands of people had been killed, most if not all of the physicists had severe pangs of remorse. One of those was Robert Wilson, who quit and never again worked on nuclear weapons; his interview clips are wonderful.

The documentary is also balanced in its portrayal of Oppenheimer, an extraordinary intellect whose life went through incredible transitions, from apolitical intellectual to radical, anti-fascist leftist, to leader of thousands of people to create the first WMD, to trying desperately (and unsuccessfully) to control the proliferation of atomic weapons via involvement in Washington DC, to a disgrace of sorts in the revoking of his security clearance. It's to the current administration's credit that it exonerated him of the McCarthy-era allegations against him recently, in Dec. 2022, 68 years after the fact. Oppenheimer's personal breadth is also intriguing, collecting artwork, communing with nature on his ranch, and reading poetry and texts like the Bhagavad Gita, the source for his famous quote "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

However, this is a clear-eyed treatment of the man. Freeman Dyson is remarkably candid about the Faustian bargain Oppenheimer had made in running the project, and in his analysis of how dropping the bomb became practically an inevitably, which is pretty damning if you think about it. Quite factually and without the least bit of rancor, he points out that "Oppenheimer gave his consent, in a certain sense. He was on a committee which advised the Secretary of War, and that committee did not take any kind of stand against dropping the bomb." Haakon Chevalier points out that by Oppenheimer cooperating with the Red Scare tribunals and providing information about his past in such an ambiguous way, he was "betrayed," lost his job, and might have been sentenced to a lengthy prison term. I only wish that this portion of the documentary had been expanded on and given longer treatment.

These interviewees are for the most part physicists, and they present themselves informally, with the refined air of intelligence and always honest. Robert Serber talking about everything from riding horses on a ridge with Oppenheimer at midnight during a thunderstorm to walking around Nagasaki after the war is a perfect example. However, despite having worked so hard on a technical problem and having achieved success, they all understood the dangerous new age they had unleashed upon the world. When taken together with Paul Frees' narration and the no-nonsense direction from Jon H. Else, this becomes a blend of admiration for genius, and horror at the results.

For a 90 minute film, this documentary does an admirable job of telling the tale of the making of the atom bomb. It's great value is the recording of interviews of some of the major players at a time when they had had time to reflect on the event. Since most all of those directly involved with the development of the bomb are now dead, this documentary is a priceless piece of history.

The events are centered around Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant physicist who became the director of the Los Alamos branch of the Manhattan Project that was responsible for the design, construction, and testing of the bomb. Oppenheimer was a person who had that unusual combination of a supreme knowledge of technology and theory as well as skills as an administrator. I think part of his success as an administrator was due to the respect he commanded from all who worked with him. Ultimately there were hundreds of scientists at the Los Alamos site; it was remarked that there has never been in history such a large gathering of world-class scientists at one place. I found it odd that there was no mention of Leó Szilárd who envisioned the idea of a nuclear chain reaction in 1933.

Unfortunately Robert Oppenheimer was not alive to be interviewed for this film, but there is substantial archival footage of him. Robert's brother Frank, also a physicist, was interviewed at some length. There is archival footage of the destruction caused by the dropping of the two bombs, both the physical and human destruction. Such scenes require a strong stomach to watch, and what is shown is only a small glimpse of the horror. The dropping of the bombs had a profound effect on the scientists who were responsible for the development. Some, like Robert Wilson, abandoned all classified work. Oppenheimer--who made the remark, "the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose"-- spent time after the war agitating for world control over nuclear weapons; he was never the same person after the war and became a tragic figure.

Given that the development of the atom bomb was a significant event in human history, there is no lacking of reference material. A complete exposition is contained in Richard Rhodes', "The Making of the Atom Bomb." I found the fact-based docudrama, "Day One," to be interesting, particularly in its dealing with the discussions surrounding the decision to drop the bombs.

I first saw this documentary in 1981 and I am not exaggerating when I say it changed my life. A few years later I took an 18 month unpaid leave from my professorship to work as a full-time volunteer trying to defuse the nuclear threat. While many factors contributed to that decision, "The Day After Trinity" certainly was one of them.

The thing that impressed me most about this film was that it showed me how we can fool ourselves as to our motivation. We think we base our decisions on a rational foundation, but this film helped me to see places in my own past where I had made major decisions and not been totally honest about some of my motivation. We have socially acceptable and socially unacceptable reasons for doing things and hide the socially unacceptable ones even from our own consciousness. But they are at work in the unconscious, where they can take over and do great harm. Watching this film made me vow to do my utmost never to do that again. (It's not as easy as it might sound!) It is not light fare, but definitely worth watching. Aside from what a viewer can learn from it, the film is very well done, with much high drama.