"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.
