NBC News Documentary on J. Robert Oppenheimer Timed to Promote the Feature Film About Him – But It's Well Worth Seeing Anyway

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, July 21) at 10 MS-NBC showed a new documentary on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the first atomic bomb, called To End All War – reflecting Oppenheimer’s optimistic and forlorn hope that the use of nuclear weapons would render war so frightening that it would become obsolete. The appearance of this documentary was an example of synergistic marketing at its most blatant: it premiered on the same day as Christopher Nolan’s dramatic film Oppenheimer (starring Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt as his wife Kitty) opened in theatres. It was brought to us by a news network of NBC, which is part of Comcast – as is Universal, the studio that produced the Nolan film. There have been innumerable documentaries, as well as fiction films, about J. Robert Oppenheimer and his work on the first atomic bomb – as well as his controversial refusal to work on the hydrogen bomb and the jihad against him in the early 1950’s led by Dr. Edward Teller, who took on the H-bomb project and denounced Oppenheimer as a Communist and a traitor for having opposed the H-bomb program. In fact, the first documentary on the Manhattan Engineering District (the code-name for the A-bomb program, though it colloquially entered American history as the “Manhattan Project”) was a March of Time episode from 1946, just a year after the first A-bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, which Oppenheimer in one of his many references to religion and spirituality called “Trinity” after a poem by John Donne mentioning the Holy Trinity of Christianity (odd since Oppenheimer was Jewish, at least by ancestry), which reproduced that test and featured Oppenheimer playing himself. Quite a few films were made about the Manhattan Project while Oppenheimer was still alive (he died in 1967 of cancer of the esophagus, the same disease that had killed Humphrey Bogart a decade earlier, and like Bogart, Oppenheimer almost certainly got it from his constant tobacco use), as well as more than one dramatic feature (including the 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy, which starred Dwight Schultz as Oppenheimer and Paul Newman as General Leslie Groves, the man the Army put in charge as overall administrator of the Manhattan Project; the title came from the two different bombs made at Alamogordo, the smaller one used on Hiroshima and the larger one dropped on Nagasaki). There have also been a number of other movies called The Manhattan Project, ranging from a 1986 teen comedy with Christopher Collet and John Lithgow in which a teenage scientific prodigy builds a working A-bomb and then has to figure out how to disarm it to a 2022 “inspirational” movie about a man dying of terminal cancer who wants to kill himself before nature takes its course.

As presented here, J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a pretty tortured life, in which his “Rosebud” moment appears to have been being literally locked in a giant ice chest by bullies at summer camp in his boyhood. He grew up to be a physics student but did poorly at experimental science; when he discovered theoretical physics, he found his calling because then he could just think and work out equations all day without getting into the messy grind of actually having to make things work. So when word got around the physics community that Oppenheimer had been chosen as the Manhattan Project’s scientific director, his colleagues joked, “He couldn’t run a hot-dog stand.” Oppenheimer is also shown as a man who wasn’t especially political until the Great Depression hit when he was a junior physics professor at Berkeley in 1929, when he was 25 years old. He was shocked at the effect the Depression was having on his students, including one who literally had to live on cat food because that was all he could afford. (This was actually more common than a lot of people realize: in the 1960’s the U.S. Department of Agriculture passed a regulation requiring pet-food companies to make their products fit for human consumption because in the days before food stamps, a lot of people were feeding themselves pet food to survive.) This inspired Oppenheimer to become decidedly Left-wing in his politics; though there’s no evidence that he actually joined the Communist Party, U.S.A. (and if there were, surely the U.S. government investigators leading the postwar witch hunt against him would have found it and publicized it to justify what they did to him!), his brother was a CPUSA member and so was his girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, whom he dated in the late 1930’s and visited at least once during the early 1940’s, when he was working on the Manhattan Project and married to Kitty Puening Harrison, who was already on her third husband when she and Oppenheimer started a sexual relationship and conceived their first child, Peter. (She got a quickie divorce from Mexico and married Oppenheimer six months before Peter’s birth.) This two-hour documentary devotes as much running time to Oppenheimer’s post-war activities, including his forlorn hopes for the international control of atomic energy and his opposition to the congealing Cold War consensus that the Soviet Union was as implacable an enemy and as clear and present a danger to the peace of the world as Nazi Germany had been.

Like many of the other scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer had rationalized his research and development of a weapon of mass destruction on the basis that Hitler and his scientists were almost certainly working on one – after all, the basic research documenting atomic fission had all been done in Germany – and the U.S. and its allies needed to build the bomb and do it first before the Nazis could. Ironically, the main reason (at least in my reading of the historical evidence) the Nazis didn’t get the bomb was that Werner Heisenberg, the physicist in charge of the Nazis’ bomb program, made a huge scientific error; his calculation of the amount of fissile material which would be needed to set off a chain reaction and an atomic explosion was about 1,000 times greater than the true amount, and on that basis Heisenberg reported to Hitler and his Nazi colleagues that a nuclear weapon would be too big to be practical. It also didn’t help that the Nazis had driven out many of the top German physicists and other scientists because so many of them were Jews, and Hitler and his colleagues had publicly denounced atomic research as “Jewish physics” and essentially ordered it, if not banned, at least heavily restricted. I love the fact that the Nazis’ racism helped keep them from developing the atomic bomb! Oddly, Oppenheimer didn’t share the reluctance of some of his Manhattan Project colleagues about using the bomb against Japan once the Nazis were definitively defeated in May 1945; he argued not only for using it but for using it against cities instead of doing a demonstration blast over a relatively uninhabited area of Japan, and apparently his thinking was that he wanted to demonstrate the sheer awfulness of the A-bomb to make sure that its first two uses would also be the last. (That’s been true so far, but who knows how much longer? Already Vladimir Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons in his war against Ukraine, especially if the U.S. and its NATO allies send in active-duty forces to fight Russians in Ukraine or cross another of Putin’s ambiguous and frequently changing “red lines.”)

At the same time the show described a contentious meeting between Oppenheimer and President Harry Truman at the White House in October 1945, at which Truman asked Oppenheimer how soon the Soviet Union would have the bomb. Oppenheimer was noncommittal but said it would be within a few years, and Truman said, “Never!” (In fact, the Soviets did have the A-bomb in 1949, sparking yet another witch hunt throughout the U.S. government to look for the spies that allegedly “stole” it for them – when more sober-minded critics, including most of the nuclear scientists themselves, said that the Soviets would have discovered the bomb anyway because the only “secret” was whether or not it would work, and the U.S. had already demonstrated that. Ironically enough, the head of the Soviet bomb program would also run afoul of his country’s political police and become a dissident: Andrei Sakharov.) Then Oppenheimer told Truman, “I have blood on my hands,” and what Oppenheimer apparently intended as a statement of humility just enraged the President; he abruptly ended the meeting and told a staff member, “Get that crybaby scientist out of my office and don’t let me see him again.” The last 40 minutes or so of the Oppenheimer documentary deal with the bizarre proceeding by which the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), then in charge of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power (the highly-touted, overhyped program by which scientists who’d felt guilty over developing the worst, most potentially destructive weapon of all time tried to atone by figuring out a way to use nuclear technology for humanity’s benefit – though I remain as committed an opponent of nuclear power as I am of nuclear war because the technology is just too damned unforgiving of the inevitable natural accidents or human errors, as demonstrated at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, etc.), stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance.

The proceeding was full of dirty tricks on the part of the government, including bugging the offices of Oppenheimer’s attorneys so the prosecution knew what the defense was going to say before they said it. According to this documentary, the attack on Oppenheimer had the desired “chilling effect” on other scientists, including any who might have otherwise been tempted to speak out against the H-bomb itself or the nuclear tests that dominated the news in the early 1960’s and spewed huge amounts of dangerously radioactive material in their wake until President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had a mutual attack of good sense and negotiated a limited test-ban treaty in 1963. Ironically, Oppenheimer’s security clearance was restored, but not until 2022 – 55 years after his death and far too late to do either him or the cause of rational debate about nuclear energy any good. Oppenheimer remains a fascinating historical figure precisely due to his contradictions: as one of the few scientists (along with Isaac Newton, René Descartes and Blaise Pascal) who took religion seriously, he seems to have been obsessed not only with the effects of his actions (good and bad) on humanity but their meaning in the broader cosmos, and he never won the Nobel Prize for physics even though as early as the 1930’s he was propounding scientific ideas, including the positron and the black hole, that would later be taken up by other theoretical physicists, many of whom did win the Nobel. Christopher Nolan’s movie was based on a biography of Oppenheimer called American Prometheus – one of whose authors, Kai Bird, was interviewed for this documentary – and of course that couldn’t help but make me think of a classic novel whose author also referred to her central character as “the modern Prometheus” – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.