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Nuclear Imaginaries and Power in Oppenheimer
Aimee Slaughter
Technology and Culture, Volume 65, Number 1, January 2024, pp.
319-332 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920526
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/920526
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319
Citation: Slaughter, Aimee. “Nuclear Imaginaries and Power in Oppenheimer.” Technol -
ogy and Culture 65, no. 1 (2024): 319–32.
©2024 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
0040-165X/24/6501-0001/319–332
Nuclear Imaginaries and Power in
Oppenheimer
AIMEE SLAUGHTER
ABSTRACT: Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is in awe of physics and the power
it can bestow. Its central character is both mythic and human, and the lm
critiques and constructs the mythology surrounding him. e lm presents
science and technology as the individualized work of masculine genius, though
it is ultimately more interested in nuclear weapons as political objects than
as technological ones. Its nuclear imaginaries contain personal anxieties and
stunning spectacle but also forget the nuclear uncanny and the human scale
of nuclear weapons.
KEYWORDS: Oppenheimer; lm; Manhattan Project; nuclear cultural heritage
Introduction
I went into the screening of Oppenheimer expecting to be an emotional
wreck on the other side—prepared for an existential hangover lasting into
the next day, fueled by scenes of personal anguish and betrayal and cinematic
representations of nuclear horrors (real or imagined). Maybe I was over-
prepared, maybe I have lived too long in this history, maybe—like Margot
Robbie’s Barbie—I think too much about death, but for whatever reason, I
le the theater feeling ne. Part of my reaction was because I was expecting
a lm about the Manhattan Project and nuclear weapons, but it was what it
said on the tin: a movie about a man.
is essay looks at Nolan’s Oppenheimer through the lens of nuclear
cultural heritage, reecting on the lm’s images and imaginaries of science
1. Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig (Burbank: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2023), theatrical
release; Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan (Universal City: Universal Pictures,
2023), theatrical release.
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and technology. Informing these reections are my personal experiences
from working as a public historian in Los Alamos for the past decade. is
lm has already had a huge impact on shaping public imaginaries of the
Manhattan Project, scientists, and technology. We can consider how the lm
imagines science and scientists, how Oppenheimer is portrayed, and what
histories the lm is and is not interested in, and we can look at some of the
local Los Alamos exchanges with the lm. Ultimately, the lm focuses on
Robert Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss as a study of personal and political
power—it is not so much interested in science or technology as about how
science and technology confer power.
Broadly, the lm follows Oppenheimer’s rise to political power through
his leadership of the Manhattan Project and his subsequent fall from power
with the revocation of his security clearance in retaliation for his opposition
to the development of the hydrogen bomb. Interwoven with this story are
black-and-white scenes of Strauss’s failed 1959 cabinet appointment, struc-
turally set up as a mirror image of two political adversaries who see similar
betrayals by the U.S. government. Oppenheimer also provides audiences
with virtually all the popularly known scenes from the physicist’s life that
one might expect: the apple incident at Cambridge, the Trinity Test, his
meeting with President Truman, and of course, the security hearing. It is
worth noting that the lm is a dense text that almost seems to want to resist
analysis because of its complexly nested chronology, and this nonlinear
structure invites a broad range of audience interpretations.
American Ozymandias
According to this lm, who is a scientist? What is science? In Oppen-
heimer scientists are, for the most part, a hardworking group of young white
men, and with the exception of a few crucial missing mustaches, the actors
2. Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, ed., Nuclear Cultural Heritage: Position Statement (Kingston
upon ames: Kingston University, 2019), https://nuclearculturalheritage.wordpress.com
/nuclear-cultural-heritage-position-paper-2019/; Storm et al., “Urban Nuclear Reactors
and the Security eatre.”
3. On less popularly known aspects of his biography that one Manhattan Project
scholar went to the lm not expecting to see: Barton J. Bernstein, “Christopher Nolan’s
Forthcoming ‘Oppenheimer’ Movie: A Historian’s Questions, Worries, and Challenges,”
Washington Decoded, July 11, 2023. https://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2023/07
/bernstein.html. On the lm’s historical accuracy—and what “accuracy” even means in
the context of history: Alex Wellerstein, “Fact, Fiction, and the Father of the Bomb: On
Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer,’ ” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 30, 2023, https://
lareviewoooks.org/article/fact-ction-and-the-father-of-the-bomb-on-christopher
-nolans-oppenheimer.
AIMEE SLAUGHTER | Nuclear Imaginaries and Power in Oppenheimer
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look strikingly like the real people they are portraying. Oppenheimer and
Einstein are the only scientists most viewers will already be familiar with. e
lm is in awe of Oppenheimer’s brilliance. is reects as much on the actual
person as it does on the popular image of physics as the most prestigious
of the sciences. e Manhattan Project is presented in Oppenheimer as it is
popularly understood: a physics endeavor, mostly ignoring the enormous
eorts of engineering and logistics that went into it, to say nothing of the
many other elds of science involved. Physicists are popularly understood
to be brilliant by denition, so as the leader of the ultimate physics project,
the lm reasons, Oppenheimer must be exceptionally so. e Einstein of
the lm looks like the familiar pop culture Einstein: wild white hair and an
absent-minded air of genius. In characterization, however, this is not the
Einstein most people imagine: he is still a sage, but he explicitly reects on
how the scientic community no longer considers him relevant and that
he has seen his most productive years pass him by. Historians of physics
are familiar with a version of this late-in-life Einstein. In the popular imag-
ination, Einstein is an eternal genius, and the idea that he is at all behind
the times is surprising. is characterization is necessary so that when he
delivers the lm’s message to Oppenheimer, it carries the proper weight: all
power is eeting. Even Einstein, the audience sees, could not hold on to it.
Less promethean here than he is in the biography Oppenheimer is based on,
the lm’s Oppenheimer is perhaps more like Shelley’s Ozymandias, whose
enormous, ruined statue ironically insists that visitors “Look on my Works,
ye Mighty, and despair!”
is interest in the power conferred by control of technology and tech-
nology policy (not interest in the actual technology or policy) explains why
Strauss is a major character in the lm, second in importance only to Oppen-
heimer. His congressional conrmation hearing parallels Oppenheimer’s
security hearing, and the titles of their interwoven chapters reect their
approaches to power. Oppenheimer’s is “Fission,” not only because of his
development of the ssion weapons but because he held on to power too
loosely and saw it fragment apart under outside bombardment; Strauss’s is
“Fusion,” because his political concerns are more with hydrogen weapons and
also because he held on to power too tightly and saw it explode away from
him. Strauss’s prominence in the lm is also interesting because it highlights
the relationship between scientists and government, which is oen ignored
4. Alex Wellerstein, “Henry Stimson Didn’t Go to Kyoto on His Honeymoon,”
Restricted Data: e Nuclear Secrecy Blog, July 24, 2023, https://blog.nuclearsecrecy
.com/2023/07/24/henry-stimson-didnt-go-to-kyoto-on-his-honeymoon.
5. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” Poetry Foundation, accessed October 18, 2023,
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias.
6. Conversations with Nicholas Lewis provided insights into this ssion/fusion
structure.
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in popular images of science. Federal and military involvement in science is
not portrayed in a particularly positive light in this lm.
e work of science is shown to be largely internal and individual. ere
are groups of scientists gathered, oen in the background, but the work itself
is oen abstracted visualizations of glowing particles swirling through a dark-
ened space. e minimalist score also reinforces the focus on the individual:
sometimes in a quiet scene the music will crescendo to a loud level, almost
suggesting that it is a representation, perhaps literal, of what the inside of
Oppenheimer’s mind sounds like. Science is rarely shown as a collaborative
eort, although collaborations are mentioned. As individual work, it is also
not presented as omas Kuhn’s puzzle-solving normal science—it is, not
surprisingly, discrete sparks of brilliance. e enormous reorganization of
the laboratory that Oppenheimer undertook in 1944 in response to new
data indicating plutonium was a poor choice for a gun-type weapon—one of
the best examples of Oppenheimer’s surprising success in a new position of
leadership—is missing from the lm. e Manhattan Project is oen used
as a dening example of Big Science, but this kind of scientic or technolog-
ical labor is largely absent from the screen. e decisions that Oppenheimer
makes in this lm are personal or political, rarely managerial or scientic.
e image of a scientist presented in the lm is that of a scientist in power:
not a scientist in a laboratory.
Answering the question “Who is Robert Oppenheimer?” is a dicult
challenge for the lm because it seems to want to both critique and pre-
serve the mythology surrounding him. Oppenheimer recognizes that its
subject is mythic and takes pains to humanize him. He is, however, always
the central character of the lm, all the action circles around him—and
there is something mythic about a lone genius at the center of the universe.
In the lm, too, he seems to be at the center of things not because of the
work he does to get and stay there—as Ray Monk argues in his biography
of Oppenheimer—but because of a series of cosmic coincidences. e
lm does, however, skillfully acknowledge and critique Oppenheimer’s own
involvement in creating a mythology around himself. Kitty Oppenheimer,
for example, in the lm accuses her husband of subjecting himself to the
7. Kuhn, e Structure of Scientic Revolutions.
8. anks go to Nicholas Lewis for pointing out this omission.
9. For more on the mythology surrounding Oppenheimer: Hecht, Storytelling and
Science. Hecht also weighed in on Oppenheimer in “Oppenheimer and the Hero Myth,”
Pangyrus, August 7, 2023, https://www.pangyrus.com/review/oppenheimer-and-the-hero
-myth. e “HSS at the Movies” episode of the Perspectives podcast discusses the lm’s
hagiography (and whether it is of a scientist or of science) and the relationship between
narrative heroes and portraying science as an individual endeavor. Yangyang Cheng et al.,
“HSS at the Movies,” August 14, 2023, in Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Issues:
History of Science Society at 100, podcast, https://www.chstm.org/video/157#22910.
10. Monk, Robert Oppenheimer.
AIMEE SLAUGHTER | Nuclear Imaginaries and Power in Oppenheimer
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indignities of the security hearing in order to cast himself in the public role
of martyr. e lm also provides some commentary on mythmaking when
it oers dierent perspectives—Oppenheimer’s and Strauss’s—on the same
scene, or when some events (like Oppenheimer’s aair with Ruth Tolman)
are foreshadowed and revealed in ashback but not in the action; in this way,
the lm acknowledges that retellings of history depend on the teller. e lm
does not shy away from episodes that put Oppenheimer in a negative light,
like the poisoned apple incident (which, aer the lm, his grandson Charles
Oppenheimer has gone on record to denounce as false). It uses this event
to emphasize Oppenheimer’s character as a tortured genius; but it ignores
the cruel episode in which he named names of former students during the
Red Scare, consequently ruining their careers. Much of Oppenheimer’s
life aer the security hearing is ignored, with none of his speeches, writings,
or leadership of the Institute for Advanced Study receiving much attention.
Perhaps because of the lm’s focus on a single event, the security hearing, or
the enormous impact of the Manhattan Project—an audience might expect
this lm to be the history of that event, rather than the perspective of one
man—the lm is unfortunately tonally dissimilar to the biography on which
it is based. It seems more like a big-man history than a biography.
Imagining and Forgetting
e lm’s technological imaginaries are also shaped by what issues it
considers less relevant to the nuclear culture it depicts. ree broad topics I
hoped the lm would address were largely ignored: New Mexicans, women,
and nuclear weapons. (As a woman living in New Mexico who thinks a lot
about nuclear weapons, I may be showing my personal biases too much
here.) New Mexico, of course, features prominently in the lm and is almost
a character in itself. Oppenheimer’s love for the state is well known, and the
lm beautifully captures the landscape that moved him. e people of New
Mexico, however, are largely absent from the lm: the people whose land
was taken for the Manhattan Project, the people whose labor was essential
for creating and operating the town and laboratory in the mountains, and
the people who lived near the Jornada del Muerto and found the fallout
from the Trinity Test in their cisterns and in the fur of their animals in
splotchy bleached patches. Nor does the lm pay much attention to women,
11. Megan McCluskey, “J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Grandson on What the Movie Gets
Right and the One Scene He Would Have Changed,” Time, July 25, 2023, https://time.com
/6297743/oppenheimer-grandson-movie-interview/.
12. For the consequences of Oppenheimer naming names: Bird and Sherwin, Amer-
ican Prometheus, 396–400.
13. Many have noticed their absence. For national coverage: Tina Cordova, “What
‘Oppenheimer’ Doesn’t Tell You about the Trinity Test,” New York Times, July 30, 2023,
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especially those working in science. Lilli Hornig, a chemist who joined the
Manhattan Project in 1944, is made to stand in as the single token female
scientist at Los Alamos. According to Ellen McGehee, women made up
11 percent of the wartime Los Alamos workforce, with at least a quarter—
probably more—working in science and technology. Charlotte Serber
also appears in the lm, bizarrely not in her actual leadership role at the lab
as head of the technical library but as Oppenheimer’s secretary. His actual
oce managers, Priscilla Dueld and Anne Wilson, are absent. e two
main women featuring in the lm, Kitty Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock, are
included primarily through their relationship to Robert Oppenheimer (see
gure 1); these characters have little relevance to the lm’s nuclear imaginaries
(and thus to this essay). Science in Oppenheimer is strongly masculinized,
as evidenced by the overrepresentation of men as scientists, the individual
nature of the work, and the power it confers.
Nuclear weapons are not technological objects in this lm; they are polit-
ical objects. e character of Oppenheimer is much more concerned about
nuclear weapons than the lm is. His anxieties are demonstrated in almost
obsessive, repetitive motifs of rippling concentric circles representing the
targeting radii for atomic bombs and the sound of stamping feet, eventually
revealed as the traumatizing applause he received at a victory party, where he
hallucinated atomic bomb victims in the audience. Oppenheimer’s aective
delirium is one of the few times the lm considers nuclear weapons as vessels
of physical rather than political power. In the appreciative crowd, he suddenly
sees someone’s face ake apart under his gaze; and as he stumbles out of the
room, he steps into a charred mass, possibly a body, that hollows into ash
under his foot. is scene of imagined nuclear destruction is not terribly
graphic and curiously avoids the common visual representation of nuclear
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/opinion/international-world/oppenheimer-nuclear
-bomb-cancer.html; Susan Montoya Bryan, “ ‘Oppenheimer’ Stirs Up Conicted History
for Los Alamos and New Mexico Downwinders,” AP News, July 18, 2023, https://apnews
.com/article/oppenheimer-atomic-bomb-radiation-legacy-new-mexico-85d2b6f57395520
a924dd44c492e4c56. For local coverage: George Gonzales, “New Mexico Advocacy Group
Speaks Out about ‘Oppenheimer’ Film,” KRQE News, July 21, 2023, https://www.krqe
.com/news/new-mexico/new-mexico-advocacy-group-speaks-out-about-oppenheimer
-lm; Kelsey D. Atherton, “Nolan’s Oppenheimer Treats New Mexico as a Blank Canvas,”
Source NM, July 28, 2023, https://sourcenm.com/2023/07/28/nolans-oppenheimer-treats
-new-mexico-as-a-blank-canvas.
14. Ellen D. McGehee, “e Women of Project Y: Working at the Birthplace of the
Bomb, Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1942–1946” (master’s thesis, University of New Mexico,
2004). Also Howes and Herzenberg, eir Day in the Sun.
15. For identications of the lm using Tatlock as a “siren,” whose seduction of
Oppenheimer to communism absolves him of responsibility: Hecht, “Oppenheimer and
the Hero Myth”; Cheng et al., “HSS at the Movies.” Tatlock’s queerness is erased in the
lm; Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 251–52.
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325
FIG. 1. As Portrayed in Oppenheimer. These five people were all portrayed in
Oppenheimer and are shown here in their (slightly cropped) Manhattan Project
identification photos: Robert Oppenheimer (identification number K6), Kitty
Oppenheimer (C5), General Leslie Groves (UA), Charlotte Serber (K4), and Lilli
Hornig (F40). The individualized work portrayed in the film was in fact the
effort of many people, including New Mexicans whose labor and land were
essential to the Manhattan Project. (Photos digitized by and courtesy of Los
Alamos National Laboratory.)
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death, the atomic shadow. e abstraction of Oppenheimer’s anxieties
into repeated symbols and sounds suggests that the lm is more interested
in what those anxieties mean to Oppenheimer—his personal stresses and
tragedies—than in nuclear weapons, particularly since the repeated motifs
exist only in Oppenheimer’s imagination and are introduced before their
specic meanings are made clear to the audience. ere is also the powerful
central scene of the Trinity Test, in which the new weapon is presented to
the audience with awe and grandeur. e lapse of time between the test’s
observers seeing the glowing cloud rising in the predawn darkness and
hearing the roar of the explosion seems close to the actual delay between
light and sound, though it is lmed as an almost dreamlike stopping of time
as the witnesses try to process what they are seeing. is climactic visual
emphasis on Trinity matches Los Alamos’s local narrative climax of the
Manhattan Project, which almost always focuses on Trinity rather than the
bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. e scale of the test is not particularly
clear: it is all-encompassing, but so are Oppenheimer’s visions of black holes.
Nor does the lm make clear the essential distinctions between atomic and
hydrogen weapons. Oppenheimer’s opposition to hydrogen weapons in the
lm could easily be understood as an (ahistorical) repentant change of heart,
not a response to the enormous dierence in scale.
Radioactivity and the nuclear uncanny are largely absent from this lm.
e unsettling and specic dangers of radioactivity go unmentioned. e
closest we get is Oppenheimer watching someone vomit at the victory party,
which, aer his hallucinatory visions of A-bombed bodies, carries implicit
associations of radiation sickness. e postwar criticality accidents that killed
Manhattan Project scientists Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin are oen used
in historical dramas as a shorthand for the horrors of nuclear weapons, but
these deaths are also missing from the lm. In e Beginning or the End and
Fat Man and Little Boy, main characters die in criticality accidents—though
in both lms, the accidents occur before the atomic bombings of Japan, both
16. For a more specic analysis: Wellerstein, “Fact, Fiction, and the Father of the
B o m b.”
17. On the local forgetting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Gusterson, “Tales of the City”;
Slaughter, “Performing the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos.” On memory and forgetting
within the U.S. nuclear weapons complex: Krupar and Depoe, “Cold War Triumphant.”
For the more general forgetting in the United States of the atomic bombings on Japan:
Lion and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America.
18. For Oppenheimer’s opinions on hydrogen weapons: Bird and Sherwin, American
Prometheus, chap. 30; Monk, Robert Oppenheimer, 570–72.
19. On the persistent images and narratives attached to radioactivity: Weart, Nuclear
Fear. Joseph Masco introduces the nuclear uncanny in e Nuclear Borderlands.
20. Slotin’s absence is noted in Darren Bernhardt, “Louis Slotin and the Demon Core:
Winnipeg’s Oppenheimer Connection,” CBC News, July 29, 2023, https://www.cbc.ca
/news/canada/manitoba/louis-slotin-oppenheimer-atomic-bomb-winnipeg-1.6915932.
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FIG. 2. The Gaze of Oppenheimer. Los Alamos celebrated Oppenheimer in a
variety of ways for locals and tourists. This new mural of Oppenheimer was
painted by Margarita Ryan on June 11, 2023, as part of the summer of Oppen-
heimer. It is located on the large outdoor patio of Bathtub Row Brewing,
about 200 feet from the front door of the house where the Oppenheimer
family lived during World War II. Visitors to Los Alamos’s historic district can
walk past the Oppenheimer House, cross a small street, and stroll directly to
the patio for a pint of Hoppenheimer IPA. (Photo by the author.)
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to foreshadow the radioactive violence to come and to make that violence
personal in scale. is narrative shorthand is almost a trope in Manhattan
Project lms, so from that perspective the absence is refreshing. However, the
complete absence of Daghlian or Slotin in Oppenheimer is another indication
that the lm is much more interested in the rise and fall of one man than in
the Manhattan Project or radioactivity.
Oppenheimer asks the audience to think about nuclear weapons but
does not provide much of a framework for that thinking. However, the mere
reminder of nuclear weapons’ existence is to some extent an antinuclear
statement, since they are easily forgotten by the modern public imagination.
Nuclear weapons can seem like relics of the past. e lm, particularly in its
ending, reminds audiences that nuclear weapons are as much a part of the
present as they are of the past, and that their (our) uncertain future depends
on the choices and decisions we make.
Two specic examples from Oppenheimer are worth highlighting for
how historical drama can deal with the nuances and uncertainties of history.
e rst is Oppenheimer’s immediate reaction to the Trinity Test: that he
thought of a line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita is well known
from a later interview; his brother Frank’s recollection that he simply said
“It worked” is less well known. e lm presents a scene in which both
memories are true: Oppenheimer acknowledges the test’s success in a short
line spoken aloud, while silently recalling his translation of the Gita. e
other example is the lm’s handling of Jean Tatlock’s death, in a scene that
very specically references the historical uncertainties raised in American
Prometheus. Bird and Sherwin consider the possibility, raised by researchers
and a family member, that Tatlock’s suicide may actually have been a polit-
ical assassination because of her close ties to the Communist Party and to
Oppenheimer. In dealing with such historical uncertainties, a movie might
choose one possibility as reality (or perhaps avoid the event altogether), but
Oppenheimer dely mirrors the uncertainty of its source material. Oppen-
heimer is informed, as he was in reality, that her death was a suicide. He is
also told by Groves that Boris Pash, a top security ocer on the Manhattan
Project, is a dangerous man and capable of great violence if necessary. In
rapid cuts, the audience sees two dierent versions of Tatlock’s drowning: in
one, she steps into a drawn bath; in another, a black-gloved hand holds her
head underwater. ese alternatives, introduced in disorienting, imagined
21. e Beginning or the End, directed by Norman Taurog (1947; Burbank: Warner
Archive Collection, 2015), DVD; Fat Man and Little Boy, directed by Roland Joé (1989;
Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 2004), DVD.
22. Frank Oppenheimer recalled this in e Day Aer Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer
and the Atomic Bomb, directed by Jon Else (Los Angeles: Image Entertainment, 1981),
DVD.
23. Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, chap. 18.
AIMEE SLAUGHTER | Nuclear Imaginaries and Power in Oppenheimer
329
ashbacks, cinematically represent the uncertainty of this event as it is pre-
sented in American Prometheus.
Conclusion
An important eect of historical dramas like this lm is that they can
inspire audiences to connect with the source material in additional ways.
Oppenheimer explicitly based its story on American Prometheus, and a direct
reference to such an excellent secondary source benets audiences and our
eld. Interested audiences also turn to multiple sources: not only other biog
-
raphies of Oppenheimer or books about the Manhattan Project but also
related lms and media, as well as visits to nuclear heritage sites. Films like
Oppenheimer have a huge impact on public perception, not only in how they
present the history but also in encouraging curious audiences to engage with
the history in other ways that share dierent perspectives and narratives.
Oppenheimer was lmed on location whenever possible. Los Alamos
residents would have recognized many interior and some exterior locations,
although most exterior shots were lmed at Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, not
on the higher mesas of Los Alamos. Some scenes were particularly disori-
enting for New Mexican viewers like me, as close-ups lmed in Los Alamos
cut to reaction shots lmed an hour away. When WGN’s television series
Manhattan aired in 2014 and 2015, the strongest and most common local
reaction I heard was an objection that the Santa Fe lming location did not
look enough like the Los Alamos mountains—some locals stopped watch-
ing because they could not get over this geographical inaccuracy, that the
ctional Los Alamos did not look enough like the Los Alamos they know
and love. I have heard similar local reactions to Oppenheimer. e better
part of a century has passed since the Manhattan Project, of course, and a
national laboratory and several forest res have changed the landscape. For
many reasons, Los Alamos today is not Los Alamos then, although locals
oen think of the two towns as virtually identical.
Los Alamos was eager to prepare for and promote the lm: the town’s
annual summer ScienceFest was extended to lead up to the lm’s premiere,
the national laboratory’s magazine devoted its summer issue to Oppenheimer,
posters of Oppenheimer’s silhouette went up around town touting the coun-
ty’s new Project Oppenheimer tourism eort, new murals of Oppenheimer
appeared on a pedestrian underpass and at a local brewery (see gure 2), local
businesses ran Oppenheimer promotions and restaurants created themed
cocktails, and the local theater hosted a weeklong Oppenheimer Festival
featuring daily screenings of Oppenheimer, history and art exhibits, a food
24. On the lm’s treatment of the apple incident as the opposite—a historical possibility
presented as fact: Wellerstein, “Fact, Fiction, and the Father of the Bomb.”
25. Manhattan, aired July 27, 2014–December 15, 2015, WGN.
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truck, live music, accompanying documentaries, and a loaned replica of
the plutonium bomb. Since the lm’s release, the number of tourists has
increased, but the town’s buzz about Oppenheimer events and programs
has subsided. e town’s reections on and connections to history seemed
to return unchanged to what they were before, with Oppenheimer retaining
his popular local role as a small-town founder or mascot, almost. Aer the
summer of Oppenheimer, Los Alamos now focuses its extra eorts around
Oppenheimer on tourists rather than locals. e county maintains the new
tourism/promotional eort centered on him, the Laboratory created a day
trip focused on him and the lm, and the Manhattan Project National His-
torical Park created an Oppenheimer guide highlighting characters from the
lm and lming locations. e Laboratory also created a new 85-minute
documentary on Oppenheimer, which screened locally in an early form on
July 27, just a week aer Oppenheimer opened, and premiered in its nal
form as a three-part online series on September 21.
Nuclear cultural heritage sites are seeing increased visitation thanks to
the lm; Los Alamos has reportedly seen a 60 percent increase in tourism
26. Kristen Laskey, “Los Alamos Prepares for Limelight With Release of ‘Oppen-
heimer,’ ” Los Alamos Daily Post, January 5, 2023, https://ladailypost.com/los-alamos
-prepares-for-limelight-with-release-of-oppenheimer; “e Oppenheimer Issue,” National
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AIMEE SLAUGHTER | Nuclear Imaginaries and Power in Oppenheimer
331
from fall 2022 to fall 2023. e White Sands Missile Range asked potential
nuclear pilgrims to consider not visiting the Trinity Site during their fall 2023
open house because they expected a record crowd and would have to turn
visitors away at the gate. Nuclear cultural heritage sites in New Mexico and
elsewhere are now taking the opportunity to share their narratives about
the Manhattan Project and nuclear weapons with a broader audience, nar-
ratives that have their own biases and perspectives. Oppenheimer may
have focused on one man’s rise and fall from power, but his lasting impact
on our world and his enduring popular power in myth mean that audiences
can engage with a rich variety of historical texts: academic and popular
writings, documentaries, heritage sites, and more. Not only Oppenheimer
but other histories—histories we can inuence if we keep public audiences
in mind—have an eect on shaping nuclear imaginaries and understandings
of our nuclear pasts and futures.
Aimee Slaughter received her Ph.D. in the history of science, technology, and medicine
from the University of Minnesota. She is an independent scholar in Los Alamos, New
Mexico, working on unceded ancestral lands of Tewa- and Keres-speaking Pueblo peo-
ples. Her research interests include popular understandings of science and technology,
particularly radiation and radioactivity; nuclear heritage; and museum engagement with
dicult histories. She gratefully acknowledges the support of an Emanuel Fellowship
from the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. She would also
like to thank the Oppenheimer Science & Energy Leadership Program for inviting her to
their Oppenheimer Exchanges colloquium and Oppenheimer screening; Daniel Cordle,
Bert Coursey, Nicholas Lewis, Laurie McManus, and Stephanie Yeamans for sharing their
insights into the lm and its meanings; the attendees who participated in discussions
during the Los Alamos Manhattan Project Film Series in the weeks leading up to the
release of Oppenheimer; and the editors for their support and the reviewers for their very
helpful suggestions.
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JANUARY
2024
VOL. 65
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
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