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Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rbul20
Oppenheimer: The man behind the movie
Dan Drollette Jr.
To cite this article: Dan Drollette Jr. (2023) Oppenheimer: The man behind the movie, Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, 79:4, 201-202, DOI: 10.1080/00963402.2023.2224160
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2023.2224160
Published online: 16 Jul 2023.
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INTRODUCTION
Oppenheimer: The man behind the movie
Dan Drollette Jr.
As this special all-Oppenheimer issue is being wrapped
(to use the cinematic term), the release of the major NBC
Universal Pictures movie of the same name is still nearly
two months away—and what, exactly, will be in it is still
mysterious. All that has been seen so far by anyone here
at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists are trailers and one
five-minute montage. So, even though the magazine itself
was founded in 1945 by a group of atomic scientists and
engineers, with J. Robert Oppenheimer—the director of
the Los Alamos laboratory that built the first atomic
bomb—serving as founding chair, we don’t know how
the articles chosen for this issue may (or may not) fit in
with the film’s narrative arc.
But this very mysteriousness is, in a way, appropriate
for the subject matter.
J. Robert Oppenheimer seems to have been an
enigma to all who knew him. By all accounts,
Oppenheimer was a complex figure; over the years,
commentators have used words as disparate as “com-
plex,” “contradictory,” “ambitious,” “charismatic,”
“mystical,” and “flawed” to describe him. About the
only thing pundits seem to agree on is that
Oppenheimer—hailed as the father of the atomic
bomb before being vilified during the red scare of the
1950s for opposing the subsequent arms race—was
brilliant.
One of those who tried to get to the bottom of the
man was Kai Bird. Together with his co-author Martin
Sherwin, the writing team put in 25 years researching,
interviewing, fact-checking, and writing the book that
the film Oppenheimer is based upon. In their epic
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of
J. Robert Oppenheimer—which won the Pulitzer Prize
for Biography in 2005—the duo devoted 599 pages (721
pages including notes, bibliography, credits, and index)
to build a nuanced, multifaceted portrait of his essential
nature. In his Bulletin interview with me, titled
“Oppenheimer: ‘A very mysterious and delphic charac-
ter,’ ” Bird delves into the personality of “Oppie”—as he
liked to be known—his leadership as the head of the
scientific end of the effort to build the bomb, his climb
to the heights of fame, and his fall from grace.
1
Bird also describes the recent, and ultimately success-
ful, effort to restore Oppenheimer’s legacy to its rightful
place in American society, which culminated in Energy
Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s decision a few months
ago—December of 2022—to vacate the 1954 order strip-
ping Oppenheimer of his security clearance.
This issue also contains an in-depth interview with
Christopher Nolan, the acclaimed director of
Oppenheimer, by the Bulletin’s editor-in-chief, John
Mecklin. In the interview, Nolan explains his journey
to transfer the biography of this polymath from the
printed page to the medium of film—and describes
Oppenheimer as “the ultimate Rorschach test. I believe
you see in the Oppenheimer story all that is great and all
that is terrible about America’s uniquely modern power
in the world.”
Our Oppenheimer issue also includes a one-on-
one interview with physicist and Nobel Prize-winner
Roy Glauber—one of the last surviving physicists
from the Manhattan Project—who, less than two
years before he died, told me his personal impres-
sions of Oppenheimer and the project, obtained
when he was an 18-year-old working at Los
Alamos. Glauber vividly describes what it was like
to be plucked out of his first year of college to work
on a secretive government war effort in the middle
of the desert, alongside some of the world’s most
famous scientists. Glauber also recounts what it was
like to witness the bomb’s explosion—which, techni-
cally speaking, he wasn’t invited to do.
For more on what drove Oppie, psychiatrist and
author Robert Lifton gives his analysis, arguing that
Oppie’s greatest tragedy was not the extraordinary
“American Inquisition” he underwent as his loyalty
was challenged (wrongly, as it turns out) in the 1950s,
but the way in which Oppie’s remarkable gifts as
a physicist and as a human being were most realized in
the building of a weapon that could lead to the destruc-
tion of humankind.
And destructive it was, in more ways than first
anticipated. The mushroom cloud set off by the first
test of an atomic bomb, at the Trinity site in New
CONTACT Dan Drollette Jr. ddrollette@thebulletin.org
BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS
2023, VOL. 79, NO. 4, 201–202
https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2023.2224160
© 2023 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Mexico, rose roughly four times higher than antici-
pated. (Physicists were also not 100 percent sure
what would happen when the bomb went off; there
were some anxious moments as they calculated
whether or not the detonation would set the entire
atmosphere on fire.) As investigative journalist
Lesley Blume reports, some of the so-called “collat-
eral damage” from the Trinity test were the people
who lived downwind from it—nearly half-a-million
human beings were living within a 150-mile radius
of the explosion, with some as close as 12 miles
away. None were warned or evacuated by the US
government ahead of time.
To give a deeper sense of events as they occurred
in and around J. Robert Oppenheimer, this issue of
the Bulletin includes four articles from its archives.
The titles alone give a sense of the tale: “Nichols
Presents Charges” (1954) “Oppenheimer Replies”
(1954), “The Oppenheimer case: A study in the
abuse of law” (1977), and “Bulletin statement on
the Energy Department’s Oppenheimer decision”
(2022).
The articles provide the context and details that those
interested in Oppenheimer—the man or the movie—
will find nowhere else.
Note
1. In 1953, a former congressional aide alleged
Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy, and President
Eisenhower cut off Oppenheimer’s access to classified
information. Oppenheimer challenged the suspension
of his security clearance, but a panel of the Atomic
Energy Commission’s Personnel Security Board ulti-
mately refused to reinstate it, effectively ending
Oppenheimer’s government service.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Dan Drollette Jr. is the executive editor of the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists.
202 D. DROLLETTE
