Since the first reviews of the Oppenheimer film appeared, a question has been floating in the ether: Why don’t we see substantial images of the destruction and victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-Bombs?
Days before the Academy Awards, I had the opportunity to learn the answers to that question. I had just returned from Japan, where I marched with Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb survivors (Hibakusha) and participated in 70th anniversary commemorations of the victims of the Bikini Bravo H-Bomb test on March 1, 1954. That bomb was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on the people of Hiroshima. It claimed and poisoned the lives of nearly all the inhabitants of Rongelap atoll 125 miles away from Bikini. It also claimed the lives of Japanese fishermen and irradiated more than 1,000 Japanese fishing vessels and contaminated much of Japan’s food supply. The resulting 1954-55 petition campaign urging the abolition of nuclear weapons garnered 31.5 million petition signatures, 65% of Japanese voters, and launched the world’s first and likely most influential social movement for a nuclear weapons-free world.
I was carrying these people and this history deep in my bones when Harvard Professor Elaine Scarry, a friend and member of my organization’s board, encouraged me to come to a panel she had organized with Kai Bird, co-author of American Prometheus:The Triumph and Tragedy of Robert J. Oppenheimer, the biography on which the Oppenheimer film is based.
I have known Kai and his now late co-author Martin Sherwin, over the years. Kai is a generous and modest man, and an excellent scholar and biographer. We chatted briefly before the panel, where I learned and was happy for him that he will be at the Academy Awards for the Oscars tonight.
In his presentation, Kai explained that the film drew heavily from his book, with many of its lines taken directly from his and Marty’s text—something very unusual for Hollywood. Kai was given only a few hours to review the film’s 200-page script before the filming began, and he said that he found only one error, which Christopher Nolan, the film's director, corrected. Kai and the other panelist, Peter Galison of Harvard’s History of Science Department, described Oppenheimer as brilliant (physicist and otherwise), complex, and emotionally fragile, a man who might have been better known for his work on black holes—begun in 1935—had World War II and the Manhattan Project not intervened.
Come the question and answer time, after a brief reference to what I had learned and did in Japan, I asked Kai if Nolan, during production of the film, had any serious conversations about exposing his audiences to what Oppenheimer’s bomb wrought? Kai’s answer was thoughtful and illuminated some of the most disturbing images from the film’s conclusion.
Kai’s direct response was “No.” Such discussions did not take place, Kai had earlier explained that the dramatic arc of the film and the book were the Atomic Energy Commission hearings in which those in power sought to destroy........