Why "Oppenheimer"?

The film triumphed at the latest Academy Awards.  

I saw the film as a somewhat long biopic which included a number of anecdotes that I was not familiar with. 

I haven't spent a lot of time on the history behind the development of the atomic bomb, but because of my interest in science and some of the personalities involved at the time, I have some background:  Feynman's autobiographical essays, articles about Einstein, about the Manhattan project in general.

I knew that Oppenheimer was a controversial choice to head the Manhattan project because of his association with communism; that he sometimes amused himself at Los Alamos by picking the locks on classified file cabinets; that there was concern that a nuclear explosion might set off a reaction that would burn up the world.

We might be enraged that Oppenheimer's career was destroyed by an ambitious red-baiter.  But today, even before the movie, Oppenheimer is still considered a hero, while the man who persecuted him is mostly a footnote.  

Did the film try to persuade us that our paranoia about American communism warrants the kind of behavior perpetrated by this persecutor?  It showed us that the tactics and arguments used then, are still being used now; and that they are still effective.  But I heard no mention of this for as to why the film should be given an award.

I can't see that all the awards it received were for performances of products that were superior to those of the other nominees.  In my opinion, others should have received those awards.

Which leads me to conclude that what was really being awarded was a celebration of American military power. 

Oppenheimer's quoting the Bhagavad Gita, "I have become death, the destroyer of worlds," is appropriate to the atomic bomb, but it is also appropriate to the United States as the only possessor of an atomic weapon at that time, and demonstrably the most powerful military in the world.  

That the Manhattan Project began the arms race should no longer be a surprise.  Every technological product which advances power over other humans seems to set off an arms race; social media, for example; AI, for another.

Oppenheimer quoted Krishna, as if Krishna were to blame.  But Krishna is a god, merely an embodiment of our nature, a way of projecting our inclinations onto another, to avoid our taking responsibility for our desires.

 

NOTE:  Adam Hochschild writes in King Leopold's Ghost, p. 279, "... More than 80 percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came from the heavily guarded Congo mines of Shinkolobwe."  This is, mined with African slave labor.