My Take | Oppenheimer the movie does not tell half the atomic horror
- Long subjected to brutal discrimination, American Hipanics were likely the first victims of the Manhattan Project that produced the bomb
My daughter and I went to see Barbie at the weekend but it was sold out. We ended up watching Oppenheimer. I am glad my daughter wasn’t bored by it. However, I might have enjoyed Barbie more, which I was told is hilarious.
The problem is that at my kid’s age, I had already watched Oppenheimer, the superb BBC-PBS 7-part drama series starring Sam Waterston, who even took on some of the mannerism of the brilliant but tormented scientist.
Except for the cinematic fireworks, the Christopher Nolan bio-pic did not at all go beyond the moral, political and strategic issues raised in the more than four decades old TV series. The latter also has the added advantage of being free to watch on YouTube.
One very important thing I did learn, thanks at least indirectly to Nolan’s movie, is that the first victims of the Manhattan Project weren’t at all known historically.
Most people, insofar as they took an interest, assumed they were the so-called downwinders, a climate reference to those who died from cancers or otherwise suffered lifelong health problems because of the radiation fallouts – due to wind directions – from the Trinity explosion, the world’s first atom bomb test. They weren’t told by their government until they saw what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the first victims might have had their lives and families ruined even before Trinity.