How does one represent what is beyond representation? In the film, Nolan recreates the intensity of the Trinity test with color and sound, following the bright flash with a pause and then the deep rumble and roar of the explosion and the clap of the shock wave. Lifton, an expert on the psychology of war, violence and trauma, called the Hiroshima survivors’ experience “ death in life,” an encounter with the indescribable. Only weeks after the test, atomic bombs flattened the previously bustling cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mathematician John von Neumann acerbically observed, “Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin.” Describing the indescribable There really was no individual “father” of the atomic bomb. In fact, the bomb was the product of a gigantic scientific, engineering, industrial and military operation, one in which scientists sometimes felt like cogs in a machine. As a spokesperson and symbol of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer sometimes seemed to encourage the idea that it was his personal creation and responsibility. The contrast between their accounts speaks to the duality in Oppenheimer’s public image: a technical expert forging a weapon, and a poetic humanist burdened by the bomb’s moral significance. According to Oppenheimer’s brother Frank, however, a physicist who was with him at the time, what they both said aloud was simply, “It worked.” Later in life, Oppenheimer famously said that he had recalled words from the Bhagavad-Gita, a classical Hindu text, as he witnessed the sight and sound of the mushroom cloud: “ I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” – lines that originally described the Lord Krishna revealing his full power. As physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi later said, the bomb “treated humans as matter,” nothing more. Where people had once pictured doomsday as an act of God’s wrath or final judgment, now a world could could be gone in an instant, with no sacred significance, no story of salvation. The atomic bomb changed the meaning of the apocalypse. ![]() “ The physicists have known sin,” he remarked two years after the attacks, “and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” ‘Batter my heart’ But he conveyed a sense of anguish – scripting his own tragic role, as I argue in my book about him. government’s justification of the atomic bombings: that they saved lives by preventing the need for invasion. Intense interest in Oppenheimer’s life and his ambivalent feelings about the bomb have turned him into almost a myth: a “tortured genius” or “tragic intellect” people try to comprehend because the terror of the bomb itself is too disturbing.įor the rest of his life, Oppenheimer gave the U.S. In American culture, however, fascination with the man behind the bomb often seems to eclipse the horrific reality of nuclear weapons themselves – as if he were the welder’s glass allowing viewers to safely look at the explosion, even as it obscures the blinding light.
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