What do you think of the bomb and the film Oppenheimer?

First off, I haven't seen the film Oppenheimer. I'm guessing it's pro-bomb? I did however have a birthday recently and was given a manga written by Keiji Nakazawa, a survivor of Hiroshima, called Barefoot Gen. So we have one art form in favor of the bomb and another against. What are your thoughts on the film and manga? What are your thoughts on the bomb?

Barefoot Gen was also anime made in the early-1980's.

I found the film to be agnostic on it. It does have some scenes suggesting the reservations Oppenheimer held about its use, but the film felt as if it took no position in favor or against the bombing. Much was dedicated to suspicions about his Soviet ties and allegiance.

The film wasn’t pro-bomb. Oppenheimer was portrayed as wanting to make the bomb to end the war, while being aware that he could destroy the planet. He was also vocal about not supporting the idea of more and bigger bombs. That’s what got him in trouble.

Incredible film that is about so much more than the bomb and isn't distilled to pro or anti; it's about the snapshot of history that surrounds it. The intersection of the personal and political; the petty and the grand; skill and ambition. It's just an incredible movie you should go see it and ideally in 70mm imax if you can

The movie is about the man and the inherent conflicts within him, both with respect to his professional and personal lives.

As noted by Mirko, the movie walks a fine line in not taking a definitive position regarding the use of atomic weapons on Japan.

However, the movie does explicitly cover why Oppenheimer chose to be involved and I happen to believe that his logic was correct and history has proven him right.

It also did an excellent and accurate job of portraying other key real life characters and the politics/culture of that era.

In examining the actual usage I find it necessary to frame the discussion in the reality of the day. Often there is discussion around morality, sometimes framed within hypothetical alternate options like invasion of the Japanese home islands, willingness to surrender, etc.

Rarely though, do I see examination of important preceding events. For instance, most people do not recall the firebombing of Tokyo on Mar 9th 1945 which occurred 5 months before Hiroshima. They also don't know that over 100,000 people died in that one raid, which is more than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Nor do they know that firebombing was essentially the result of the scientific discovery of napalm. And virtually no one knows that the US built mock Japanese villages to represent Tokyo housing, right down to the type of wood used in their architectural style. And then they practiced burning down the mock village to get the firebomb mixture just right.

Superb film. The 3 hours was worth it.

I think there unfortunately was no alternative to developing the bomb. Having a world in which the Nazis/Soviets were the only ones with an atomic bomb was just unthinkable.

The morally more difficult question if it was necessary to use the bomb the way it was used. In the movie I think the argument was along the lines of an invasion would cost millions of life. And they needed to drop two bombs to show the Japanese that the could keep doing it for as long as it took.

But there were others who thought it would be enough to detonate a bomb high above Tokyo, to demonstrate its power without requiring as many casualties. I don't know more of the factors that went into Truman's decision. I guess 6 years of grueling war had made everyone a bit insensitive to human lives.

Quite big.

Oppenheimer does not really preach one way or the other. It builds a case both ways with how the race to build a bomb was necessary to end the war but also exposes the scare of if development of such bombs continue to happen.

The film isn't really about one development or the other, though. Oppenheimer really is a character study of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and everything happening around him.

You can certainly draw up your own conclusions about the bomb, but that's not the centered focus here.

Incredible film, btw.

@DEVILinIRON said:

First off, I haven't seen the film Oppenheimer. I'm guessing it's pro-bomb? I did however have a birthday recently and was given a manga written by Keiji Nakazawa, a survivor of Hiroshima, called Barefoot Gen. So we have one art form in favor of the bomb and another against. What are your thoughts on the film and manga? What are your thoughts on the bomb?

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Barefoot Gen was also anime made in the early-1980's.

According to me its an amazing moving. I Have miss the Tommy Shelby in this movie. Obliviously the main character is not playing his role but on the other hand its an amazing movie and i also recommend to watch the peaky blinders season.

I agree with this. Just wanted to add that I think it's really awesome how the movie contrasts the characters of Oppenheimer and Strauss. And in so doing also the realms of science and politics. And what happens when people move from one realm to the other.

It was incredible 😎

Have not seen Oppenheimer, though I'd like to. No thoughts on that.

Have not seen/read the anime/manga, though I did see the bomb clip and it was terrifying.

As for the bombs (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), they were necessary evils. And while terrible, if you take a pragmatic stance and weigh the pros and cons, it was the right thing to do. Or the wrong thing for the right reasons. I don't know.

• Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen to minimize casualties. Both were located in geographical "bowls".
• The entirety of Japan, from rice-farming village to steel-working city, was mobilized for the war effort. There were few legitimate "civilians"; children were being trained by the military in schools, adults contributed to the war effort. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were very much "mobilized".
• Prior to the atomic bombs, the US was conducted firebombing raids (as shown in the Grave of the Fireflies anime). This was arguably every bit as bad as atomic bombs, though not every bit as dramatic.
• The Japanese public, from child to senior citizen, believed the emperor of Japan was placed there by god, and ruled with divine right. And that as Japanese it was their duty to fight, to the death, to defend Japan from foreign aggressors. Had the US invaded mainland Japan, the battle would have lasted years and cost millions, not thousands, of lives.

Those are facts.

It's also my opinion that someone had to drop the bombs so we could see how terrible they are, so we never drop another one in anger again. If there was any other way to resolve the conflict at less cost, I think it would have been pursued.

And let's not forget: the Japanese started the whole thing in the first place. So don't get too teary-eyed when you think of the Japanese people that launched an attack on their ally around Christmas and then fought for years, but only after raping and slaughtering through the countries of China, Korea, and elsewhere.

@mrbojangles25: Did you mean to say Maximize casualties? Because the bowl topography was expected to magnify the effect, not minimize.

Hiroshima was chosen because it was essentially untouched by war and therefore would demonstrate total effect and did not have a POW camp. It also had minimal military relevance. Nagasaki was not the primary target for Fat Man, and the crew diverted to the secondary target because Kokura was under heavy cloud cover.

In both cases the primary and secondary targets were all chosen to demonstrate maximum effect, although some were more legit military targets than Hiroshima.

@SUD123456: I was under the impression the bowl topography was chosen to minimize the spread, keep it contained. Maybe that made it more damaging in the area it did touch, though?

I've been to Hiroshima, gone to the museum. The Japanese themselves have stated Hiroshima was militarized, though I am sure there are sources that say otherwise.

In either case, I recommend anyone that happens to visit to Japan spend some time there. It's chilling to walk around and see the city and the museum and stuff, but also inspiring how much has been built back.

Hiroshima did have some militarization.

Haven't seen it, but hope to some day. I understand that they should have picked someone other than Damon to pick the general, as the guy was very abrasive and Matt's just too likeable.

One thing I didn't know is that for many working on the project, they kind of felt less motivated to finish their work to complete the bomb once Germany surrendered -- as many of them wanted it to be used against the Nazis.

Oppenheimer is the the greatest biopic of all time. Another Nolan movie that makes it into my top 15 greatest movie of all time, yet some how only ranks #6 among Nolan's movies.

Nolan is like the Kojima, Miyazaki and Druckmann (combined) of moviemaking

I thought it lacked impact in the film because it lacked scale. The buildup was excellent. It just didn't feel as big on screen as I think they maybe wanted it to.

Or, maybe the Trinity test wasn't as big an explosion as our imaginations have made it to be. In which case, it was fine. In my mind it was going to be something crazy and grand. And it was grand, but not crazy. Which led me to just kinda say, "okay." If that makes sense.

It was, but not significantly so. It was chosen in part because most of Japan had already been firebombed and they didn't want to bomb Tokyo or sacred locations. There just wasn't a very long list of locations that were still in tact that they could use to fully demonstrate their new weapon. It's why the list of places was so short. The part about the one guy advocating for one place not to be destroyed because he and the wife vacationed there once and liked it is a true story, by the way. Trash people.

Anyway, they certainly knew they weren't targeting exclusively a military installation. Their intention was absolutely to murder civilians while using the military presence it in such a way as to avoid being tried for war crimes by bombing exclusively civilians. IIRC, the bomb was detonated above a hospital.

The ultimate irony, of course, is that the bombs had little if anything at all to do with the end of the war. The Emperor didn't give 2 dusty nickles about Japanese civilians. They were fodder. He had his own goals and requirements for surrender and there was going to be no surrender without the additional agreed upon terms and Russian invasion of Manchuria. Our government's failure to understand what the Emperor was holding out for (and the Emperor's failure to clearly communicate it) cost thousands of additional lives.

History is messy, complex, and fleeting little of it is black and white, good vs evil. Sometimes we're the good guys. Sometimes we're definitely the baddies.

This is because Nolan didn't want to use any CGI. What was recorded for movie was an actual, conventional bomb.

To convey the scale and power of an unconventional bomb? Why? 🤔

Look, I’m for practical effects as much as anyone, but special effects and CGI exist for a good reason. There are certain things in filmmaking that you cannot achieve by actually filming said event. A nuclear explosion, for obvious reasons, is one of them. If Nolan is so beholden to the practical and averse to CGI that he is willing to concede what his film requires to convey the point of why it even exists in the first place, then he has let his creative preferences infringe upon creative necessity. The conventional is insufficient to convey the unconventional.

Though I was more disappointed that it didn’t delve into showing a much more visual, microscopic representation of the physics of how the chain reaction led to such a tremendous release of energy. It was a massively missed opportunity to distinguish such a weapon from the rest, but that’s just me.