The Impossible Story of the Bomb
Ever since its detonation in 1945, people have been grappling with the enormity of the atomic bomb’s power. This is the complex tale Christopher Nolan is trying to tell with ‘Oppenheimer.’The Impossible Story of the Bomb
Ever since its detonation in 1945, people have been grappling with the enormity of the atomic bomb’s power. This is the complex tale Christopher Nolan is trying to tell with ‘Oppenheimer.’
Imagine a meadow, unsullied by floodlights or asphalt or creosote or diesel fuel; here, turkeys gobble, squirrels dart, songbirds sing. High in the sky, a lone hawk circles. This is the scene Richard Rhodes sets in the foreword to his totemic 1986 book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, the definitive, gripping account of the bomb’s genesis. For a time, Rhodes lived on such a meadow, spread across 4 acres in the Connecticut countryside. “Except for the hawk,” he writes, “every one of those animals constantly and fearfully watched over its shoulder lest it be caught, torn, and eaten alive. From the animals’ point of view, my edenic four acres were a war zone.”
The potential for war is everywhere. For humans, that’s a fact that became much harder to ignore after the U.S. detonated two atomic weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Nuclear annihilation looms, just one impulsive push of a button away: a lone hawk drifting over the meadow.
Even if you don’t feel connected to the bomb’s origins, the story of how nuclear weapons came to be is absolutely crucial to understanding the ongoing precarity of our existence. When J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, addressed his peers in early November 1945, he opined, “I think it is true to say that atomic weapons are a peril which affect everyone in the world, and in that sense a completely common problem.” But Oppenheimer’s use of “common” should not be mistaken for “simple.” As Rhodes notes, nuclear weapons are paradoxical in nature. While any nukes belong, in theory, to the nation that created them, in truth, they belong to no one because the consequences of using them would result in everyone’s demise. Rather than thinking of nuclear weapons as property, Rhodes argues they’re more like an epidemic: “And like an epidemic disease, they transcend national borders, disputes, and ideologies.”
The Ringer’s Streaming Guide
There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.
Similarly far-reaching are the tendrils of nuclear weapons’ origins, linking back to not only some of the most revolutionary discoveries in science, but also the history of warfare itself. Even before the atomic bomb entered this world, “Man-made death became epidemic in the twentieth century,” Rhodes writes. This epidemic was courtesy of “increasingly efficient killing technologies,” from machine guns to poison gases to big bomber aircraft that destroyed not only battlefields, but cities, killing everyone from the very old to the very young. Yet in its own perverse way, the atomic bomb brought an end to the madness of global war: While tragic wars have been fought since 1945, none has remotely matched the scale of World War II. “In a profound and even a quantifiable sense,” Rhodes writes, “the weapons that counseled caution these past seven decades at the level of deep nuclear fear served as containers in which to sequester the deaths they held potential, like a vaccine made from the attenuated pathogen itself.”
Since the atomic bomb’s creation and detonation, its twisted and knotty story has been among the most daunting to tell on-screen or otherwise—in part, Rhodes notes, because it wasn’t born out of some “Faustian bargain”: “Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might have hidden from the politicians and the generals. To the contrary, here was a new insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coax forth.” How to convey these nuanced, tortured origins has eluded filmmakers for more than 75 years. There have been attempts both satirical (Dr. Strangelove) and allegorical (the Godzilla films), and too many spy tales, action franchises, and Tom Clancy adaptations to list here. The last major movie to try its hand at the Manhattan Project was 1989’s critically and commercially panned Fat Man and Little Boy, starring Paul Newman as the director of the Manhattan Project, U.S. Lieutenant General Leslie Groves. The film was well-meaning but ultimately awkward and stilted, torn between illustrating the enormity of the scientific discoveries that spurred the development of the bomb and the small, human stories of folks just struggling to find a sense of normalcy while living at the laboratory settlement of Los Alamos. The problem with telling the story of the atomic bomb is that one can’t tell it smaller than it is, since its vastness is what makes it so unique and worth telling in the first place. But that enormity—as Christopher Nolan surely realized in endeavoring to make the soon-to-be-released Oppenheimer—isn’t easy to capture.
Speaking over the phone from his home in the Pacific Northwest, the 86-year-old Rhodes tells me that The Making of the Atomic Bomb has been optioned to be turned into a movie at least 10 times since it was published. “No one has ever figured out how to tell the story,” he says, “because the development of the entire story, at least, is really too big for an ordinary two-hour [or] three-hour film. … The scale is so far beyond that everybody takes a crack at it, and then they start to back away.”
Rhodes says he had the same problem when he first started his book. Originally, he conceived of it as a work of fiction, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship as funding. But after finishing a draft of his novel, Rhodes’s publisher found the manuscript to be unworthy of publication. “And when I got over why,” Rhodes tells me, “I realized it was because the novel was—as most novels—kind of a love story. … [There] just was no way to squeeze a little love story into the middle of this enormous story of the development of the bombs.”
Rhodes’s struggle, and that of the screenwriters who would later try to adapt his book, “is kind of a metaphor for the whole story of the development of the bombs,” he says. “The problem has always been: How do you deal with something this transformative? How do you deal with something this large?”
At a glance, Rhodes’s solution was to include seemingly everything. His book is nearly 900 pages long, so vast that in my paperback copy, Robert Oppenheimer doesn’t appear until page 119. It reads like a who’s who of iconic scientific minds: Rutherford and Geiger and Bohr and Hahn and Schrodinger and Heisenberg and the Curies and Fermi and, yes, Einstein. Rhodes had taken only one physics lecture in college, but by the end of his research, he estimates he read as many as 400 books on the subject. “Once I’d mastered the jargon,” he writes in the foreword to the 25th-anniversary edition of his book, “it was possible to read through the classic papers in the field, visualize the experiments, and understand the discoveries, at least where their application to making bombs was concerned.”
The book includes long passages about the discoveries of the atom, X-rays, and nuclear fission, and it is littered with complex physics equations. All of that legwork serves two functions: First, it conveys the sheer inevitability of the bomb’s development, independent of moral or philosophical discussions regarding humanity’s best interests. “Nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion are not acts of Parliament; they are levers embedded deeply in the physical world,” Rhodes writes, “discovered because it was possible to discover them, beyond the power of men to patent or to hoard.” Second, the backstory illustrates the transformation that physics as a science underwent in the first half of the 20th century. Where physics had once “almost seemed like a spiritual quest,” according to one scientist, “physicists became one of the most important weapons of war that the nation state had at its disposal.” So it goes, the reader must understand how insatiable physicists’ minds were in order to appreciate the dilemmas they faced while working on the bomb. Fulfilling the ultimate goal of progress and pushing their discipline forward meant approaching the ultimate destruction of the world in which we exist. “We were forced into the darkest corner of our beautiful science when we were there at Los Alamos,” Rhodes remembers the theoretical physicist Victor Weisskopf lamenting to him.
Serendipity played a role in Rhodes’s research. In the mid-1970s, right around the time his novel was killed, the government gave him a gift by declassifying a mountain of documents regarding the Manhattan Project. After imagining this story as a work of fiction, Rhodes already understood the central characters of the story and their interior lives—now, he could couple that with archives of detail. With this sudden influx of materials, Rhodes began to piece together not only the scientific and political machinations surrounding the bomb’s construction, but also the sheer industrial and economic achievements of the Manhattan Project. “I guess you could think of the Manhattan Project as one of the first start-ups [in the] history of the world,” Rhodes says. “When those bombs were finished, the Manhattan Project had reached the scale—in terms of industrial investments, plant scale, and employees—of the United States automobile industry in 1945.”
Rhodes was also granted access to the FBI’s exhaustive surveillance files on Oppenheimer, which it started to collect back in the 1930s over concerns that Oppenheimer might be a Communist. “They had so many requests for two people, two figures in history, that they had pulled the FBI files on those two people and put them in a separate room,” Rhodes tells me. “And [those two people] were Robert Oppenheimer and Martin Luther King.” Over the course of several weeks, he returned to this room packed with boxes—“It looked like Donald Trump’s bathroom”—to assiduously transcribe the documents under the watchful eye of an FBI representative. Throughout his writing process, Rhodes got closer than anyone had to the scientific discoveries that resulted in the bomb. He traveled to Berlin, where he was brought to tears as he held in his hands the physical letter Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent to Lise Meitner, in which they described for the first time the phenomenon of nuclear fission.
Rhodes characterized the five years he spent writing his book as “panicky.” He’d received a modest advance and was scrapping for grant funding from other foundations to keep his writing going. To make ends meet, he ghostwrote a sex manual with a Stanford psychiatrist. “Which,” he says, “turned out over the years to sell as many copies as The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” The book’s composition was also painstaking. “It’s not enough just to lay out the facts and tell the story,” Rhodes says. “Why not make it well-written prose as well?” Take the way he describes uranium as not merely an essential element for the bomb: “No essence was ever expressed more expensively from the substance of the world with the possible exception of the human soul.”
When The Making of the Atomic Bomb was finally published in 1986, it was a massive success: It won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Probably the most shocking and indelible thing about Rhodes’s tome is that it doesn’t feel long. It’s packed with scientific detail and philosophical deliberations on both the enormity of this weapon’s creation and the massive implications it had on humanity as a whole, but none of these elements feel tacked on or out of place. The book almost exists in its own genre of nonfiction. It’s not a biography, but it is character driven, with a particular focus on a handful of physicists. It’s not solely military history, but swaths of the book do delve into the machinations of World War I trench warfare and the bombing efforts of World War II. It’s not a religion textbook, but there is an illuminating discussion of the haunting history of antisemitism that precipitated the Holocaust. In a way, it—and the story of the bomb more generally—is a social history as much as it’s a scientific one. Here was this collision of events across tens, hundreds, even thousands of years, all of which led to a discovery that quite literally changed the world.
Reflecting on his work leading up to the release of Oppenheimer, Rhodes concedes that there was a gap in his research. “The one thing I couldn’t do, of course, was actually see a nuclear explosion. So I’m looking forward to the ones in the movie.”
It was a simple hypothetical scenario that started Rhodes on a journey that has now been half a life’s work. “I wondered if, back at the beginning, … there had been alternative pathways to the present,” he writes, “pathways different from those which we and the Soviets had followed.” Other films and creative works have asked the same question. But what Fat Man and Little Boy and the opera Doctor Atomic misunderstand is that this couldn’t have ever been stopped (even though the scientists at Los Alamos would voice their ethical concerns on more than one occasion). “It’s been a fundamental idea that somehow the scientists could have gotten together in 1938, when fission was discovered, and agreed not to pursue it,” Rhodes tells me. “The idea that the scientists could have somehow put the lid on developing nuclear weapons is absurd. … Science doesn’t work that way.”
Oppenheimer made a similar argument to an audience assembled at Los Alamos in 1945. When it came to the atomic bombs, there was never a choice not to build them, he asserted. It was “an organic necessity,” he declared. “If you are a scientist, you cannot stop such a thing. … You believe that it is good to find out how the world works, … to find out what the realities are, … to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.”
What this unstoppable and “organic necessity” yielded was the first of what became staggering stockpiles of weapons that would make the threat of extinction both far easier to realize and seemingly impossible to enact, since it would go against our base survival instinct. For Rhodes, it’s this tension that Oppenheimer needs to somehow convey in order to set it apart from other attempts at grappling with the atomic bomb. “These weapons make it much too dangerous to attempt to take over so much of the world,” Rhodes says. “It just can’t be done anymore. And I don’t know, … if those thoughts don’t find their way into this film, then I don’t think it’s done its really serious purpose.”
Fortunately, Nolan appears to be on the right track. He selected as his source material American Prometheus, an exhaustive, 700-page biography of Oppenheimer “written with the belief,” its authors, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, note in the preface, “that a person’s public behavior and his policy decisions (and in Oppenheimer’s case perhaps even his science) are guided by the private experiences of a lifetime.” Without spoiling too much of what Oppenheimer has to offer, Bird and Sherwin detail a meeting held at the Los Alamos chapel, where “Oppenheimer argued with his usual eloquence that, although they were all designed to live in perpetual fear, the bomb might also end all war.” At another meeting among the scientists held not long after, Oppenheimer emphasized the importance of the general public’s knowledge about the bomb’s existence for the sake of future survival—that transparency, not furtiveness, was the safest course of action to avoid future nuclear holocaust. “The war, he argued, should not end without the world knowing about the primordial new weapon,” Bird and Sherwin write. “The worst outcome would be if the gadget remained a military secret. If that happened, then the next war would almost certainly be fought with atomic weapons.”
Rhodes’s takeaways embody the paradoxical hopefulness of the weapons themselves. It was inevitable that such a destructive and horrific weapon would be developed. And the specter of that weapon is breathtaking and terrifying. But the sheer scale of the bomb often overshadows a much more optimistic fact of the story: Since 1945, mankind has had the choice to use the weapon and thus far have chosen not to. “Despite everything across these past seven decades—nearly the length of my life—we have managed to take into our clumsy hands a limitless new source of energy,” Rhodes writes in The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “Hold it, examine it, turn it over, heft it, and put it to work without yet blowing ourselves up.”
It just remains to be seen whether we’ve avoided this fate out of goodness to our fellow creatures trying to survive in the meadow. The lone hawk in the sky was soon joined by more hawks, each one with slightly bigger wings and sharper talons, until soon there were so many hawks that they blotted out the sun.
Hal Sundt is a writer from Minnesota. His first book, Warplane: How the Military Reformers Birthed the A-10 Warthog, comes out in October.
An earlier version of this story erroneously quoted Richard Rhodes as saying there was no way to “squeeze a little love story into the middle of this normal story”; the correct quote is that there was no way to “squeeze a little love story into the middle of this enormous story.”