Oskar: In every business I tried, I can see now, it wasn't me that failed. Something was missing. Even if I'd known what it was, there's nothing I could have done about it because you can't create this thing. And it makes all the difference in the world between success and failure.
Wife: Luck?
Oskar: War. -- Schindler's List
A psychometric analysis, study of the scientists themselves through a series of tests, of a typical American scientist commissioned by the military during the peacetime mid 30s, revealed an interesting profile - a sickly child who grows up to a be loner, a usually high profile father, a businessman or a great thinker himself, who paid little attention to his child causing him to grow as an introvert developing a liking to his field of study only at a much later stage, dabbling till then in the fields of art and philosophy thereby developing a more sympathetic and a humanitarian view of the world in the process. In effect, it is not his science that ultimately shapes the scientist, but his philosophy. This profile could be extended to many scientists worldwide, particularly during that era, when multiple political and social movements - Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazism, not to mention, the resident evil, Capitalism - were sweeping the world, trying to shape it in each of its likeness. And like the regular people themselves, even the scientists were caught up in these ideologies swayed away by the merits of each of those system, viewing them through the lenses of their individual philosophies. (yes, even Nazism, if the career choices of Heisenberg, of famed Electron's Uncertainty Theory, was anything to go by). What else can explain the card-carrying affiliation to the Communist Party by people/scientists, who have never set foot out of their capitalistic worlds even once, to not just profess their love, by way of channeling funds and material support, for whatever was happening thousands of miles away in Soviet Russia, but in some cases even betray their own countries sharing military and scientific secrets with the latter! And then the Great War happened....
"Oppenheimer" is less about the events leading up to the detonation of the first atomic bomb, as it is about the times and the profiles of men involved in a project that not only brought about destruction of unimaginable scale and finally ended the war, but also stirred up serious moral, ethical and political turmoil in most of those men witnessing the enormous power and the devastating potential of their discoveries ni the lead up to the bomb. "Oppenheimer" is Nolan's "Full metal jacket", another political statement about the futility of the war machines, in it, the bigger and more destructive a weapon is, it outstrips the deterrence factor that much faster and destabilizes the world just as sooner setting off an inevitable arms race. This is the moral and ethical dilemma at the heart of "Oppenheimer", whether an atom bomb is meant for destruction of enemy or offer protection against the same, because, paradoxically, in the long run, it ends up doing neither. Wars, replete with their hellish, barbaric and cruel natures, have from time immemorial been fought on (almost) level playing fields - man versus man, weapon vs weapon, strategy vs strategy. But when one side gains a weapon that throws the war equation completely off balance, and even uses it as a demonstration of its destructive capability (like in, Hiroshima) and uses it again (in Nagasaki, to show the steely resolve of the side accepting nothing but unconditional surrender), whatever moral high ground that the "good guys" had it till then was quickly ceded to heartless military strategy. And when wars become games of chess, every weapon - of mass destruction, or total annihilation even - becomes fair game. (Consider the recent decision of US to hand over cluster munitions to Ukraine against Russia or Saddam Hussein's brutal strategy of gassing the Kurds fighting against his regime, or the current Syrian regime indiscriminate (is there any other kind?) usage of chemical weapons on its own revolting citizenry.) The duty of a soldier to kill his enemy in the battlefield is viewed as noble, but the same can't be said of the push of a destructive button to end a war. The questions remains, is the life of a soldier worth more than tens and hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, because that is ultimately the justification (?) offered by the powers that be when unleashing weapons of mass destruction - our soldier vs their citizens.
None could serve as a better example of the change of heart than Leo Szilard, a Hungarian scientist of Jewish faith, who first thought about the idea, and vigorously lobbied for the same at the highest echelons of the US government, of using atomic energy to build a bomb just as Hitler started extending his tentacles eastward towards his home country, but who, upon ultimately assessing, just theoretically, the amount of energy/power/heat harnessed during the bombardment of the subatomic particles, quickly reversed his stance and lobbied just as hard against the deployment of the weapon. In "Oppenheimer", Robert Oppenheimer merely serves as a stand in for the vast scientific community of that period, which was completely onboard during the research part of the splitting of the atom and even went along with the military building the bomb, but once the political machinery, blissfully unaware or blithely unconcerned of the horrific ramifications of its usage, got into the mix, it suddenly wanted to put the genie back in the bottle unable to bear the guilt and remorse of potentially unleashing such a potent force on an unsuspecting populace and having their blood on its hands. On a side note, the one that kickstarted the development of weapons of mass destruction, Alfred Nobel with his invention of dynamite in the 19th century, donated all the monies that he earned through the sale and licensing of his dynamite, into constituting the Nobel Prize, which among others, offers up a prize for working for peace. Talk about guilt!
"Oppenheimer" is a pacifist's plea, a philosopher's quandary, and a strategist paradox. For a weapon that is supposed to end all wars, it surely heralded the era of rat race among all and abled, leaving the world in a much dangerous place and at the whims of people who cannot comprehend the extent of its destructive expanse.
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