Ace wrote: ↑

July 13th, 2023, 11:19 pm

physicshistoryguy wrote: ↑

June 5th, 2023, 11:57 am

Waitedalongtime wrote: ↑

June 5th, 2023, 6:33 am

physicshistoryguy wrote: ↑

June 4th, 2023, 9:50 pm

I'd absolutely be onboard with such a thread should you choose to make one. My historical interests focus more on the big picture narrative and the sequence of events, so although I've noticed a couple things in the trailers (the security gate being too close to Los Alamos, CP-1 looking weird), I'd be very curious to see what you and others find. What you list may be "silly visual stuff," but it's the kind of stuff that's always interesting to find and compare with real history, and the more nitpicky, the better, haha (like, I think the stand-in for Stagg Field was filmed at Berkeley).

Personally, I don't think Nolan will spend more than a couple minutes, if any, on the separation/enrichment processes. As much as I'd love for him to show the reactors at Hanford and the racetracks at Oak Ridge, if the focus is on Oppenheimer then I doubt they'll appear (to the best of my recollection, he wasn't involved in the separation business besides endorsing Abelson's method of liquid thermal diffusion). And frankly, despite Strauss' role in pushing forward the detection programs, everything else that Strauss did pretty firmly and rightly secures his role as the film's villain. He was a very unlikeable person who pursued a personal grudge against Oppenheimer to an infuriating and illegal extent, as the book covers in detail. Of course it wasn't just Strauss - Oppenheimer had many enemies in the Air Force, AEC, and among other scientists like Teller and Lawrence - but, more than anyone else, Strauss was the architect of his downfall.

It's gonna be interesting seeing the balance between Oppy as this flawed character who is arguably the architect of his own downfall (as I commented in another thread, chain smoking gave him throat cancer) and also making him this persecuted and sympathetic character. No wonder Nolan called him the most "contradictory" (think that's the word he used) character he's ever tackled. Strauss indeed seems like the "villain" but it's interesting that he apparently did what he did illegally. So he broke laws and rules during this trial process?

Somewhat long post, so I put it all in a spoiler tag.

Sure, I mean, Strauss had Oppenheimer's home, office, and lawyer's office illegally wiretapped by the FBI so that he knew exactly what their legal strategy was ahead of time. He made sure the AEC's lawyers got a security clearance to be able to view classified documents in their case against Oppenheimer, and blocked all attempts for Oppenheimer's lawyers to get clearances of their own. The members of the Gray Board - the judges in this "trial"; there was no equivalent of a jury - were handpicked by Strauss, and were allowed to pore over Oppenheimer's FBI file for a solid week, with the AEC's lawyer acting as their tour guide. Strauss wanted Oppenheimer's downfall to be complete, so that he wouldn't be able to influence policy as an outsider, to such an extent, that he had an attempt by McCarthy to investigate Oppenheimer blocked; from what I can tell, McCarthy was seen as kind of a joke, who would be focused more on grabbing headlines than utterly ruining Oppenheimer. In at least one case, a witness was blackmailed by Strauss and the FBI into testifying against Oppenheimer, and another witness was shown a transcript of Oppenheimer's testimony before testifying himself. Then, after the hearings, despite the fact that witnesses were told that their testimony would remain confidential, Strauss had all the transcripts published, hoping they would make Oppenheimer look bad publicly. To quote American Prometheus, "In Strauss' view, neither Oppenheimer nor his lawyer had any of the 'rights' afforded to a defendant in a court of law; this was an AEC Personnel Security Board Hearing, not a civil trial, and Strauss was going to be the arbiter of the rules" (p. 490). It's also interesting to note that when the Department of Energy overruled the AEC's verdict on Oppenheimer last year, they did not explicitly vindicate him, but in effect said that the verdict was unsound because the AEC broke its own rules.

And yeah, you make a very good point about Oppenheimer; Strauss was ultimately responsible for his downfall, but Oppenheimer was his own worst enemy. I remember that a nuclear historian I follow online was (is?) skeptical about this film because it's difficult to make the real Oppenheimer into a likeable figure. Sure, he said unpopular things his enemies didn't like - he opposed the hydrogen bomb, and was in favor of using tactical nuclear weapons against the Soviets - but he had a kind of gift for making enemies in the first place. His insecurities manifested as arrogance, and he could make people feel like complete idiots; before and after the war, he had a habit of engaging in "casual cruelty" (that may be Oppenheimer's phrase, but I can't find the source at the moment). He helped to destroy the lives of some of his former students by name-dropping them as communists before the HUAC, five years before his own security hearings (Bird and Sherwin are sympathetic, but it's nevertheless a rotten thing to do). Strauss certainly disagreed with Oppenheimer's policy recommendations but, in my opinion, Strauss' personal grudge began in 1949 when Oppenheimer publicly humiliated him before the JCAE, mocking his fear of exporting radioisotopes to other nations. I'm really looking forward to seeing how Nolan achieves this balance, as you said, between the Oppenheimer who was quite unlikeable and could do irrational things and the Oppenheimer who was insecure and sympathetic.