How do we know the motorman’s not insane?
How do we know the motorman’s not insane?
Oppenheimer and the demon heart of power
Then – God willing, if I still have the strength,
and, of course, if they are still alive –
I must find my wife and children and I must kill them.
What am I to do with thoughts like these?
Martin Amis, introduction to Einstein’s Monsters
I admit the human element seems to have failed us here.
General Buck Turgidson, in Dr. Strangelove or:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
BEHOLD THE GODHEAD’S ERUPTING madness: more fluid than fire, pulsing and bellowing like the soft underside of a shore-bound wave – a surf’s curling, enveloping thunder heaved sidewards and shot vertical; tinted terracotta and rich carmine, melting to melon and sanguine rose, fissured to its heaven-breaching height by matte-black seams of irradiated dust. The heat – immediate, intense, immolating – recedes and meets halfway returning the hurried gust of the blast-wave’s advancing diameter. One hundred seconds pass. The sick breath of a new age sweeps the sunglassed, sunscreened face of Edward Teller, awing upwards to the ionised cloud hung unearthly and lavender in July’s dawn. And he smiles.
Teller’s smile is not the smile of simple satisfaction, thrilling to a well done job. Nor is it the glee of a hard task – a near-impossible task – finished and cradling a definitive glimpse of victory after four years of war. These cheers of delight come later in Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, when the staff of the Los Alamos laboratory bear-hug and back-slap and beat bongo-drums in the desert and loft Oppenheimer himself on their shoulders to hail his wisdom, when even he – yes, he – can allow a rare beam of success to trouble that spare and skullish face. They are cordoned off, in the film, these celebrations, once the stunned silences have passed. Teller and his smile get their own moment, immediate in the aftershock and afterglow of Trinity, a special attention.
For that smile represents possibility rather than finality; not the end of a project but the beginning of a larger one; a consciousness debuting in the world at the precise moment of the atom bomb’s ignition as an instant and illicit byproduct of fission – a consciousness that does not in horror recoil but rushes closer, wooed by that infernal heat, turned on by it, lusting for it. An arrogance is born too with the first Bomb, an ego unleashed to warm itself by nuclear fire as if it were a small blaze in a domestic hearth to be stoked and nurtured rather than a force which, by its fundamental equation (1.132 × 1021 atoms per pound of U-235 multiplied by the speed of light squared) will always and inevitably escape the restraint of those defective enough to believe they are its masters.
Nolan’s movie is flecked with moments like these, small but fathoms-deep ruptures in the fast-running fabric of its narrative, teasing glimpses beyond its slick surface into a forbidden strata of disease and desire too terrifying to contemplate. Oppenheimer is a film constantly invaded by the shadow of a plutonium-stained black-gloved hand, a hand which stills its own tremble the closer it gets to the launch button, or to the neck of a man daring to defy the authority derived from it. Like the balled flash of Trinity, creased and veined with the particulate of invisible death, this otherwise regular story of a monumental figure is riven with a sickness neither potassium iodide nor Prussian blue can cure: the sickness of power, and what that power is prepared to do to a single life – what that power is prepared to do to all life. What Stanley Kubrick distilled in its absurd and comic mode in Dr Strangelove, Nolan is attempting to grasp in a serious manner in Oppenheimer. And in that attempt, in the strain of his effort, we see Nolan butting up against the limits of his own creativity, his own inclination for rationality and scientific rigour in his work, the often extreme literalness of his art. Rationality, after all, was the first thing betrayed in the world Oppenheimer helped to birth.
“They won’t fear it until they understand it,” Oppenheimer says to a midnight forum of scientists worried about ‘The Impact of the Gadget on Civilization’, “and they won’t understand it until they’ve used it.” Perhaps more than any other, “understand” is the most common and important word in the film. In his earliest work on the rules divining the structure of the universe, Neils Bohr is trying to “understand reality.” A lack of “understanding” is what non-scientists plead when they encounter Oppenheimer’s totemic mind and the eccentricity of the New Physics. It sums up the impasse and strife of a relationship, and acts as a bid for humility before a hostile interrogator. Ernest Lawrence understands “completely” the rule of secrecy he is expected to follow, then immediately breaks; it is what Lewis Strauss says whenever he is lying, what Teller utters as he leans forward and delivers the Judas kiss.
Understanding is the subconscious joke made by a director to his audience in a film about physicists but which contains almost no physics. Understanding is also the motive for Oppenheimer’s making: my generation is the first generation not to have learned duck-and-cover drills alongside basic grammar and multiplication, who did not help out on the weekends building backyard shelters, and the film’s audience – for the most part and mercifully – do not remember the daily Damocles of the Cold War, and must be reminded how dire things were then, and how dire things remain for so long as the invention remains invented. Understanding is also the antonym of naiveté. For all his erudition and brilliance, his intuitive gift for spasms of genius, naïve is decidedly what Oppenheimer was – a curse of foolishness which delivered him and all his achievements into the claws of a caste of people he could not comprehend and whose passions Oppenheimer could never quite translate; a passion for extermination, the ultimate extermination.
Trinity may have been beautiful in its own perverse, deformed way: the strange ecstasy of a thirty-thousand-foot tall buttercup and mandarin-tinged firestorm; Nolan would like us to wonder at its biblical majesty and at his own technical talent. But every subsequent drop of the Bomb, every successive test was shaded deeper, richer, and redder, for it contained, as Martin Amis observed, “a kiloton of human blood.”
ON READING THAT A FORMER colonial potato farmer had described the deepest known sanctum of the atomic world, Vassily Kandinsky’s brain cracked open. “The discovery hit me with frightful force, as if the end of the world had come. All things become transparent, without strength or certainty.” Until 1911, the structure of an atom was sketched as a seasonal confection – a plum pudding, in fact: dense and immobile, dotted with occasional raisins of electrons. What Ernest Rutherford found in that year, in describing a dense nucleus enveloped by particles pinballing in a vast emptiness, was the essential energy of the subatomic world. Everything was energy, not just in the sense of potential but of velocity: hurtling, limitless, frenzied energy, a constant clashing and bombardment prefiguring, in its own minute way, the defiled earth of the coming war. There was nothing still in the world; the fundamental state of existence was motion.
Six years earlier Albert Einstein had liberated human life from the fetters of its own perception. The genius of Special Relativity was its creativity. Einstein, with his love of Mozart, had to bypass the observable rules of the universe, had to give in to the seductions of abstract thought to grasp what was otherwise unthinkable. The nature of space and time – a nature once thought fixed and unchanging, like the plum pudding atom – was split apart. Kandinsky threw aside the hazy Impressionism then in vogue – the mushy hymnals to the concord of the natural world – and began a long trek into the wilds. Within a decade the artist pared back his style so radically that his canvases became explosions of pure geometry: the closest any painter has ever come to grasping the essential weirdness of science. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, the founders of Cubism, both denied the linkage in their own work with the thrilling science of their time, but they were lying. Simultaneity, it came to be called: the blending of Henri Poincaré’s theories about four dimensions with photography’s ability to show something in action and at rest in the same moment. Marcel Duchamp described his pioneering 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 as an attempt to condense “time and space through the abstract presentation of motion.” On the wall of Neils Bohr’s study in Copenhagen, hung proudly as an essential font of inspiration, was Jean Metzinger’s La Femme au Cheval – a prismatic vision of collapsing angles and interrupted arcs. It was from Cubism’s experiments in simultaneity that Bohr developed, in part, the idea of Complementarity: that an electron, for example, might be a wave as well as a particle – two qualities at the same instant and dependent on the point in space of the observer.
On the hunt for order and explanation, the physicists discovered little but mysteries and disorder, a disorder and confusion the artists reflected in their shivered mirror: a reality of speed and shifts and momentum, a single object seen from an infinity of possible angles. We are habituated today to the strict demarcation of science and the humanities – in the modern academy they are pitched against each other for money and prestige while a wretched habit divides people into personality types with an aptitude for the hard or the soft, and never shall they merge. On one side rigour, discipline, rules, falsifiability; on the other creativity, inspiration, arguments, ephemerality. Yet from the years immediately before the First World War until the mid-1920s – when a bright and rich American son of German-Jewish immigrants stormed into Göttingen – science and art shared in the glories of the avant-garde and developed its own politics of rebellion against the known values of harmony, order, and coherence – the virtues of a gorgeous, complacent, doomed world the Victorians bequeathed them.
This period had already augured what technology, conjured by the alchemies of science, could do to the human soul. Thomas Edison promised in 1890 that his new electric current was the most merciful method for taking a life – less grotesque, certainly, than the guillotine and the noose. But when William Kemmler, condemned to die for the twenty-six axe-blows delivered to the skull of his lover, was given the fatal jolt the execution chamber rapidly filled with the bitter smell of seared flesh. Only a second, doubled shock killed Kemmler. His fingernails were found embedded in the palms of his hands. An instrument created for a quick end caused only torrid suffering. And what began as a marvel and novelty – Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery in 1896 of the X-ray – soon took on a morbid symbolism. “In making every living body appear skeletal,” Philipp Blom wrote in The Vertigo Years, the X-ray photograph “became a technological memento mori, a high-tech injunction whispering through the dark: Remember you will die.” (A half-century later, entire divisions of men were compelled to watch the detonations of the first hydrogen bombs. What did they see, these lab rats, when they held their arms to the pure-white field of the blast? Their own blood vessels pulsing under invisible skin, their own bones backlit against the glow).
These were the years of J Robert Oppenheimer’s forming. And what Oppenheimer found, like Einstein and Bohr before him, was beauty in abstraction – an abstraction Christopher Nolan illustrates with flashed images of arcing tensile rays, blurred hailstorms of striped rupturing particles, sunspot luminescence ringing the iris of a thermite-bright core. In swift montage, between the visions, we see Oppenheimer hurling crystal into a corner, hypnotised by the shattering structure of their breakage, TS Eliot’s The Waste Land at his side, the jagged horn-blares and rhythmic staggers of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring haring away on the gramophone and shuddering the walls, then stalking gallery halls hungrily consuming the Cubists of his period. More than just a generational genius preternaturally attuned to the momentous movements of the universe, what Oppenheimer’s visions reveal is a figure lashed by the tenor and timbre of his time, moved and inspired by art and science to the same degree they moved and inspired each other. The breathless thrills of modernity and modernism, Nolan suggests, brought Oppenheimer inevitably to the Bomb, and the Bomb inevitably brought his downfall. In fact, as Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin’s American Prometheus makes vivid, it was not just The Waste Land but Fitzgerald, Claudel, Zweig, Gide, Hemingway, and Yeats; the intellectual hothouse of Göttingen didn’t haul him out from his juvenile depression – it was Proust, devoured during a Corsican holiday. He was omnivorous, and could reach for John Donne in naming the Trinity test just as easily as he could later quote (infamously) from the Bhagavad Gita.
But dwell a while on that brief flash of Oppenheimer prowling the gallery. Look closer, and we find Nolan has placed there the most obvious examples possible. A lot of Nolan is like this: the literal impersonating the profound – and this in a moment supposed to express the thick, double-binding artistic and scientific lash in which Oppenheimer was caught. To the left: Roger de la Fresnaye’s Married Life (1912), a charcoal-clad thicket-haired man smoking voluminously, clutched on the arm by a nude woman, hemmed in by a bohemian shamble; a stack of books, an empty glass. To the right is Still Life with Pipe (1918) by Juan Gris, and who could that represent? In a separate emphasis shot we get Picasso’s Femme assise aux bras croisés – but that won’t be painted for another ten years, and lives in a different school.
In the middle we find Ivan Kliun’s 1914 work The Clockmaker – a mad-scientist figure of terse deco teeth and half-moon spectacles hassled by fragmented watch-faces. The reference is not to Oppenheimer but to Nolan himself who, even before Interstellar, thought like a pure Einsteinian – indeed, still does (not for nothing did Guillermo de Toro once call him an “emotional mathematician”). As a director he knows that light is the only constant. Time is a plaything by contrast, to be warped and dilated. The malleability of time unifies his work. Nolan’s colours and feelings are moved by time: the alienation of being suspended in it, the longing it can provoke, the pressure of having so little left. Memento was about rediscovered time; Inception slowed it to a stumble, then levered it back on itself; before the mighty forces of a black hole (which Oppenheimer predicted in the fated year 1939), Interstellar sped minutes in aeons; Tenet begins and ends at the same point in time and space. Dunkirk almost – almost – approached the simultaneity of the Cubists, depicting the same event in three angles over a contracting span of week, day, and hour. His characters (though really they are just functionaries) bow and swirl on a parabolic path around the arrow of plot, and at the moment when actions and emotions threaten to swing out from the narrative’s controlling orbit, they interlock again neatly and without friction – the peroration of planetary alignment, a finished mechanism sounding its final totemic click.
However much Nolan treats time like clay to be moulded and reformed, it is still an immutable law he cannot totally transgress, the rule of order which, when violated, leads to chaos. But faced with a figure as singular as Oppenheimer, with his own singular place in history’s tempest, Nolan has to strain against the caged formulas of his own making. Though Oppenheimer is split between its ‘Fission’ and ‘Fusion’ streams, and each contain their own nested flashbacks and recollections, and though it is strung together with the same self-assured pace of his other work and functions like a puzzle box, it is still the story of a single life adapted from a single non-fiction source: something Nolan has never attempted. And in his attempt you can see him finally encountering the outer bounds of his own creativity, the artistic impulse usually kept smothered.
Nolan doesn’t do symbol, metaphor, gesture. Yet here they are. Some are silly: he signals vulnerability – baring one’s soul before the beloved – by having his characters face each other bracingly naked. Some are obvious: the radium-green luminous apple on Patrick Blackett’s desk supposes an illusion of choice to leave the Eden of the pre-atomic world (“Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee”). Some are subtler still: the allusive hand forcing Jean Tatlock’s neck below her shallow bathwater, murderous for a second, then vanishing (“a faint trace of chloral hydrate,” said the coroner). And in the gentle tap-drips which disturb the surface of that water, mirrored again in the opening glimpse of a Cambridge puddle shelled by rain, linked in turn to the torrent of uranium marbles clunking into the core’s goldfish bowl at Los Alamos, repeated on the Princeton pond where Einstein betrays his hidden despair for Oppenheimer, superimposed on a map during the conference room debate, and magnified finally in the mantle of the earth plashed and rippled by a thousand megaton, megadeath events. Twelve thousand, actually: that is how many warheads still taint our existence, tucked in their dank warehouses, shuddering in their silos. For here is the opposite of the creative abstraction which can comprehend the inner turmoil of an atom – its dark twin, its inverse, a Janus face clean on one side, the other smeared red with radiation burns: a mind that would abstract and accept a billion lives – then a billion more, a billion more after that – as the proper “price” of “survivability.”
And catch that hastening thump as the warheads fall, a sound which recurs in Oppenheimer at points of high crisis, like a locomotive cranking over or the massed canter that begins a cavalry charge. It is not the metallic spooling of a ballistic missile’s rocket motor (though it could be), nor a purely aesthetic effect (though it might have been), but the triumphant rumble of eager feet on the bleachers of Fuller Lodge – the moral and spiritual centre of the film, by far its most impressive and important sequence, more essential even than the stunner of Trinity. Having heard the news of Hiroshima’s levelling from that satanic hick Harry Truman, Oppenheimer goes before a drunk and feral audience seedily dressed in the colours of vomit and plasma, beaming and needy for someone to indulge them. And Oppenheimer does, with hollow words. But the walls shake. A woman laughs ecstatic, then collapses in confounded tears. Kids fondle each other under the stands. A man curls stricken and inconsolable in the corner. Another woman – Nolan’s eldest daughter Flora, in case anyone doubted the director’s opinion on the atomic question – reaches towards an imaginary fire as the flesh of her face flays away. They all go to dust. It is their shoes on the floor Oppenheimer hears as a haunting evocation of the nightmare he, by his naiveté, has created; their spastic American flags which twirl in his dreams; and that single scream piercing the shudders… that stranded cry which is the only thing humanity will hear when the time comes, panicked and alone before a “terrible revelation of divine power.”
It is telling that Nolan thought the sequence “experimental and spontaneous.” And amusing, too, because it is about as deep into metaphor and symbol he can imagine himself being, about as far as he will dare stray from the common rules and comforts of his craft. But if this is what happens when a technician like him finally eases their nervous grip on the diamond-cut laws undergirding their work? The result is appropriate: horrifying, vengeful, and, surprisingly for Nolan, nasty. It mocks the glee with which the western world greeted the evisceration of foreign cities, and scours their horrid luxuriations in the neutron-glow of the new American power. In Dunkirk, Nolan recast Churchill’s famous oratory as a gentle, mournful refrain of rescue rather than a balled fist of defiance; here he goes further, transmuting the joy of victory into a grotesque bacchanal of bloodlust and heavy-petting – Eros and Thanatos, sex and death, never more comfortably entwined in scorn of all Oppenheimer’s doubts, of all our anxieties. Staggered on the bleachers in Fuller Lodge, a hundred haunting faces, all wearing Edward Teller’s sick smile.
The only journalist present at Trinity was William L Laurence of the New York Times, and he described the gadget’s eruption (or irruption) as “the Great Flash – the first cry of a new-born world.” What it augured was not a new weapon, Neils Bohr says in the film, but “a new world.” “The world is pivoting in some new direction,” Kitty Oppenheimer worries. “Reforming.” It is apt – morbidly apt – that Dr Sasaki in John Hersey’s seminal Hiroshima described the detonation of Little Boy as a “gigantic photographic flash.”
BECAUSE HOLLYWOOD WAS ONCE the primary target of its wrath, there has always been a good and brave tradition in American filmmaking of defiance in the face of McCarthyism. It runs through Storm Center and Inherit the Wind, Woody Allen’s The Front and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the very bad 2015 biopic about Dalton Trumbo and George Clooney’s minor but excellent Good Night and Good Luck. Perhaps we might even include Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (“Better dead than Red, Ethel,” says Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s pitbull, in that play. And how did Ethel Rosenberg die, condemned for leaking atomic secrets? The electric chair). These films are the debt the writers who never had to face McCarthy paid to those who came before, who were destroyed by the junior senator from Wisconsin’s drunken raging; blacklisted, never resurrected.
At their best, these works are American liberalism at its most precocious and indignant. By their nature they are committee room movies, courtroom movies – forums for the sending-up of persecutors and paranoids, witness-boxes for grandstanding and grandiloquence. The truth will always out, these pictures teach us. Speak loud enough, speak well enough, stick by your principles, and the tide might turn, justice might be done. The hero always gets his or her revenge, and the restoration of all that was once right. Howard in The Front even gets to tell them to “Go fuck yourselves.” It is possible, at last, for a good person with good ideas to stand against the bullies and win.
Oppenheimer is proof of the opposite. Forbidding, terrifying proof. Speech alone makes nothing happen. Lone defiance is suicide. Oppenheimer speaks – what lovely smoke-softened speech – and his enemies grow larger; his syllables sound on the battlements and give no echo. Nolan’s courtroom scenes are not even courtroom scenes: they are an invigilation, a hosing down, a drip-drip water torture, a ritual humiliation. True, we get Kitty’s little moment of sangfroid rebellion; we also get (elsewhere and meanwhile) David Hill’s exposé, yet they cannot ease the conclusive and complete defeat of the hero. Robbed of his fist-thumps-table moment, meekly and wide-eyed Oppenheimer accepts his professional annihilation. Between the film and its source, American Prometheus, it is impossible to really know what ushered Oppenheimer so pathetically into the arena with the lions. Maybe it was his own naiveté, trusting to the last that truth – in politics as in science – was the only quality of consequence, the quality that would exonerate him. Or perhaps he went willingly to his own execution as a form of self-punishment for the sin of creating The Bomb, becoming a flagellant before the Gray Board: four weeks in a cupboard, bleeding the stripes of his atonement.
Christopher Nolan is not so interested in the answer, because in an important sense the answer does not matter. What matters is the fact of Oppenheimer’s humiliation: the same power which in a few short years made his reputation could so easily, in a few short years more, completely unmake it. Oppenheimer does not gesture inwards, as other anti-McCarthy films do, towards the drive for purer principles and unsullied consciences, but outwards: to that fizzing critical mass behind the curtain, to that impulse which moved Edward Teller to smile warmly at the mushroom cloud – a twinned cynicism and nihilism which overtook the furthest corners of the American state in those crucial years. Dissenting critics and unhappy viewers moaned at Oppenheimer’s final third, annoyed by so much big talk in a small room (such people probably think that Jaws was also a movie about a shark). But that final third represents something – something larger than the mere ‘trial’ it depicts. For underneath its procedure thuds the demon-heart in the chest of the United States, motoring and moving a gangrenous blood through the system, expunging all dissident bodies, cleansing at the cellular level all qualities thought parasitic, alien, and traitorous, weeding out the conspiracy, as Jack D Ripper in Dr Strangelove growls, “to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”
What to call this heart, this spectre? The System, the Machine, the Deep State, the National Security Apparatus? Thomas Pynchon’s Raketenstaat, or Don DeLillo’s infinite and incomprehensible secret archive? Or perhaps, by way of a Henry James story Oppenheimer once read, The Beast in the Jungle? Gary Wills called it Bomb Power: the ulcerous attitude of a corrupted administration built to protect atomic weapons and defend the possibility of their use, a regime trained to guard against precisely the sort of challenge Oppenheimer hoped to make in the final years of his potency. And in the inner room of the inner room sits the nuclear priesthood: a covert and entirely irresponsible elite which believes that it knows better than every other man and woman in the street, and is prepared to annihilate every man and woman in the street – is happy to annihilate all of them, wants to annihilate all of them. The Bomb (to quote Erik Baker) demands secrecy, secrecy demands lying, and lying breeds lawlessness. Lawlessness, we might add, breeds murder. This is what Oppenheimer saw behind the curtain, what Oppenheimer gestures towards, what we see at last in Teller’s smile.
The lie which birthed this new power is also the mother of all modern lying: that Japan had to be A-Bombed. Through the summer of 1945, intercepted cable traffic spoke of panic in the Japanese leadership, talk of capitulation before the Soviets declared against them, whispers of surrender on one condition: they keep their emperor. Truman knew this; Eisenhower knew this. They dropped anyway. And the surrender terms – two eviscerated cities later – were not much different than what had been possible three months and a hundred thousand lives earlier. Patrick Blackett, Oppenheimer’s former tutor, intuited early that “the two bombs – the only two existing – were whisked across the Pacific to be dropped” not because it was conclusive that their detonation would end the war, but that it might be “the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia…” General Leslie Groves agreed, in his testimony under oath to the Gray Board. “There was never,” Groves said, “from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy and that the project was conducted on that basis.” Why bomb? First, to impress Joe Stalin. Second, because they could.
From such lying, lawlessness naturally follows. Like all McCarthyite tactics, what Lewis Strauss arranged was entirely illegal – and entirely ironic. In fear and in defence against the “Commies”, they invented their own Moscow-style show trial, a star chamber backed by wiretaps, bugging, blackmail, pre-selected evidence, and loyalty oaths. For Oppenheimer’s twin-stream structure to function, to set him up as a friendly betrayer, Nolan has to soften Strauss’ loathing of Oppenheimer, colouring it in part as an accumulation of personal slights and a dispute over political style. But there is more than enough of Strauss’ true nature in the film to identify him as a willing agent of that demon heart, of Bomb Power. “Survival in Washington,” Strauss says, demurely, “is about knowing how to get things done.” Getting things done means doing everyone in, when the time comes. More than Oppenheimer’s socialism, more than his indiscretions during the Manhattan Project, what Strauss, Kenneth Nichols, and William Borden (who really does look in the film like a certain failed Austrian painter) objected to was his opposition to Edward Teller’s “baby”: the Hydrogen Bomb. The Atomic Energy Commission’s charges, engineered by Strauss, contained the definitive accusation: Oppenheimer was “instrumental in persuading other outstanding scientists not to work on the hydrogen bomb project,” and as a result “definitely slowed down its development.”
“A prophet,” Isidor Rabi calls Oppenheimer. He wasn’t, not really. But having borne witness to the first conclave of the nuclear priesthood, he was its first heretic and dissident. And for this, he had to be ruined – the coup de grâce which cleared the field for lesser men with fewer scruples. Indeed, after Oppenheimer the radical scientist working inside the system became an endangered creature, lately an extinct one. Judged, branded, then excommunicated, Oppenheimer was the last of the Enlightenment men: the polymaths who accumulated to themselves all the treasures of rational learning and artistic temperament and were never shy of identifying the evil in their own discoveries. In 1944, when it became obvious that the Nazis could not develop their own Bomb and could be defeated by conventional means, the Polish-Jewish physicist Joseph Rotblat downed tools and walked out the front gate of Los Alamos, devoting the rest of his life to the curtailment of atomic weapons; because of him we know what nuclear fallout does to our bodies, what it does to the earth. No more Oppenheimers; no more Rotblats. Science was subdued by the Gray Board, straitjacketed and made an accomplice to Bomb Power.
Rabi was more correct when he called Edward Teller an “enemy of humanity,” and it is reassuring that Teller, to the day he went to his welcome grave, hated knowing he was one part of the model and inspiration for Dr Strangelove. Kitty Oppenheimer was right, in the film as in life, not to shake his hand. If there is a critical fault in Oppenheimer, it is Nolan’s gentleness with this monstrous man. Because it was Teller who first volunteered to the FBI, in 1951, an accusation-by-innuendo that Oppenheimer was blocking the H-Bomb and promised to “do anything possible” to have him removed from government service. Thus, less than a week before his slick testimony to the Gray Board (“I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better”), he met late at night with an AEC officer and begged Strauss to “deepen the charges” against Oppenheimer so as to “unfrock him in his own church.” From his crepuscular corner of the security state he never stopped repeating his catchphrase “A little radiation is good for you.” Teller never met a Bomb he didn’t like and couldn’t swoon for, never witnessed a test he was not enraptured by, and never tasted the invisible metal on his tongue: the flavour of guilt at the possibility of a nuclear holocaust wrought by his own hand.
There are few works of fiction, you’ll notice, that begin before the missiles start spooling in their silos; most take place as the final curtain comes down, or after the eternal winter has already set its dark pattern. Of these, the best is not The Road or On the Beach, but the distinctly low-budget, distinctly British 1984 film Threads – one of those rare pieces of art which makes me feel sick, clinically sick. Despite the obvious ketchup smeared on its actors’ faces and the bouncy camera poorly imitating the blast, Threads grasps the innate terror – like the scream in Oppenheimer’s Fuller Lodge sequence – of the siren sound separating then from now. How quickly humanity would lose all resemblance to itself, Threads says: the only possible form of government would be instant fascism, and the first generation birthed into hell would be deformed beyond comprehension. Their language would consist of no more than a few dozen words, for who has need of anything but the crops expelled by a poisoned earth? In Threads, art imagines its own end, via The Bomb.
But no artist has yet apprehended the nature of Bomb Power, seized its scruff and spat in its face. Stanley Kubrick came close in Dr Strangelove – a kind of cackle on the gallows with the blade going up. Christopher Nolan gets closer still in his impressions and gestures, his nodding beyond the curtain, in that huff of arrogant impatience when Strauss bursts his Southern gentleman disguise and insists Oppenheimer “should be thanking me.” That is Bomb Power, in a way: it wants to murder you and be praised for it. Perhaps, much like the Holocaust, its corrupting effects can never be distilled as a whole. No single picture, no single novel can possibly contain all of it. Perhaps each of them might contribute their individual fragments to the collage of our own making, might at last assemble the fuller picture of those who, in the spring of 1954, assassinated one man and might yet assassinate you.