Oppenheimer-Destroyer of Worlds

Oppenheimer

The Fauci of the Atomic Age

Destroyer of Worlds. The bio-pic 'Oppenheimer' debuted in Paris on July 21, 2023. Its first weekend grossed $82 million, exceeded only by 'Barbie', at $162 million.

Directed by Christopher Nolan, 'Oppenheimer' is based on Kai Bird's and Martin Sherwin's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography 'American Prometheus'. Oppenheimer would have appreciated the comparison to the Greek wanabe-god who brought fire down from the heavens, hoping only to serve mankind, then persecuted for his hubris. Oppenheimer, a child of wealth and privilege who did not suffer from lack of self-esteem, found divine company compatible with his own self-image. Upon witnessing the first test of a nuclear weapon at Alamagordo New Mexico, he had a quotation from the Bhagavad-Gita ready to hand: 'I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds'.

The film skips lightly over the fruition of the Manhattan Project in the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the instant deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, and the lingering deaths of others from radiation sickness.

Nolan focuses instead on Oppenheimer's drive to complete the bomb, a touch of remorse upon becoming aware of the consequences, the ingratitude of politicians exploiting his Communist past for their own ends, and his efforts toward personal redemption by assisting in negotiating limits on first-strike nuclear arsenals. His life had elements of both nobility and tragedy, ideal cinematic material that Nolan makes the most of.

Oppenheimer's life also set the tone of subsequent scientific hubris, of which the most recent manifestation was the three-part experiment conducted by an international consortium of life scientists. Synthesizing a bio-weapon from a bat virus was the first part, injecting billions of people with a purported 'vaccine' for the covid lab-crafted virus was… READ MORE