The top of each stub is rippled, like whipped cream. If you look down, though, you see a couple of sheared-off metal stubs-all that remains of the hundred-foot tower that held the bomb. No sulfurous atmosphere lingers at the place: it’s a patch of high desert like any other. In the months before the “Atomic” première, I chronicled the making of the opera and visited major locales of Manhattan Project history, including the Trinity site. Three adaptations appeared in the nineteen-eighties, a time of renascent nuclear alarm: the BBC miniseries “Oppenheimer,” the television movie “Day One,” and Roland Joffé’s film “Fat Man and Little Boy.” But Nolan’s most formidable competition is, perhaps surprisingly, an opera: John Adams and Peter Sellars’s “Doctor Atomic,” which had its first performances in 2005, in San Francisco. Christopher Nolan’s “ Oppenheimer” is the latest in a series of attempts that go back to the stiff Hollywood docudrama “The Beginning or the End,” released in 1947. The test shot that Oppenheimer named Trinity, in an allusion to John Donne’s sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” has been reënacted many times onscreen. Ellsberg concluded tersely, “This is not a species to be trusted with nuclear weapons.” The fact that no nuclear weapon has been used in combat since August 9, 1945, is the result more of pure chance than of accumulated wisdom. Ours would have been the historic omnicide.” To which one can add: if any historians remained. Richard Rhodes, the author of “ The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” wrote in this magazine, in 1995, “If John Kennedy had followed LeMay’s advice, history would have forgotten the Nazis and their terrible Holocaust. Several times in the past eight decades, the world has come shudderingly close to losing that gamble-closest of all during the Cuban missile crisis, when the Air Force general Curtis LeMay urged a strike on Soviet missile positions in Cuba. The scientists were “engaged in a longer-term gamble imperiling the survival of humanity.” It’s unlikely that either Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Harry Truman would have called off the atomic program as a result, yet the withholding of information struck Ellsberg as symptomatic of a moral void. (Enrico Fermi, less sanguine, reportedly placed the odds at 10–1.) Ellsberg noted that these dire discussions were never shared with civilian authorities. Robert Oppenheimer, had also pondered the prospect of an atmosphere-igniting chain reaction, although they put the chance of such an outcome at less than three in a million. In fact, as Ellsberg pointed out, Hitler killed himself less than three months before the first atomic device was detonated, on July 16, 1945, at what is now the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico. Hitler said he would certainly not live to see it. However, he joked that the scientists in their unworldly urge to layīare all the secrets under heaven might someday set the globe on fire.īut undoubtedly a good deal of time would pass before that came about, Under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star. Hitler was plainly not delighted with the possibility that the earth
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