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Oppenheimer
Just saw it. Went in with sky high expectations; They were exceeded. Awesome movie. Very intense, very cerebral, and very enlightening. Had quite an interesting convo with Mrs. Chopper afterwards over dinner about the ending of WWII and the never ending debate about dropping the bombs vs invading Japan. See it on the biggest possible screen and go in with your bladder bone dry.
Comments
Agree on all counts, including the very last one. Excellent film, and not really the film I was expecting to see.
Interesting note: I was told by a Cal Tech student, at a small party, that during the Manhattan Project, a famous physicist, (name eludes me) who was a grad student at the time, was given the task of determining if exploding an atomic bomb would set the atmosphere on fire and destroy life on earth. I've never known a grad student I'd trust with that. His answer was, of course, "No". I guess he had some #s to back up his claim.
That plays a part in the movie. If the narrative is accurate no one was entirely certain what the outcome was going to be when they pushed the button, but we wanted to be the first ones to push it. Cannot imagine the anxiety present in Los Alamos that day.
I knew an old man in my hometown that used to eat in the dining room of our hospital every day for lunch. He was a 19 year old GI on a boat heading to the Philippines for the muster to invade Japan when the bombs dropped. It was no debate to him. He reverently called President Truman "Mr. Truman" into his 80's. Unquestionably the loss of life on both sides was lower than it would have been in an invasion, and it served as a warning regarding the horror of nuclear war such that nuclear weapons have not been used in the 78 years since. It was the right call.
My Grandfather was a POW captured in the Philippines and transported back to Japan and used as forced labor in rice fields. The bombs ended the war much sooner, and no doubt allowed him and many of his fellow prisoners to live long enough to be freed and have a future.
Great movie exceeded my expectations! As to the decision to use the bomb, all I know is that in the end it saved lives. I had 3 uncles in Pacific, two mud Marines and one in the Navy on an aircraft carrier. After what the two Marines had been thru and that included landing at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa that the Japanese would never surrender and the Americans would have to be prepared to deal with that. After 3 years of fighting the combat veterans were not going to take chances. Also all three of them wrote home that if we invaded they were sure they wouldn't survive. The Marines felt they had used up all their luck and the Navy had just been thru the Kamikaze attacks at Okinawa.They thought the invasion of Japan would have made the hell of Okinawa and Iwo Jima look like a picnic. But they knew it was needed and they were willing. They all believed that they made it home because of those two bombs. I think right or wrong isn't the right question to ask, was it nessassary ? I think it was.
**** he got lucky
I agree with this. My push back on the non-bombers has always been that there were 2 options on the table (only two...) and they were both horrible. You have to make a choice. You make the one that is best for those you represent given the data that you have at the moment and then you live with it. I also think people forget the extreme degree of urgency of getting that thing built before Germany; it wasn’t initially built for the Pacific. If Adolf has that thing when we level Dresden much of Europe is uninhabitable to this day, there is a bridge from Sicily to Northern Africa after Gibraltar has been dammed and the Mediterranean lowered and what was desert is being irrigated and used to grow food for the surviving Europeans who are all speaking German. Don’t even want to think about what the East coast USA or Moscow would look like.
I haven't seen the film, but it got an 8.8 rating on IMDB. Reserved for exceptional films.
And an impressive list of accomplished actors: Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Jason Clarke, Tony Goldwyn, and Kenneth Branagh who was fantastic in "Murder on the Orient Express".
You couldn't assemble a better cast.
Was it militarily necessary? Probably not since we had decimated imperial Japan through a conventional bombing campaign that continued even after the atomic bombs were dropped. Psychologically it had a pretty big effect on some of the higher ups in the government but they were still split on surrender when the Soviets violated their neutrality pact with Japan after a secret arrangement was made between the allied forces and began their invasion of Manchukuo with only ten days before they would reach the home islands. The atom bombs and the subsequent Soviet invasion broke Emperor Hirohito and he ordered his government to surrender and accept the terms of the Potsdam declaration. There was an attempted coup after this but most of the military didn’t participate and it failed. They knew they had lost. It’s still debated whether the Soviet invasion or the atomic bombs played a larger role in imperial Japan’s surrender
Probably not ? here is what wikipedia tells us " In all, there were 2.3 million Japanese Army troops prepared to defend the home islands, backed by a civilian militia of 28 million men and women. Casualty predictions varied widely, but were extremely high. The Vice Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff, Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi, predicted up to 20 million Japanese deaths.[15] The Allies mean while estimated the invading Allies would suffer between 1.7 and 4 million casualties in such a scenario, of whom between 400,000 and 800,000 would be dead, while Japanese fatalities would have been around 5 to 10 million. Anyway you look at it millions of lives were saved. The Japanese were not surrendering , as you stated they were still split after the second bomb and only the declaration of war by the Russians sealed the deal. Anyway I got to grow up with my uncles and all in all they were fine men.
He was fortunate to survive, but it messed him up for the rest of his life. He became a drunk and suffered flashbacks and violent episodes for most of the rest of his life, but he finished out a military career and then started a second career with Orkin. He also was the first person in the Augusta area to bowl a 300 game in league play. He rarely talked about it, so as I understand it, he was captured shortly after the Bataan Death March, so he avoided that piece of the terror. My father was born in 1946, so I consider it providential that he made it out, and was able to have a family and provide for them while he battled the scars it left on him his whole life. He was not a great man or a kind man, but he was a man of his time as best he knew how to be.
I know it may appear contradictory, but Oppenheimer did a tremendous service to humanity, not only by providing the tool to end what would have been a longer and more deadly war for all sides and even the non-combatants of the countries involved, but also in providing a powerful tool for peace in that it has never had to be used again.
I've been a bit wary. My boys and I read for school portions of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and I understand the moral dilemma faced by Oppenheimer, but what does the woke entertainment industry do with ethical questions?
I think they handled it very well considering our times. Much of the angst of the team working on the project has been well documented for decades. And Nolan did not I think add to that . All in all I was as impressed by the lack of virtue signaling as I was of the incredible acting. One thing I didn't like was the sound trac it could have just been the theater I saw it in but it was at times overwhelming.
Only because of how effective the bombing campaign on imperial Japan was. Internally, the government had already made the decision to surrender because their ability to wage an effective war had been destroyed and their army was useless. They had no fuel, they had no food, and they had no navy. They knew the war was lost for months, but they were fighting over terms of surrender and if they should surrender before a land invasion took place. The atomic bomb and the Soviet invasion forced them to surrender quickly and unconditionally though.
There were Japanese soldiers who didn't surrender on islands until the 1970's. It wasn't going to be over quickly without the bombs. They thought we were going to be dropping them every 3 days.
They don’t have a thing to say about ethical questions nor should they. I thought the show played it right down the middle and although you leave with a decision to make on the justifications for the drop (that existed prior to viewing) most of it is an awareness that apparently brilliant people are not only flawed but manipulated endlessly.
And Go Dawgs
Always!
It seems that feeling was common amongst the US servicemen, including my father who was an officer on a destroyer escort in the Pacific.