Oppenheimer Movie Review

[EEVblog]

A little bit OT, but I'm sure this movie is potentially interesting to many here.
Herewith is my review just posted on Twitter:

The Oppenheimer REVIEW you maybe didn't expect:
(May have plot spoilers, kinda?)

I was SO looking forward to this, being a big nuclear history buff. And, well, I've got to say I’m disappointed and kinda annoyed.
Not in the visuals, they were great.
Not in the performances, they were great.
Not in the lack of ANY special effects, that was great (everything was done in camera, wow!).
But I’m disappointed because the trailer makes you expect something totally different. Or at least it did for me. I had to rewatch the trailer just now to confirm I wasn’t imagining that.

The trailer made me think the film was about, or at least would have a lot about the design and building of the bomb, building, development of and the work at Los Alamos and other locations, the effort put in the refinement, the physics etc etc. But it’s not there, there is almost nothing. You’ve sadly seen most of that stuff in the trailer already. You get the occasional very brief glimpse of the labs and trinity tower, and the gadget. but I was disappointed.

Examples: The pile test under the stadium for example gets maybe a minute, he walks in, geiger counters tick and that’s it.
Zero on the refinement of the fissile materials and the huge effort that went into that. They just represent it all as literally marbles in a glass jar.
Hardly anything on the Trinity tower, the setup, life at Los Alamos etc.
You get a couple of test shots on the explosive charges and that’s it.
There is almost nothing on the physics involved.
Hardly anything on the bombs dropped, but I didn’t expect that.

Basically nothing for technical minded people to get excited over, and certainly nothing for those like me with an interest in the history of nuclear development.

Yeah, I know, it’s in the name, Oppenheimer. This is almost entirely a character movie about Oppenheimer and how he got shafted after the war, all the commie stuff etc. But that’s not just after Trinty and all the early development, it’s woven throughout the entire film, all 3 hours of it.
Take a shot every time you hear the word communist and you’ll have to be removed from the theatre by ambulance.
With hindsight, it’s obvious if you look at the IMDB main character list. It’s all politicians etc and not scientists.
Basically the plot of the entire movie is based around a post-war investigation into Oppenheimer, and the movie is basically just flash-backs so to speak to tell the rest of the story.
The overall plot is basically all about Openheimer and Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr’s character).
If you want any focus on science and engineering characters this is NOT the movie for you. There is no real nitty gritty stuff, no people experimenting, testing, building etc.

And I mentioned annoying. Holy crap, almost the entire film has constant background music that drowns out the dialog. Dialog that should be important and focussed gets downed up.
And not just light background music, BLOODY LOUD, pulsating annoying crap.
Literally floor shaking stuff, I didn’t know my local cinema could go that low in frequency. And I’m, not talking the explosions, I’m talking about important dialog!
You just want to shout at the screen to shut the F up! And for the entire 3 hours.
It does go dead silent in a few places, but not where it needs to, and not even close to enough.
It’s like Nolan is trying to put you inside Oppenheimers head, and he’s got constant migraine headaches, so you have to experience that too.

And that investigation throughout the entire film gets annoying and confusing, cutting back and forth in time with various players, again, and again, and again, and again. Your head spins and you lose track of what timeline you are in.
This is NOT a structured historical flow film that I expected (maybe just hoping?) from the trailer.

Don't get me wrong, there are many great scenes in the film that I really enjoyed. And it treats the consequences of nuclear weapons and nucealr war very well. And I expected it to. A scene with Oppenheimer and Truman in the oval office is great.

The cinema was packed, and when I came out I heard many say the likes of “that was dumb”, “that’s not what I expected”, “I didn’t get it”, “weird” etc.

As I said, the performances are great, Cillian Murphy nails Oppenheimer, Matt Damon works as Groves. Robert Downey Jr is almost unrecognisable and great. But the scientists, well, you just don’t see much of them, and they are ultimately fairly inconsequential to the plot apart from giving testimony at the commie investigation.

The final end scene actually was really great, and tied the whole character and persecution of Oppenheimer plot nicely, and summed up nuclear war very poetically. Full marks for that, it was one of the highlights for me.

If you are after an entire character driven film maybe you’ll gush over this, and I wouldn’t argue.
But if you came for the science and engineering you’ll be bitterly disappointed.
I’m be struggling to even give it a passing grade of 5/10 here. What’s there is accurate and looks and feels great, but there is just so little of it.

Sorry, I’m, not going to gush over this one like 98% of critics and viewers are.
I can’t help but think it was a wasted opportunity to at least have SOME decent focus on the science and engineering of the whole thing.
They built the whole town and trinity tower etc and you hardly see any of it.
They had some of the major scientists involved and they don't give them the time or focus needed.
And with 3 hours run time they could have done way more here.

But maybe I’m just that oddball nuclear history buff that expected too much?

[coppice]

Zero on the refinement of the fissile materials and the huge effort that went into that. They just represent it all as literally marbles in a glass jar.

That part is odd. I would expect them to skip over almost anything that's even basic physics or engineering, but skipping the massive industrial effort is strange.

And I mentioned annoying. Holy crap, almost the entire film has constant background music that drowns out the dialog. Dialog that should be important and focussed gets downed up.

Mood over clarity seems to be the norm in cinema sound these days. As a native English speaker I now generally watch things at home with the subtitles turned on.

[dobsonr741]

This book covers what you missing: https://www.amazon.com/First-War-Physics-History-1939-1949/dp/1605981974

[nctnico]

Probably the biography of Richard Feynman is a more interesting read if you want to have some insight into the effort it took to design the first atom bomb.

Dialog being drowned out by music and sound effects is symptomatic nowadays. Many TV series suffer from it as well. That is the reason I download everything and pull the audio through a band pass filter from 500Hz to 4kHz to make the dialogs come out better.

[magic]

Feels good living under a rock.

By the way, wasn't this movie produced in America by any chance? Sounds about typical for that place and time...

[TimFox]

I haven't seen the movie yet, but I read the book it was based on:  "American Prometheus" by Kai Bird.
I assume that like the book, the movie concentrates on the interesting biography of Oppenheimer itself, rather than the physics and engineering of the bomb project.
In 2007, I went to the opera "Dr Atomic" by John Adams, in Chicago (a joint venture between San Francisco, Chicago, and Amsterdam).
The prop for "The Gadget" was perfect (obviously based on project photographs), down to the MS31 cable connectors.
However, in the important meteorology scene (where Gen. Groves doesn't understand why he can't order a guaranteed forecast), the walkie-talkie used to communicate with the observers looked like 1970 Radio Shack, not the Galvin SCR-536 we all know from WWII movies (made in Chicago).
Question:  you mentioned the reactor under the football stands (CP-1 at Stagg Field, University of Chicago).  Did the movie show Oppenheimer at the criticality tests (December 1942)?
Fermi, Szilard, Compton, Wigner, and other locals were there, including H L Anderson who was still on the faculty when I attended Chicago.
I believe Oppenheimer was active in California at that point in history, while Los Alamos was being formed.

[rsjsouza]

But maybe I’m just that oddball nuclear history buff that expected too much?

TBH, I was waiting for a review like this. I can't say I am surprised, since the contemporary Hollywood has been quite disappointing to tell interesting stories and I am not really hopeful for any scientific/engineering detailed movies after the fiasco (IMO) about Alan Turing's work on the crypto stuff at WWII.

[JohanH]

And that investigation throughout the entire film gets annoying and confusing, cutting back and forth in time with various players, again, and again, and again, and again. Your head spins and you lose track of what timeline you are in.

I don't have statistics, but it feels like this has increased a lot lately, especially in TV series. It makes sense if someone recalls something and is thinking on the past. But to without purpose cut forth and back is so annoying and doesn't make any sense at all.

[Stray Electron]

   First, let me start off by saying that one of my distant relatives worked for the OSS and was a known Soviet informer in the 1940s. So I have a lot more than a casual interest in that area. With that in mind, I've read A LOT about the Communist spy networks that operated inside the US in the 1930, 40s and early 1950s including reading the the much later released Vernona decrypts and the FBI investigation reports that were released in the 1980s and 90s. And IMO if Oppenheimer wasn't actively involved with leaking information to them then he was at the very least turned a very blind eye towards their intelligence gathering operations. His wife was a known and active member of the Communist Party USA and so were several of his closest friends. And there is at least one now released recording of one of his friends asking him to supply the USSR with classified information. Oppenheimer failed to report that contact, which he was REQUIRED to do. That alone fully justifies him losing his security clearance.

    But I've noticed there has a been a concerted effort by someone in the last ten years or so to "rehabilitate" his image.  Just like for decades, there were continuing efforts by the sons of the Rosenbergs to claim that their parents were innocent of spying charges.  But in around 1980, the FBI released SOME of the Vernona transcripts that fully PROVED that the Rosenbergs were guilty of espionage AND at about the same time, Ethyl Rosenberg's brother David Greenglass finally went public and co-authored a book, 'The Brother',  about the entire story of his and the Rosenberg's spying efforts. NOW you no longer hear claims about the Rosenbergs innocence.

   My opinion is that Oppenheimer probably had been a member of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s but then either lost interest OR like many others in the party was TOLD by Moscow to drop his public membership and to go underground but to keep supplying the USSR with information.  The FBI and other US intelligence agencies have never publicly said which they believe happened.  But to me it is clear that he was an idealist and at least passively allowed agents of the USSR to continue to operate in his social, family, educational circles and IMO, most likely within the various parts of the US atomic bomb program.

   I urge anyone that is interested in this to go look up the names that I mentioned and the Vernona records and other items and read them for yourself and not to rely on the various claims, disclaimers and accusations that have been floating around for the last 50 years and certainly do not relay on Hollywood to tell you the truth!  The book 'The Brother' is a great place to start and fully discloses how the Soviet spy agencies actually operated in the US in those years, including how they recruited "useful idiots" (their term for their American partners) and how they communicated and how many of both the Americans and the soviet agents were eventually caught and a lot of other necessary background material.  Here are two more useful links http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page66.html#_ftn3 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers. Yes, my kin is listed there but I won't say who it is. 

[coppice]

They were strange times. Just after the 2nd World War the British government gave the USSR extensive access to their most advanced technologies, like jet engines. This included detailed plans and manufacturing information for Rolls Royce's latest models. It appears almost everyone on all sides scratched their heads over just why this would be done, but it did happen. The Russians must have put the knowledge in the right hands, because it didn't take them long to have their own jet fighter so good it gave the US a very hard time in Korea.

[2N3055]

Probably the biography of Richard Feynman is a more interesting read if you want to have some insight into the effort it took to design the first atom bomb.

Dialog being drowned out by music and sound effects is symptomatic nowadays. Many TV series suffer from it as well. That is the reason I download everything and pull the audio through a band pass filter from 500Hz to 4kHz to make the dialogs come out better.

Agree.
Everybody should read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!".

And old Yamaha receiver I have have has a program that suppresses that automatically. Need I say that is on most of the time, and even when I enable full surround, I deliberately attenuate sub in volume because most of the time it is just mental...

[Stray Electron]

   You can now read many of the Vernona transcripts directly on the NSA's (No Such Agency. LOL! ) website  <https://www.nsa.gov/Helpful-Links/NSA-FOIA/Declassification-Transparency-Initiatives/Historical-Releases/Venona/smdpage14707/14/>

[peter-h]

Stray Electron thank you for such an excellent post, and right on the mark. As ex comm bloc (CZ) this has been an interest of mine since I could read

Even though Oppenheimer does appear on the Venona list (as one might expect) Venona still contains many agents who were never identified. Pity the programme was shut c. 1980 because today's computers are so much more powerful and better able to look for patterns in the "duplicate OTP" traffic. I wonder why not the whole lot has been declassified.

Fuchs gets the "credit" for giving the USSR the bomb and while he gave them the dimensioned drawings they were sure to have got other details from other sources.

[David Hess]

This is almost entirely a character movie about Oppenheimer and how he got shafted after the war, all the commie stuff etc.

I do not understand how you got misled, but that is exactly what I expect the movie to be about based on the title and trailers.  Maybe that is because I am somewhat acquainted with what happened to Oppenheimer?

I tend to be less interested in movies about the engineering of the bombs themselves because they lack detail, and where they include detail they usually get it wrong, perhaps deliberately like Tom Clancy did.

[jonpaul]

 Oppie's great  love Jean Tateloc was a diehard commie.

Testimony of Dr Edward TELLER at Dr O security clearance hearing 1956
asked if he believed Oppenheimer to be a security risk, Teller testifies

“In a great number of cases, I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act – I understand that Dr. Oppenheimer acted – in a way that for me was exceedingly hard to understand.
 I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated.
 To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more.”

https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/oppenheimer-security-hearing/

https://famous-trials.com/oppenheimer/2706-testimony-of-dr-edward-teller-in-the-oppenheimer-hearing

Jon

[mendip_discovery]

And I mentioned annoying. Holy crap, almost the entire film has constant background music that drowns out the dialog. Dialog that should be important and focussed gets downed up.
And not just light background music, BLOODY LOUD, pulsating annoying crap.
Literally floor shaking stuff, I didn’t know my local cinema could go that low in frequency. And I’m, not talking the explosions, I’m talking about important dialog!
You just want to shout at the screen to shut the F up! And for the entire 3 hours.
It does go dead silent in a few places, but not where it needs to, and not even close to enough.
It’s like Nolan is trying to put you inside Oppenheimers head, and he’s got constant migraine headaches, so you have to experience that too.

I have a dad that is deaf in one side and he struggles with these films. Even I do when they insist on "acting" so whisper stuff that would usually be spoken.

I'm not surprised that it is not a film about the science, that would require writers that care about source material. There have been many films that turned me off as soon as I realised it wasn't about the subject of the film but some random shoehorned need to have a love interest or some sort of conspiracy for example "Imitation Game". The only program in recent years that I really enjoyed for the information and background it provided was the Chernobyl TV series, it wasn't exact on the science but it gave enough that I felt better informed while also being entertained with some great stories. By the way, I enjoy tales of WW2 and I really disliked the Dunkirk film as well as that Peal Harbour one.

[nctnico]

You can't expect movies to be documentaries 

[HighVoltage]

I have not seen the movie and still look forward to it.

In the late 80' I visited Los Alamos several times, because I was so fascinated by the trinity project. In addition, the junk yard next to the labs had so many jewels of stuff, I could have stayed there for days. Even bought a few things out of the times from the early lab days.

A year later I met Edward Teller in the Market Cafe in Santa Fe, where he was a regular guest, and we had only a short conversation, but it was really cool, since I was so much interested in this subject.

The trailer intrigued me.
But I was expecting also technical and physics to be shown.
At least now, I will not be too disappointed.
Thanks for your summary, Dave!

[BrianHG]

The actual science behind the lens implosion plutonium bomb:

[EEVblog]

This is almost entirely a character movie about Oppenheimer and how he got shafted after the war, all the commie stuff etc.

I do not understand how you got misled, but that is exactly what I expect the movie to be about based on the title and trailers.  Maybe that is because I am somewhat acquainted with what happened to Oppenheimer?

Is there another trailer I missed?
Almost the entire movie is about the commie scare.

[EEVblog]

You can't expect movies to be documentaries 

At least throw us a few bones?

[BrianHG]

You can't expect movies to be documentaries 

At least throw us a few bones?

Imax films which are documentaries do exist.  Looks like if you want the entire deal, you will have to wait or search for a good BBC / PBS documentary.  Even the clip I placed 3 posts above has more technical info on the design difficulties and inner secrets of the implosion style bomb than most documentaries.  So, maybe some Youtube video might have even more technical interesting stuff compared to any big production style docus.

[langwadt]

Basically nothing for technical minded people to get excited over, and certainly nothing for those like me with an interest in the history of nuclear development.

making a movies that get technical people excited probably isn't you best bet on making hundreds of millions at the box office

[vad]

A scene with Oppenheimer and Truman in the oval office is great.

The best scene in the movie, in my opinion, features Gary Oldman portraying Truman.

Edit: PS. For those who are not familiar with Gary’s career, he is best known for his exceptional portrayal of villains in numerous films.

[David Hess]

making a movies that get technical people excited probably isn't you best bet on making hundreds of millions at the box office

When I was a teenager, I got excited that PBS was going to do an episode of some science show about fluorescent lamps.  I was looking forward to technical details which would allow me to design an electronic ballast.  Wow, I was sure disappointed.  After that, I gave up on anything being technically interesting on TV, and movies, which has so far remained the case.

[DavidAlfa]

It's a great movie, but being the history of the damn atomic bomb, I was expecting more action and deeper technical details about the process, not so much moral objection and politics!

It was a little like The Martian (Matt Damon), absolute great movie but would have reached perfection without the "6 months later" thing, not just planting potatoes and ta-da!.
Anyways, easy fix ! 
 

[Veteran68]

The wife and I just got back from seeing it today.

While there were a few moments where the dialog was quiet and hard to hear, I didn't notice such an overwhelming soundtrack as Dave points out.

For someone who isn't a history buff, at 3 hours it's probably not an enjoyable movie. My wife lost interest pretty quickly and struggled to keep up. While I enjoyed it myself, I would have liked to see more focus on the engineering and less of the political/commie/railroad aspects.

[vk6zgo]

And I mentioned annoying. Holy crap, almost the entire film has constant background music that drowns out the dialog. Dialog that should be important and focussed gets downed up.
And not just light background music, BLOODY LOUD, pulsating annoying crap.
Literally floor shaking stuff, I didn’t know my local cinema could go that low in frequency. And I’m, not talking the explosions, I’m talking about important dialog!
You just want to shout at the screen to shut the F up! And for the entire 3 hours.
It does go dead silent in a few places, but not where it needs to, and not even close to enough.
It’s like Nolan is trying to put you inside Oppenheimers head, and he’s got constant migraine headaches, so you have to experience that too.

I have a dad that is deaf in one side and he struggles with these films. Even I do when they insist on "acting" so whisper stuff that would usually be spoken.

I'm not surprised that it is not a film about the science, that would require writers that care about source material. There have been many films that turned me off as soon as I realised it wasn't about the subject of the film but some random shoehorned need to have a love interest or some sort of conspiracy for example "Imitation Game". The only program in recent years that I really enjoyed for the information and background it provided was the Chernobyl TV series, it wasn't exact on the science but it gave enough that I felt better informed while also being entertained with some great stories. By the way, I enjoy tales of WW2 and I really disliked the Dunkirk film as well as that Peal Harbour one.

If you want a fairly good film about Pearl Harbour, you can't go much past "Tora!Tora!Tora!".
It fairly closely followed the various historical accounts.

Of course, it did have one blooper which was immediately obvious to 1960's radio people.
As the Japanese aircraft formation swept across the Hawaiian landscape, a microwave comms site was clearly visible on one of the hilltops!

[VK3DRB]

This is a tough call... Barbie or Oppenheimer?

On second thoughts, I'll leave the Barbie movie to the Apple fanboys

[Bud]

Watch "Blackberry". In the final scene the CEO goes through a load of defective blackberry devices received from China factory and tweaks each device with a screwdriver 

[.RC.]

Probably just that for the vast majority of people, they are not that interested in technical stuff and why movies are what they are. 

I found this entertaining though. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYu7z3I8tdEnTQMXpP6gYN9DVm_DjXza9

[EEVblog]

This is a tough call... Barbie or Oppenheimer?

[EEVblog]

Ben Heck nails it.

[BrianHG]

Ben Heck nails it.

  And I was getting ready to go into town where we have a real IMAX dome to see this with an old engineering buddy.  I'm getting the feeling that the documentaries I have on the subject from a site called MVGroup would be a superior use of our time.

[BrianHG]

Everything Oppenheimer Gets Right And Wrong About The True Story

[JPortici]

seriously, what did you expect from a nolan flick?
I have no plan to pay to see this movie on a cinema, as i expect many of the memes to be accurate (all the greentexts with holliwood dialogue cliché)
after the dark knight all his movies have been the same, half fine half a huge disappointment

[dietert1]

Let the sun shine on some weed.
As a boy i learned about Oppenheimer at school and it was about responsability.
- Heinar Kipphardt: In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer
- Max Frisch: Die Physiker
Some days ago i listened to a 1968 interview of Werner Heisenberg on Youtube. The science work to establish nuclear fission as an energy source was done by Otto Hahn and his fellows. There were some sentences about how german physicists escaped from doing what Oppenheimer and his fellows did.

Regards, Dieter

[fourfathom]

The film is titled "Oppenheimer", not "How We Made The Bomb".  It is based on the book "American Prometheus", which is a biography of Oppenheimer.  I plan to watch it, and expect that it will be mostly about the man.  BTW, the saga of Oppenheimer and his reputation has seen much evolution.  I recall, back in the year 1969, seeing a play "In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer" (I was 14 or 15).  It's tied into the whole McCarthy era which has also undergone many changes in interpretation over the years.

[mengfei]

Movies/ Film are made to Entertain the masses & rake in a lot of Moola for the producers

that's all there is to it.   

[dietert1]

The saga of Barbie and her reputation has seen much evolution, too. That's why it needs the movie.
By the way: "In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer" is the english translation of "In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer". It's the play by Heinar Kipphardt i mentioned before.

Regards, Dieter

[David Hess]

Movies/ Film are made to Entertain the masses & rake in a lot of Moola for the producers

For an example, Dredd wasn't, and it failed because its intended audience was too small for its budget.

[Stray Electron]

Stray Electron thank you for such an excellent post, and right on the mark. As ex comm bloc (CZ) this has been an interest of mine since I could read

Even though Oppenheimer does appear on the Venona list (as one might expect) Venona still contains many agents who were never identified. Pity the programme was shut c. 1980 because today's computers are so much more powerful and better able to look for patterns in the "duplicate OTP" traffic. I wonder why not the whole lot has been declassified.

Fuchs gets the "credit" for giving the USSR the bomb and while he gave them the dimensioned drawings they were sure to have got other details from other sources.

   You really should read David Greenglass' book!  David was only a machinist on the atomic bomb program and most of the security people and upper management didn't think that he had disclosed anything of any great importance to the Soviets. But years later David reproduced the hand made drawings that he delivered to the soviets via the Rosenbergs and when the reproduced drawings were shown to some of the atomic scientists, they were SHOCKED by what he knew and was able to disclose.  Fuchs was able to give the Soviets a lot of the theory of the Bomb but Greenglass  was able to give them drawing for the implosion design that made the bomb possible. David and other low level employees provided many details about many of the other parts that made the bomb a practical device.

[coppice]

Stray Electron thank you for such an excellent post, and right on the mark. As ex comm bloc (CZ) this has been an interest of mine since I could read

Even though Oppenheimer does appear on the Venona list (as one might expect) Venona still contains many agents who were never identified. Pity the programme was shut c. 1980 because today's computers are so much more powerful and better able to look for patterns in the "duplicate OTP" traffic. I wonder why not the whole lot has been declassified.

Fuchs gets the "credit" for giving the USSR the bomb and while he gave them the dimensioned drawings they were sure to have got other details from other sources.

   You really should read David Greenglass' book!  David was only a machinist on the atomic bomb program and most of the security people and upper management didn't think that he had disclosed anything of any great importance to the Soviets. But years later David reproduced the hand made drawings that he delivered to the soviets via the Rosenbergs and when the reproduced drawings were shown to some of the atomic scientists, they were SHOCKED by what he knew and was able to disclose.  Fuchs was able to give the Soviets a lot of the theory of the Bomb but Greenglass  was able to give them drawing for the implosion design that made the bomb possible. David and other low level employees provided many details about many of the other parts that made the bomb a practical device.

It takes some major arrogance to be that bad at security. Its commonplace, though, whether its national security issues, or industrial espionage.

[mendip_discovery]

It takes some major arrogance to be that bad at security. Its commonplace, though, whether its national security issues, or industrial espionage.

I get regularly left in rooms where if I wanted to I could walk away with some protected stuff. Though just going onto a site where anything American military is made I have to do some security checks but once past that it's fairly open. I have been left in rooms with scaled detailed drawings of things. I did have to ask a customer once if they wanted to clean the whiteboard before I work in a room.

People who are good at social engineering can get into some amazing spaces with just a bit of charm and high vis and clipboard.

[Stray Electron]

It takes some major arrogance to be that bad at security. Its commonplace, though, whether its national security issues, or industrial espionage.

   I really don't think that the Americans were that bad at security but you have to remember that there were MANY tens of thousands of people working on the various parts of the atomic and hydrogen bomb projects and you can't watch everybody all of the time.  Also the agents didn't have to deliver actual Secret Documents. Some like Greenglass simply sketched out the shape of the nuclear pits and explosive lens segments that he had fabricated and that was enough to lead the Soviet scientists down the right path about what it took to make an implosion type device. That one disclosure alone probably saved the Soviets over a year of development time on their own bomb.

  What surprises me is that the Greenglasses and the Resenbergs and many others had been born in the US and of European parents who had come to the US as refugees (not immigrants but laterally refugees) from Russia and other despotic European countries, but yet they choose to commit espionage against the country to had taken them in and sheltered them. And, quite often, on behalf of the same country that their parents had fled in the first place!

[David Hess]

What surprises me is that the Greenglasses and the Resenbergs and many others had been born in the US and of European parents who had come to the US as refugees (not immigrants but laterally refugees) from Russia and other despotic European countries, but yet they choose to commit espionage against the country to had taken them in and sheltered them. And, quite often, on behalf of the same country that their parents had fled in the first place!

MICE - A mnemonic device used in counterintelligence training to remind trainees of the four general motivations that could lead someone to commit treason, become an insider threat, or collaborate with a hostile agency or organization. It stands for Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego.

It takes some major arrogance to be that bad at security. Its commonplace, though, whether its national security issues, or industrial espionage.

At some point you have to trust someone or suffer limiting progress.  The film Fat Man and Little Boy touches on this with the conflict between Groves and Oppenheimer.

There are also advantages to less security, or at least less classification.  UK industries were held back compared to US ones after World War 2 because the UK kept so much more wartime development classified.

[langwadt]

It takes some major arrogance to be that bad at security. Its commonplace, though, whether its national security issues, or industrial espionage.

   I really don't think that the Americans were that bad at security but you have to remember that there were MANY tens of thousands of people working on the various parts of the atomic and hydrogen bomb projects and you can't watch everybody all of the time.  Also the agents didn't have to deliver actual Secret Documents. Some like Greenglass simply sketched out the shape of the nuclear pits and explosive lens segments that he had fabricated and that was enough to lead the Soviet scientists down the right path about what it took to make an implosion type device. That one disclosure alone probably saved the Soviets over a year of development time on their own bomb.

  What surprises me is that the Greenglasses and the Resenbergs and many others had been born in the US and of European parents who had come to the US as refugees (not immigrants but laterally refugees) from Russia and other despotic European countries, but yet they choose to commit espionage against the country to had taken them in and sheltered them. And, quite often, on behalf of the same country that their parents had fled in the first place!

maybe they considered that a single country with the nuclear bomb and no possible opposition could end really bad

[David Hess]

maybe they considered that a single country with the nuclear bomb and no possible opposition could end really bad

Some individuals thought that, or claimed to, but US leadership sure did not.

Now if the Soviets had been the only country to have an atomic bomb, they would have used it after the war.  There is a story illustrating why:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Article

[magic]

  What surprises me is that the Greenglasses and the Resenbergs and many others had been born in the US and of European parents who had come to the US as refugees (not immigrants but laterally refugees) from Russia and other despotic European countries, but yet they choose to commit espionage against the country to had taken them in and sheltered them. And, quite often, on behalf of the same country that their parents had fled in the first place!

I presume they fled from tsarist Russia and spied for the commies, so it sorta makes sense. Doubly so if you know that their names aren't exactly Russian names and have enough familiarity with early 20th cerntury realities and/or prejudice to know what it means

[DavidAlfa]

The film is titled "Oppenheimer", not "How We Made The Bomb".

Touché. We can close the thread now, there's no argument against that 

[dietert1]

They made the bomb since they were afraid of others having it first and then using it. Similar idea. They had no other choice.
In the end US leadership became the only ones who used nuclear weapons against humans (until today). Once more no other choice..

Regards, Dieter

[peter-h]

I recommend a book by Max Hastings: Nemesis. It covers the issue well.

Historians will debate for ever the point at which Japan would have capitulated "eventually".

[mendip_discovery]

There are also advantages to less security, or at least less classification.  UK industries were held back compared to US ones after World War 2 because the UK kept so much more wartime development classified.

You mean like the computer made by some post office people and a great mathematician.

Then there was the issue around Frank Whittle's little project.

Movies/ Film are made to Entertain the masses & rake in a lot of Moola for the producers

Yeah, that is working great at the moment. Can't wait for the reboot of BttF.

btw Tora!Tora!Tora! is a great film. I love all the older war films, they told a story and helped me get a general idea of what happened. I will hold judgement on this film as I may watch it and really enjoy it.

[DavidAlfa]

Once more no other choice..

I hope my irony detector worked...
Japan was already in ruins, nothing left except the pride and the honour built in their cultural roots, they had already accepted a conditional surrender, but US wanted it all at any costs, it was like beating a terminal person during his last breaths.
Nuke bombing should be considered War Crimes, but no problem because there was not Geneva Convention back then .
Unlike told in the film, Tokyo wasn't nuked because it was already flattened down by previous bombs, there was nothing left to destroy and show the nuke power, everything there had to be rebuilt after the war, including the ancient buildings.


The Air Force kept bombing, cities were dissapearing day after day, they literally had to beg to have something to drop the nuke at.

[David Hess]

Oppenheimer has a lot more to answer for.

[helius]

That's completely correct. The motivation for the two atomic bombs was as a "demonstration" to chasten Stalin (who cancelled plans for a Soviet invasion of northern Japan after Nagasaki). It had nothing to do with defeating the Japanese, although the civilians who survived the blasts were useful test subjects for studying radiation effects. The Manhattan Project itself was proposed to reduce the risk of Hitler building and using an atomic bomb: but in the end, after SHAFE had intelligence on the Germans (including Heisenberg's) ignorance about all the practical issues involved, so disposing of the threat of a Nazi bomb, the project was pushed on to completion and its patrons wanted a battlefield demonstration.

You see the same kind of thinking today, revealed by leaked State Department memos concerning the Ukraine SMO. The NATO policy was designed as a show of force to deter China exerting power in the Pacific; the prospects of actual victory on the battlefield aren't part of the calculation.

John Pilger made a much better documentary about nuclear weapons development.

[vad]

The justification for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to prevent the Allies from having to invade Japan by land, which could have resulted in an estimated million deaths, including casualties on both sides. Additionally, it spared millions of Japanese from potential enslavement under the Soviet Union, had Russian soldiers invaded the island.

The number of civilian casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was comparable to the casualties caused by conventional air raids on other cities during that time. Nothing out of ordinary that might have impressed Joseph Stalin, who was used to murdering millions without a hiccup.

It is a tragic reality that in war, civilian casualties occur, but it is essential to remember that those responsible for initiating the conflict bear the greatest responsibility for all the lives lost. The US did not attack Japan unprovoked; it was Japan that initiated hostilities. Therefore, Japanese leaders are accountable for all the casualties that followed.

Similarly, in the case of Ukraine and Russia, it was Russia that invaded Ukraine in 2014. The Russian regime must be held fully responsible for all the lives lost during this war.

In summary, while the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had devastating consequences, they were undertaken to avoid an even greater loss of life through a potential land invasion.

[langwadt]

That's completely correct. The motivation for the two atomic bombs was as a "demonstration" to chasten Stalin (who cancelled plans for a Soviet invasion of northern Japan after Nagasaki). It had nothing to do with defeating the Japanese, although the civilians who survived the blasts were useful test subjects for studying radiation effects. The Manhattan Project itself was proposed to reduce the risk of Hitler building and using an atomic bomb: but in the end, after SHAFE had intelligence on the Germans (including Heisenberg's) ignorance about all the practical issues involved, so disposing of the threat of a Nazi bomb, the project was pushed on to completion and its patrons wanted a battlefield demonstration.

it ended the war in the pacific and since then everyone knows starting world war isn't an option

stopping the project thinking that then no one else would figure out how to build a nuclear bomb would have monumentally stupid

[nctnico]

That's completely correct. The motivation for the two atomic bombs was as a "demonstration" to chasten Stalin (who cancelled plans for a Soviet invasion of northern Japan after Nagasaki). It had nothing to do with defeating the Japanese, although the civilians who survived the blasts were useful test subjects for studying radiation effects. The Manhattan Project itself was proposed to reduce the risk of Hitler building and using an atomic bomb: but in the end, after SHAFE had intelligence on the Germans (including Heisenberg's) ignorance about all the practical issues involved, so disposing of the threat of a Nazi bomb, the project was pushed on to completion and its patrons wanted a battlefield demonstration.

it ended the war in the pacific and since then everyone knows starting world war isn't an option

stopping the project thinking that then no one else would figure out how to build a nuclear bomb would have monumentally stupid

There are different opinions on whether the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually ended the war. After all, the Japanese where not very willing to give up and fought fiercely. The two nuclear bombs only affected a relatively small area of the country and it would have taken many more nuclears bombs to deliver a serious blow. Some say the Japanese would have surrendered to the US anyway because the Japanese feared the Russians attacking & occupying Japan more. History has shown that Russia is hard to beat due to the sheer numerical advantage where it comes to foot soldiers; the Japanese would not have stood any chance. In WWII the Russians lost most soldiers by far (around 8 times more compared to Japan). And the Russians where still standing strong...

[HuronKing]

The most sobering statistic about the US military's expectation of an invasion of Japan is the fact that, to this day, the Purple Hearts manufactured in preparation for the invasion are still being issued to American servicemembers (approximately 500,000 leftover by the end of WW2):
https://www.americanheritage.com/half-million-purple-hearts

One other thing that often gets brought up is this passage from the US Strategic Bombing Survey:

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

But, the war ended in August. I cannot fathom a scenario for either Japan or the United States in which it is preferable for the war to drag on through August... September... October... under relentless conventional bombing, with a naval starvation blockade of the Japanese home islands, and 1 million+ Japanese soldiers still fighting in China.

Bringing it back to Oppenheimer himself, he recognized the incongruity of everyone expecting him to feel guilty about developing the bomb when one city after another was being leveled by the USAAF as a matter of policy. He said later in life,

The whole damn thing [his security hearing] was a farce, and these people are trying to make a tragedy out of it. ... I had never said that I had regretted participating in a responsible way in the making of the bomb. I said that perhaps he [Kipphardt] had forgotten Guernica, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Dachau, Warsaw, and Tokyo; but I had not, and that if he found it so difficult to understand, he should write a play about something else.

PS
I had the opportunity to meet Col. Paul Tibbets (pilot of the Enola Gay) as a youngster. He said he never regretted his role in ending the war.

[dietert1]

Todays news are "Explosives discovered at Zaporizhzhia plant" and Israel is becoming a nuclear monster similar to Iran or North Korea. It all started in Los Alamos, in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki. Nothing to be proud of.

Regards, Dieter

[SiliconWizard]

They made the bomb since they were afraid of others having it first and then using it. Similar idea. They had no other choice.
In the end US leadership became the only ones who used nuclear weapons against humans (until today). Once more no other choice..

Regards, Dieter

If you say so. We always have a choice.
But that's way beyond discussing a movie anyway.

[ledtester]

As reported in CNN... the US flag isn't correct for 1945:

[armandine2]

The cinema was packed, and when I came out I heard many say the likes of “that was dumb”, “that’s not what I expected”, “I didn’t get it”, “weird” etc.

That's going to be my response, when I see Barbie 

[Circlotron]

ABC radio had a good 52 minute long article on Oppenheimer's life.

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/oppenheimer/102625158

[coppice]

Todays news are "Explosives discovered at Zaporizhzhia plant" and Israel is becoming a nuclear monster similar to Iran or North Corea. It all started in Los Alamos, in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki. Nothing to be proud of.

Regards, Dieter

Nothing to be ashamed of, either. The positions of Israel, Iran, North Korea (or did you mean Chick Corea?) and others would be pretty much the same today, with or without Oppenheimer and the team around him. You need an extreme level of arrogance to think progress depends on any one person or group. We celebrate the first, but the second is never far behind.

[David Hess]

There are different opinions on whether the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually ended the war. After all, the Japanese where not very willing to give up and fought fiercely. The two nuclear bombs only affected a relatively small area of the country and it would have taken many more nuclears bombs to deliver a serious blow.

The Japanese could not know how many bombs we had.

Some say the Japanese would have surrendered to the US anyway because the Japanese feared the Russians attacking & occupying Japan more.

The two dropped bombs could have provided the excuse the Japanese needed to unconditionally surrender before the Russians got involved without excessive humiliation.

[helius]

Rather, an extreme level of arrogance would more properly be defined as the stolid certainty that history is determined by impersonal forces; at one time this was called "dialectical materialism" and was the offical party line of a large swath of the planet.

[dietert1]

Today i learned that Oppenheimer and many others at the Manhatten project were jewish. Seems like they joined in order to nuke Hitler for revenge, yet they were late and the Soviets had already taken Berlin. Then unexpected things happened.

Regards, Dieter

[coppice]

Rather, an extreme level of arrogance would more properly be defined as the stolid certainty that history is determined by impersonal forces; at one time this was called "dialectical materialism" and was the offical party line of a large swath of the planet.

That makes zero sense. The Hegelian idea of a natural path of history, which uses people and then discards them has nothing to do with the block stacking nature of scientific and engineering progress. Unless there is a huge setback - e.g. the dark ages that followed the Romans - at any point in time most of the blocks are in place for something new, and there are always smart motivated people trying to put more blocks into place. They might succeed next year, they might do it in 10 years, but they won't take an awfully long time.

[EEVblog]

I discovered a new type of rabbid comment fanboy, Christopher Nolan fans 

[DavidAlfa]

I can't undertand how people switch sides so easily.
No doubt his last films were a bit flimsy, but how about Memento, The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkerque... most were absolute masterpieces!

[KE5FX]

The Prestige puts them all to shame, IMO.

[HuronKing]

The Prestige puts them all to shame, IMO.

I once made my lab students watch that for extra credit. 

[HuronKing]

I can't undertand how people switch sides so easily.
No doubt his last films were a bit flimsy, but how about Memento, The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkerque... most were absolute masterpieces!

"You're only as good as your last movie."

[HighVoltage]

When I was in 10th grade in Germany, we had to read Robert Jungk' Book from 1956,

"Heller als Tausend Sonnen"
"Brighter than a 1000 Suns"

This book got me started looking into the field of nuclear physics and got me hooked.
Probably still a good book to read.

I just booked tickets for the 50mm version of the Oppenheimer movie for next week.

[MadTux]

The fact alone, that this Nolan guy puts digital nixie clocks back into 1945 makes it unwatchable for me.
https://youtu.be/9O2GXfiiNw4?t=69

Nolan, basically Michael Bay of science fiction/historical movies, big boom but no substance.

[Sal Ammoniac]

I saw the movie last night.

I generally don't care for movies with multiple, disjoint timelines. This one has four going on: 1930s, early 1940s, late 1940s, mid 1950s, with three in color and one in black & white. A confusing mess if you aren't already familiar with Oppenheimer's story. Too much jumping around.

IMO, too much emphasis on the security clearance/commie stuff and almost nothing about the design of the bomb and the work required to separate U-235 and make plutonium. I suppose the rationale behind this decision was that it would be over the heads of the vast majority of the potential audience. Most of the famous physicists (Bohr, Einstein, Fermi, Szilard) only get cameos and only Rabi gets any real screen time.

[DavidAlfa]

Sometimes I think having slighly more working neurons than the average is more like a punishment that a benefits, films are made for empty skulls, so they don't understand sht but "Wow the music was loud!" 9 of 10!
(Not too vain, just 2 or more neurons, as I stopped drinking like an Irishmen at pretty young age LOL)

If you didn't see it and feel ashamed after viewing Oppenheimer and seekign for something good, I highly recommend Ex-Machina if you didn't watch it.
It's great and after several years I think it's time to watch it again!

[KE5FX]

The fact alone, that this Nolan guy puts digital nixie clocks back into 1945 makes it unwatchable for me.
https://youtu.be/9O2GXfiiNw4?t=69

Nolan, basically Michael Bay of science fiction/historical movies, big boom but no substance.

Michael Bay?!  That's not a fair assessment of Nolan, whatever you like/dislike about his work. 

Wikipedia says that similar tubes were patented in the 1930s, but there's no citation, or even a [Citation Needed] flag before I added one just now.  Back then, defense applications were still the literal bleeding edge of technology.  If anyone had access to numeric display tubes in the WWII era, it would've been these guys. 

Plus, they look cool.  I'll allow it.

[coppice]

The fact alone, that this Nolan guy puts digital nixie clocks back into 1945 makes it unwatchable for me.
https://youtu.be/9O2GXfiiNw4?t=69

Nolan, basically Michael Bay of science fiction/historical movies, big boom but no substance.

Michael Bay?!  That's not a fair assessment of Nolan, whatever you like/dislike about his work. 

Wikipedia says that similar tubes were patented in the 1930s, but there's no citation, or even a [Citation Needed] flag before I added one just now.  Back then, defense applications were still the literal bleeding edge of technology.  If anyone had access to numeric display tubes in the WWII era, it would've been these guys. 

Plus, they look cool.  I'll allow it.

Nolan is another character like Ridley Scott. His movies are all over the place, between excellent and utter garbage. Do these people have a very inconsistent output, or are they low calibre people who sometimes strike lucky and work with really good people?

Nixies date from Burroughs in the mid 50s, but there were incandescent displays where the digits are actually formed by filaments before that. They can look similar to nixies in pictures, although clearly different in real life. Since they didn't run the filament super hot, I expect their lifetime was quite reasonable. Digital displays pre-date digital electronics, as they were needed for use in relay logic systems.

[MadTux]

HP frequency counters, 10 years later, barely had nixies.
7 years later, 80kg box, for 8 digits, with neon indicator lamps.
https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/wa_pages/wall_a_page_11.htm
https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/hewlett_pa_frequency_counter_524a.html

Nixie tubes in 1945 is just like Battle of Britain, but with F104G and English Electric Lightning.
Or "Das Boot" with a Type XXI submarine, utter garbage!

Can't stand that Nolan guy, Dark Knight might have been a decent movie, the rest is just over hyped, pretentious Nolan ego cyclejerk.
If even the writing would be good, but not even that, weird pseudo-intellectual pseudo-scientifically accurate garbage from confused overinflated Nolan mind.
Best example, Interstellar, better watch Alien, if you want good, hard, entertaining Science-Fiction.

[HuronKing]

I saw the movie on Monday. I liked it a lot - probably one of the most important and most intellectual mainstream movies to come out in the last 10 years. It's getting people to talk about quantum physics, the men and women connected to Oppenheimer, and reminding the world of one of the biggest existential threats that face our existence - nuclear weapons.  It may not be an intentional parallel but I can see the lessons of Oppenheimer applied to climate change as well. Science has unlocked wonderful secrets and technology (combustion engines, electronics, and globalization) but those things are also existential threats facing the planet that scientists are trying to warn about while political interests try to ignore or suppress the danger.

I think its fantastic that this movie exists - its about Oppenheimer - not the Manhattan Project. His life didn't end at Los Alamos... it ended when his security clearance was revoked. The movie is about Oppenheimer's journey, his perspective, and Lewis Strauss' efforts to discredit him and other scientific philosophers who tried to oppose militarism in the atomic age.

I gotta thank you all for the laugh though.
"OMG! They had Nixie tubes in 1945! W0rst m0v1e ev3r!"

If you're watching a dramatization of the g*ddamn Trinity Test... and this is the takeaway... I dunno that Nolan or anyone else is capable of making the nerds happy. 

There are artistic flaws with the movie (I agree with Dave that the music was way too obnoxious during character conversations) and the movie assumes you have a basic understanding of Oppy's biography when the movie starts. But, making a faithful adaptation of American Prometheus (fantastic book BTW) is no easy feat. Short of breaking up the movie into multiple parts or a miniseries, I thought Nolan did a fine job and Cillian Murphy better win an Oscar.

[msuffidy]

Well murdering your prof with cyanide is a pretty big personal error up there with random bombings. I am GUESSING that didn't really happen? It is probably somewhere between reality and a sort of posh stereotype of being a physicist. And most people probably don't get Tinnitus disorders probably when imagining atomic psychics.

[EEVblog]

I think its fantastic that this movie exists - its about Oppenheimer - not the Manhattan Project. His life didn't end at Los Alamos... it ended when his security clearance was revoked. The movie is about Oppenheimer's journey, his perspective, and Lewis Strauss' efforts to discredit him and other scientific philosophers who tried to oppose militarism in the atomic age.

His life also would never have been of any mainstream importance were it not for the Manhatten project. That is the reason this movie was made and he was on the cover of Time magazine, and was one of the most well known people on the planet after it.
And his life didn't end after the security clearance was revoked. That really had no impact on anything in terms of his relevance to the public.

[EEVblog]

and the movie assumes you have a basic understanding of Oppy's biography when the movie starts.

Which is essentially zero people watching it.
They should have had info text on the screen with dates and what the scenes were about.

[Stray Electron]

Today i learned that Oppenheimer and many others at the Manhatten project were jewish. Seems like they joined in order to nuke Hitler for revenge, yet they were late and the Soviets had already taken Berlin. Then unexpected things happened.

Regards, Dieter

   You show an amazing lack of any knowledge of the development of atomic bomb. Einstein, and huge number of the other leading scientists were Jewish but they didn't get involved in the bomb project as some sort of revenge against Hitler. They have all been involved in research into atomic physics long before the war and most even before Hitler started oppressing the German Jews in roughly 1938. And don't forget that if that they had wished that the US to drop an atomic bomb on Hitler, it would have meant killed huge numbers of European Jews as well. And probably some of the European families of the atomic scientists. So dropping an atomic bomb on Germany purely for revenge WAS NOT something that they wished for.

   But the Jewish atomic scientists were aware of what Hitler was doing to the European Jews and one of their greatest fears was the Hitler would get an atomic bomb first and then become unstoppable and would be able to impose his "final-solution" on the rest of Europe and the rest of the world.  Therefore the Jewish atomic scientists and the American government were determined to built a bomb before the Germans could.

  I suggest that you go read up on the professional careers of Neils Bohr, Erico Fermi, Werner Hisenberg, Leo Szilard and Robert Oppenheimer and some of the other leading scientists involved directly, or indirectly, in the development of the atomic bomb.

   Yes, many of the scientists were Jewish but IMO only because the Jews have always pursued higher educations than non-Jewish. So a disproportionate number of our BEST scientists have always been, and continue to this day to be, Jewish.  Largely in part because historically in Europe the Jews were not allowed own land so they couldn't farm and they were also banned from many other professions so they have been forced to pursue careers as scientists, doctors, lawyers, college professors, and bankers.  All careers that demand a higher than average education.  Another Jew that literally changed the world and that is well worth reading up on is Fritz Haber.

[HuronKing]

I think its fantastic that this movie exists - its about Oppenheimer - not the Manhattan Project. His life didn't end at Los Alamos... it ended when his security clearance was revoked. The movie is about Oppenheimer's journey, his perspective, and Lewis Strauss' efforts to discredit him and other scientific philosophers who tried to oppose militarism in the atomic age.

His life also would never have been of any mainstream importance were it not for the Manhatten project. That is the reason this movie was made and he was on the cover of Time magazine, and was one of the most well known people on the planet after it.
And his life didn't end after the security clearance was revoked. That really had no impact on anything in terms of his relevance to the public.

You're saying his influence on the public and ability to make contributions to science wasn't diminished by being humiliatingly  defrocked as a suspected communist?  Have you read American Prometheus? 

The movie tracks his early years, his rise to fame, and his fall from grace and ability to influence public policy decisions. He never made any more substantial scientific discoveries or made any major policy influence after his clearance was revoked (other than the academic scientific community banding together to trash Lewis Strauss).  The man's life was more than the Manhattan Project even if that's what made him mainstream famous. He made important contributions to quantum physics, he brought quantum physics to America, built the theoretical physics departments at Caltech and UC Berkeley from almost scratch (something the movie somehow manages to make exciting), and of course had difficult personal relationships with many important people that led to his downfall.

Which is essentially zero people watching it.

Audiences disagree. It's one of only 19 movies so far this year to break $100 million on an opening weekend. I tried to buy tickets to see it again and theaters are almost sold out in my area for the next 2 weeks.
The movie also has outstanding scores from both critics and viewers:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/oppenheimer_2023
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15398776/

They should have had info text on the screen with dates and what the scenes were about.

Maybe. On the other hand, it's a challenging movie and audiences might very well be starved these days for some intellectual content that doesn't spoonfeed its message and story.

I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the movie and were perhaps misled by the marketing that the film would focus heavily/exclusively on the technical details of the Manhattan Project. For me, I'm glad a movie about Oppenheimer and based on the comprehensive biography showed that he was *more* than just the Father of the Atomic Bomb... he was also a regular father too.

[fourfathom]

Well murdering your prof with cyanide is a pretty big personal error up there with random bombings. I am GUESSING that didn't really happen?

According to "Modern Prometheus" Oppenheimer did indeed inject some type of poison into his professor's apple, or at least he claimed that he did.  The exact details vary, depending on who is relating the story.  The professor probably didn't eat the apple.  His father pulled strings so that Oppenheimer wasn't expelled or prosecuted, but one of the conditions was that he take psychiatric counseling.  He was definitely a troubled, brilliant, young man.

[TimFox]

Today i learned that Oppenheimer and many others at the Manhatten project were jewish. Seems like they joined in order to nuke Hitler for revenge, yet they were late and the Soviets had already taken Berlin. Then unexpected things happened.

Regards, Dieter

   You show an amazing lack of any knowledge of the development of atomic bomb. Einstein, and huge number of the other leading scientists were Jewish but they didn't get involved in the bomb project as some sort of revenge against Hitler. They have all been involved in research into atomic physics long before the war and most even before Hitler started oppressing the German Jews in roughly 1938. And don't forget that if that they had wished that the US to drop an atomic bomb on Hitler, it would have meant killed huge numbers of European Jews as well. And probably some of the European families of the atomic scientists. So dropping an atomic bomb on Germany purely for revenge WAS NOT something that they wished for.

   But the Jewish atomic scientists were aware of what Hitler was doing to the European Jews and one of their greatest fears was the Hitler would get an atomic bomb first and then become unstoppable and would be able to impose his "final-solution" on the rest of Europe and the rest of the world.  Therefore the Jewish atomic scientists and the American government were determined to built a bomb before the Germans could.

  I suggest that you go read up on the professional careers of Neils Bohr, Erico Fermi, Werner Hisenberg, Leo Szilard and Robert Oppenheimer and some of the other leading scientists involved directly, or indirectly, in the development of the atomic bomb.

   Yes, many of the scientists were Jewish but IMO only because the Jews have always pursued higher educations than non-Jewish. So a disproportionate number of our BEST scientists have always been, and continue to this day to be, Jewish.  Largely in part because historically in Europe the Jews were not allowed own land so they couldn't farm and they were also banned from many other professions so they have been forced to pursue careers as scientists, doctors, lawyers, college professors, and bankers.  All careers that demand a higher than average education.  Another Jew that literally changed the world and that is well worth reading up on is Fritz Haber.

Fritz Haber was a scientific hero of Germany in WWI, but the Nazis cancelled him anyway in 1933.
He was awarded the Iron Cross in 1915, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918.
Hitler's policies were a huge source of talent into British and American universities, including my alma mater (U Chicago).
Many of the scientists on the Manhattan Project were technically enemy aliens at the time.
Heisenberg remained behind in Germany, despite his knowledge of what the Nazis called Jewish science, but was unable to build a working bomb.

[TimFox]

A surprisingly good TV movie about the Manhattan Project is "Day One" from 1989.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097159/
There are a lot of gizmos for those bored by biography.
My favorite scene had several PhDs assembling the physics package for Trinity, while Oppenheimer is pacing nervously behind them until they chase him away.

For the nitpickers:  like most TV movies of that era, much was shot in Canada for tax reasons.
McGill University was the backdrop for stuff that happened at the University of Chicago.
Windsor Station in Montreal served both for Berlin Hauptbahnhof and a rail station in Chicago.
Some have pointed out that the London buses and reel-to-reel tape recorders were anachronistic, along with some inappropriate stock footage of other nuclear blasts.

Brian Dennehy was especially good as General Groves, in an all-star cast.

[dietert1]

Well murdering your prof with cyanide is a pretty big personal error up there with random bombings. I am GUESSING that didn't really happen?

According to "Modern Prometheus" Oppenheimer did indeed inject some type of poison into his professor's apple, or at least he claimed that he did.  The exact details vary, depending on who is relating the story.  The professor probably didn't eat the apple.  His father pulled strings so that Oppenheimer wasn't expelled or prosecuted, but one of the conditions was that he take psychiatric counseling.  He was definitely a troubled, brilliant, young man.

In the ABC radio podcast linked above by Circlotron Oppenheimers biographer Ray Monk reports a second similar attack and that the treatment involved sex with a professional. The term "random bombings" by msuffidy says it all. IMHO scaling up known science from micrograms to kilograms was a technological achievement, not a scientific one.
Today we see the upscaling of AI and nobody can say whether it will be dangerous or important. Depends on whether they can control the chain reaction.

Regards, Dieter

[TimFox]

W Heisenberg, with many talented German engineers, was not able to achieve that scaling, of work originally done in Germany by scientists expelled later from the Reich (and by others who stayed).

[HuronKing]

Here is something different to consider that I can't find any positive research on - if William Shockley had taken any classes from Oppenheimer.

It's entirely possible - Shockley got his B.S. in Physics from Caltech in 1932 and Oppenheimer was a physics lecturer there starting in 1930 teaching courses like Statistical Mechanics, Quantum Theory, and Quantum Radiation.

I wonder if a call to Caltech Admins & Records could demonstrate if Shockley got any tutelage from Oppenheimer. 

[Stray Electron]

Fritz Haber was a scientific hero of Germany in WWI, but the Nazis cancelled him anyway in 1933.
He was awarded the Iron Cross in 1915, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918.

Hitler's policies were a huge source of talent into British and American universities, including my alma mater (U Chicago).

  Fritz Haber was a national hero in Germany between the world wars and Adolf Hitler personally offered to make an exception to the anti-Jewish laws for him but he turned down that offer and wanted to maintain his Jewish identity.

   Absolutely!  I serious doubt that the US could have built the bomb or made many of their other scientific advances without the aid of the very people that the Nazis drove out of Germany!
   Ironic, isn't it?

 

[David Hess]

Scott Manley just did a 20 minute video about the Trinity test which includes as many details about the design and construction as I have seen in one place:

https://youtu.be/H1QuZ6nsC68

I wonder if they still use Kryton switches.  The datasheet he shows confirms that there are at least two different solid state switch designs with the needed performance.

My father worked at LRL and told me the story about the huge photoflash for reconnaissance planes.  I did not know the connection until now.  He never told me exactly what he worked on but I figured it out later.

[msuffidy]

The movie sort of treated the bomb like oh it really worked. I mean when you think of the progression from discovery of fission to bomb, there has to be some logical steps. Like someone must of thought well if we have a lot of fissions in one place it would do basically the same thing as a chemical explosion, but more powerfully. Maybe someone was messing with bringing a certain amount of material together and had a small tactical kind of explosion and people just thought about how to improve it. There may have been a thrust to it for some reason the Nazis were interested in it. Maybe they were brought to it by extraterrestrials. Saying oh we decided to make it is kind of useless because everyone was going to. The world is more fundamentally out of control than people give credit to.

[JPortici]

Stolen from the web 

[David Hess]

Like someone must of thought well if we have a lot of fissions in one place it would do basically the same thing as a chemical explosion, but more powerfully.

That someone was Leo Szilard.  The film Fat Man and Little Boy started off with him.

[TimFox]

When Szilard had his idea about a chain reaction, he filed for a British patent that he assigned to the Admiralty to keep it secret.  He was at the University of Chicago during the war.

[Sal Ammoniac]

Fritz Haber was a national hero in Germany between the world wars and Adolf Hitler personally offered to make an exception to the anti-Jewish laws for him but he turned down that offer and wanted to maintain his Jewish identity.

He did convert to Christianity, so perhaps his Jewish identity really wasn't that important to him.

[Sal Ammoniac]

The movie sort of treated the bomb like oh it really worked.

That was the plutonium implosion bomb. Implosion was required for the plutonium bomb because plutonium had too high a spontaneous fission rate to use the gun mechanism. A lot of theoretical work and engineering went into understanding implosion before a working bomb could be built.

The enriched uranium bomb, however, was considered to be such a sure thing that it wasn't even tested before it was used on Hiroshima.

If you look at the overall history of the Manhattan Project one thing stands out--the numerous unknowns forced the project leadership to hedge their bets by using multiple different techniques simultaneously. For example, plants to separate uranium using gaseous diffusion, thermal diffusion, and electromagnetic separation were all built on industrial scales. And an entirely separate infrastructure was built to produce plutonium and chemically separate it from the reaction byproducts.

[David Hess]

That was the plutonium implosion bomb. Implosion was required for the plutonium bomb because plutonium had too high a spontaneous fission rate to use the gun mechanism. A lot of theoretical work and engineering went into understanding implosion before a working bomb could be built.

The way I remember it from two difference sources is that pure Pu239 could have worked in a gun type design, but their plutonium had too much contaminating Pu240 leading to a high spontaneous fission rate.  The Pu240 is created from Pu239 absorbing a neutron during the production process so to avoid it, a lower concentration of Pu239 has to be accepted for chemical separation lowering throughput.  You can make a lot of Pu239 per batch and accept a higher concentration of Pu240, or make less Pu239 per batch and get a more favorable ratio.

Nuclear weapons intended for naval deployment, where they will be in unavoidable close proximity to personal, use a process that cycles the Pu239 out more often so less Pu240 is produced making the cores are less radioactive.

[dietert1]

Wikipedia describes Szilards early ideas as speculation. The science happened 1938 between Otto Hahn, Fritz Straßmann, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch. Szilard reproduced the results of the german groups in 1939 and later joined the Manhatten project. In the end he opposed using the bomb for military purposes.
When travelling to visit Einstein in the USA Niels Bohr talked about the induced fission results to his former scholar Wheeler and to others. The concept of a controlled nuclear chain reaction is attributed to Enrico Fermi and 1942 they had the first reactor setup in Chicago.

Regards, Dieter

[Veteran68]

Well murdering your prof with cyanide is a pretty big personal error up there with random bombings. I am GUESSING that didn't really happen?

According to "Modern Prometheus" Oppenheimer did indeed inject some type of poison into his professor's apple, or at least he claimed that he did.  The exact details vary, depending on who is relating the story.  The professor probably didn't eat the apple.  His father pulled strings so that Oppenheimer wasn't expelled or prosecuted, but one of the conditions was that he take psychiatric counseling.  He was definitely a troubled, brilliant, young man.

[HuronKing]

Well murdering your prof with cyanide is a pretty big personal error up there with random bombings. I am GUESSING that didn't really happen?

According to "Modern Prometheus" Oppenheimer did indeed inject some type of poison into his professor's apple, or at least he claimed that he did.  The exact details vary, depending on who is relating the story.  The professor probably didn't eat the apple.  His father pulled strings so that Oppenheimer wasn't expelled or prosecuted, but one of the conditions was that he take psychiatric counseling.  He was definitely a troubled, brilliant, young man.

If *some* form of the incident never happened, I wonder why Oppenheimer's parents had to buy off the school to keep him from getting arrested.

It's unclear exactly what he did since according to witnesses Oppenheimer told different people different things... but it is evident he did a naughty whatever it was.

[KE5FX]

That's some impressive string-pulling.  "Uh, Dad, I tried to kill my professor with cyanide and now they're going to kick me out of school.  Bunch of reactionaries.  Can you, you know, say something to somebody?"

[TimFox]

His parents were wealthy.  Enough said.

Szilard and Fermi patented the nuclear pile in the US:  filed 1944 and granted 1955.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2708656A/en

When I got to the University in 1970, the new library built on the site of Stagg Field had just opened.
The last bit of the stands (at 57th and Ellis) was supposed to be gone by then, but there had been a bookstore fire and they kept the run-down building temporarily until the bookstore could reopen.

[peter-h]

Implosion was required for the plutonium bomb because plutonium had too high a spontaneous fission rate to use the gun mechanism.

Curiously that isn't the case. David Hess is right.

You can make a "gun" device but you need a much higher velocity. The resulting device is about 5m long. The US built some mockups and spent a lot of time dropping them to get them to fall in a stable way instead of wobbling. I have a book by a guy who tracked down a lot of the drop sites of various mockup devices (he got the coordinates from a "contact"). Very good read.

Implosion is of course much more compact. As interesting is how they made 155mm shells... this is still well classified but most likely the PU was egg-shaped and charges convert it into a spherical shape. That destroys the shape of the shell of course but it doesn't matter by then.

[msuffidy]

It seems to me that you are working with a bomb material that is pretty much always putting out some neutrons, so you would not like to like just handle it. When you squish it together somehow, all of a sudden so many neutrons are splitting more and more nucleus until there is a lot of energy being created. So it was classified at the time, but like maybe if you had like a vacuum foam bubbles in a sphere and you could just smash it all into a small sphere that would do it. Ideally the geometry would be very regular between the explosives and the metal foam ball, so you don't want like a tube canister between them. Or maybe there could be like a neutron inhibitor that scoots somehow as it is crushed.

[David Hess]

It seems to me that you are working with a bomb material that is pretty much always putting out some neutrons, so you would not like to like just handle it.

The original plutonium samples which were tested came from a giant mass spectrometer used to separate the plutonium, so were pure Pu239 with a very low spontaneous fission rate.  The plutonium that came from the reactor later however had considerable Pu240 and the measured spontaneous fission rate was way too high to support the gun type weapon as designed.  That is when they knew they had a problem and seriously considered the implosion design.

The lower the spontaneous fission rate is, the more time is available to assemble a critical mass.  Real designs include some way to apply a burst of neutrons to the compressed core at the optimum time, and starting out with a higher number of free neutrons produces greater yield.

[Bud]

So many nuclear experts here, what are you guys doing on Electronics forum 

[David Hess]

So many nuclear experts here, what are you guys doing on Electronics forum 

Conversion weapon design is just a hobby.

[DonKu]

"The Day After Trinity" is the story of Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb. The skeletons on sidewalks it shows are suitable for a "Terminator" movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After_Trinity

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22day+after+trinity%22&t=h_&iax=videos&ia=videos

[coppice]

So many nuclear experts here, what are you guys doing on Electronics forum 

There are far more electronics engineers than physicists working on nuclear weapons.

[peter-h]

Seen the movie.

It's not bad although for non-informed viewers it suffers from difficulties in that there is basically no plot; it is just a long strings of events. It is a good attempt at historical accuracy.

The music is too loud in just a few short bits.

[Infraviolet]

"There are far more electronics engineers than physicists working on nuclear weapons."
And then one remembers that some of the most notable books on Electronics were actually written by Physicists.

[coppice]

"There are far more electronics engineers than physicists working on nuclear weapons."
And then one remembers that some of the most notable books on Electronics were actually written by Physicists.

Most of the really good RF engineers I have worked with had physics degrees, and were not eligible to join the relevant UK engineering institution (whose name has changed over time).

[peter-h]

I doubt anybody posting on this thread has any idea of the electronics in a modern atom bomb

And I am sure they have come a long way from a load of krytrons

were not eligible to join the relevant UK engineering institution

They must have felt absolutely terrible to be thus deprived of a real sense of belonging

[coppice]

were not eligible to join the relevant UK engineering institution

They must have felt absolutely terrible to be thus deprived of a real sense of belonging

I know very few electronics engineers who went through the process of becoming a full member of the IEE (its old name). A lot of us joined as student members and that was it. I only found out about the physics people being excluded when I showed minor interest in becoming a full member, and couldn't muster four people who were full members to act as sponsors in a business with hundreds of electronics engineers.

[MadTux]

Fun fact, you could simply build a nuclear weapon with natural uranium back 3.5billion years ago.
Unfortunately the good stuff decays much faster, so much less is present now 

[m98]

I doubt anybody posting on this thread has any idea of the electronics in a modern atom bomb

And I am sure they have come a long way from a load of krytrons

I don't think they would have moved away from Krytrons, or rather Sprytrons. Why would they? Semiconductors are still catching up to their performance for pulsed power switching. Diode laser igniters might be the next technology step, but again, why would they want to innovate something that was probably perfected half a century ago?

[MadTux]

I doubt anybody posting on this thread has any idea of the electronics in a modern atom bomb

And I am sure they have come a long way from a load of krytrons

I don't think they would have moved away from Krytrons, or rather Sprytrons. Why would they? Semiconductors are still catching up to their performance for pulsed power switching. Diode laser igniters might be the next technology step, but again, why would they want to innovate something that was probably perfected half a century ago?

Exactly, wouldn't go boom any different, decrease in size probably only marginal, while huge risk with reliability of designs tested 100s of times in the 1950-1960s...

[peter-h]

Regular tests are taking place these days too, but without the active material. So you can just do it in a bunker.

They must be using MOSFETs or similar nowadays. It is very easy. About 30 years ago I designed a handheld exploder device (these are widely used to trigger demolition/mining charges) and the spec is typically a few hunded volts and a few amps, discharged from a specific capacitor. There is a spec on the V/I profile to be achieved. The krytron or similar device does the job nicely (even at ~10000G for a 155mm shell - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W48) and at the time there was nothing else because valve technology won't deliver high currents. The krytron works by flashing over. There is totally no reason to use them today.

[msuffidy]

"The Day After Trinity" is the story of Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb. The skeletons on sidewalks it shows are suitable for a "Terminator" movie.

Is this it?
https://archive.org/details/thedayaftertrinity

[coppice]

Regular tests are taking place these days too, but without the active material. So you can just do it in a bunker.

They must be using MOSFETs or similar nowadays. It is very easy. About 30 years ago I designed a handheld exploder device (these are widely used to trigger demolition/mining charges) and the spec is typically a few hunded volts and a few amps, discharged from a specific capacitor. There is a spec on the V/I profile to be achieved. The krytron or similar device does the job nicely (even at ~10000G for a 155mm shell - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W48) and at the time there was nothing else because valve technology won't deliver high currents. The krytron works by flashing over. There is totally no reason to use them today.

They have concerns, like radiation hardness, that you might not.

[themadhippy]

like radiation hardness

recall a story from years back were the west was laughing about russia still using valves and wasn't clever enough to use something a bit more modern.

[KE5FX]

(Shrug) Ours still work.  Do theirs? 

[msuffidy]

(Shrug) Ours still work.  Do theirs?

That is a good question. It seems Russia is so dysfunctional they may not really have anything left to send back. That is coincidentally maybe the problem with what is happening right now with hitting Moscow. That is to say all the expensive property in Russia may be keeping nuclear exchange from happening, and is now being attacked anyway. You can't blame Ukraine for wanting some retribution, but it probably is the best way of getting WW3 happening. It may also be an active plan to try to get a war going to save Ukraine.

[peter-h]

The problem is that out of the few k they have, even if only a few work, it will be bad news.

[David Hess]

One reason Russian conventional forces are in such poor shape is that after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia could only afford to maintain their nuclear weapons and launchers first, and their conventional forces second.  They were more confident in their nuclear deterrent defending themselves from the West.

[Wolfram]

Regular tests are taking place these days too, but without the active material. So you can just do it in a bunker.

They must be using MOSFETs or similar nowadays. It is very easy. About 30 years ago I designed a handheld exploder device (these are widely used to trigger demolition/mining charges) and the spec is typically a few hunded volts and a few amps, discharged from a specific capacitor. There is a spec on the V/I profile to be achieved. The krytron or similar device does the job nicely (even at ~10000G for a 155mm shell - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W48) and at the time there was nothing else because valve technology won't deliver high currents. The krytron works by flashing over. There is totally no reason to use them today.

What was the exploder for? Bridgewire detonators as used in nuclear weapons require currents and voltages many orders of magnitude higher than used for regular pyrotechnic ones. From the NWFAQ:

The detonators that fire high explosive implosion systems (exploding wire or
exploding foil detonators) require voltages in the range of (roughly) 2-20
kilovolts, a complete detonating system may draw currents ranging from 10
to 100 kiloamps. Pulse neutron tubes, used to precisely control the
initiation of fission chain reactions, require voltages of 100 to 200
kilovolts, and currents in the ampere range. These currents must be turned
on rapidly and precisely, timing accuracies of tens to hundreds of
nanoseconds are required.

https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Library/Pasley1.html

This is well out of the practical range of solid state switching even today, especially considering the radiation environment.

[KE5FX]

One reason Russian conventional forces are in such poor shape is that after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia could only afford to maintain their nuclear weapons and launchers first, and their conventional forces second.  They were more confident in their nuclear deterrent defending themselves from the West.

Yes, they spent a lot of money on nuclear weapons procurement and maintenance, but how much of that money ended up being used for yacht procurement and maintenance? 

I mean, consider the incentives.   You're an apparatchik in the Russian equivalent of the US Department of Energy.  A large amount of funding for stockpile maintenance crosses your desk.  If you "divert" it, nobody will ever find out... and if they do, it will be the least of your problems (and theirs).  An easy decision to make, it would seem.

[peter-h]

Wolfram - for various reasons I don't believe that is true. There is no reason it should be. Bridgewire detonators are commonly used today.

Also the neutron initiator in implosion devices does not necessarily need any power or any external connection. It can be just squeezed by the implosion, and off it goes all by itself.

More complex designs do involve more complex timed events but those numbers seem totally wrong. Maybe deliberately - as with so much stuff in this business.

There are good reasons terrorists have not managed to get hold of these weapons. It is mostly the material but there is also a lot of detail. Fuchs for example gave the Russians a good start by supplying them with dimensioned drawings, and sure enough their first tested design was a copy.

The guy who wrote that Pasley page admits to not knowing much about anything there. I've read extensively on this topic, and used to work in high voltage, and the idea of those astronomical numbers just to get a detonator to work is bizzare. IMHO somebody made that up on the spot. No argument with the timing precision - tens of ns or better is needed.

[vad]

Radioisotope-based neutron sources, such as PoBe, were superseded by neutron generators capable of delivering many orders of magnitude greater neutron flux with higher timing precision. Neutron generators have a longer lifetime than the decaying isotopes. They also improve the safety of the device. Unlike PoBe beads that can get activated from physical damage (caused by high Gs from an accident, for example), a neutron generator will not work without being energized.

I doubt that krytrons/sprytrons, which are more immune to EMP, have been replaced by IGBTs or FETs.

[dietert1]

..
There are good reasons terrorists have not managed to get hold of these weapons. It is mostly the material but there is also a lot of detail. Fuchs for example gave the Russians a good start by supplying them with dimensioned drawings, and sure enough their first tested design was a copy.
..

You may feel uncomfortable with this, but shouldn't we consider people who used nuclear weapons on towns with hundreds of thousands of people terrorists? Think about it.

Regards, Dieter

[peter-h]

As was correctly pointed out in the film, the same number was killed daily with conventional bombing, and brought Japan no nearer to surrender.

The physical effects were also not much different.

[DonKu]

Yes, that's it.

[coppice]

There are good reasons terrorists have not managed to get hold of these weapons. It is mostly the material but there is also a lot of detail. Fuchs for example gave the Russians a good start by supplying them with dimensioned drawings, and sure enough their first tested design was a copy.

There is one single reason - limited funds. There are a lot of people who could put together a fairly modern weapon, without massive effort. Much simpler techniques now exist than the approaches used in WW2. They were actually developed quite rapidly after the first explosions. Producing suitable material is the stumbling block. You need a large scale industrial activity to produce that. This is why people were so concerned when the USSR crumbled. So much fissile material was poorly managed, there was a real concern that some might get into bad hands, bypassing that industrial scale requirement, and there would have been no stopping them.

[David Hess]

You may feel uncomfortable with this, but shouldn't we consider people who used nuclear weapons on towns with hundreds of thousands of people terrorists? Think about it.

Luckily for those people, they were on the side which won the war.

[Stray Electron]

..
There are good reasons terrorists have not managed to get hold of these weapons. It is mostly the material but there is also a lot of detail. Fuchs for example gave the Russians a good start by supplying them with dimensioned drawings, and sure enough their first tested design was a copy.
..

You may feel uncomfortable with this, but shouldn't we consider people who used nuclear weapons on towns with hundreds of thousands of people terrorists? Think about it.

Regards, Dieter

  I have thought about it and no, I don't consider them terrorists and I consider that view to be asinine.  Why would they be considered any more of a terrorist then anyone that ever bombed a town from the air, or shelled one with a piece of artillery or any of the other million and one ways of attacking a city? Or any target for that matter?

  You clearly have no idea of the definition of a terrorist.

[helius]

A simple dictionary definition would hold a terrorist to be anyone who uses terror (a justified fear of mass torture, death, or worse) as a means to an end. That would include the French Jacobins of the 1790s, Napoleon's armies, the United States Army during the Indian Wars from the 1830s to the 1880s, the Bolsheviks in 1917, both sides of the Spanish Civil War, and many political movements, both hegemonic and subaltern, and various military forces since WW2.

Wikipedia refers to

The term terror bombing is used to describe the strategic bombing of civilian targets without military value, in the hope of damaging an enemy's morale.

There have been attempts to defend the bombing of cities during WW2 as having "military value", but they don't stand up to much scrutiny. In some cases planners justified the presence of rail facilities, mainly used for civilian purposes, as "military targets".

[David Hess]

I have thought about it and no, I don't consider them terrorists and I consider that view to be asinine.  Why would they be considered any more of a terrorist then anyone that ever bombed a town from the air, or shelled one with a piece of artillery or any of the other million and one ways of attacking a city? Or any target for that matter?

Before the war, there was a general consensus that bombing civilian targets was a war crime.  This broke down when all sides discovered that strategic bombers could not reliability hit targets smaller than entire cities, and sometimes even missed those.

The allies committed many war crimes which were never prosecuted.  Often they were deliberately ignored or even covered up by higher authority.

[TimFox]

Before WW II, the Italian general and military theorist Giulio Douhet was a driving force behind the massive use of aircraft in the bombardment of cities.
Douhet believed that bombing cities would totally paralyze industry and the power centers of society, and would decisively undermine the morale of civilians, who would stop supporting their leaders and force them to accept their enemy’s conditions.
During WW II, this didn't seem to work. 
Coventry, London, Dresden, Tokyo, and other strategic bombing campaigns did not appear to force surrenders.
Later, the bombing of North Vietnam had similar results.
Perhaps the only case where a bombing of a civilian target had the desired effect was the nuclear bombing of Japan, but revisionist historians dispute that.

[Bud]

You may feel uncomfortable with this, but shouldn't we consider people who used nuclear weapons on towns with hundreds of thousands of people terrorists? Think about it.

Luckily for those people, they were on the side which won the war.

Next time they may not be that lucky.

[KE5FX]

"Terrorist" traditionally implies a non-state actor.  Of course the distinction is largely lost at the receiving end.

[dietert1]

Nowadays the term "terrorist" is used for state actors (e.g. Russia). It's in the news everyday. So the modern western world considers massive bombing of civilians a cruelty of past ages. Of course, we can never be shure. More than enough nuclear weapons on this planet.
Everybody who has weapons of mass destruction needs to demonstrate they are willing to use them in the most horrible way possible? Obviously those people thought they are exempt from all rules and standards.

Regards, Dieter

[Stray Electron]

"Terrorist" traditionally implies a non-state actor.  Of course the distinction is largely lost at the receiving end.

   A terrorist is also someone that is willing to strike at PURELY civilian targets and in countries that his country is NOT at war with. And usually their objective to achieve a political or religious object and not any kind of military objective.  Consider all the bombings in civilian mosques in Iraq between the two different Islamic religious factions.  And just a week ago the bombing of a civilian market place in Pakistan. And going back some years, the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and then later the aircraft attack on the Twin Towers in New York.

   Some of you can bury your heads in the sand and claim that the atomic bomb attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima are in the same category but they're not.

   In the first place those attacks were carried out by countries at war with each other. Second, the attacks were carried out by recognized and uniformed members of their country's military forces, just as the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese was. An attack BTW that did kill a large number of civilians and by a county that was not yet at war with the U.S.  Third, all of the cities in Japan were involved in war production and in supporting the war, even if the city had nothing more than a road junction in it. That made every city in Japan a legitimate military target, just as it did in Germany and Austria and until they surrendered, Italy.  I defy anyone of you to go find any kind of supporting documents that shows that Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced nothing of benefit to Japan during the war or aided, in anyway directly or indirectly, to the continuation of the war. Just from what I know of the two cities, Hiroshima was the headquarters of a large reserve army that would have been committed if the U.S. had invaded Japan, and Nagasaki had the large steel production center. Both were military targets that had already been considered for fire bombing but the U.S. high command spared them (temporarily) so that the effects of the atomic bombs could be accessed without the effects of other bombing.

[TimFox]

The reason it's called "terrorism" is that the aim is not so much to damage or destroy infrastructure, military units, etc., but to instill fear in the population.

[themadhippy]

but to instill fear in the population.

bit like what the mainstream media and government do in the uk

[TimFox]

Are you afraid of them?  It seems it has worked.

[David Hess]

You may feel uncomfortable with this, but shouldn't we consider people who used nuclear weapons on towns with hundreds of thousands of people terrorists? Think about it.

Luckily for those people, they were on the side which won the war.

Next time they may not be that lucky.

There was no next time for them, and most or all of them have died of old age by now.  So you must be referring to some even which has not happened yet involving a different group of people.

[EEVblog]

As was correctly pointed out in the film, the same number was killed daily with conventional bombing, and brought Japan no nearer to surrender.

Not many people know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki where arguably not the biggest single bombings of all time. The bombing raid of Tokyo was bigger and resulted in more destruction and death than either of the nuclear bombs. It just took around 280 B-29 bombers instead of 1.

[coppice]

As was correctly pointed out in the film, the same number was killed daily with conventional bombing, and brought Japan no nearer to surrender.

Not many people know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki where arguably not the biggest single bombings of all time. The bombing raid of Tokyo was bigger and resulted in more destruction and death than either of the nuclear bombs. It just took around 280 B-29 bombers instead of 1.

Dresden was a bigger event than any single attack on Tokyo, but a lot more bombers were used to get the firestorm going.

[BrianHG]

As was correctly pointed out in the film, the same number was killed daily with conventional bombing, and brought Japan no nearer to surrender.

Not many people know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki where arguably not the biggest single bombings of all time. The bombing raid of Tokyo was bigger and resulted in more destruction and death than either of the nuclear bombs. It just took around 280 B-29 bombers instead of 1.

Dresden was a bigger event than any single attack on Tokyo, but a lot more bombers were used to get the firestorm going.

I would say that the 2 Nukes gave the Japanese a legitimate reason for surrender without completely loosing face.  On the other hand, I wonder if at the time they knew the US only had those 2 bombs.  A reasonable fear would be that instead of 200 flights to demolish a single city, they might have thought that 200 nukes, 1 per B-29 could completely flatten their entire country in 1 day.  And again a week later.  Never stopping.

[Stray Electron]

  The US only had two bombs at the time but within a month they would had more and they planned to be able to produce about 3 per month very shortly. So the Japanese were smart to surrender when they did.

[msuffidy]

  The US only had two bombs at the time but within a month they would had more and they planned to be able to produce about 3 per month very shortly. So the Japanese were smart to surrender when they did.

I was thinking maybe the Japanese may have thought they won some legitimate race so that could have worked out for the US.

[vad]

The US had four bombs: one uranium gun type, three plutonium cores, and four implosion assemblies, allowing them to build three plutonium bombs. The uranium one was detonated over Hiroshima. The first plutonium bomb, Trinity, was tested in the desert. The second plutonium bomb was used over Nagasaki. The third plutonium core and the two remaining assemblies were not used but were available for a potential third bombing if needed.

[TimFox]

For those who were disappointed in the movie "Oppenheimer" because it was, as advertised, about Robert Oppenheimer and not about hardware, I can recommend a very interesting book that I just received:
Martin Miller: Weapons of Mass Destruction: Specters of the Nuclear Age, Schiffer Publishing 2017.

The first 68 pages are an historical survey from WW II through 1991, concentrating on American weaponry and nuclear-weapons laboratories.
The remaining 145 pages are the author's own stunning photographs, mainly of weapon exhibits in military museums.
He started out with a proper 8x10 inch camera, but later used modern digital cameras (with manual focusing) and complex mosaic software, to assemble his high-resolution, deep-focus monochrome images.
(Trading mobility for complexity.)

Among other things, there are interior shots of the Minuteman launch control center at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, many shots of aircraft and missiles, the BA-53 H-bomb and other bombs, and even the HTRE-3 Experimental Nuclear Propulsion Reactor for the abandoned strategic nuclear bomber project.

[EEVblog]

For those who were disappointed in the movie "Oppenheimer" because it was, as advertised, about Robert Oppenheimer and not about hardware

The "advertisment" was the trailer. And the trailer implies that there is a LOT about the hardware and the project.
Add in the fact that Oppenheimer would be essentially a nobody, and a movie never made about him if it wasn't for the project. Hence why the had to sell the trailer as being about the project.

[magic]

It's your fault for not knowing that Hollywood is a bunch of SJWs only interested in a poor persecuted communist, not nukes

[EEVblog]

It's your fault for not knowing that Hollywood is a bunch of SJWs only interested in a poor persecuted communist, not nukes

Oh I knew that, I was just dumb enough to think what I saw in the trailer might be expanded on in the movie somewhat. Stupid me.

[iMo]

Next time you may let design, assemble and detonate the nuke in a reality show shot directly in the Disney Studios Australia..
Not sure how much a ticket would cost then, however..
 

It's your fault for not knowing that Hollywood is a bunch of SJWs only interested in a poor persecuted communist, not nukes

Oh I knew that, I was just dumb enough to think what I saw in the trailer might be expanded on in the movie somewhat. Stupid me.

[TimFox]

For those who were disappointed in the movie "Oppenheimer" because it was, as advertised, about Robert Oppenheimer and not about hardware

The "advertisment" was the trailer. And the trailer implies that there is a LOT about the hardware and the project.
Add in the fact that Oppenheimer would be essentially a nobody, and a movie never made about him if it wasn't for the project. Hence why the had to sell the trailer as being about the project.

Yes, Hollywood has a bad habit of releasing trailers that are often more interesting than the movie.

However, I object strenuously to your statement that "Oppenheimer would be essentially a nobody" if it weren't for the project.
The project actually ruined him as a scientist:  besides the official government proceedings against him, culminating in not being allowed to read papers he had authored, it almost stopped his publication.
According to Wikipedia "After World War II, Oppenheimer published only five scientific papers, one of them in biophysics, and none after 1950."
During the interwar years, Oppenheimer had a lot of competition in terms of scientific novelty (before going into the bomb business), and was an imperfect human being, but made many useful contributions to physics.

Prior to the project, summarizing from that Wikipedia article, he worked on many important topics in quantum mechanics and other subjects that were evolving between the wars.
A few: 
The quantum theory of molecular band spectra and a method to carry out calculations of its transition probabilities.
He calculated the photoelectric effect for hydrogen and X-rays, obtaining the absorption coefficient at the K-edge.
Field emission of electrons.
The Oppenheimer-Phillips process for deuteron-induced radioactivity.
Prediction that the positron was a positive electron (not a proton).
Shortly before the war, he concentrated on astrophysics, especially gravitational collapse of neutron stars and production of black holes.
The last above is his most famous work, along with the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which separates nuclear motion from electronic motion in the mathematical treatment of molecules, allowing nuclear motion to be neglected to simplify calculations (published in 1927, fresh out of graduate school).

Meanwhile, I seriously recommend the book I cited.  I especially liked the deep-focus interior shots from the two US museums dedicated to Titan and Minuteman launch control centers.

[coppice]

Yes, Hollywood has a bad habit of releasing trailers that are often more interesting than the movie.

I'd say they have a bad habit of releasing trailers that simply misrepresent movies. I've avoided several films based on trailers that made it seem the movie was not for me. Then years later I stumbled on the film on a plane or in a hotel room, and found it was quite good.

[EEVblog]

However, I object strenuously to your statement that "Oppenheimer would be essentially a nobody" if it weren't for the project.

Oh come on, you know I meant a nobody to Joe Average.
He's not even remotely close to an Einstein, Feynman,  Bohr et.al in terms of public name recognition.
If it wasn't for him leading the Manhatten project he'd only be known within the physics circles, and there wouldn't be any movies or documentaries made about him.

[TimFox]

I reacted to your actual statement with respect to the effect of the Project on his career.
One could make the opposite point that had Oppenheimer not directed the Manhattan Project, he would have continued real science and become more famous.
Although I never met the man, I did interact with professors who knew him and had interesting opinions and anecdotes about him as a person.
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) is not known to "Joe six-pack", but is still an important figure.
Perhaps someone should make a movie about him.
Einstein was certainly very well-known to the general public, but Bohr and Feynman, although very well known to the technical and scientific communities and Einstein's equal in terms of scientific production, are not that well-known to the general public.
Einstein and Oppenheimer have operas written about them (by Glass and Adams, respectively).
Of the scientists directly involved, Enrico Fermi was perhaps the most productive, but how well known is he to the general public?

[EEVblog]

I reacted to your actual statement with respect to the effect of the Project on his career.
One could make the opposite point that had Oppenheimer not directed the Manhattan Project, he would have continued real science and become more famous.

Entirely speculation. Odds are he wouldn't have. Few of the well known physicists that we (engineers and scientists) would have heard of became big household names, enough to warrant a movie or documetnary.

Although I never met the man, I did interact with professors who knew him and had interesting opinions and anecdotes about him as a person.
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) is not known to "Joe six-pack", but is still an important figure.
Perhaps someone should make a movie about him.

Ask Kathy
https://www.youtube.com/@KathyLovesPhysics

Einstein was certainly very well-known to the general public, but Bohr and Feynman, although very well known to the technical and scientific communities and Einstein's equal in terms of scientific production, are not that well-known to the general public.

Feynman was huge in the US. He had so much name recognition with the public that even though he had terminal cancer, NASA asked him to be the head phyicist investigating the Challenger disaster.
He hosted very popular TV series and stared in various documentaries and TV show appearances. Him and Carl Sagan were probably the two "go to" scientists of that era when public outreach was required.

[coppice]

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) is not known to "Joe six-pack", but is still an important figure.
Perhaps someone should make a movie about him.

Noooo. Hollywood is afraid of bell curves.

[TimFox]

Feynman's most famous moment with the general public was probably his cogent analysis of the Challenger disaster.
The statement "Oppenheimer would be essentially a nobody, and a movie never made about him if it wasn't for the project." is not "speculation".
Both of us are speculating on a situation contrary to fact.
In fact, both Feynman and Bohr ended up far more important in actual science than Oppenheimer.
Neils Bohr, besides being a great scientist, was a good human being:  the biographies of such people are edifying, but not as interesting as those of less perfect subjects.
(Of course, quite a few biographies of Bohr have been published.)

[rsjsouza]

Ask Kathy
https://www.youtube.com/@KathyLovesPhysics

That is an excellent channel!

[quadtech]

A very interesting talk by Jennet Conant (James Conant's grand daughter) -

https://www.c-span.org/video/?187135-8/109-east-palace-robert-oppenheimer

Her book, Tuxedo Park, was an excellent read.

[KE5FX]

A very interesting talk by Jennet Conant (James Conant's grand daughter) -

https://www.c-span.org/video/?187135-8/109-east-palace-robert-oppenheimer

Her book, Tuxedo Park, was an excellent read.

That's a hell of an unscripted talk.  Whatever she's on, I want some.

[Joebeazelman]

I saw the movie last night and it was terrible. The creators couldn't figure out whether to target a general audience, or your typical science buff. It failed spectacularly at engaging either. It was a major disappointment for those expecting a nuclear horror film with earth shattering atomic blasts, radiation sickness, and charred corpses. Despite hundreds of hours of restored nuclear test films sitting in the archives, there was hardly any footage of the bomb. The Trinity test scene was anti-climactic after building up so much anticipation. The nuclear accidents at Los Alamos, particularly the Demon Core accident, was painfully overlooked and a major ball drop.

It's really a longwinded drama film and a horrible one at that. The characters spoke in annoyingly contrived sound bites. A lot of time was wasted on the security hearings where the characters were barely heard against the loud melodramatic soundtrack. Of course, there were the obligatory sex scenes, including a surreal one that tool place during Oppenheimer's questioning. It was cheap and awkward way to emphasize how his privacy was being exposed to the world. Overall, it was not a great movie. I really struggled to stay awake watching it.

[lezginka_kabardinka]

“Barbie” movie was absolute woke-signalling rubbish, but held at gunpoint and forced to choose, I’d take it over Oppenheimer.

[EEVblog]

“Barbie” movie was absolute woke-signalling rubbish, but held at gunpoint and forced to choose, I’d take it over Oppenheimer.

I've heard arguments that the supposed "woke" part actually backfired and it turned into a men's rights movie and Ken is the hero?
I don't know though, I haven't seen it.

[lezginka_kabardinka]

“Barbie” movie was absolute woke-signalling rubbish, but held at gunpoint and forced to choose, I’d take it over Oppenheimer.

I've heard arguments that the supposed "woke" part actually backfired and it turned into a men's rights movie and Ken is the hero?
I don't know though, I haven't seen it.

I don’t have enough interest to care. Society is way off course. It’s all just a big distraction. Let them play with their toy movies.

[magic]

Most people are woke one way or another and can't afford not to care about nonsense

[Andy Chee]

Woke is fine, if done well. 

For example, the movie "Hidden Figures" is about black women computers in the John Glen era of NASA, and is an excellent movie IMO.

[EEVblog]

Woke is fine, if done well. 
For example, the movie "Hidden Figures" is about black women computers in the John Glen era of NASA, and is an excellent movie IMO.

I wouldn't call that one woke by modern standards, just exaggerated period drama.
In fact it had a white director and was accussed of "whitewashing" in some circles:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hidden-figures-and-the-diversity-conversation-we-arent-having_n_58adc9bee4b0d0a6ef470492

But yes, quite enojoyable apart from some technical and storyline exaggerations.

[Andy Chee]

I wouldn't call that one woke by modern standards, just exaggerated period drama.

You can bet that some Southerners (in USA) would definitely call it woke, exactly for the exaggeration of racial issues.

[pickle9000]

I found "Hidden Figures" very enjoyable. A good movie is a good movie.

[EEVblog]

I wouldn't call that one woke by modern standards, just exaggerated period drama.

You can bet that some Southerners (in USA) would definitely call it woke, exactly for the exaggeration of racial issues.

No doubt. To me it just didn't at the time have the whole "woke vibe" around it, and still doesn't.

[Stray Electron]

“Barbie” movie was absolute woke-signalling rubbish, but held at gunpoint and forced to choose, I’d take it over Oppenheimer.

   It must be pretty bad then!  I thought the Barbie movie looked cute and I planned to watch it at some point but it was on cable TV yesterday and my wife and son both watched it and they both told me NOT to watch it and that I wouldn't like it!  Oppenheimer has been on cable TV for about a month now and I haven't watched it and have no intention of watching it and NO ONE that I know has watched or plans to.

    It's dumbfounding how Hollywood has managed to take so many good stories and turn them into absolute rubbish in the last 20 or so years.

[coppice]

“Barbie” movie was absolute woke-signalling rubbish, but held at gunpoint and forced to choose, I’d take it over Oppenheimer.

   It must be pretty bad then!  I thought the Barbie movie looked cute and I planned to watch it at some point but it was on cable TV yesterday and my wife and son both watched it and they both told me NOT to watch it and that I wouldn't like it!  Oppenheimer has been on cable TV for about a month now and I haven't watched it and have no intention of watching it and NO ONE that I know has watched or plans to.

    It's dumbfounding how Hollywood has managed to take so many good stories and turn them into absolute rubbish in the last 20 or so years.

People complain about the woke movies driving audiences away, and they do, but that's only apart of Hollywood's problems. A Starsky and Hutch movie made so long after the TV series that the main movie audience (youngsters) wouldn't relate to it looked to most people like it would be the loser it turned out to be. That was an interesting early example of Hollywood so fearful of doing anything original they'd stick with a "proven" formula they showed no signs of understanding. This trend has just gotten worse and worse. Much of the race swapping and gender swapping of famous characters, rather than creating original characters for them, seems to have more to do with a fear of generating something original than anything else. The lack of demand for originality in turn seems to explain the rise of the talentless in the world of scriptwriting.

[fourfathom]

I saw the movie last night and it was terrible.
[... Trinity program details left out ...]
[... Storytelling issues...]

For those of you who were expecting a thorough covering of all the many interesting and crucial A-bomb program details, perhaps your first clue should have neem the movie title: "Oppenheimer".  This is a movie about the life of Oppenheimer.

If you didn't like the way his story was told, that's a perfectly valid criticism.

I saw the film and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I had also read the book on which it was based, and that was quite interesting as well.

[EEVblog]

I saw the movie last night and it was terrible.
[... Trinity program details left out ...]
[... Storytelling issues...]

For those of you who were expecting a thorough covering of all the many interesting and crucial A-bomb program details, perhaps your first clue should have neem the movie title: "Oppenheimer".  This is a movie about the life of Oppenheimer.

I cover this on my video, but the basic complaint is that that's not how the trailer made it out to be. And really, Oppenheimer would essentially be a public nobody were it not for him being the head of the A-bomb program. So it's not unreasonale to assume there would have been more stuff about the A-Bomb program. Especially considering they built the entire Los Alamos town set etc.

If you didn't like the way his story was told, that's a perfectly valid criticism.

I found the back and forth time cuts with no reference to when or what they are talking about really annoying.

[dietert1]

To begin with it is pretty difficult to make the development of weapons of mass destruction into entertainment. Oppenheimer may be a US national hero, but most people prefer athletics and socker over martial arts.

Regards, Dieter

[coppice]

To begin with it is pretty difficult to make the development of weapons of mass destruction into entertainment.

Oh come on. Some very successful shows, like Mythbusters, get most of their viewership from working up to an explosion.

[David Hess]

To begin with it is pretty difficult to make the development of weapons of mass destruction into entertainment.

Fat Man and Little Boy (Paul Newman and Dwight Schultz), and The Manhattan Project (Christopher Collett and John Lithgow) come to mind.

[YurkshireLad]

To begin with it is pretty difficult to make the development of weapons of mass destruction into entertainment.

Oh come on. Some very successful shows, like Mythbusters, get most of their viewership from working up to an explosion.

There's a difference between Mythbusters and weapons of mass destruction. I'm really not sure how you can compare the two.

[KE5FX]

You don't know many Americans, do you?  "That blowed up real good" and "Hold my beer and watch this" are nothing short of shibboleths.

[watchmaker]

My wife and I both watched it after reading "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (1987) a year ealier.  I had to read it twice; once for the interconnnected social/professional lives of the scientists, then to understand some of the p chem.

So, when we saw the movie we did not expect it to be exhaustive.  First, it starts in 1939.  Secondly, it leaves out the impact of HG Wells on the philosophy of many of the scientists.  It also leaves out how the Facists screwed themselves or that Churchill himself recommended Fuchs to FDR. 

Still, it hit some of the political and philosophical points which, in my experience, many Americans fail to grasp.

The book makes it clear that Truman's decision to "hide it" from Stalin and the rest of the world reverberates today.

To me the whole episode reflects lost opportunities that have a lot to do with hubris.  Including the scientists thinking they could actually run policy.  Including Fascists thinking they could advance without intellectuals.

Got me reading HG Wells though.  Very thoughtful guy.  Which led to reading some thought pieces by survivors of WWI.  1930s was a period of deep soul searching.

Just made the mistake of reading "Red Dawn".  I had watched the movie as a kid; it was entertaining back then.  My advice:  do NOT read the book.  I was depressed for a week.

So it goes.

Dewey

[coppercone2]

trump should read red dawn because that what happens when you defund nato

[watchmaker]

He can read?

[HuronKing]

The nuclear accidents at Los Alamos, particularly the Demon Core accident, was painfully overlooked and a major ball drop.

The first incident with the Demon Core happened when Oppenheimer was in DC meeting with Truman (Oppenheimer left Los Alamos on August 17 and the accident happened on August 21st).

Oppenheimer permanently left the Manhattan Project in November 1945. The second Demon Core accident happened in May 1946.

So... Oppenheimer did not really have anything to do with either incident. It's hardly a major ball drop to not waste screentime on those events. 😀

Besides, Fat Man and Little Boy portrays those events and is more narrowly focused on the Manhattan Project than a biopic about Oppenheimer titled... Oppenheimer. 😉

[pickle9000]

There was so much they didn't know and they understood that. I can imagine injuries and fatalities being passed on and evaluated. The science of that would have been a good dramatic tool.

[CatalinaWOW]

To begin with it is pretty difficult to make the development of weapons of mass destruction into entertainment. Oppenheimer may be a US national hero, but most people prefer athletics and socker over martial arts.

Regards, Dieter

I am not convinced that it is difficult.  The invasion of Normandy on D-Day, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the defense of Thermopylae and other events are more horrible on an individual level than the almost unrelatable horror of WMDs and there have been many movies of this ilk that have been wildly successful.

And it isn't just a problem with the American psyche, those movies were wildly successful worldwide.

[coppercone2]

He can read?

lol george bush has a higher reading level, he managed to read a childrens book

[vad]

trump should read red dawn because that what happens when you defund nato

Was it not European NATO member states that defunded their own defense?

Defense expenditure as a percentage of GDP by country in 2014, during Obama's presidency:

USA - 3.42%

versus the five largest EU member states:

Germany - 1.38%
France - 1.84%
Italy - 1.22%
Spain - 0.92%
The Netherlands - 1.32%

Edit: NATO's recommended threshold was 2% of GDP. Someone had been enjoying a free ride for too long…

[coppercone2]

yeah it was a little pov but its not dissolved.

even if it dropped to 1/3 of levels its not like it would not be formidable. Maybe it would fail but its still a major hassle to deal with (you would still need a total psychopath to engage it). Dissolving it however.......

pretty sure I heard t say that we don't need nato at all

and on the plus side those countries are kind of paying indirectly by being the potential battle zone and keeping down the cost of the navy and air force, because im pretty sure the navy budget would rise by 500000 percent if they made it to the western side of the ocean

its much cheaper to contain them on land

also if you tax those people too much they will just turn communist because its not like it does not work, you need to offer a better deal. lots of ambivlant people that will just take whatever is slightly better.

[magic]

It's always been Eastern Europe (and South, I guess?) which had to deal with external enemies.
For the last thousand years the only enemies of Westerners were themselves, and overseas bushmen here and there.

They don't get it. Ruskies scared them for a while, but they thought the Cold War was over.

[CatalinaWOW]

It's always been Eastern Europe (and South, I guess?) which had to deal with external enemies.
For the last thousand years the only enemies of Westerners were themselves, and overseas bushmen here and there.

They don't get it. Ruskies scared them for a while, but they thought the Cold War was over.

The '"Cold" part is.

[coppice]

It's always been Eastern Europe (and South, I guess?) which had to deal with external enemies.
For the last thousand years the only enemies of Westerners were themselves, and overseas bushmen here and there.

They don't get it. Ruskies scared them for a while, but they thought the Cold War was over.

The '"Cold" part is.

Really? The Americans don't seem to have got the message. They've continued manipulating things in Europe since the USSR fell, like that event never happened.

[magic]

I think it was an allusion to things getting somewhat "hot" recently.

[CatalinaWOW]

I can't pretend to understand why American foreign policy over the last 30 years has been what it is.  Inertia certainly is one factor, but I am sure there are many others.  Leaving Europe alone has a many century history being a problem for the neighbors.  Hubris, thinking of ourselves as ruling the world is another.  The list goes on and on.

I can sit here and point out lots of ways we could have done it better, but it wasn't my job, and wasn't a job I would have taken on under any circumstances.  And the people I voted for that I thought would have done a better job either didn't win, or didn't live up to my expectations.

Oh, and I was referring to the fact that the warfare currently is much hotter than any time during the Soviet era, and is in real danger of heating up more.  None of the three major general outcomes of the heavy fighting in Ukraine bode well for the future (Complete Russian success in Ukraine, continued high intensity stalemate, or complete Ukrainian victory).

[AVGresponding]

It's always been Eastern Europe (and South, I guess?) which had to deal with external enemies.
For the last thousand years the only enemies of Westerners were themselves, and overseas bushmen here and there.

They don't get it. Ruskies scared them for a while, but they thought the Cold War was over.

The '"Cold" part is.

Really? The Americans don't seem to have got the message. They've continued manipulating things in Europe since the USSR fell, like that event never happened.

You imagine they are alone in this?

[coppice]

It's always been Eastern Europe (and South, I guess?) which had to deal with external enemies.
For the last thousand years the only enemies of Westerners were themselves, and overseas bushmen here and there.

They don't get it. Ruskies scared them for a while, but they thought the Cold War was over.

The '"Cold" part is.

Really? The Americans don't seem to have got the message. They've continued manipulating things in Europe since the USSR fell, like that event never happened.

You imagine they are alone in this?

Did I suggest they were? Every government in the world is perpetually trying to screw every other government to the maximum extent they think they can get away with. Its what makes the dynamics of things like the EU such a joke.

[Andy Chee]

Oppenheimer seems to be a winner at the Golden Globes awards.

Then again, those who vote at the Golden Globes are a different species of critic to science & technology enthusiasts (they're entertainment media journalists).

[LaserSteve]

Nixe Tube invention is credited to 1955 or so.
So why is there a Nixie clock countdown at Trinity?
Because it looked cool for the movie?

Saw that  on Youtube and gave up on watching the rest of the movie.  Am I the only person on the planet that caught that detail? 

For those folks debating Bridgewires, Mound Lab, here in Ohio, was bragging about diode laser pumped,  fiber optic detonator development long ago. Much easier to sync.
Mound was being closed at the time, so it's various divisions were looking for ways to survive.
Hence the news articles on Fiber Optic Detonators.

Krytrons were always dangled as bait to catch the un-weary. Contrary to popular belief, they are not that difficult to make, if your nation has/had a domestic lighting or vacuum tube industry.

"Whizzer"
 neutron generator designs have been published The tube has its own gate/trigger electrode, so let's despell the myth that triggering it requires some sort of mystical HV sync circuit.

Ref: https://pubs.aip.org/aip/rsi/article-abstract/70/1/1104/444254/Compact-neutron-generator-for-diagnostic?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Those who ignore technological history are bound to claim it's redevelopment.

Steve

[vad]

Nixe Tube invention is credited to 1955 or so.
So why is there a Nixie clock countdown at Trinity?
Because it looked cool for the movie?

Saw that  on Youtube and gave up on watching the rest of the movie.  Am I the only person on the planet that caught that detail? 

For those folks debating Bridgewires, Mound Lab, here in Ohio, was bragging about diode laser pumped,  fiber optic detonator development long ago. Much easier to sync.

Those who ignore technological history are bound to claim it's redevelopment.

Steve

Spot on! Checking the flux capacitor's invention date is crucial for fully enjoying Back to the Future.

[LaserSteve]

Was digging through the library at work  { Unclas, Academic}

and was shocked to find a Kapton Tape based "slapper" paper bragging on kilometer per second velocities for very cheap. At the time Kapton was not cheap, but always wanted to try to copy the design in that publication.  In today's world Kapton foil
is s commodity material.

The magic is in the computation,materials processing, machining, gas injection, and explosive lensing. The basics of lensing has been well documented in a recent Youtube video.


What is  amazing is how many processes and materials relating to building a "gadget" have been published.

The fact of the matter, is the scarcity and cost of the required metals is all that's  keeping us safe.


As to Vad's comment..1.21 is the key to the Universe.

Steve

[David Hess]

Krytrons were always dangled as bait to catch the un-weary. Contrary to popular belief, they are not that difficult to make, if your nation has/had a domestic lighting or vacuum tube industry.

And at least now, krytrons are not required for high voltage fast switching.  I was actually surprised how poor krytrons perform based on the published datasheet.

The magic is in the computation,materials processing, machining, gas injection, and explosive lensing. The basics of lensing has been well documented in a recent Youtube video.

I have done the math for the geometry of an explosive lens, but for a different application.  However the explosive lens geometry requires some empirical testing because of non-linear variation in the velocity of propagation.

[LaserSteve]

 I don't think DoE and the USSR maintain all sorts of device myths jointly,. I have an educated guess that a few things used for proliferation monitoring are kept very, very, quiet by mutual agreement of all parties who have devices.  Let's face it, the nuclear industry worldwide has a great PR and recruiting machine. Hiring people who ask really good questions insures a fresh stock of skilled people. So if Hu checks book X out of your library, we're from the Goverment, let us know... Hum, great recruiting tool.


What I think holds back common knowledge in this case are the journalists and book authors regularly regurgitating the same poor explanations over and over again. 

My high school Physics and Electronics teacher was a highly skilled skilled Electrical Engineer with a Masters and extensive military and civil reactor  experience. Yet he still taught us that electrons flow from negative to positive outside the battery.
Even back In 1984 and 1988 I. knew "flow" was probably the wrong choice of words, but right or wrong on the theory, Veritasium at least tried to set the record straight for fun and profit.

Now mind you, as someone who frequently finds himself informally teaching, I know you have to start with easy analogies sometimes, but the amount of stringed along bad simplifications in this world are legion.

I've yet to hear a really good explanation of how base current in a transistor works, it's only taken something like the Internet to make a good theory accessible to me, and I've had access to some of the best science libraries in a five state region.

I've had some real problems in the past using EE and ET and Physics models with Chemists and Chemical Engineers.

Approximations I've been taught  hold up well for my applications. However when you jump fields [pun intended] it may not go well when collaborating.

 Just try to explain Tan D  or Electret behavior to a Chem Eng.

At the University, some of the Chem Eng types have offices right next to EE Profs, but they might as well have been in different universes.   Conversation starts about Laplace and Maxwell and the strategic retreat begins.  Ok, call the Technician...(Me) which used to end in a trip to the now abolished science library for "easy" materials texts. We don't keep books anymore though,   Science Librarians are just too expensive. 

Just a rant, I've had people tell me nuclear and atomic bombs are two different things.

Steve

[David Hess]

Just a rant, I've had people tell me nuclear and atomic bombs are two different things.

Just refer to them all as "conversion weapons", which is short for "mass-energy conversion weapons".

[Stray Electron]

trump should read red dawn because that what happens when you defund nato

   IIRC it wasn't NATO that Trump wanted to defund, it was the UN.  (And I completely agree!  The UN has been WORTHLESS in preventing the current wars in both Gaza and the Ukraine. And also utterly useless in stopping the attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea.)

[HuronKing]

Just a rant, I've had people tell me nuclear and atomic bombs are two different things.

Just refer to them all as "conversion weapons", which is short for "mass-energy conversion weapons".

Indeed - there are subtle differences in the nomenclature between 'nuclear weapons' and 'atomic weapons.'

Atomic bombs are understood to be fission devices.
Hydrogen bombs are understood to be fusion devices.

Nuclear weapons is a catch-all to refer to both collectively.

The distinction is important because some countries had A-bombs figured out before H-bombs and, as the film Oppenheimer tries to explain, there was controversy over whether the US should or should not have pursued H-bombs after figuring out A-bombs.

It's the ol' logical syllogism. A Frenchman is a European but a European is not necessarily a Frenchman. 

[Veteran68]

trump should read red dawn because that what happens when you defund nato

   IIRC it wasn't NATO that Trump wanted to defund, it was the UN.

We're venturing dangerously close to partisan politics here, so I'll respond to this in as civil a way as I can before leaving it.

As an isolationist, Trump had contempt for both NATO and the UN. Honestly IMO I'm not sure he understood the difference.

This was presented often in the news during his first term and was discussed heavily in some of the books written by his insiders, especially John Bolton's book. Trump wanted to heavily cut the US contributions to both, and was expected by many to pull the US out of NATO entirely if he were elected to a second term.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/27/politics/trump-nato-contribution-nato/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/04/bolton-says-trump-might-have-pulled-us-out-nato-if-he-had-been-reelected/

[helius]

Krytrons were always dangled as bait to catch the un-weary.

What's with the wary/weary confusion that's everywhere all of a sudden? Never used to see it.

As an isolationist, Trump had contempt for both NATO and the UN.

Note the complete contrast with the current occupant, whose contempt for the institution is such that when he wanted to veto the Security Council resolution called by the Secretary General according to Article 99, he didn't even send his real ambassador.

[LaserSteve]

Helius, my. phone has tried in the past 10 seconds to force a name change for you.   I had to override it to type your name.
It wished and desired to change you to Helium or Helios.

I suspect therein lies the answer.
My phone, snd most forum sites, abhors indentation, for example.

Steve

[nardev]

The movie is crap!

The production is as expected but the the way the story is presented is completely stupid!

[themadhippy]

NATO's recommended threshold was 2% of GDP. Someone had been enjoying a free ride for too long…

imagine if those funds went to do some good instead of filling the pockets of gun runners

[coppice]

NATO's recommended threshold was 2% of GDP. Someone had been enjoying a free ride for too long…

imagine if those funds went to do some good instead of filling the pockets of gun runners

I can imagine. I can see a world in which you get overrun and dominated by the armies who didn't cut back. I can imagine a world in which that doesn't happen, but that doesn't include human beings.

[magic]

If NATO had balls they could have overrun Russia and China when there was an opportunity in the '90s, installed democratic governments in those countries and thus made them equally corrupt and lazy as NATO.

Then there would be peace

[fourfathom]

NATO's recommended threshold was 2% of GDP. Someone had been enjoying a free ride for too long…

imagine if those funds went to do some good instead of filling the pockets of gun runners

I can imagine. I can see a world in which you get overrun and dominated by the armies who didn't cut back. I can imagine a world in which that doesn't happen, but that doesn't include human beings.

I think that Pax Americana was/is better than most of the likely alternatives.  Not perfect, but as coppice points out: humans.

And I also think that Oppenheimer was a very good movie, an interesting story told in an interesting manner.

[Bud]

“Barbie” movie was absolute woke-signalling rubbish, but held at gunpoint and forced to choose, I’d take it over Oppenheimer.

I've heard arguments that the supposed "woke" part actually backfired and it turned into a men's rights movie and Ken is the hero?
I don't know though, I haven't seen it.

Argentina's president spared no words throwing punches on Woke from the World Economics Forum stage:

https://youtu.be/BGnSpt2Q7CY?feature=shared

[SiliconWizard]

Merely going to the WEF shitshow is a completely dumb move.

[coppercone2]

If you watch the WEF intro speech carefully you can see the chefs erecting large poles with meats on them, right in front of the podium, just before the opening speech.

In actuality none of the food is cooked prior to the start of the event but ends up having a nice air fried sear by the time the opening remarks are concluded.

[Sal Ammoniac]

Implosion was required for the plutonium bomb because plutonium had too high a spontaneous fission rate to use the gun mechanism.

Curiously that isn't the case. David Hess is right.

You can make a "gun" device but you need a much higher velocity. The resulting device is about 5m long. The US built some mockups and spent a lot of time dropping them to get them to fall in a stable way instead of wobbling. I have a book by a guy who tracked down a lot of the drop sites of various mockup devices (he got the coordinates from a "contact"). Very good read.

Implosion is of course much more compact. As interesting is how they made 155mm shells... this is still well classified but most likely the PU was egg-shaped and charges convert it into a spherical shape. That destroys the shape of the shell of course but it doesn't matter by then.

I'll reword my statement: Implosion was required for the plutonium bomb because plutonium had too high a spontaneous fission rate to use a gun mechanism practical enough to be delivered by air.

[Andy Chee]

Oppenheimer looks to have done well at the Oscars.