I’m not sure you can visit a gas pump or pay a water bill or dig a ditch or stop at a tollbooth or go to a cookout and avoid three topics at any of them. Everyone’s singing to the tune of John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, only the words have morphed into Taylor Barbie Oppenheimer Swift! I’m giving all three a hard pass, no matter how hard a pass their press flacks make at me.
But the Oppenheimer movie intrigues me in one way. They already made an Oppenheimer movie, in 1989, and while it didn’t set the world on fire (sorry, too soon?), it was pretty good as entertainment, and not bad at explaining the power politics behind the making of the atom bomb. I’ve not seen one reference to that movie anywhere, including the gas pumps I mentioned, and I kinda wonder why. The movie had its problems, I’ll grant you that. They tried to drag romance kicking and screaming into the thing. The casting gorgon threw in John Cusack in an entirely fictional, borderline absurd role. But I suppose they can be forgiven for trying to gin up some female interest in a story that mostly revolved around arithmetic with a lot of letters mixed in on blackboards in the desert. Oppenheimer has some sexy time with a comely commie, which isn’t as thrilling as any of the assorted Helgas in low-cut Nazi outfits vamping around in any number of bad WWII movies, but it’s not nothing.
Everyone agrees that Paul Newman was miscast as Leslie Groves. Everyone but me, I mean. He’s an unusual choice, I’ll grant you, but he acts like a general. The screenwriter was smart enough to make it a weird kind of buddy picture between Groves and Oppenheimer. And the fellow they hired to play Oppenheimer, Dwight Shultz, portrayed a robodweeb just fine. But the movie cost $30 million in 1989 bucks, and made $3.5 mil, so I guess my affection for it is particular, not general amongst the hoi polloi.
I gather Cillian Murphy plays Oppenheimer this time around, and he’s more popular than free samples at a bank, so that’s bound to help the war effort, so to speak. It’ll put more butts in the seats than Paul Newman with an AARP card could. Maybe someone can make a better movie, but can you tell the story better? I doubt it. Because the story of the atom bomb is as much about Leslie Groves as Oppenheimer, or Szilard, or Einstein, or any of the other eggheads Groves hired, like particularly effete plumbers, to unclog his Tokyo toilet in a big way.
The word genius gets thrown around a lot these days, generally by people who wouldn’t recognize one if they saw one, or would burn him at the stake if they did. Being able to do enough math to torture python scripts for a FAANG company doesn’t make you a genius, or a good judge of one, either. Everyone who worked on the Manhattan Project was about as bright as people get, but there was only one, bona fide genius there, if you ask me, and it wasn’t Oppenheimer. The smartest man at Los Alamos didn’t even live there. When they couldn’t make the thing work, Oppenheimer called in John Von Neumann, the smartest man to walk the earth since Imhotep.
“We are in what can only be described as a desperate need of your help. We have a good many theoretical people working here, but I think that if your usual shrewdness is a guide to you about the probable nature of our problems you will see why even this staff is in some respects critically inadequate…I would like you to come as a permanent, and let me assure you, honored member of our staff. A visit will give you a better idea of this somewhat Buck Rogers project than any amount of correspondence.”
All the other scientists lived in a boy scout camp in the desert for years, getting nearly nowhere, and then Von Neumann dropped by in his three-piece suit and figured out that implosion would work, and how it would work. The rest was plumbing. Simple as that. Hell, even Leslie Groves was an organizational superman compared to Oppenheimer. After all, Groves did something remarkable twice.
It’s telling that Fat Man and Little Boy never mentions Von Neumann. They show an un-named deus ex machina character drop in and straighten out Seth Neddermeyer, who was a real person who gets a credit in the movie, so it’s not like everyone else is anonymous or fictitious or anything. For some reason, probably because Von Neumann was a patriotic square, and not the least ambivalent about what they were doing, the glitterati don’t like him much. They like people who paste a veneer of indecision over their ambition, to seem more moral than they really are. But Like Paul Newman says, “…the death march of Bataan, was that moral?”
I don’t need movies to help me make up my mind over whether dropping bombs of any sort on Japan was moral. My father hung in a little glass ball underneath a B-24J Liberator in WWII and dropped plenty of bombs on Japanese soldiers, or their oil dumps, anyway. He was a profoundly moral man. One of the planes that sometimes flew in formation with my dad’s squadron got shot down by ground fire, but one crewman miraculously made it out alive, and parachuted down to the island of Koror. He was immediately beheaded with a sword, along with a few other fliers and a hearty handful of missionaries, right there on the beach. And all you backseat driving logicians on Twitter who think the Japanese didn’t need an atomic reason to quit fighting, maybe you should try understanding arithmetic before you take a crack at physics. They didn’t surrender after the first one, did they? They asked Yoshio Nishina, the head of their atomic bomb program, if the blast in Hiroshima was indeed atomic, and whether he could duplicate it within six months. It was a totalitarian government. It only understood total war.
Maybe that’s why I re-watch Fat Man and Little Boy from time to time. The Manhattan Project was durn interesting. The movie didn’t pussyfoot around the politics of it, and they showed both sides of the argument about using the gadget they’d made. The military wanted to make it, and use it. Lots of ex-European scientists were very enthusiastic about a fission mission over Berlin, but felt instantly ambivalent about doing the same to Japan after VE Day.
I’m sure the recent movie will make the scientists sound very ethical and righteous and sympathetic when they change their minds overnight about building and dropping a big bomb when the target shifts, but it reminds me of the old joke about a man offering a beautiful woman a million dollars to have sex with him. When she says, “Sure,” he says, “OK, will you do it for ten dollars?” She replies, “Hell no, what do you think I am?” The man answers, “We’ve established what you are, we’re just haggling over the price.”
14 Responses
You’ve convinced me to watch Fat Man and Little Boy again. Your comments about Von Neumann are interesting – something to thing about.
Hi Mack- Thanks for reading and commenting.
No argument agains Von Neumann’s intelligence, but I’d say Alan Turing gave him some stiff competition in the run for “smartest”.
Hi lpdbw- Thanks for reading and commenting.
I’ve read a little about Turing and Von Neumann’s work just before and during WW2. It’s pretty safe to say that they’re the fathers of modern computers, each contributing important parts of the process. Anyone that wants to geek out on the question can read this. It’s dry, but durn interesting.
I think it’s interesting that Von Neumann wasn’t on the Manhattan Project team from the get-go. He was already working for the military, specializing in explosives and shaped charges. When they couldn’t figure out if an implosion would even work, they called him in, he did the calculations that proved it would, and then told them to dial back the amount of fissionable material and use shaped charges to crush it more effectively, and with less risk of the whole stew cooking off. And the whole time he’s thinking about computers, because the atom bomb isn’t that interesting to him.
DH and I saw the film yesterday. He did his grad work at Berkeley and came away creative but not commie (wouldn’t have married him if he was). He did his graduate work at Lawrence because he is a systems thinker I never understood the role Bechtel had in the whole process. I lived east of Berkeley and had friends in the physics and biology departments of a small junior college. They were still angry about Lawrence (1970-75)
Oppenheimer the film is important to see because of the clarity and expansion of real issues. We saw it in an Imax theater so the big explosion was very powerful. I want to re-watch it because I couldn’t understand half of the dialogue (too loud?) On any good night I need closed captions to understand anything on TV! Go see it if you can it’s worthy of your good mind!
Hi Anne- Thanks for reading and commenting.
BTW, there’s nothing wrong with your hearing. All the dialog on every TV show and movie is unintelligible. I’m not sure if it’s unintelligent. It may be, but how would I know, it’s unintelligible.
We just watched this very enjoyable lecture by Feyneman and I thought you and your readers would enjoy it. It provides wonderful insight as to life in Los Alamos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY-u1qyRM5w
Mr. Sipp, which book/books would you recommend to lesser brains like mine to better understand the Manhattan Project and the people involved?
Hi Jean- Modern Times by Paul Johnson is an good choice, although it covers the period from Einstein discovering the Theory of Relativity to Nixon going off the gold standard, and everything in between. A very readable, well-researched, and lively history book explains the times and the people that made the bomb possible, and maybe necessary.
Also if you have seen it, there’s an excellent documentary called Trinity & Beyond, narrated by none other than Captain Kirk. It starts with 1945 and ends in 1964.
There’s some background info on Von Neumann here.
Thank you.
You’re heard of the Rape of Nanking, I suppose. Was that moral? Sorry, Paul Newman is so compelling I had to parrot him. Just War isn’t moral but it is just. I don’t care if Jesus, Gandhi, and Obama / scratch that: I don’t care if Jesus, King David, Saint Peter, and Audie Murphy fought a war that was theologically Just, three of those four men would sin somewhere and somehow along the way. War is so full of sin, you can walk on it.
OK, back to Nanking. Most interested and smart people who know their WWII pass over the fact that Japan had an active and large war going in China while MacArthur and Nimitz were island hopping towards Honshu. Let’s say the Allies had failed to A Bomb anything, and the invasion of mainland Japan had taken place. Particularly unimaginative thinkers claim that Japan was ready to surrender wholesale by Fall of 1945. So, American GIs take the mainland, and incur their proposed multi-millions of casualties in doing so (what would have made every other war America ever fought look small by comparison, including the European Theater 1942-1945. Then, Joe now has to just casually drop over to China and take on somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 million troops of the Japanese Imperial state. No thanks, comrade! I think it was those A bombs or nothing, to tell the truth.
Sippi, your dad, whose story you told so well in your one blog post (asks for nothing), certainly would’ve disliked the Japanese invasion. My own dad, with the famed 10th Mountain Division, ended the war in Italy and jumped on ships en route to amphibious assault training and was designated fro the second wave assault of the mainland of Japan. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we’d be typing from our keyboards in Valhalla because our fathers would’ve had us there. Wait…I’m bad at analogies today. Anyway, you get it. No Casey if the bombs hadn’t worked.
Scientists, and one finds out in Oppenheimer 2023 that they aren’t all keen mathematicians, are a dull lot of suits. The movie has them constantly partying with their attractive wives like they were actually the football team at Auburn, and not the nerds from Princeton and Berkley. But, I get it. It’s a movie. By the way Matt Damon is superb in Paul Newman’s part. So glad they found him in Normandy that time.
I learned much from your post, as always. When I read the news, I usually come away brain damaged. When I read here, I come away a bit smarter.
Hi Casey- I see you don’t have an opinion about the topic. Me neither.
I will opine that it is good to see Howlin’ Mad Murdoch was once an earth-shaking scientist. Is that moral??
Hey Casey- I had to look that reference up. I haven’t watched TV since it had a horizontal hold knob, I guess. I found out all sorts of things. George Peppard had a career after Banacek? Why wasn’t I informed? And, whoever didn’t inform me, I’d like to say, “Thanks.”