Oppenheimer: The Movie

Oppenheimer, The Movie

Peter Schultz

 

            Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer got it right, when at the end of the movie, Oppenheimer says to Einstein that they had, indeed, destroyed the world with the creation of atomic weapons and the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But it wasn’t the weapons that destroyed the world; it was the attacks on an already defeated Japan that did the trick. That is, Truman and the United States, by using the weapons as they did, had started World War III, a war that would be waged in Korea, in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), in Nicaragua, in Cuba, in Africa, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Kosovo, in Chile, in Syria, in Libya, in Ukraine, even in the United States (9/11). That war goes on today, as evidenced by the humongous United States “defense budgets,” approved by “both” political parties, with no end in sight. Technology doesn’t control our fate; politics does.