![]() ![]() "Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!" he theatrically recalled in 1959, making the incident public for the first time. When Oppenheimer informed Arthur Compton, who worked on chain reactions at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, Compton was willing to halt the whole project unless the doomsday scenario could be ruled out. Back in July 1942, Edward Teller (played by Benny Safdie in the movie) had raised the possibility that the bomb might generate temperatures sufficiently intense to set off a thermonuclear chain reaction in the atmosphere – igniting atoms of nitrogen, hydrogen or both – and "encircle the globe in a sea of fire". In reality, as head of the Manhattan Project, Groves would have been well aware of the theory that inspired Fermi's dark joke. Lt Gen Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) asks Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) what Fermi meant, leading to a conversation about apocalyptic possibilities and the impossibility of absolute certainty in theoretical science. The first of these scenes comes on the eve of the Trinity test, the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb, after Enrico Fermi (Danny Deferrari) takes bets on whether the blast will destroy the world. Still, there are a few fabrications, including two pivotal scenes that elaborate on the same truth: the scientists who built the bomb were genuinely worried that it would accidentally bring about the end of the world. It is testament to the inherent drama of Oppenheimer's life, and of the Manhattan Project's three-year effort to design and build an atomic bomb, that the vast majority of the film's most memorable scenes and lines are taken straight from Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin's book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, or from contemporary sources. What does 'Barbenheimer' mean for Hollywood? Oppenheimer is 'a flat-out masterpiece' For the most part, the writer-director has chosen the historian's responsibility over the dramatist's liberty. But there has been little controversy about the authenticity of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. And we are used to hearing screenwriters such as Aaron Sorkin and Peter Morgan respond that it is legitimate to scramble chronology, invent composite characters and fabricate incidents in order to tell a deeper truth. We are accustomed to hearing historians protest that biopics mangle the truth.
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