The Truth About Trinity: How Accurate is Oppenheimer?

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer Photo: Universal

By now you're probably tired of hearing about Christopher Nolan's masterpiece dramatizing the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist responsible for developing the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. A favorite at this year's Oscars almost since its premiere last summer, it will enter Sunday's Oscar ceremony with 13 nominations.

However, artistic merit and historical accuracy do not always coincide, especially in Hollywood. And while Nolan is an unusually demanding and conscientious director (and Oppenheimer is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the American physicist, American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin), there have already been complaints and suggestions that some of the film's highlights are contrived to be catchy and vivid moments and scenes. But which ones demonstrate cinematic license, and which ones are based – however improbably – on fact?

Did Oppenheimer really poison his mentor's apple?

There is a startling scene early on in which young Oppenheimer, then a Cambridge student, in a fit of rage injects cyanide into Professor Patrick Blackett's apple after Blackett forces him to miss part of a lecture by Niels Bohr (who later became something of a mentor to the physicist). It's a startling scene that coincidentally recalls the death of another brilliant and troubled man, Alan Turing, who died after allegedly eating an apple laced with cyanide. But, according to Oppenheimer's grandson Charles, this is pure fiction.

“My least favorite part is the poison apple reference,” he told Time. If you read American Prometheus closely, the authors say, “We don’t actually know if this happened… There is no record of him trying to kill anyone.” This is a really serious accusation, and this is a historical revision. There is not a single enemy or friend of Robert Oppenheimer who heard this during his lifetime and believed it to be true.»

James D&#39 ;Arcee and Kenneth Branagh in the film “Oppenheimer” Photo: Universal

However, both American Prometheus and Raymond J. Monk's 2012 biography of Oppenheimer suggest that the incident occurred. As Monk writes: “In what appears to be an attempt to kill his mentor, or at least make him seriously ill, Oppenheimer left an apple poisoned with toxic chemicals on Blackett’s desk.” The author notes that this became part of the Oppenheimer myth: “The incident was then hushed up, and none of his friends knew about it until Oppenheimer himself told them about it, usually in some more or less misleading version . However, that his feelings for Blackett were a combination of ardent admiration and furious jealousy was obvious to those who knew him well.”

Monk theorizes that somehow his actions were discovered, but he was allowed to continue his studies in exchange for agreeing to see a psychiatrist on Harley Street. If he had been expelled from Cambridge or imprisoned, his seismic career would have been ended before it even began.

However, according to Monk, one moment in the film is pure cinematic invention. “I think we can be quite sure that Niels Bohr did not take the apple and that Oppenheimer did not knock it out of his hands,” he says. Even Nolan is not immune to the temptation of fiction for fiction's sake.

Was Jean Tatlock murdered?

One of Oppenheimer's most intriguing characters is Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), a member of the Communist Party who was romantically involved with Oppenheimer before and during his marriage to Kitty. Although she appears in the film relatively briefly, she makes a significant impression — not least in the depiction of her suicide in January 1944, when, under FBI surveillance for her political sympathies and suffering from clinical depression, she took barbiturates and drowned herself in the bathtub.

Gene Tatlock in his 20s. Photo: Wiki Commons

The presence of a suicide note — «I think I would be a burden all my life — at least I could carry the burden of a paralyzed soul out of the fighting world,» it read in part — seemed to make it clear that she wanted to commit suicide, and the investigation rendered a verdict of suicide for unknown reasons.

However, Nolan provocatively includes a scene depicted as Oppenheimer's vision or fantasy of a gloved hand belonging to an unknown person pushing Jean's head under water. This could be seen simply as creative license, were it not for the fact that it is an allusion to a well-known conspiracy theory, suggesting that Jean's political views and association with the director of the Manhattan Project made her dangerous and therefore expendable for a greater good .

This theory is supported by the fact that her body contained chloral hydrate at the time of death; combined with barbiturates, this meant that she had what could be called «Mickey Finn» in her system — a non-lethal dose of drugs that would immobilize her before she was forcibly drowned. According to the American Prometheus, one doctor said: “If you were smart and wanted to kill someone, then this is the way to do it.”

Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock and Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP

The release of Nolan's film eclipsed the earlier film on the same subject, Roland Joffe's The Fat Man and the Little Boy, but that film's co-writer Bruce Robinson, best known as the writer and director of the original Withnail and I, became convinced that Tatlock was murdered, and that the public record of her autopsy was, in his words, «an inadequate invention.»

As Robinson told writer Alistair Owen in his collection of interviews, Smoking in Bed: “Step by step we are getting to the point where, if I were a policeman, I would make an arrest. The G2/FBI people killed her. They gave her chloral hydrate to make her unconscious, threw her into a bathtub, forged a note, and within a day or two—since her father was a very prominent man in the Berkeley area—Jean Tatlock's suicide appeared in the newspapers. Whatever the truth behind Tatlock's death, Nolan's film certainly hints at a larger story than just a tragic, self-inflicted demise — and is sure to leave others asking questions again, too. .

Could the Trinity test really end the world?

Tatlock's interest in the poetry of John Donne inspired Oppenheimer to name the first atomic bomb test «Trinity» after Donne's religious poems. However, it is the fear of planetary destruction, rather than poetic contemplation, that drives Matt Damon's General Groves to ask Oppenheimer in the film what the chances of global annihilation are. “Close to zero,” the physicist answers. In one of the film's brightest moments, Groves' horror at this discovery causes Oppenheimer to say, «What do you want from a theory alone?» The military man replies: “Zero would be nice.”

An Oppenheimer bomb is loaded onto a tower at the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico. Photo: AP

The film's «atmospheric combustion» scenario caused genuine fear among many scientists, including Oppenheimer's colleague Edward Teller, who worried that the splitting of the atom would lead to a chain reaction that would destroy the world. But by the time the Trinity test took place, it was widely accepted that such a seismic event was impossible.

As Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, commented to the Washington Post: “Over the years, this thing has ballooned to incredible proportions. The question that worried scientists before the test was not “Will it be able to blow up the world?”, but “Will it even work?”

The conversation between Groves Oppenheimer thus represents a moment of dramatic license on Nolan's part that effectively dramatizes the concerns of the military who financed the operation, but the main concern was the success of the test, not that it would lead to the apocalypse.

A recurring motif throughout the film, which is only fully explained in its climax, is the meeting of Einstein and Oppenheimer, as the latter becomes a high-ranking figure at Princeton under the auspices of his future enemy Lewis Strauss. The meeting between the two men—misinterpreted by Strauss, who was self-aggrandizing himself by believing they were criticizing him—shows a mournful Einstein suggesting that Oppenheimer's invention of the atomic bomb could destroy the world, and Oppenheimer responds, “I believe we did it. »

This is, of course, Nolan's invention and elegantly portrays both the shared values ​​and differences between the two men. But they certainly knew each other in real life, first meeting in 1932 at Caltech and then working together at Princeton after the war, where Oppenheimer remained until 1966. The two men were respected colleagues rather than close friends, and Bird and Sherwin suggest that the young man saw Einstein as «a living patron of physics rather than a working scientist.»

Tom Conti and Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal

Nevertheless, Einstein respected Oppenheimer, calling him «an extraordinarily able man with a wide-ranging education,» and later defended him when his security clearance was threatened, publicly declaring that «I admire him not only as a scientist, but also as a a great man.» and privately that «Oppenheimer's problem is that he loves a woman who doesn't love him—the United States government.»

Oppenheimer returned the compliment, saying in a lecture in 1965: “Einstein is also, and I think rightly, known as a man of very good will and humanity. Indeed, if I had to think of one word to describe his attitude towards human problems, I would choose the Sanskrit word ahinsa, “to do no harm,” “harmlessness.” Although Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt that convinced him of the need to develop an atomic program, he never participated in the Manhattan Project and ultimately believed in the power of science as something constructive rather than destructive.

President Truman called Oppenheimer a “crybaby”?

In one of Oppenheimer's most effective scenes, President Truman, played by Nolan regular Gary Oldman, meets with the physicist, ostensibly to congratulate him on his work on the Manhattan Project. But when Oppenheimer repents of his involvement in the project and suggests that he has blood on his hands, Truman sardonically waves a handkerchief at him before remarking about Oppenheimer's ouster from the Oval Office: «Don't let that crybaby get here again.» »

This seems almost obvious, unlike much of the rest of the elegant script, but this is one of the cases where the dramatic confrontation is based on documented facts. Monk's biographer testifies that Truman, in conversations with his aides, called Oppenheimer a «crybaby scientist» and told his Secretary of State Dean Acheson that he never wanted to see him again.

J. Robert Oppenheimer points to a photograph of an atomic bomb exploding over Nagasaki, Japan, in the 1940s. Photo: GettyAlthough this is reduced to one short scene in which Oppenheimer overhears his dismissal, it is nevertheless true that Truman was outraged by the scientist's principled objection. «There's blood on his hands, heck, he doesn't have half as much blood on his hands as I do,» he was recorded as saying. «You just won't argue about it.»

Didn't Kyoto get bombed because a politician went there on his honeymoon?

In a moment that epitomizes the mixture of horror and black comedy that defined much of the Manhattan Project, US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, deciding where there would be legitimate targets for dropping atomic bombs, proposes that Kyoto should be partially spared. because of its cultural and historical significance to Japan, but also, Stimson says cheerfully, because he and his wife honeymooned there.

This line, coined by James Remar, the actor who plays Stimson, seems to be the perfect encapsulation of institutional whim. «It's the bureaucratic quality of a group of people discussing mass destruction and how they're going to do these terrible things.» Nolan said. “And suddenly you see a human face in these negotiations.”

US Secretary of State Henry Stimson (right), with Winston Churchill and American Chief of Staff General George Marshall (right) in 1942. Photo: Getty

It is unclear whether Stimson went on his honeymoon to Kyoto, much less whether his personal attachment to the city led to his almost arbitrary rescue. However, it is documented that Stimson visited the city several times when he was governor of the Philippines in the 1920s, and that he personally urged Truman not to bomb it. The President agreed with him, as Stimson wrote in his diary on July 24, 1945. this act may make it impossible for a long post-war period for the Japanese to reconcile with us in this area, and not with the Russians.”

Still others argue that, rather than Stimson or any other politician, the credit for saving Kyoto should go to archaeologist and art historian Langdon Warner — one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones — who, in his role in Monuments, Fine Arts and the Armed Forces Archives Division presented convincing arguments against the bombing of Kyoto, as well as Nara and Kamakura. To this end, monuments to Warner have been erected in Kyoto and Kamakura; a gesture of gratitude to a man who truly understood the horror of what would happen if Japanese culture were swept away by Oppenheimer's invention.

Did Kitty testify on behalf of her husband at the security hearing?

Emily Blunt's presence in much of Oppenheimer's work is slightly disconcerting; In a film that focuses heavily on men, the A-lister is largely limited to domestic scenes at home that show both her alcoholism and her frustration at being sidelined from her husband's job. However, she has a great scene towards the end when Kitty attends a security hearing and passionately defends her husband and attacks their right to hold a quasi-kangaroo trial that will ultimately result in his security clearance being revoked.

Emily Blunt and Cillian Murphy as Kitty and J. Robert Oppenheimer Photo: Universal

It is drawn largely from the transcript of the hearing — as is much of this narrative thread — and shows Kitty as «frank and unflappable», as Bird and Sherwin suggest, and that «she acquitted herself with ease, coolness and precision in answering every question.» . Rejecting the idea that she and her husband's previous association with the Communist Party might have put them at risk, Oppenheimer's biographers conclude that «Kitty didn't give an inch.» Even [Roger] Robb [the lawyer who cross-examined her at the hearing] couldn't touch her. Calm and at the same time attentive to every nuance, she was undoubtedly a better witness than the husband she was defending.”

Did Oppenheimer really learn Dutch in six weeks?

There is a funny scene at the beginning of the film when Oppenheimer is about to give a lecture to a group of Dutch students. His colleague confidently expects him to speak English, leading to general confusion, but instead Oppenheimer delivers a complex technical discourse in fluent Dutch. When asked how long it took him to master the language, Oppenheimer replies: “Six weeks.”

This may seem like pure fiction intended to demonstrate Oppenheimer's genius, but it is completely true; the physicist had the ability to master languages, which allowed him to learn Dutch and Sanskrit in record time; his reading of the Bhagavad Gita in the latter prompted him to make his famous commentary after the success of the Trinity test: «Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.» His friend Harold Cherniss paid tribute to his ability to cope with any intellectual challenge, saying: «When he was interested in something, he very quickly acquired a huge amount of knowledge about it.»

Did he follow a diet of martinis and cigarettes?

Cillian Murphy's brilliant performance as Oppenheimer is due in part to the naturally slender actor's weight loss, which makes him look as gaunt as the real man. Oppenheimer himself weighed only 127 pounds (just over nine stone) and failed the Army medical examination because he was considered too thin to become an officer. At its lowest point, during the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer's weight dropped to just 115 pounds.

J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1947. Photo: Getty

Bird and Sherwin wrote that «his energy level never decreased, but it seemed as if he was literally disappearing little by little, day by day.» He may not have literally lived off cigarettes and martinis, as the film suggests, but food increasingly took a back seat to the more immediate stimulation provided by nicotine and alcohol; as one of his neighbors remarked, “My God, if a man ate a thousand calories a day, it was a miracle.”

Kitty Oppenheimer refused to shake Edward Teller's hand?

There is a powerful short scene at the end of the film where an elderly and rehabilitated Oppenheimer is presented with the Femi Award at the White House, and his friend-turned-friend Judas Edward Teller (who testified against him at a security hearing) extends his hand to shake. Oppenheimer does this apparently without resentment or anger. But when Teller in turn offers Kitty his hand, she scowls furiously at him, and he pulls it away in embarrassment.

This may have seemed like a convenient dramatic invention, but the audience witnessed its accuracy and confirmed—as if it were necessary—that Kitty's passion and anger were an invaluable foil to her husband's coolness and composure. more analytical temperament.