To be uncomfortable with the film Oppenheimer?

[LKM23]

I haven't seen the film, I'm sure it's a brilliant thriller and will be a Blockbuster hit. I don't think I'll watch it though, it makes my feel really uncomfortable.

It feels like a man who at the end of the day killed thousands of people and damaged millions is being celebrated and turned into a hero.

I lived in Japan for 10 years in my twenties. I visited both Hiroshima and Nagasaki and spent a lot of time with people both directly and indirectly affected by the dropping of the bombs. Those scars are real and still there and will be for a very very long time. It changed Japan and the people who live there forever and at the end of the day I think he was an awful person.

AIBU?

THIS!!💯⬆ALL of this!

I think this is pure hollywood.

Oppenheimer was amongst a group of brilliant physicists including Fermi and Feynman looking at the theoretical aspects of fission for the the Manhattan project. I don't actually think one man (or woman) can take credit for the atomic bomb actually as there were a series of advanced that led to its conception (including Einstein who thought of its possibility after populating his relativity principles).

nice to see a theoretical physicist in a blockbuster film but will this not just stereotype the profession needlessly? Oppenheimer did a lot of work on quantum theory as it applied to spectra for instance which I guess will hardly get a mention.

I think of interest is that a lot of these planet sized minds actually were pacifists fundamentally and dislikes the idea of armies of any hue and thought armed conflict barbaric. There was regret I think after the development and use of atomic bombs and the subsequent activism by scientists to prevent proliferation was ignored (but like climate change).

Yes the Rhodes book starts far enough back to show how so many contributed

It was interesting to me that many who were instrumental were forced to flee Germany

The pp outlining the Nanking atrocities were a hard read. I don’t have the words but just so terrible.

The film is apparently quite faithful to the book, which emphasises that oppenheimer was not solely responsible for the bomb's development. But the book makes an excellent case that Oppenheimer was a singular figure and extraordinary person, and as I said, it covers the period after the war where he was accused of being a Communist and lost his security clearance.

War is an awful thing, and WWII was exceptionally so. It really isn't possible to take the bombs out of their context. The film Bridge on the River Kwai is fiction, but it's based on the real building of the Burma Railway--and the conditions were far worse than those in the film. 100,000 people died to build it, POWs and local civilians. (As a Jew whose family hails from Poland and Lithuania, I'm understandably biased on the European side of the war.)

But it is not WHY the atomic weapons were used.

Saw it last night. Very good and educational lots I didn’t know. Much of it was based on the persecution of Oppenheimer afterwards. It was a nuanced film and dealt with his guilt. It’s rather silly to get your knickers in a twist about a film you haven’t actually seen.

At what points of history would it have been justifiable to a bomb the uk, pretending the technology was available?

But civilians including kids didn't deserve to die for actions of their government and army.

Agreed. The technology was suddenly available and, what would you know, they had an entire population of civilians who absolutely deserved for it to be to tested on… What luck!

sorry OT a bit but this made me chuckle @AndIKnewYouMeantIt i have a Cineworld Unlimited card and have been seeing the trailer for about 6 months before virtually every film. it’s become the standard “just popping to the loo” moment 😅

So civilians and kids had to pay the price for action of their emperor and army.

2 cities were wiped out, can you imagine doing today? You can't defend nuclear bombing of cities

I was replying to a posted who said "His actions prevented the death of many allied personnel who would have been involved in the invasion of Japan." if your grandfather was a POW then he would not have been among the soldiers invading.

There is some discussion about whether there was an actual policy to kill POWs, it was almost certainly discussed at some camps but no documentation is around. Of course that could have been destroyed.

Your grandfather surviving is as much luck as anything else. I appreciate this is personal for you and I'm just looking at numbers.

Approximately 36000 allied POWs were in Japan at the end of the war. Several camps were bombed or bombarded killing allied soldiers including some in Nagasaki.

If the two bombs saved their lives then the people of the two cities paid a heavy price.

Just to answer this question alone. There are lots of points, the campaigns against the Native Americans, those in Africa when the British invented concentration camps, the great Irish Famine, although I see these things as class struggles and agree with the socialist idea that we should have united and not fell for the racism/religious etc divides.

On a side note a film should be made about the taking of the land for testing. Let's hope Oppenheimer (which I want to see) helps that happen because of public interest.

I think a really pertinent point is that the geniuses of theoretical physics to some extent found it hard to contemplate being in the same humanities that causes such atrocities. I guess if your mind is constantly immersed in the subtle beauties of the universe at a fundamental level do you have the bandwidth to contemplate politics and human psychology (maybe I am being stereotypical). I think the juxtaposition of a mind like Einstein's revising Newtonian mechanics with two simple postulates leading ultimately to energy mass equivalence and a mind that is truly cruel is really revealing of human nature.

I wonder what Oppenheimer would have made of the fate of the only country to ever have given up its nuclear arsenal?

@mids2019

Hi

I guess if your mind is constantly immersed in the subtle beauties of the universe at a fundamental level do you have the bandwidth to contemplate politics and human psychology

I think you might know the answer to that, but for those that don't, a document sometimes referred to as "The Einstein-Szilard letter" might be of interest. It was written by Leo Szilard (Physicist) in 1939, signed by Einstein, sent to Roosevelt:

https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Resources/einstein_letter_photograph.htm#1

Just watch it yourself. This is one of the stupidest threads I’ve seen in ages.

Go and see Barbie while you’re at at it, sounds like you need to relax and stop being so uptight.

It’s far too complex of a situation to definitively say whether those bombings were ‘justified’ or ‘unjustifiable’ and sort of pointless imo. We have decades of hindsight, haven’t struggled through a years long war and aren’t on the precipice of the unknowns of the Cold War.

It’s too simplistic to ascribe the decision to one thing only. It surely lies within a huge web of context, some known at the time and some partially unknown and all of the options ending in wholesale death.

Japan couldn’t win at that point, but how long and at what cost would it take for the allies to win? Where is the situation with Russia going? How long will it take them to develop a nuclear weapon? What might they do with it? Will using the weapons to bomb Japan have a net positive effect on either of those things for us? Does that make it justifiable? How will history view this decision…

It is one of the most distressing threads I've ever read on Mumsnet. Just the sheer scale of the amount of fake historians who are happy for other ethnicities' children to be killed and whole cities wiped out because they read some books. Of course, as long as no one touches them, because they are "good". And they should not bear any responsibility for what their armies or forebears ever did. Let's not think about it. It's others who are truly evil and cruel and deserved to be wiped put by nuclear explosions. But these musmnetters, no, they are fair and kind. Truly truly shocking

Oh for heaven's sake. Are we really this dumb? History is full of diabolical people. Cruelty. Torture. Crimes. Senseless destruction. This film is a character portrait of one man. It's... A.... Film!

Where did anyone say they were happy for children to be killed?

and why would we take responsibility for decisions made by people born a century ago?

Do you believe Germans are responsible for the decision made by Nazis? Or that Japanese people today are responsible for the crimes of Japanese people almost a century ago?

How far back do that responsibility go?

Sorry but that is simply factually incorrect. The war was far from over and the US had lost very substantial numbers of personnel invading the islands around Japan. Even after the dropping of two bombs surrender was conditional on the Japanese Royal Family remaining in place.

Half of the thread is filled with people saying the dropping of atomic bombs was justified. This means they are happy with children to be killed and disfigured, unimaginable suffering to ensue, and soil and environment be contaminated for thousands of years.

I’ve been reading recently about Unit 731 - a Japanese medical experimental centre in the war, where 300,000 people, including children and babies, were experimented on and tortured to death, vivisected, in the most horrific ways. Most victims were Chinese but lots of other nationalities too. I had never heard of this. The victims were regarded as “logs”. It’s horrendous. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

With atomic bombs, humanity invented its own end. We are living in the presence of the forever present possibility of nuclear annihilation of all life on the planet at any moment.

@Ponoka7 'the British' did not 'invent concentration camps'.
IIRC, that honour goes to the Spanish.