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?

Exactly mango. Of course the bombs were horrific no one is pleased children in other countries were obliterated but they weren’t dropped out of the blue - the film is informative on the political situation at the time. There was genuine fear of the outcome if the nazi regime at the time got hold of these weapons and due to their cultural mindset the Japanese didn’t look like they would stop fighting.

@yogibutton you are setting up a false dichotomy. I think that the atom bombs were justified. This does not mean that I am 'happy' that children were killed. It was a case of the lesser of two evils. Asians were dying, in their thousands, all across Japanese-controlled areas, every day, many of them children, of hunger and malnutrition caused by the war. Civilians continued to die and to suffer the consequences of the war, some of them for the rest of their lives.

This idea that the war was over is fallacious. There was a war faction at high level in the Japanese government who tried to stop the surrender. There were Japanese commanders vowing to fight on. Japanese officers continued to kill unarmed 'undesirables' even after the surrender.

wars have never ever been fought without civilians suffering. It isn’t as if WW2 was the first time this had happened and prior to that wars had been confined nicely to armies, navy’s and later air force fighting each other & leaving everything else intact. 20% of Europe’s population was killed in the 30 years war, some areas list 65% of their population and that was in the 17th century. Crudely, civilians have nearly always born the brunt of war.

reading American Prometheus the book on which Oppenheimer is based, it’s very clear that he knew that they couldn’t unmake the knowledge they had acquired, they couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle and that there was no way only America would develop a bomb. Oppenheimer believed that they had to use the bomb to demonstrate its power. He hoped that by doing so it would put an end to war - all war - because with nuclear weapons, it was now quite possible to destroy the world. It was one of the reasons why he was appalled by Edward teller’s relentless push for the H bomb. They already had something capable of immense world ending destruction, why build something even bigger?

obviously we now know with the benefit of 80 years hindsight that he was naive to believe that could happen

People seem to have forgotten that the US needed the UKs approval to deploy the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since the UK provided a lot of the research and materiel for the project.

@MissyGirlie
Your post exemplifies my point exactly. You say it was the lesser of two evils. Who are you to evaluate evils and make a judgement of which one is lesser? You just repeat an official popular American (maybe British-American) version of that history, but you're somehow convinced that it has superior access to truth and you allow yourself to occupy a moral position in relation to this atrocious act which makes you feel comfortable. This is just how ideology works.

Good to see a voice of reason on the thread, amongst the posters who think it’s ok to drop bombs on a country that the US knew was surrendering.

Agree, but assume he didn't make that vert wrong decision.

@Lacucuracha Thanks! Good to see I am not alone. It has been a very sad thread indeed. I somehow wish I didn't know that this is what a lot of people think

That is a complete over simplification

Agree

The japenese imperial Council met on 9th & 10th august (so after the bombing of Nagasaki) and even then after 2 nuclear bombs they were tied at 3-3 as to whether to surrender. It was only the intervention of the emperor who ordered them to surrender, that they finally did.

My DD came home from seeing Barbie last night and said it had a really interesting feminist message!

I guess we all make presumptions about films and their messages.

But they weren't surrendering, even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thats post-war BS. It took the intervention of the Emporer to bring that about.

I went to see the film last night. It was a tour de force. It definitely did not make Oppenheimer out to be a hero for his work on the A and H bombs but it did portray how courageous he was in opposing the arms race and speaking truth to power after the war was over. He was depicted as being deeply conflicted about the use of the bomb in Japan even before the impact of that was known and haunted by the knowledge of the devastation it had wreaked for the rest of his life.

it was a very nuanced film and your concerns about it are entirelt misplaced @LKM23

No it’s not the same.

Understanding it’s not black and white when there’s a war doesn’t mean they are happy for children to be killed, disfigured or any of the other things.

Just because you don’t understand the nuance of a conversation, it doesn’t mean you can make things up.

@yogibutton I'm not sure that you read my earlier post. This is a topic about which I know far more than I would like, owing to my family background.

My 'moral position' on the atom bomb isn't something that makes me 'feel comfortable'. It's something I have examined in depth and re-examine every time the topic comes up. And equally, who are you to say (as you are effectively doing) that the lives of civilians of the aggressor nation (Japan) deserve more consideration than those of civilians under Japanese rule elsewhere in Asia?

To take one example, life at the end of the war in Singapore was horrendous. The Japanese admin had washed its hands of the Javanese labourers they had brought to the city and these men were, literally, dying in the gutters and on the five-foot-ways. There were virtually no cats left, because they had been eaten by the starving population.

Or how about Thailand, where entire families of slave labourers, more-or-less press-ganged in Malaya and shipped north, were hungry and riddled with illness, and were dying in their droves of dysentery and cholera? Do their lives not come into your consideration?

Because they sure as hell come into mine.

Japan had done some terrible things. This seems to keep on being conveniently forgotten by the Japan apologists on here

Such as? Funny how you don't quote or name.

No matter what the Japanese did, these were not the reasons the US government considered when dropping the bomb. They are reasons people come up with to justify the event later.

Even at the time, the entire uselessness of the targets was noted by US military, i.e they did not constitute significant targets to hinder the Japanese war effort.

You know what the Japanese did, right?

We should ignore history at our peril

^This. That bomb meant my grandad made it home alive after being held as a Pow for over 4 years, presumed dead for a long time. Weighed 5 stone and had various diseases. Him and his friends suffered horrendously at the hands of the Japanese, they were cruel fuckers.

When the war in Ukraine began I've read a post here on Mumsnet by a woman who said that NATO should enter the war. Others pointed out to her that it could mean the end of life on Earth but she was adamant that for fairness and to punish the aggressor, there was no other way and needs must. It surprised me then but now I see how this thinking arises.

You grandad’s life is not more valuable than those of innocent children

Maybe you misunderstood my post - if indeed this post of yours was aimed at me.

To my mind, the use of the bombs was justified as they reduced the net loss of life. Nothing to do with revenge on the Japanese, or punishment.
Deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki vs troops on both sides who would have died in continued fighting + civilians in Japan killed in continued fighting + people dying of hunger all over Asia (c10k/day) + continued high death rate of POWs and internees.

NANKING !!!!!!!