Director Christopher Nolan’s 12th feature film is released in cinemas on July 19. Its title “Oppenheimer”, named after the physicist who developed the atomic bomb.
Christopher Nolan is back where we least expected him: on the biopic field, revisited in his own way in Oppenheimer, a film that paints a tortuous portrait of the American who developed the atomic bomb. Highly anticipated, the film, which is released in theaters on Wednesday, retraces in three hours the key moments in the life of Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), a physicist who marked the history of the United States and the 20th century, and contributed bring the world into a new era: the nuclear era.
>> “Oppenheimer”: Christopher Nolan signs a labyrinthine film on the “father of the atomic bomb”
The film particularly recounts the establishment of the “Manhattan Project” during the Second World War. AT From 1942, 5,000 people including a thousand physicists and researchers will meet in the greatest secrecy in a research center built from scratch in Los Alamos, a remote area of New Mexico. This is where the atomic bomb will be manufactured and tested, which will be dropped in August 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing the death of 200,000 people. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, becomes the scientific director of this project.
An ethical activist
It is difficult to know if Robert Oppenheimer had measured at the time the devastating magnitude of his invention, because the physicist was a complex character steeped in ethics from childhood and a brilliant and ambitious researcher. It will be noted that subsequently Robert Oppenheimer opposed the development of the “H” bomb (for hydrogen), 1000 times more powerful than the “A” bomb, for atomic. He also campaigned for nuclear research to be strictly supervised at the international level and put at the service of civil science. A cautious position for which he is then reproached.
In the 1950s, Robert Oppenheimer fell out of favor both because of this opposition to the “H” Bomb, and his relations with communist personalities. In the midst of McCarthyism, the American services wondered if he was really a loyal servant of his country. In 1954, Robert Oppenheimer was relieved of his responsibilities at the US Atomic Energy Commission.
Robert Oppenheimer is also interested in space
Until his death in 1967, he taught physics, but also the ethics of science at Princeton University in New Jersey. He succeeded in washing his reputation: his work on nuclear power was rewarded, but also that on astrophysics. Robert Oppenheimer was indeed also one of the first researchers to theorize the existence of black holes.
This career remains emblematic of a thorny question: are researchers accountable for the subsequent use of their discoveries? AT In the age of research on artificial intelligence, this question remains more topical than ever.