The battle over the bomb
In the years immediately following the war, public opinion about the use of the atomic bomb hadn’t yet solidified. The first time Oppenheimer appeared on the big screen was in August 1946, when he starred in the 18-minute documentary “Atomic Power,” which was part of Time’s “The March of Time” series. Onscreen, Oppenheimer (one of several figures who participated in the film, including Einstein, Groves and Rabi) re-enacts waiting anxiously for the detonation at Trinity with Rabi, who gives a stilted performance as he reassures his boss, “It’s going to work all right, Robert. And I’m sure we’ll never be sorry for it.”
In fact, Oppenheimer was already sorry. In October 1945, he told President Harry S. Truman (played by Gary Oldman in Nolan’s film), “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.” The tide of public opinion was also beginning to turn. Three weeks after “Atomic Power” was released, John Hersey’s searing, book-length article “Hiroshima” appeared in the New Yorker, awakening many Americans for the first time to the horrors of the bomb.
Fearing they were losing the battle for the history books, Truman and other officials sprang into action, compelling former Secretary of War Henry Stimson to defend the use of the bomb in a Harper’s magazine article published in February 1947. The story, which reads as a simple recitation of the facts, portrays the decision to use the bomb as one made with sagacious care. It introduced the argument—repeated often since—that the bomb prevented an Allied land invasion of Japan that would have cost “over a million casualties, to American forces alone.”
“That article really set the history for most Americans for the next generation,” Bird says. “And the narrative was, ‘Oh, it was a difficult decision. It was terrible. But it was necessary, and it saved perhaps a million American lives.’”
The first major Hollywood film about the bomb, The Beginning or the End, debuted the month after Stimson’s article. Initially conceived by atomic scientists as a way to educate the public about the dangers of nuclear warfare, the movie went through script approvals and retakes ordered by Groves and Truman that turned it into a “pro-bomb celebration—dictated by the Pentagon and White House,” wrote Greg Mitchell in his 2020 book, The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
