By Walter Staggs, PhD

The gap between what a film is meant to convey versus what actually gets conveyed (and therefore lost) can often be vast. In this case, though, Christopher Nolan delivers on his assertion that Oppenheimer is about consequences, particularly the kind that are out of our control once the genie is out of the bottle. For decades, those of us who grew up in the wake of the creation of the atomic bomb and its eventual normalization have had the luxury of using hindsight in our debates over whether the bomb should have been created in the first place. Thus, one of the things I like about Oppenheimer is that Nolan shows how the enormity of what they were doing was never lost on either the scientists or the politicians. It’s just that no one really had the time to think about it. “Because if Hitler got it first” was all anyone really had to say. Yet Nolan doesn’t leave it there. As we see with Oppenheimer himself, his misgivings grow as time passes and the reality of what the bomb was and what the atomic age could become just wouldn’t go away, and it speaks well to the inner turmoil of human nature when we find ourselves at odds with our own moral framework.

However, most telling in terms of The Bomb’s far-reaching implications was the discussion in the movie about the potential for the device to light the atmosphere on fire. This, if truth be told, is still lost on us to a great extent, for there is no point ever in human history where this was a necessary discussion we needed to have with ourselves “just in case.” In fact, because conceptualizing this was so beyond anything we’d ever known, it officially gets classified by the mind as “too big to fully comprehend,” and we end up having to use what we hope are useful analogies to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and actual experience. It’s like those online discussions that emerged about ten years ago when we needed to understand just how much a trillion dollars really is once budget talks in Congress starting frequently using the word “trillion.” The effects of the atom bomb were thought to be on that same kind of mind-numbing scale. Even so, they did it, and here is where I think we can look at the scope of everything that transpired in a way that might helps us appreciate just what a big deal The Manhattan Project really was.

As the movie reminds us, the math said it should be possible to split the atom, and possible it was, but they wouldn’t know for sure until they “lit the fuse.” I appreciated this back-and-forth about theory v. application because it provides us with a more practical understanding of what faith is both functionally and substantively. From the outside, faith is often juxtaposed against reason, which somewhat undermines the logical integrity of the thought and act which is proposed for belief. I’ve never thought this to be a very accurate or fair description of what faith is. Instead, what the discussion in Oppenheimer depicts is faith as an extension of reason, which ties faith intrinsically to logic itself. For people, regardless of tradition, simply cannot believe in something their minds fail to find at least somewhat logically plausible. Our minds just won’t latch on to it.

In fact, because of all the unknowns involved, which is what produces the need to accept something on faith, everything seems to boil down to where one puts the emphasis in the “maybe/maybe not” scenario because unknowns can be so difficult to quantify. A roommate of mine once used to complain about relying on weather forecasts while living in Oklahoma. He was from sunny California. One day after being caught in a horrific and quite violent thunderstorm unprepared, he came home livid, and obviously, soaked. He was not amused, although I secretly was…a little. On another day, when the weather guy said rain chances were 100%, he smartly took his umbrella, but to no avail. This is when he said, “Why do they put numbers in the forecasts? They should just emphasize the maybe or the maybe not. If it’s a 50/50 chance, then fine—maybe/maybe not. If it’s above 50% for rain—maybe! . . . but maybe not. If it’s less than 50%–maybe . . . but maybe not!” He was convinced this would be as accurate as anything he’d experienced in that state thus far. Fortunately for Oppenheimer and the planet, their chances for destroying all life on Earth was a strong maybe not . . . but the prospect of a “maybe” rightly haunted them a little bit.

Perhaps, though, nothing speaks to the magnitude of what they accomplished more than our own history with atomic fusion, which up until then, we really didn’t have. It’s an operative point made throughout the movie, the idea that theory will only get you so far. Thus, when they succeed at creating nothing short of a tiny sun on Earth for mere moments, humanity officially requires reclassification of genus and species. For until this moment, at least in our observable sphere of the universe, the only beings who’d accomplished such a feat were the gods. This was more than the emergence of the atomic age. We now produced a new means of conceptualizing ourselves in relation to the other creatures on the planet. We looked around, and none of the other animals could compare, so we had to look to the stars, and we found ourselves more reflective of our heroes from theology and mythology than those with whom we share any biology. Then we built on it and went to the moon—as the logical place for deity is out there, not down here. Like Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon and do these other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” or, as I posit, because that’s what gods do. 

Right now, it’s more metaphor than literal, but the shoe is beginning to fit. Geneticists are inching us ever closer to some form of physical eternality. Maybe we’ll end up being something like the Elves in Lord of the Rings, or those aliens that keep crashing and dying on our planet that Congress is just now being told about (Notice I didn’t say “allegedly crashing” either. We’re in too deep for that now. Let’s be honest). It reminds me very much of an episode of Stargate: SG1 called “The Fifth Race,” and it goes back to this idea of inevitable and unforeseen consequences for our actions in Oppenheimer.

If you’re not familiar with the actual movie upon which the series is based, humanity excavates a Stargate in Egypt and figures out how to make it work, which they then use to travel the galaxy, albeit naively at first. In this particular episode, the character O’Neill (played by MacGyver’s Richard Dean Anderson), gets afflicted by some alien technology that’s beyond human capacity to control and ends up making his way to another galaxy where he’s met by the Asgard, who are the little gray aliens. It’s fantastically more complicated than that, but long story-short, they save him and tell him that human beings were not advanced enough to handle what he was stuck trying to handle due to his hasty decision to grab onto alien technology he sorely underestimated. Then they tell him something further. Apparently, there were four “races” in the universe that had achieved some sort of technological and biological advancement that catapulted them above the capabilities of other beings, the Asgard being one of them. Here, the suggestion is offered that human beings may well be on their way to becoming The Fifth Race, though it’s obvious they’re in their infancy stages. But as O’Neill suggests, they are on their way.

Therefore, to suggest the deification of humankind by way of the atomic bomb is not to insinuate whatsoever that we’re worship-worthy. Our narcissism as a species is renown, especially in our theological and mythological literature. So, too, is that of some of the gods for that matter. Even the God of the Bible had to be told to stand down by Moses when he was going to wipe out the Israelites, his chosen people. Thus, it’s important for us to recognize that god-like actions should not be separated from the god-like responsibilities associated with those same god-like actions. Nolan captures this sentiment well with his portrayal of Einstein in the film, which, I think, can suggest something further about the concept of deity I am positing here—that deity is not without reproach. Deity can do bad things, and in some of our literature, very bad things, like genocide. We need not follow suit. We can create deity in the image we find most constructive to the good of all those that are affected by what we do in such a capacity. This, also, Nolan brings to the forefront of the atomic question as Oppenheimer wrestles increasingly with the ramifications of what they were doing.

The question for us now, having had eight decades of hindsight and “progress,” however you choose to define that, is “are we a species even capable of non-violence?” History does not seem to support that from any angle. Or is it simply in our DNA to make war in some capacity, even in times of peace? And if it is in our DNA, can we use our divine powers, which we refer to as “Science and Technology,” to rewrite that portion of ourselves? If we’re going to continue to live with such powers, perhaps that’s where we should be focusing our divine inspirations.