When my partner first told me the Oppenheimer movie didn't talk about this AT ALL, I immediately lost whatever little interest I had. Gross to make so much money off of them, yet not even mention the victims. 35 infants died the month after the test bomb alone.
Idk, call me a buzzkill or whatever but I don't think there's enough special effects in the world to make me feel less gross about this. I really thought part of the movie would be him facing the reality of what he created tbh.
@vapaad I have not seen the film yet. I never met Oppenheimer. I did attend a lecture by Edward Teller in which he was asked about Oppy. I won't quote him, but his defensive answer left me with the impression that none of these guys were heroes.
IMHO:
The mindset of the scientists of the time is most clearly captured in Kurt Vonnegut's book, "Cat's Cradle." For better or worse, their toying with the destruction of global civilization was mainly "play," until the Trinity test.
As a science teacher, I explained the process of nuclear decay on the blackboard, and the principles of fission and fusion. It wasn't until I visited the research reactor at Oak Ridge and stared down through the pure water in the "swimming pool" at the eerie blue-white glow in the core of the reactor, and felt the heat on my face, and saw the Cerenkov radiation from the spent fuel rods, that nuclear energy became real to me. I suspect that something like that was true of the physicists of the time.
@sysfrank Cat's Cradle is one of my favorite books so it's nice to read your assessment of it.
I work in oncology so perhaps I'm a bit more knowing of the effects on the body than the actual science around the bombs itself, but man when you have faces and names and obituaries to put to (later, but still cancer causing) US war crimes it just makes it a lot harder to swallow I feel.
abby
sysfrank 🤣🤣🤣