Why "Oppenheimer" Is a Philosophical Film

Co-authored by my good friend (and Nolan aficionado) Lance Belluomini

Oppenheimer (left) and General Groves at Ground Zero September 1945.

Source: Wikimedia/ Fair use

Christopher Nolan’s new film, Oppenheimer, shot in 70mm IMAX format with no CGI, is a wonder to behold. Even the sound design and Ludwig Göransson’s musical score add robust emotional depth.

The aim is to give the viewer a deeper look into J. Robert Oppenheimer’s mind, to feel how aware he was of his own responsibilities, and how he was racked by guilt. And that, we think, is central to the film’s philosophical core.

The Riskiest Bet in History

Nolan’s fascination with Oppenheimer’s story stems from his interest in him (and his fellow scientists) feeling as if they had no choice but to develop a nuclear weapon for the U.S. government; they had to create one before the Nazis did, despite knowing how much destruction and death it would cause. This idea is emphasized when Nolan takes us directly into the moment he regards as the most dramatic in history. Which moment?

Leading up to the Trinity test detonation in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oppenheimer and his team realized they couldn’t eliminate the possibility of an atomic chain reaction that would ignite the entire atmosphere and destroy all life on Earth. The odds weren’t as high as they first calculated, but they still weren’t zero. Despite this, they pushed the button anyway. The weight of the extraordinary risk they took with, but also on behalf of, the entire human race is unfathomable.

In the film, General Leslie Groves raises the issue.

Groves: Are we saying there’s a chance that when we push that button, we destroy the world?

Oppenheimer The chances are near zero.

Groves: Near zero?

Oppenheimer: What do you want from theory alone?

Groves: Zero would be nice.

They’re both right. Theory alone can’t rule out anything; but the fact that the probability of destroying the entire world is not zero (yes, it’s near zero, but that also means that it is not zero) is a very good reason for not going through with the test. It would seem absurd, regardless of the probabilities, to take any bet where the price of losing was that high. That is, of course, unless you were convinced that someone would eventually take that bet anyway, and if they won, they would just destroy the world in a different way.

That, of course, is why Oppenheimer’s team went ahead. They couldn’t just hope that (for example) Heisenberg, Oppenheimer’s German counterpart, would see the error of Nazism and intentionally sabotage the Nazi’s atomic bomb efforts (although there later was speculation to that effect).

They needed to create atomic weaponry before the Nazis did; if the Nazis did it first, they would win the war and rule the world. As Oppenheimer puts it in the film, “It’s about unleashing the strong force before the Nazis do.” It was a paradoxical moral situation, with which Nolan’s film forces us to wrestle.

The test detonation didn’t destroy the world, but it did change the world forever. As the scientist Neils Bohr tells Oppenheimer in the film, “You are the man who gave them the power to destroy themselves. And the world is not prepared.”

Nolan makes it a point to show that this is a power humankind has never had before, and we still live with its consequences. We understand Nolan’s message: There is no escaping the immediate threat that nuclear weapons pose.

Good Intentions, Bad Consequences, and Nuclear War

This also points to another reason Nolan made the film: To show that acting with the best of intentions can still have the most profound and negative consequences. The good intention of ending World War II and getting the Japanese to surrender led to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed and injured hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians through the bomb’s flashes, firestorms, and radiation.

This brings us to the moral dilemma that the film raises but doesn’t answer: Can the use of nuclear weapons in war, especially on civilians, be morally justified? Was the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki morally wrong? President Harry Truman and the U.S. government made the utilitarian argument that the decision for the bombings was an unfortunate but necessary act for the greater good, to prevent a greater degree of overall suffering.

Dropping the two bombs ended WWII, thereby avoiding a ground invasion, which they thought would have resulted in the death of over one million U.S. soldiers and millions of Japanese. But there are at least four problems with this argument.

First, this was just an estimate. Sure, the Japanese said they wouldn’t surrender—but Spiro Agnew said he wouldn’t resign if indicted for corruption (he was accepting bribes), and then a week after being indicted, he resigned. There is no way to know what would have happened had the U.S. chosen not to drop the bomb.

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Second, many philosophers argue that certain actions are wrong, regardless of the consequences. It’s wrong to murder an innocent, even if it is to save the lives of others. Granted, people tend to say that they would pull a lever to divert a trolley away from killing five people, even if its new course would kill one; but ask the same people whether they would be willing to push a single person in front of the trolly to stop it from killing five others, and they aren’t so confident.

Philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that you should never treat others as merely a means to an end, and the U.S. government treated the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as merely a means to ending the war.

Third, there are rules to how war should be waged, and the intentional killing of civilians is expressly forbidden. Indeed, there is a name for when civilians are intentionally targeted as a way to instill fear and capitulation in one’s opponent: It’s called terrorism. The argument could be made that, when a nation declares war, no matter how necessary that war is, if that war is to be just, that nation must accept the consequence that it may have to sacrifice the lives of its own soldiers to spare civilians—even the civilians of the opponent’s population. (To be fair, however, Japan was training its civilians to fight, in the case of a land invasion of the homeland, and thousands of civilians were killed during the occupation of Okinawa.)

Lastly, it’s just not clear that dropping atomic bombs on heavily populated cities was necessary. As scientist Edward Teller and Oppenheimer watch the two bombs being hauled away on the truck, Teller asks, “Would the Japanese surrender if they knew what was coming?”

The film’s scene where the generals are deciding how and where to drop the bomb forces one to wonder: What if the U.S. had elected to merely demonstrate the bomb’s destructive force by, say, dropping one in Tokyo Bay? Granted, Japan didn’t surrender after Hiroshima, but that’s because they didn’t believe we had another bomb. They might have believed we wouldn’t waste the only atomic bomb we had on a mere demonstration.

Indeed, the option of inviting Japanese dignitaries to the Trinity test was scrapped, and a letter from nuclear scientists urging Truman to merely demonstrate its destructive power on a barren island was not heeded. None of this proves that Truman’s choice was morally wrong, but that it was morally right is far from unquestionable.

The Cost and Threat of Nuclear War

Controversially, Nolan elected not to show the bombs being dropped or the destruction and suffering they caused. This is because he wanted us to only experience how Oppenheimer felt when he learned of the bombing of Hiroshima on the radio with the rest of his fellow Americans, to feel how he likely processed the magnitude of what happened given his understanding of nuclear fire and what it’s capable of doing to everyone, even to the people around him.

While we respect Nolan’s decision of seeing the consequences of the bomb droppings through Oppenheimer’s eyes, perhaps he could have also included “flashes” in his mind’s eye of the suffering the bombs caused to Japan’s civilians.

The film brings into focus that human beings have the capacity for mass destruction, and in the end, Oppenheimer believed that they did start a chain reaction that would eventually destroy the entire world: the nuclear arms race. We are fortunate that no leader since Truman has ever used nuclear weapons against another country; whether one thinks the use of atomic weaponry is right or wrong, that itself is a victory.

But Nolan thinks that the threat of nuclear war is the worst it has ever been; it’s not clear that’s true, but it does seem to be the worst it’s been since the cold war. And that’s part of Oppenheimer’s legacy, and what makes Oppenheimer (in Nolan’s eyes), the most important person to ever live. The threat he made possible is never going away; the film reminds us that is something that must be continually managed.

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