The Deadly Effects Of The Trinity Test That Oppenheimer Didn’t Show
Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” just might be the biggest surprise of 2023, a tremendous box office success that tells the crowd-pleasing, four-quadrant story of … J. Robert Oppenheimer’s work on the atomic bomb.
In his review for /Film, Chris Evangelista called the film “a conflicting movie with an unknowable core. It’s also one of the best movies of the year.” Nolan’s best movie, “Oppenheimer” unites virtually every white male actor in Hollywood for a film with endless talk about physics and math that still manages to be thrilling.
Nolan’s crowning achievement is condensing the gargantuan 700-page biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” into a functional screenplay, but that meant cutting some things. This made the film a target for audiences disappointed that the film undermined the point of view of those who were wronged, attacked, harmed, and/or killed by Oppenheimer’s work, like the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the victims of radiation from the Trinity test in New Mexico.
Tina Cordova, the co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, wrote in The New York Times about how the film does a disservice to the inhabitants of the area where the Trinity test occurred. In the film, Oppenheimer says the entire area where the Los Alamos town was built was uninhabited, but that is inaccurate. In reality, more than 13,000 New Mexicans lived within a 50-mile radius of the test side, with many of those people were not warned about the test in advance.
“Eyewitnesses have told me they believed they were experiencing the end of the world,” Cordova wrote, and many “simply dropped to their knees and recited the Hail Mary in Spanish” before being slowly poisoned with radiation that has resulted in generations of people getting cancer since 1945.
The Deadly Effects Of The Trinity Test That Oppenheimer Didn’t Show
