Oppenheimer is a biographical film about J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the Manhattan Project, a World War II American project funded by both the United Kingdom and Canada to build nuclear weapons.
Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, was a theoretical physicist whose work directly contributed to the first successful nuclear bomb test. Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904. Oppenheimer excelled in physics as an undergrad at Harvard University. He continued his education by doing research at the University of Cambridge in England. Later, he moved to the University of Göttingen in Germany, to study then-revolutionary quantum physics with pioneers in the field.
Oppenheimer dabbled with Communism in the 1930s, meeting Communist students and supporting the leftist Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, but he never joined the Communist Party. This involvement, though, would come back to bite him. However, the commencement of World War II would put Oppenheimer’s political concerns on hold, upending the destinies of physicists in ways no one could have predicted.
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The United States Army enlisted the help of American and British physicists to figure out how to convert nuclear energy into unrivaled military power. The project was given the name the Manhattan Project, and Oppenheimer was appointed as its administrator. He directed multiple hidden labs, including one famously built in the middle of nowhere on the desert plateau of Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Indeed, the Manhattan Project was a success in its own right: work in Los Alamos (as represented in Oppenheimer) resulted in the first test nuclear explosion on July 16, 1945, in a remote area of New Mexico near Alamogordo.
The atomic bomb was not detonated until after Germany had surrendered in WWII. Nonetheless, the United States detonated two nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945, despite the fact that Japan was an active Axis power against the American and British Allies. Those nukes were the first and remain the only nuclear bombs used in warfare to this day.
Source: menshealth.com
