{"id":1982799,"date":"2023-07-26T03:30:01","date_gmt":"2023-07-26T07:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/oppenheimer-explores-the-heroic-and-horrific-power-of-mans-inventions\/"},"modified":"2023-07-26T03:36:12","modified_gmt":"2023-07-26T07:36:12","slug":"oppenheimer-explores-the-heroic-and-horrific-power-of-mans-inventions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/oppenheimer-explores-the-heroic-and-horrific-power-of-mans-inventions\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Oppenheimer\u2019 delves into the dual nature of mankind&#8217;s creations: heroic and horrific."},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">24<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Foppenheimer-explores-the-heroic-and-horrific-power-of-mans-inventions%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1982799&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div class=\"article-content\">\n<h2>The Tragic Tale of \u2063Oppenheimer<\/h2>\n<p>The \u200cpivotal scene in Christopher Nolan\u2019s \u201cOppenheimer\u201d \u200dis a victory speech gone wrong. Cillian \u200dMurphy is masterfully cast as the queasy\u2063 genius, a spindly boy with troubled \u2063dreams who has grown into an unlikely and\u2063 uncomfortable\u200c war hero.<\/p>\n<p>Addressing an exuberant Los Alamos \u200ccrowd\u2064 after his bomb has cinched the victory in Japan, Julius Robert Oppenheimer hovers between triumph and torment like a particle in quantum superposition, overlaid \u2064in two conflicting states at once. He barks out a rousing tribute\u200d to\u2064 his country, but Nolan shows us imagined scenes of\u200d horror clouding the scientist\u2019s vision: skin peeling from the fresh faces \u200cin the audience, ashen corpses crunching beneath his feet.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>What fate could be worse for humanity than to achieve\u200b our grand designs? It\u200d wasn\u2019t our failures that God protected us from when \u2064he \u200dhalted construction\u2064 of \u2062the world\u2019s greatest building project to date: It was the \u2064cataclysm of our potential success. \u201cSee,\u201d he said as a monstrous silhouette rose against the\u2064 skyline of \u200ba place that would come\u200d to be called\u200b Babel. \u201cThis is\u2063 the beginning they have made as one \u2063people, speaking one language. Now nothing \u2063that they try to do will be out of\u200d their reach\u201d (Genesis 11:1-9). There is something terrifying about getting what we \u200cwant.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<h3>The Power of Technology<\/h3>\n<p>Power makes it possible for a man to follow through on his intentions, and so to\u200b reveal them for what they are. It follows that technology, \u2062which delivers power, reveals what is in the hearts of men. The more we can do, the more we learn about what we choose to do when we can. \u200dNot everyone can bear the discovery.<\/p>\n<p>Shortly \u200cbefore World War II, the \u2064brilliant\u2063 chemist Fritz Haber developed a technique \u2062for extracting nitrogen from Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Since ammonia made with nitrogen \u2064can be used to fertilize crops, Haber became\u2062 known as the man who pulled \u201cbread from air.\u201d He was also the man who\u200b supplied Germany with munitions, \u2063using the same nitrogen\u2064 to equip his\u200c Kaiser\u2019s arsenals with explosives. Life and\u200c death\u200b alike came seeping out of the\u200d sky at his command: It was impossible to bring one without the other.<\/p>\n<p>Haber also helped create the \u2064poisonous gas that sent boys choking to their deaths on the front lines. His wife Clara Immerwahr, herself a formidable chemist, saw the whole \u200dthing as \u201ca perversion of science\u201d and \u201ca sign of barbarism,\u201d as Morris Goran explains in <em>The Story of Fritz Haber<\/em>.\u200c In 1915, Immerwahr shot herself with Haber\u2019s military pistol, unable to bear the thought of her husband\u2019s creation descending \u2062like a curse over the \u200bsons of Europe. That very morning, Haber embarked for the Eastern front to supervise the first gas offensive\u2064 there.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Bread and bullets, victory and agony, slaughter and grain: They come into being \u200cas twins, midwifed by imperfect men of science. \u2063\u201cOppenheimer\u201d portrays\u2063 its title character as \u2062just such \u2062an imperfect man, an \u201cAmerican\u200c Prometheus\u201d (also the title of Kai Bird and Martin\u2063 J. Sherwin\u2019s biography, which inspired the film). At \u200dthe prompting of \u2062Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves \u2014\u2062 played by a bluff and frequently red-faced Matt Damon \u2014 Oppenheimer endows mankind with the ability to fuel or destroy the world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<h3>The \u2063Weight \u200cof Choices<\/h3>\n<p>The original Prometheus did \u2064the same thing, seizing fire from heaven\u2064 to bestow upon humanity; he\u200d was chained forever to a rock\u2062 and \u200bgutted alive \u2062by eagles as\u2064 punishment. What gnawed away at the real Oppenheimer was remorse. The uranium bomb\u2063 did\u2063 not ignite \u2063the atmosphere\u200d and engulf the world in flame, as some theorists \u2062feared it could. But Oppenheimer worried \u200bthat it might as\u2064 well have. The last \u2064third of Nolan\u2019s\u200c film \u2064shows a man caught up in his own chain reaction, \u200cstruggling desperately against \u200bthe inevitable nuclear arms race between America and Russia as his hopes \u2064of international collaboration recede\u200d into the mists of na\u00efve idealism.<\/p>\n<p>Nolan expertly threads Oppenheimer\u2019s professional \u200dself-doubt\u2063 together with his personal failures and regrets. His lover, Jean \u200bTatlock, a stylish psychoanalyst played to sultry perfection by\u2064 Florence Pugh, embodies the past he could \u200dnever quite outrun. She slinks into his life at a meeting for communist\u2064 sympathizers, straddling him while he reads verses aloud from Hindu scripture. Oppenheimer is entranced, but ultimately he must leave Tatlock behind for a more \u200dstable partnership, just as he must suppress his leftist sympathies to make his crucial contribution to the war effort.<\/p>\n<p>Emily Blunt plays Kitty, the wife \u200cOppenheimer eventually chooses: severe and distant toward her\u200b children, bitterly wounded by her husband\u2019s infidelity, but fierce in\u200c his defense against\u200b accusations of treason after \u200bthe war. Jean, meanwhile,\u200c <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/joe-biden-vladimir-putins-back-against-the-wall-and-preparing-consequential-cyber-attack-and-chemical-weapons\/\" title=\"Joe Biden: Vladimir Putin's 'Back Against the Wall' and Preparing 'Consequential' Cyber Attack and Chemical Weapons\">grows increasingly desperate<\/a> as she\u200b finds herself relegated to the status \u200cof\u2064 the other woman. Her confident sophistication dissolves\u200b into desperate anguish, and she drowns herself in the bathtub, leaving Oppenheimer \u200cto grow old in \u200bthe \u200cdisastrous \u2063wreckage of a well-intentioned youth.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>As an American, he could hardly\u2064 have withheld his gifts from his country\u2019s service in her hour of need. As a Jew, he could \u200dhardly have abandoned his \u2063people to death camps in foreign lands.\u2062 As a scientist, he could hardly have resisted the allure of a new physics that promised to crack open \u200cthe\u2064 seeds of existence itself. But he was just about as ill-equipped to wield such awesome power as it was possible to be.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<h3>The Complexity of Moral Decisions<\/h3>\n<p>\u201cGenius is no guarantee of wisdom,\u201d observes Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the power broker who maneuvered \u2062quietly to have Oppenheimer\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/zarif-had-no-knowledge-of-israeli-strikes-until-kerry-told-him-translation-reveals\/\" title=\"Zarif Had No Knowledge of Israeli Strikes Until Kerry Told Him, Translation Reveals\">security clearance revoked<\/a> on suspicions of communist sympathy. Strauss is \u200bat home in the unscrupulous world of politics; Oppenheimer, \u200dcaught unawares,\u2062 is tossed aside by a \u200dgovernment that no longer needs him. Nolan shoots the post-war scenes in black and white,\u2062 contrasting the vivid urgency of discovery at the Los \u2063Alamos \u2064laboratory with \u200cthe drab\u200d and\u200c petty intrigue of subsequent partisan maneuvering.<\/p>\n<p>Nolan occasionally loses his footing in this third act by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/oppenheimer-explores-the-heroic-and-horrific-power-of-mans-inventions\/\" title=\"\u2018Oppenheimer\u2019 delves into the dual nature of mankind's creations: heroic and horrific.\">letting lazy political \u2063clich\u00e9s stand<\/a> in for \u200creal \u200bmoral complexity. Strauss comes across as a conniving villain; President Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) appears in one scene as a callous buffoon; Sen. Joe McCarthy is brushed off \u200bin a \u200csingle line as a \u2062fanatical amateur.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s clear that Nolan\u2019s sympathies lie with the likes\u2063 of Albert Einstein, who recoiled\u200b from political entanglements \u200dafter writing President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 and advising him to stockpile uranium. Chastened by the thought of \u2063what his advice might have \u2064brought to pass, Tom Conti\u2019s Einstein stands \u200daloof from the grubby \u200denticements of politicians, pronouncing gravely on the dangers ahead.<\/p>\n<p>The movie <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2023\/07\/25\/unlike-barbie-oppenheimer-lets-us-decide-who-the-villains-are\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">never answers<\/a> \u2062 that one question \u200dthat any critic of the American war effort must face: What else was Oppenheimer, or Truman, or anyone for that matter <em>supposed<\/em> to do? In 1972, two hunters in Guam\u200c stumbled across Shoichi Yokoi, a lance corporal in \u2064the Japanese Army. He \u200bhad been hiding out there since 1945, when\u2063 Oppenheimer\u2019s \u200cbombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Refusing to surrender, Yokoi stuck \u2064to his post for almost\u200b 30 years, until his country\u2019s defeat became impossible \u2062to ignore. That is the\u2063 kind of enemy America was facing: dogged, \u200dunyielding, prepared to\u2063 gasp its way through years of protracted conflict \u2062down to the last man.<\/p>\n<p>Faced\u2064 with prospective deaths\u2062 in\u200d the tens of millions, Truman dropped the bomb. It\u2019s possible \u200bto grapple seriously with the awful necessity of that decision, just as it\u2019s \u200cpossible to understand that a \u2062bright-eyed young man might innocently favor\u200b communism as an apparent alternative to\u2062 fascism \u2063in Europe. Serious moral\u200b decisions are rarely cut \u2063and dry; good arguments\u200c can be made for a range of imperfect alternatives. But what\u2019s <em>not <\/em>possible is \u200bto \u2063simply do nothing \u2014 \u200cto absolve \u200coneself of the complexity inherent in decisive action, indulging in the luxury of \u200dcondemning the least bad option without proposing any workable alternatives.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The only serious flaw in Nolan\u2019s otherwise riveting movie is the \u2063hint of sanctimony it\u200d attaches to the \u200dman who retires from the world. \u200dIt\u2019s the\u2062 scientist, the\u200b artist, the philosopher that gets to wash himself of the \u200cmoral stain that comes from hard choices.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<h3>The Burden\u200b of Responsibility<\/h3>\n<p>If he does bestow his powers of insight upon the masses, he\u200c is likely to be martyred and misunderstood: \u201cYou see beyond the world\u2064 we live\u2062 in \u2014 there is a price for\u2063 that,\u201d says a fellow scientist to Oppenheimer. Kitty watches in exasperation as her husband sits with quiet dignity through his interrogation: \u201cDid you think that if you let them tar and feather you, the world would forgive you? Well, they won\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She\u2019s\u2062 right, of \u2063course, and Nolan does an excruciatingly thorough\u200b job of counting the price Oppenheimer \u200dhad to pay \u2014 in personal \u2062effrontery, in public humiliation, in existential angst \u2014 for his\u200d greatest \u2063discovery. But men of action pay \u2063a price for their choices, too, and there\u2019s precious little sympathy on offer for the mere mortals who had to get their hands\u2062 dirty fighting the war. Were they so awash with good options that we can fault them for the one they chose?<\/p>\n<p>In his <em>Nicomachean \u200cEthics<\/em>, Aristotle notes that\u200d young men can become experts at geometry but not politics, \u201cbecause the former\u2064 subject exists through abstraction, \u2064whereas the principles of\u200c the latter come from experience\u201d (VI.8). This is the difference between what the ancients would have called the\u200c \u201cactive\u201d life and the \u2062\u201ccontemplative\u201d life: the pristine clarity of mathematics is nowhere to be seen in the\u200b ragged \u2063trenches of human experience, where none are found righteous, and no one gets out alive.<\/p>\n<p>Oppenheimer and Einstein get to\u200d brood nobly by the pond in the rain, fretting over \u200cmatters\u200c of\u2064 pure principle.\u200b But Truman\u200c and Groves\u2064 have the thankless job of corralling the world\u2019s most temperamental masterminds and eliciting from\u200d them a weapon of mass destruction\u2064 \u2014 which will then\u200d be dropped, or not, with\u200c unthinkable consequences\u200b either way.<\/p>\n<p>Though it leans a little heavily on the side of the tender-hearted pacifists, \u200bNolan\u2019s \u201cOppenheimer\u201d lays \u200cbeautifully bare the tragedy of human endeavor, which is that our most spectacular triumphs \u200calso \u200daggravate \u200bour most hideous flaws.\u2062 We can do our \u2062best to act rightly and to mitigate the risks we face.<\/p>\n<p>But\u2064 there is no such thing as safety and no question of pursuing \u2063only \u200dthose achievements that don\u2019t also cast a shadow of potential catastrophe.\u2062 The peril \u2062and the promise are both built into science and politics themselves because\u2062 they are built into <em>us. <\/em>The line between good and evil, as\u2064 Aleksandr \u2062Solzhenitsyn observed, runs\u200c through every\u200d human heart.<\/p>\n<p>If we are living in the world \u2064that Oppenheimer helped to build, \u200bthen it is the world of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/china-denies-leak-after-fuel-rod-trouble-reported-at-nuclear-power-plant\/\" title=\"China denies leak after fuel rod trouble reported at nuclear power plant\">nuclear power plants<\/a> as well as nuclear war. The universe\u2062 in\u2062 which Russian\u200b President Vladimir Putin could feasibly unleash an atomic weapon is\u2063 the same one in which nuclear-powered rockets could\u2064 feasibly land \u200don Mars. Our era of hyper-accelerated technological\u200b development has been terrifying\u2062 and disorienting precisely because it unleashes wonders and \u2064disasters in equal measure.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s\u200c said \u200dthat when Oppenheimer saw \u2064the bomb\u2064 explode \u2064for the first time, he recalled \u200ca line from the \u201cBhagavad Gita,\u201d the Sanskrit poem\u200b that Nolan has him read to Tatlock in bed. \u201cNow I am become death, destroyer of \u200bworlds.\u201d Krishna, \u200blord of the cosmos, reveals himself in the poem as master of \u200bdestruction as\u200c well as\u2064 creation.<\/p>\n<p>The powers\u200b we touch upon at the core of the universe are every bit as \u200cfearsome as they are magnificent \u2014 but\u200c we, in our broken humanity, are the ones who must wield them. There is no getting out of that responsibility. Only God can help us bear\u200d it.\u2063 It \u200bmay well be He \u2063who charged\u2063 us with it in the first place.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\">\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The key moment in Christopher Nolan&#8217;s &#8220;Oppenheimer&#8221; is a failed victory speech. Cillian Murphy excels as the uneasy prodigy, a fragile man haunted by his aspirations, now an unexpected and uneasy war icon. Speaking to a jubilant Los Alamos audience, he celebrates his bomb&#8217;s triumph in Japan, Julius Robert&#8217;s transformation evident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":312,"featured_media":1982800,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1982799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/312"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1982799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1982800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1982799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1982799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1982799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}