This article containers spoilers for the film Oppenheimer.
Few authors have written as insightfully about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer as Richard Rhodes, whose 1986 book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is widely regarded as the definitive account of the Manhattan Project. Rhodes’s comprehensive history, which won a Pulitzer Prize, is both a massive work of scholarship—the main text alone runs nearly 800 pages—and a literary feat that he conceived as “the tragic epic of the twentieth century.” Over the years, according to Rhodes, it has been optioned many times, but no film or television version has ever been made. “It’s quite obvious why,” Rhodes told me. “It’s just too big a story.”
Over the weekend, along with millions of other moviegoers, Rhodes saw Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s three-hour biopic of the physicist known as the father of the atomic bomb. The next day, curious about his reaction, I spoke with Rhodes by phone. He was deeply impressed by the film, especially in light of earlier attempts to adapt the same material. “It’s really first-class work,” Rhodes said, comparing it favorably with Roland Joffé’s Fat Man and Little Boy (“badly done,” from a technological perspective) and specifically praising Cillian Murphy’s performance in the title role. “If anything, he was a little too confident. But Oppenheimer was pretty confident.”
We also discussed aspects of the story that weren’t covered by the film, which Nolan adapted from the biography American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Given its relentless concentration on Oppenheimer, the movie necessarily leaves a lot out, including plenty of what Rhodes called “drama on the industrial side” and the perspectives of scientists and victims who fall outside its protagonist’s circle of consciousness. For the rest, viewers may need to return to Rhodes’s own wide-ranging work, which expands beyond even the largest IMAX screen.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Alec Nevala-Lee: Do you think that the film’s picture of Oppenheimer is accurate?
Richard Rhodes: One time I asked [the physicist] Bob Serber if my portrait of Oppenheimer was anywhere close to the real human being. And Serber, who had a very dry wit, said, “It’s the least wrong of all those I’ve seen.”
And I think that applies here, because the difficult edges to Oppenheimer were, to some degree, sanded off. But there have been several Oppenheimers in past versions. The BBC did a series with Sam Waterston. He was wonderful, but he was much too nice. Then when the next version [the 2009 PBS docudrama The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer] came around, [David Strathairn] played Oppenheimer as a hand-wringing neurotic, which really pissed me off when I watched it. You could not possibly have someone who did what Oppenheimer did in his life who was just sitting around shaking all the time with anxiety.
[Read: Oppenheimer is more than a creation myth about the atomic bomb]
Nevala-Lee: Most viewers are probably encountering figures such as Lewis Strauss (the government official who orchestrated the notorious hearing that revoked Oppenheimer’s security clearance, played by Robert Downey Jr. in a towering performance) and Leslie Groves (the military head of the atomic-weapons program, played by Matt Damon) for the first time.
Rhodes: Yeah, I think Strauss, if anything, was depicted somewhat more pleasantly than he really was. I think he was even more nasty. And I was really surprised by Matt Damon, who did a damn good job. In fact, it gave me a different sort of perspective on Groves. I had pictured him as stuffier than he was depicted here, and I think this is probably closer to the truth. Groves was really a superb leader, and also anxious and insecure around the scientists. Which was a funny combination, because he drove them to get the job done anyway.
Nevala-Lee: Was there anything else about the movie that surprised you?
Rhodes: Mostly minor things. I’d read about the arrival of the shock wave after the light [from the Trinity test], but my God—when you see it in IMAX, it really hits you; it resonates in your chest. We were just knocked back in our chairs. I wish [Edward] Teller [Oppenheimer’s nemesis in the debate over the hydrogen bomb] had been a little different. I spent an interesting 30 minutes with Teller and had some sense of what he was like. That guy [Benny Safdie] was a little too oily, not quite as sinister as Teller really was.
Nevala-Lee: Nolan has always struck me as a pretty cerebral guy who also makes movies on the largest possible scale. It tracks to me that Oppenheimer, a theorist who found himself in charge of this incredible industrial operation, would appeal to him.
Rhodes: That makes sense. My experience with writing books is, your best books are the ones that you have a deep emotional investment in. And there’s an automatic tendency when you’re writing a biography to turn the character in the biography into oneself.
Nevala-Lee: Nolan, who is willing to play with structure, seems like a good choice for this story, because it allows him to deliver so much information. He can cut between the Manhattan Project period, the Oppenheimer hearing, and the hearing for Strauss’s nomination as secretary of commerce, and use the dynamic to explain things to the audience.
Rhodes: I had never thought about the parallel between Strauss and Oppenheimer before, but the story is structured so that both of them are destroyed by the forces of Washington, D.C. And that’s really a wonderful sort of parallel. Oppenheimer’s kind of a tragic hero, and I wouldn’t give that credit to someone like Strauss. But in a kind of corrupt way, he followed the same arc across his life. That was a real insight that I haven’t seen—maybe it’s in the biography [American Prometheus].
Nevala-Lee: I read it recently, and Strauss’s hearing takes up just a single paragraph. But Nolan decides to make it a fifth of the movie, for the reasons you’re saying. There’s this fascinating parallel that is possible only in a movie—the thematic echoes and the rhythm of the editing provide a sense of closure that would be much more difficult in book form.
Rhodes: You can do that, but you’d have to have that insight. And Nolan had that insight. When you do research for a book, often you’ll come across something that can be expanded upon. When I was working on The Making of the Atomic Bomb, I read a history of the development of physics in the United States. And in a footnote at the end of a chapter deep in the book, there’s this note about [Enrico] Fermi, one day going up to the window and looking down at the gray winter length of Manhattan Island—alive with crowds—and cupping his hands together and saying, “A little bomb like that and it would all disappear.” The historian who wrote this book threw that away into a footnote. I made it the end of the whole first third of my book.
Ian Allen
Nevala-Lee: The movie for the most part is very realistic, but dreamlike moments visualize Oppenheimer’s psychological state, which reminded me of your book. The opening paragraph starts with the physicist Leo Szilard—whom you use in your book as a “clothesline” character, someone the audience can follow across a complex narrative—crossing the street, with a description of what the weather was like in London, and then it ends with a passage out of John Milton. And that elevates the tone in a way that tells you something about the material.
Rhodes: That’s what I was trying to do, of course. But I thought it was really off tone when [Nolan, in one of those dream sequences] had Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock screwing on the table in the security hearing. That was, I think, maybe a bit of an overreach. It’s curious and interesting that they decided not to visit Hiroshima.
Nevala-Lee: I was wondering whether Nolan would show that, but every scene that’s not about Strauss is from Oppenheimer’s point of view. So instead of the bombing, you see him waiting for a phone call, because he has no control over how the weapon is used. There’s an earlier scene where the characters talk about saving lives by heading off an American invasion of Japan. Is this something that would have been discussed before the bombing, or is this a rationalization that defenders of the decision arrived at after the fact?
Rhodes: Well, George Marshall [the U.S. Army chief of staff during World War II] said we knew that the Japanese were getting their people trained to fight us. And we thought that if we could bomb the beaches with atomic bombs, we might shock the Japanese into surrender. In fact, there were plans to keep going. I found a memorandum from Oppenheimer to Groves saying if we make a design that uses both plutonium and uranium, we can have six bombs a month by October.
Nevala-Lee: If the movie had included that suggestion, it would have really changed the viewer’s sense of Oppenheimer.
Rhodes: There was also discussion in ’43 or ’44 of making radiation bombs stuffed with cobalt 60 or something that would just spread radioactive particles all over the place. We did some tests down in New Mexico, and I remember someone’s comment afterward—it was the most god-awful stuff you could imagine. Which, yes, it would be, wouldn’t it?
[Read: The real lesson from The Making of the Atomic Bomb]
Nevala-Lee: I recently watched the opera Doctor Atomic, where one character is Oppenheimer’s Native American maid. That’s the kind of voice you don’t hear in the movie.
Rhodes: It was certainly a valid perspective. These guys came in and swept the mesa clean, and they used the Native American people to clean their houses.
Nevala-Lee: Nolan is so focused on Oppenheimer—but with a movie like this, you have to find, as you’ve said, the clothesline.
Rhodes: And there was so much drama on the industrial side that’s basically just left out. It’s compressed into something that is really very brilliant—those big open jars in which they keep dropping marbles [to track the supply of uranium and plutonium]. That’s as close as we come to seeing the Hanford complex, with its huge production reactors, or the Oak Ridge complex, with one factory that was [about] a mile long, so the supervisors inside rode around on bicycles.
Nevala-Lee: How do you feel about the impact this movie will have on how a mass audience understands this immensely complicated story?
Rhodes: I’ve been living with this story now for 40, 50 years. So what I’m most excited by—you will consider this crass, but this is where I am in my life—is we’ve got an option from a German company for The Making of the Atomic Bomb to be made into a multipart television series. And I’m just hoping that this will cause enough stir that these people will finally, for the first time in all these years, actually pick up the option. That would be just wonderful, and I’d pay off my mortgage, and my version of the story would be out there.