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Thinking of ways I could lie to you and not lose you
I understand from both context and the body of the e-mail that the eye-catching subject header "The story Oppenheimer won't tell you" is referring to the film and specifically to its elision of the existence of the Downwinders—whose concerns, long before they were designated by name, were flagged well within the timeline of the movie and whose survivors and still-affected descendants are in current danger of losing their compensation for nothing more than the government of cruelty which has become the point of the Republican Party—but because no quotation marks are placed around the name, it really does sound like the non-profit which sent the e-mail has just run out of patience for Oppie's caginess, which did also happen to people in history.
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(I haven't read the giant book it's based on so IDK if the author ignores the forced relocation, or if that was Nolan's interpolation or what.)
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I have a friend who was born in Albuquerque in 1962! Not exactly a new city at the time!
What turned into Los Alamos was selected for a variety of criteria including low population density, but "fewer people around to be security risks" is not the same as "nobody living there to start with." The laboratory almost ended up at Oak City in Utah or Jemez Springs in New Mexico before Oppenheimer sold Groves on the Pajarito Plateau. American Prometheus then has a hilarious section about the clusterfuck of the logistics:
"John Manley, an experimental physicist whom Oppie had tapped as one of his assistants, had serious qualms about the site. Manley had just come from Chicago, where on December 2, 1942, the Italian émigré physicist Enrico Fermi had led a team that conducted the world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction. Chicago was a big city, home to an eminent university, world-class libraries and a large pool of experienced machinists, glass-blowers, engineers and other technicians. Los Alamos had nothing. 'What we were trying to do,' wrote Manley, 'was build a new laboratory in the wilds of New Mexico with no initial equipment except the library of Horatio Alger books or whatever it was that those boys in the Ranch School read, and the pack equipment that they used to go horseback riding, none of which helped us very much in getting neutron-producing accelerators.' Manley thought that if Oppenheimer had been an experimental physicist, he would have understood that 'experimental physics is really 90 percent plumbing,' and he never would have agreed to having a laboratory built in such a setting."
(They proceeded to have at least one sewage-related disaster and a miniature energy crisis. Everyone involved in the planning was completely wrong about how many personnel the project would require and how much infrastructure would be required to support them. This is the sort of thing that interests me and as far as I can tell Nolan did not at all care about.)
(I haven't read the giant book it's based on so IDK if the author ignores the forced relocation, or if that was Nolan's interpolation or what.)
American Prometheus at least alludes to the bulldozing surrounding the building of the Los Alamos Laboratory, although I don't believe it incorporates the Downwinders; it is very tightly focused on Oppenheimer over even the Los Alamos community at large. Leaving it out, however, feels entirely in keeping with Nolan's approach to the history, which has almost zeroed my interest in him as a filmmaker again. Dunkirk was so good! It's like someone said "science" and the man's brain fell out his ears.
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https://www.nps.gov/places/000/bathtub-row.htm
Everyone involved in the planning was completely wrong about how many personnel the project would require and how much infrastructure would be required to support them
People frequently do that when they plan stuff in the desert, if they're not from that actual environment!
....Dunkirk was SO gripping. Indeed, it was so gripping that we totally missed that it is three intertwined storylines, and it didn't really make that much difference in viewing, lolsob. I mean there were a couple of times I was like "....wait, wasn't it just daylight?" but I was too caught up in the story to put it together!
Oppenheimer OTOH was the opposite of gripping. Which is pretty impressive, in a bad way.
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What a distinction to put on an actual sign. Normally it's just a local joke!
People frequently do that when they plan stuff in the desert, if they're not from that actual environment!
The number of scientists needed to build a bomb was also massively underestimated. It was like that medieval statistic about how many civilians in a population it takes to field an army: for so many scientists, how many janitors? Way more than currently budgeted for!
Oppenheimer OTOH was the opposite of gripping. Which is pretty impressive, in a bad way.
I had just wanted it to be a good movie, and instead it seems to have come out a critically acclaimed movie that I do not know if I can ever spend time around without screaming historical facts like some sort of possessed textbook. I am kind of not joking about the science. I like Cillian Murphy immensely and I got to the end of an interview where he talked about how differently scientists think from other people and had a moment of intense augh.
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YES, that and I would also do my Feminist Bitch From Hell thing about not just his wife and his mistress but there were also actual women there! Administrative jobs, sure, but also physicists, analysts, mathematicians! Boy you wouldn't really know it from ANY history of LANL, though, including this one. (Yeah, it's fiction but it's going to be treated as pop history, I've already heard a lot of Discourse on OMG how could those scientists have gone ahead when they could have destroyed the planet! THEY WOULDN'T HAVE. I really have a great big scientific grudge against him for that one.)
....oh that article. Why do they torture poor actors that way. It was bad enough with the MCU.
The director recently told Wired magazine that some of those who’d seen it were left “absolutely devastated … they can’t speak”. Which sounds like a bad thing, but is related perhaps to the thought of the 214,000 Japanese people, overwhelmingly civilians, who lost their lives when the bombs were dropped.
WELP NOT REALLY
(The whole "maybe we did destroy the world" weepie ending ALSO really annoys me but this is getting far off the track)
The real question for Murphy was what combination – ambition, madness, delusion, deep hatred of the Nazi regime? – allowed this theoretical physicist to agree to an experiment he knew could obliterate humankind.
....well noooooooooo but anyway
I remember one scientist saying, ‘I don’t believe in love. It’s a biological phenomenon, the exchange of hormones between the female and the male. That’s all. Love is a nonsense.’”
OMFG, Cillian, love, you were talking to a wanker. A lonely, horny, literal wanker.
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Peter Bacon Hales' Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (1999) and Ruth H. Howes and Caroline L. Herzenberg's Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project (1999), while obviously not recent, are very much worth their time on this front. Voices of the Manhattan Project is also invaluable. I had a serious exchange once with a friend in this journal about the TV series Manhattan (2014–15), which I have never been able to watch because its sole historical character is Oppenheimer and everyone else is invented right down to espionage that never happened: they interpreted its invention of central marginalized characters as a deliberate corrective to the white, straight, male, historical reality and I had to explain that Chien-Shiung Wu and Moddie Taylor and Lise Meitner are the tip of a quite historical iceberg who all deserve their own biopics. I hate that Oppenheimer has come along and slammed all the popular imagination of Los Alamos back into the mold of the 1950's, especially when the 1950's were every now and then more nuanced about their atomic freakouts.
(Yeah, it's fiction but it's going to be treated as pop history,
Didn't we suffer enough with Oliver Stone's JFK (1991)?
I've already heard a lot of Discourse on OMG how could those scientists have gone ahead when they could have destroyed the planet! THEY WOULDN'T HAVE. I really have a great big scientific grudge against him for that one.)
(The whole "maybe we did destroy the world" weepie ending ALSO really annoys me but this is getting far off the track)
I am curious about the reasons, if it doesn't stress you to articulate them. From the outside it sounded precious.
OMFG, Cillian, love, you were talking to a wanker. A lonely, horny, literal wanker.
+1.
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Another thing I hold against Christopher Nolan is having the sense to cast David Krumholtz as Rabi and then not actually making a movie about Rabi.
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
yes
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It is officially worse than the time I realized that Burn Gorman was so good as Hermann Gottlieb that no one would ever cast him as Alan Turing.
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Thank you for validating my annoyance.
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When my father first told me about the bombing at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he made sure I knew all about the lingering effects on the Downwinders.
I'm genuinely surprised that Josh Hawley is named as someone who objected to the removal of the NDAA. A broken clock is right twice a day, I guess.
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Thank you for asking! Pleased to meet you, and I do not mind.
I'm genuinely surprised that Josh Hawley is named as someone who objected to the removal of the NDAA. A broken clock is right twice a day, I guess.
I suspect it was a local cause for him because of the contamination of Coldwater Creek, but the amendment should still have been in there.
I am glad your father told you a fuller story of the Manhattan Project that many people get the first time around.