5 Fascinating Details That “Oppenheimer” Left Out
Oppenheimer was one of the most successful films of 2023, and with good reason. Christopher Nolan’s account of the “father of the atomic bomb” is a meticulous biopic and gripping thriller all at once, with its depiction of the Trinity nuclear test ranking among the most awe-inspiring visual spectacles in cinema history. After grossing an eye-popping $960 million at the box office as part of the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, the movie dominated the 2024 Oscars, winning seven awards including for Best Picture, Best Director (Christopher Nolan), Best Actor (Cillian Murphy), and Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr.).
The film didn’t tell the whole historical story, however — no single movie could — and some of the details that were omitted are as compelling as the ones that made it into the final cut. Here are five of them.
The Nuclear Fallout From Los Alamos
Developing and testing nuclear weapons is a dangerous affair, especially for the people living downwind of the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, where J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team conducted their top-secret research. “Some people thought it was the end of the world,” said Paul Pino of Carrizozo, New Mexico, located some 40 miles south of Los Alamos, in an interview with NPR after the film’s release. “They thought, the sun’s coming up on the wrong side of the world.” Oppenheimer portrays the testing site as essentially barren and desolate, which isn’t exactly accurate.
The Trinity test itself was conducted 200 miles from Los Alamos in the more remote Tularosa Basin, but even that region was hardly unpopulated: Half a million people lived within 150 miles of the explosion, many of them Indigenous and Hispanic peoples, and these “downwinders” have been called the world’s first victims of nuclear fallout. These groups have reported high rates of heart disease and cancer, not to mention their cattle’s hair getting burned off and their land being covered in white dust in the wake of the actual explosion. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was passed in 1990 to address some of these concerns, but many of those affected say its parameters are too narrow and they’ve been left in the cold.
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Oppenheimer and Einstein’s First Meeting
In one of the film’s best, most memorable sequences, Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein meet at Princeton University sometime in 1947 to discuss the trumped-up congressional hearings Oppenheimer is being subjected to. Though it’s mentioned that they’ve known each other for decades in this (likely fictional) conversation, we don’t actually see the origins of their professional relationship. That meeting of the minds began at the California Institute of Technology in 1932, when “Oppie” was a faculty member and Einstein visited the prestigious university. The two are said to have disagreed and debated many times throughout the next few decades, but they always respected one another.
Where the Manhattan Project Was First Discussed
Not much about the Bohemian Club is known to outsiders, which is entirely the point. An all-male private club, it has counted the likes of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Mark Twain, and Clint Eastwood among its members since it was founded in 1872. It was at Bohemian Grove, the group’s 2,700-acre restricted campground in Monte Rio, California, that Oppenheimer met with nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence and the heads of the S-1 Executive Committee on September 13, 1942, to first discuss what became known as the Manhattan Project.
The club was left out of the film, perhaps because its inclusion could have lent a conspiratorial air to the proceedings that would have raised more questions than it answered. The Bohemian Club’s motto is “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here,” and its annual Cremation of Care ritual — in which members dress in robes, a 40-foot owl is constructed, and a body is burned in effigy to symbolize that outside concerns shouldn’t be dwelled on — is eyebrow-raising to say the least.
Oppenheimer’s Second Affair
The bizarre love triangle involving Oppenheimer, his wife Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, and his lover Jean Tatlock, a psychiatrist, adds personal intrigue to the largely political thrills depicted in Oppenheimer — especially in the wake of Tatlock’s suicide, for which Oppenheimer considered himself responsible. That didn’t stop him from stepping outside his marriage yet again, however, the second time with Office of Strategic Services (OSS) psychologist Ruth Sherman Tolman. Though the movie briefly hints at their affair, it certainly doesn’t tell the full story: Their relationship continued long after the war and had a profound effect on both of them, to say nothing of Kitty.
Oppenheimer’s Death
Though it’s told in a nonlinear fashion, Oppenheimer’s chronological end is in 1963, when its subject receives the Enrico Fermi Award from President Lyndon B. Johnson nearly a decade after having his reputation tarnished in the wake of World War II. “I think it is just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today,” he told Johnson upon receiving the award. (The film’s actual final scene is a flashback to 16 years earlier, when the chilling end of Oppenheimer’s conversation with Einstein is revealed.)
Oppenheimer, who smoked as many as 100 cigarettes a day and weighed only 115 pounds at the height of the Manhattan Project, was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1965 and died at the age of 62 on February 18, 1967. His memorial was attended by more than 600 mourners, and his wife Kitty dropped his cremated remains in the sea near their beach house on Saint John in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
