FATHER OF THE ATOMIC BOMB

A new movie shines a spotlight on how scientist Robert Oppenheimer helped the US develop the world’s first nuclear warhead – and then came to bitterly regret his deadly invention

- HARRY HOWARD

THEY are words that have become almost as famous as the act they were uttered in reaction to.

“I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” said J Robert Oppenheimer, quoting from the Hindu scriptures as the sky lit up with a blaze of colour.

The chief of the Manhattan Project spoke these words just seconds after the world’s first atomic bomb, nicknamed “the gadget”, was detonated in New Mexico in July 1945.

Less than a month later, the devastating nuclear technology was used on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, acts which ended the Second World War, but took as many as 170 000 lives in the process.

“Like it or not, Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived,” says director Christopher Nolan. “He [and his team] made the world we live in, for better or for worse. Should they have done those things?”

And it’s for exactly this reason that the British-American filmmaker, whose previous blockbuster movies include Dunkirk, The Prestige and The Dark Knight, decided he wanted to make a movie about the father of the atomic bomb.

Oppenheimer, which stars Peaky Blinders actor Cillian Murphy in the title role along with a host of other big-name actors such as Emily Blunt, Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr, is the first feature-length film to look at the scientist’s life in its entirety.

The new movie, which hit cinemas late last month, is introducing a new generation to Oppenheimer and his top-secret bomb project. But far from being a dry historical account, it’s packed with drama, conflict and personal turmoil as it examines Oppenheimer’s life and ultimately how guilty he felt about the havoc wreaked by his catastrophic invention.