The most astonishing thing about the man and the legend J. Robert Oppenheimer—a man whose intellectual brilliance was so prodigious that even in the top-secret and desolate expanses of Los Alamos, brimming with the most brilliant minds of the era, he was considered by all to be an intellectual superior—is not that he was so variously brilliant in so many fields and with tastes ranging from medieval French literature to theoretical physics and Eastern mysticism, but that he was so naïve. He fell prey to a fanciful idealism—this is the easiest takeaway, but maybe not the right one.
His was a mind, brilliant and profound, that nonetheless retained the old habits of his youth even as he was helming the wartime research and development of a weapon that would kill hundreds of thousands of people—many of them children—in a burst of light lasting a number of seconds. He was an intellectual from cradle to grave, first and last, and in his youth he spurned newspapers and politics in favor of the more profound and substantial interests that would go on to lift him inauspiciously into the spheres of politics, governance, and the geopolitical battles of the Second World War. But how naïve (or more properly, how idealistic) was he?
As an ideology put into action and then being carried out in the Soviet Union under the brutal reign of Joseph Stalin, Communism came to captivate J. Robert Oppenheimer all the more because it contrasted with the surging Third Reich that, for this Jewish American, might have become more than a geopolitical threat. But this same theory-driven suggestibility and brilliance in the world of the intellect cropped up again—and again became the obvious indicators of his idealism and of how unsuited he was to the game of power politics—when he made known that his current president, Harry Truman, should get along well with the Soviet leader so that they could share atomic secrets and avoid precipitating their countries into a frightful battle with world-destroying weapons in the wings…whoops. Things didn’t really work out that way.
And this cockamamie notion of a naïf, which he made known around the time that the bomb was completed, cropped up like the final gasps of a flopping fish after a grueling and multi-year effort to develop it. At least The Day After Trinity, directed and produced by Jon Else, gives the impression that it happened that way.
Brought to this inevitable endpoint of a brilliant man’s journey down what seems to have been an ill-fated path, I have come to conclude one of three things: that J. Robert Oppenheimer had truly malevolent intentions as he was working on the development of the bomb, fully aware that he was taking part in obliterating hundreds of thousands of innocent lives; that he gave no thought to the ends of his work, and was simply focused on doing his part in the wartime effort against the Axis powers—the completely naïve position; or that he was aware of the possible consequences of his work and realized that, even at so high a cost, the real threat of German world-domination justified the risk of getting carried away with all this firepower—a position taken up by Frank Oppenheimer, who survived his brother by a couple decades.
Because the first conclusion is not only unlikely but unfair, I am left with the second and the third, and I’m inclined to the take the latter. J. Robert Oppenheimer was not as naïve as he seems to be in certain snippets of this documentary; he was a brilliant man whose life was swept away by the collective force of a military machine that he had helped set in motion. He might even have been more cognizant than I can possibly infer from what I’ve seen—maybe he was completely aware but saw the inevitability of how these things perpetuate themselves, that they can’t be stopped but that he had to take part, and then he publicly masked his guilt with the naiveté and wishful thinking that mark him out in The Day After Trinity.
Whatever his state of awareness and his foresight during these years, no one could have absolved him of the guilt he felt for playing a significant role in the grisly outcomes. Not even he could have absolved himself—you can see the tortured conscience on his face in the photos and footage from the years following the war. He bears a human burden of guilt and suffering for a fault that might not have been avoidable, but that was perpetrated with his willingness against hundreds of thousands; a collective action that masks guilt and responsibility but that inculpates the individual—a dark side of humanity indeed, and the terminal point of its sickness.
