![]() ![]() But Japan fought on, so Truman-who became president after FDR died-shifted the plans to drop the bomb on Japan. As it happened, the Allied armies defeated the Nazis in the spring of 1945, before the German scientists succeeded. Roosevelt instigated the Manhattan Project in 1942, after Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, two of the most prominent physicists of the day, wrote him a letter warning that German scientists had figured out how to split an atom, that they could turn this discovery into a very powerful bomb, and that we needed to beat them to it or risk losing the war. But he was enormously charismatic, grasped concepts with preternatural speed, and saw how progress in one department could jolt progress in another department, so he made it work in ways that possibly no one else could have. Oppenheimer was 38 when he was appointed director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, the centerpiece of the Manhattan Project, the $2 billion, top-secret World War II program to build the atomic bomb.* Though a brilliant theoretical physicist and a pioneer in the newfangled field of quantum mechanics, he had never managed any project, was inept at experimental (i.e., practical, bricks-and-mortar) physics, and wasn’t even the most talented scientist of any sort among the hundreds who worked around him. As someone who has read a lot (and written two books) about nuclear history, I can say that, for the most part and as far as it goes (important qualifiers, which I’ll soon get to), the film is a faithful portrait of what really happened-especially, perhaps, in the scenes that some might assume are made-up or exaggerated.
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