Oppenheimer

During World War II, Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. appoints physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer and a team of scientists spend years developing and designing the atomic bomb. Their work comes to fruition on July 16, 1945, as they witness the world’s first nuclear explosion, forever changing the course of history. Read Roger Ebert’s review here…

Oppenheimer famously said of the first testing of the bomb: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

The debate over when and how to use the atomic bomb was first discussed on April 12, 1945, and it took 135 days to come to a decision. Germany had surrendered in April 1945, but Japanese forces continued to fight and as the war raged on the casualties increased ever further.

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