The darkened sky stretches over miles of desert sand as in the distance, from an illuminated scaffold, the object rises that will change the world. The first atomic test is the defining scene in “Oppenheimer,” which won seven Academy Awards on Sunday night, including best picture. The scene plays out over seven or so minutes of steadily escalating tension: No one knew whether the bomb would go off at all that night and, if it did, whether it would incinerate the whole world.
Watching the film on opening weekend, I found the scene excruciating, even though history had long since recorded the outcome. I just kept staring at the Los Alamos scientists who gathered to witness the big event, lying under the stars as though taking in an outdoor movie, with nothing more to protect them than a small eye shade. The physicist Edward Teller is the only one who seems to recognize the need for any precautions, and he addresses it by applying sunscreen.
“Oppenheimer” is a movie about a singular genius, an extraordinary collaboration and a turning point in history. But it’s also a lesson in applied physics: the way a lone catalyst may trigger a chain reaction whose impact cannot be predicted or controlled. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s greatest triumph set into motion forces that brought about his downfall. An innovation designed to make the world safer in the long term made it manifestly more dangerous. And in subsequent atomic tests through the postwar years, many Americans were deliberately exposed to radiation, to see what the blast and its aftermath would do to them.
Soldiers were marched through detonation sites when the sand cooled down enough to walk on; pilots were sent through the still-billowing clouds; sailors were lined up on nearby boats. At the Yucca Flat testing grounds in Nevada, an Army band was even summoned to play. I know that last part because my uncle Richard Gigger was the band’s leader.
Richard enlisted in 1946. He was a 16-year-old Black kid in a still-segregated Army, but it got him from East St. Louis to Germany. While there, he got permission to attend a music training program in Dachau, of all places, led by members of the Berlin Philharmonic. It changed his life. Over the next decades he performed for heads of state, led ticker-tape parades through Manhattan and made numerous appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
On multiple occasions between 1952 and 1955, his responsibilities also included playing “Shake, Rattle and Roll” to accompany the most destructive force in human history.
Other atomic veterans, as they have come to be known, were in the South Pacific, wading through radioactive water while filling in blast craters. You can hear former service members speak about a range of these experiences — with pride, honor and a deep sense of betrayal — in a documentary called “I Have Seen the Dragon.” Richard’s in it, too.
After 25 years spanning three wars, he retired from the Army and met my aunt Ellen. Together they started teaching music at San Fernando High School, where they led the marching band to so many championships — 13 in all, 11 of them consecutively — that it almost wasn’t fair. Along the way they mentored hundreds or maybe thousands of kids, many of whom still credit them with changing their lives. A school building and an intersection were renamed in tribute. There’s a huge mural, too. But eventually Richard’s military service caught up with him, as it did for so many others.
For Richard it started with a pituitary tumor. Surgeons removed it, but the result, a few years later, was a cranial bleed and brain damage that worsened over time.
As a kid I found my uncle kind but intimidating, a larger-than-life mix of showman’s bravado and military rigor. After the bleed, all that was gone. He moved slowly and said little. He could still play musical instruments, but in the documentary, it’s my aunt who speaks. Richard sits, silent. He died three months later.
For five decades, atomic veterans were forbidden to tell anyone about their experience, not even a spouse or doctor. That has made it hard to get a reliable accounting of their numbers, or of the medical consequences they suffered, which include leukemia, thyroid cancer, esophagus cancer and multiple myeloma. It has also made it hard for them or their family members to get needed support. To prove her case to the Department of Veterans Affairs, my aunt spent long hours in the library reading scientific articles about atmospheric ionizing radiation (many of which she first had to get translated from Japanese), went digging through the archives of old Nevada newspapers, consulted doctors. She was rebuffed many times but finally, after seven years, the V.A. relented. It confirmed that Richard’s condition was most likely caused by his exposure. That qualified her to receive modest compensation.
A number of conditions are now “presumptive” for atomic vets, meaning that they’re assumed to be a result of their service. But there’s no way to know how many people suffered or died before that policy was adopted or how many other conditions may also be the result of exposure — nor how many families couldn’t undertake the kind of research my aunt did or persevere through so many setbacks. The veterans’ numbers are dwindling, but these questions remain urgent, since the effects of radiation can be passed on to children and grandchildren.
“Oppenheimer” has been criticized for not showing the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think it was the right choice. It would have been offensive, maybe even obscene, to reduce that suffering to a subplot of a great-man biopic, a movie that, however deeply based in fact, is ultimately an entertainment, a fiction. Leaving Japan’s horror to the imagination, or to the intrusive thoughts you can see Oppenheimer struggling to shut out, felt to me like appropriate humility about the limits of representation, as when the film goes all but silent when the blast first registers.
As for the bomb’s effect on American bodies, the sight of those unprotected scientists is the closest the film comes. The scene plays like a metaphor for how naïvely optimistic the nuclear program was, how unprepared the nation, or even the world, was for the terrors it would unleash. After the test, when the Army guys crate up the remaining bombs and drive them away, Oppenheimer tells Teller, “Once it’s used, nuclear war, perhaps all war, becomes unthinkable.” Equally unthinkable, I suspect, would have been the idea that the United States would intentionally inflict some of the bomb’s harmful effects on its own service members.
If “Oppenheimer” were a more traditional film, Japan’s surrender might have been the climax. But the movie continues for another hour, turning its attention to Oppenheimer’s struggle to retain his security clearance, a fight that plays out in parallel with a Washington insider’s struggle to secure a cabinet post. It’s possible to leave the theater with the impression that, in the United States at least, the main victim of the bomb was Oppenheimer’s career.
For my uncle, the fallout came later. For some other atomic vets or their families — or for people living near test sites such as those in Nevada and the Marshall Islands and of course for people in Japan — it may yet be in the future. The film honored at the Oscars told a very specific story, but countless other lives trace back to that day, too. In one way or another, no one emerged untouched. We are all living downwind of that first momentous blast.
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March 11, 2024 at 12:00PM
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Opinion | 'Oppenheimer,' My Uncle and the Secrets America Still Doesn't Like to Tell - The New York Times
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