The unbilled star of the film Oppenheimer is a metal monster named Gadget, which resembles a heavy-plated diving bell bristling with cords. Its creation required three years, $2.2 billion, and 130,000 workers. If Gadget works as designed, conventional explosives packed within will detonate, compress plutonium in the center, and produce a fission chain reaction.
If it works. Viewers know, of course, that it does—the successful test, known as Trinity, on July 16, 1945, made possible the use of two atomic bombs to end the war with Japan. Our foreknowledge of the outcome does not diminish the dramatic tension of director Christopher Nolan’s transfixing recreation. Observers lay prostrate in neat rows, clutching rectangles of smoked glass to shield their eyes. The beauty and horror of the blast—blinding light, enormous clouds of red, orange, and black—brings both joy and dread. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” J. Robert Oppenheimer whispers, quoting the Bhagavad Gita.
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