Glowing reviews for Oppenheimer movie.
The worst hell ever unleashed on the planet occurred on August 6th and 9th in 1945.
Atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, annihilating more than 200,000 people, most of them civilians, and hideously disfiguring tens of thousands more.
The twin holocausts ended World War II — Japan surrendered to the Allies on August 15 — but the world would forever walk a tightrope of total destruction.
On the night Hiroshima was leveled, Robert Oppenheimer, ‘the father of the atomic bomb,’ received a hero’s welcome in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bomb was developed. He clasped his hands together “like a prize-winning boxer” as the crowd cheered.
But Oppenheimer was tormented by his creation. After the explosions he quoted Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Two months later Oppenheimer met with President Harry Truman, a former haberdasher who made the decision to inflict the worst imaginable horror on the face of the earth.
Oppenheimer reportedly cringed before Truman and told him he felt he had blood on his hands.
Truman, who bragged he never had any remorse over the bombings, was enraged by the pitiful remark. After the meeting Truman told his staff: “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.”
Now comes the movie Oppenheimer and the critics are raving about it, giving it an overall 96 percent rating on the aggregate Rotten Tomatoes.
“Oppenheimer is a movie that makes you say ‘Oh, my God’ over and over again — in awe and in terror,” writes Johnny Oleksinsky of the New York Post.
Brian Viner of the Daily Mail gave it a perfect five stars, noting that directors Christopher Nolan ‘magnificently balances thriller elements with profound questions about the morality of laying Hiroshima and Nagasaki to nuclear waste.’
Those questions may haunt throughout the three-hour movie but Nolan stays focused on Oppenheimer the man and steers clear of the actual outcome of Oppenheimer’s A-bomb.
As Oppenheimer said: “Just because we’re building it doesn’t mean we get to decide how it’s used.”
Oppenheimer, a chain smoker, died of throat cancer in 1987 at the age of 62. Truman died in 1972 at 88.