It’s been 78 years since the first plutonium bomb exploded, but sadly, the fear of a nuclear holocaust is more alive than ever.
He July 16, 1945, the atomic bomb The Gadget exploded in the New Mexico desert. His creator, JR Oppenheimer, lived in torment for the rest of his life. The prestigious director Christopher Nolan tells us about it in his new film Oppenheimerwhose trailer you can see is the opening video of the news.
In the middle of the last century, the United States was at a crossroads: Germany was being defeated in World War II, and their despair had led them to accelerate the development of the atomic bomb.
A race began in which the United States started from scratch. He launched the Manhattan Project: he assembled the most important scientists in the country, under the command of JR Oppenheimer, and they would not leave Los Alamos until they developed an atomic bomb.
In just over a year, the uranium and plutonium bombs were prepared. The latter was difficult to detonate, so I had to try it before. July 16, 1945 the Trinity Test (Trinidad) took place in the desert Jornada del Muerto, in New Mexico.
A plutonium bomb called The Gadget, caused an explosion equivalent to 22,000 tons of TNT. Here you can see the actual nuclear explosion:
caused a cloud of fire more than 10 kilometers high and turned the desert floor into glass, creating a new mineral called trinitite.
While looking at the smoke mushroom, J.R. Oppenheimer A phrase from the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text, came to mind: “I have become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds“. No one could have described it better.
On August 9, 1945, a very similar plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Three days earlier the uranium bomb had fallen on Hiroshima. Total between 129,000 and 246,000 people died, most of them civilians. Japan announced its surrender, which marked the end of World War II.
Oppenheimer was marked by this experienceso he dedicated his life to calling for control of nuclear weapons.
Oppenheimer, the film of the father of the atomic bomb
Almost 80 years have passed, but lhe nuclear threat is more alive than everafter the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
We don’t know if it was opportunism or coincidence, but Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer will be released on July 21which tells the life of the father of the atomic bomb.
The trailer shows us a tense thriller that narrates the launch of the Manhattan Project, and how the atomic bomb was developed. On a more personal level, we will know the dramatic moral dilemmas faced by its creators: a bomb that would end a world war… killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Christopher Nolanwith hits like Interstellar or Tenet, is known for using computer special effects as little as possible. A real Boeing 747 plane explodedand now it has done the same thing: the atomic explosion that we will see in the film is not a computer effect. It’s a real explosion. We assume to scale and without radiation, but it will be interesting to see how he did it.
Oppenheimer is based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. The script is by Nolan himselfand the cast includes world-class actors such as Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, and Kenneth Branagh.
Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan is going to be one of the movies of the summer, and surely of the year. It arrives at the ideal moment to refresh our memory, with the aim that it does not happen again.
