Dear people,
I don’t go to many movies in theaters, but recently I saw Oppenheimer and Barbie and I found both excellent. They both address major issues: nuclear weapons and gender equality respectively, but the films are about people.
The characters in Oppenheimer developed concepts I’d been reading about in sf for many years. It isn’t a heavy movie. There’re no blocks of math to wade through but it does get across the fact that the people who built the bomb were people first. As a result of the movie, I’m reading the book it was based on– American Prometheus. It’s a fine job.
The film rightly emphasizes that the scientists involved were concerned about beating the Nazis to the bomb at a time most Americans wanted to see America take vengeance on Japan for Pearl Harbor. But Germany was a scientifically advanced country that could have built a bomb before we did. Japan was not. The biggest handicap the Germans had was that they’d expelled their Jews, which meant most of the theoretical physicists in Europe. The decision to use it on the Japanese was simply because the Germans had already surrendered while the Japanese were saying that they were going to fight to the end and take subject people with them as they had done on Okinawa.
Even after Hirohito had surrendered, it was by no means certain that the Japanese peoplewould accept the decision. The US immediately landed a company of the 22nd Marines without ammo in their weapons at Yokohama where they watched the formal surrender a week later. They had just watched the Japanese murdering the Okinawan natives, so they knew whatthe risk was. But they were Marine riflemen and taking the risk to save a million of their buddies.
One of those Marines was Ed Livingston who became my friend. The country is better for men like Ed.
Try to make the world better yourselves.
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