As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Fridge Brilliance:
- Every explosion is shown before their sound is heard, but this works doubly in favor for The Trinity Test. When the bomb detonates, we see the bright flash, we see the explosion, the fireball and all that, but we never actually hear the sound until the fireball evaporates and the shockwave occurs. This is because of the differentiation between how nuclear explosions are processed and how people see them versus how they get recorded. This is because light travels faster than soundwaves. Although the movie uses this for dramatic effect, the most infamous example, and to date the only nuclear explosion with recorded sound, the Plumbbob Fizeau tests in 1957, is a perfect showcase of this
. - During the testing at Los Alamos, there is a particular character playing bongos while at the site. It’s a matter of record that Richard Feynman played the bongos, which identifies him as the drummer.
- Truman's annoyance at Oppenheimer's "blood on his hands" comment makes perfect sense given that he had been involved in far greater military decisions with far more death even before the bombings (the Battle of Okinawa, for example, killed 250,000 people on both sides, and every day of the Pacific War circa mid 1945 was costing tens of thousands of mostly-civilian deaths). Oppenheimer is basically accusing him of being far worse without saying so (or realizing it).
- Truman was also a WWI artilleryman, and "proved to be a very capable artillery officer, displaying great courage and initiative while under enemy fire." So he had personal experience of battle and had directly killed people, while Oppenheimer was a scientist who never served. In fact, the original plan was to make Los Alamos a military operation. Oppenheimer failed the Army physical. Might've added to Truman's disgust.
- The movie's dual structure is deliberately divided between the color sequences (Fission) taken from Oppenheimer's point of view and the monochrome sequences (Fusion) from Strauss's point of view. At its most basic definition, fission is splitting bigger things into smaller things (e.g., splitting of the uranium atom). In contrast, fusion is the opposite - combining smaller things into a bigger thing (combining two hydrogen atoms to make one helium atom). This ties into the thematic narratives presented in the film:
- In the color sequences, Oppenheimer's story in developing the atom bomb is gradually fractured into explorations of his scientific ambitions, his moral ethics and personal motivations, the politicization of his work, and the guilt and trauma he experienced after its usage. Scenes in color also incorporate aspects of psychological horror that Oppenheimer imagines (or experiences) that are separate from the actual story.
- In the monochrome sequences, Strauss's decision to humiliate Oppenheimer and neutralize his political influence in the US grew from his own motivations and perceived slights, and he calls back to different aspects of Oppenheimer's life to weave a narrative of disloyalty. Strauss's defeat at his cabinet nomination was also caused by the allying of different scientists and Senators who opposed his treatment of Oppenheimer.
- Finally, the film broaches the question of a simultaneous process of fission and fusion as the next step in nuclear weapons, as proposed by Edward Teller in creating a thermonuclear weapon (or a hydrogen bomb). If we are to assume that Oppenheimer and Strauss's stories serve as a metaphor for these processes, we see the consequences of what happens when they do intersect: Mutually Assured Destruction.
- Rule of Symbolism: When the Senate Aide hits Strauss with the idea that Oppenheimer and Einstein weren't even talking about Strauss, you can see Strauss is stunned. Then the Aide opens the door, the reporters' flashbulbs go off in Strauss' face, and he visibly jumps. He had a near-literal Idea Bulb moment. Or in a different sense, the aide shone a shocking light on Strauss' own assumptions.
- Earlier in the sequence, when Strauss realizes he's about to be "pilloried" by the same extrajudicial process he put Oppenheimer through, he's looking in a mirror. And when he escapes back to his narrative, he turns his back to the mirror and walks away.
Strauss: (to mirror) They're not convicting. Just denying.
Fridge Horror:
- While he loses out on being the Secretary of Commerce, that really does little to salve the fact that Strauss was the expert people turned to on nuclear matters during the most formative years of the Cold War. His influence would be the biggest in developing things like the H-Bomb and thermonuclear warheads.
- The essential fact that Strauss was so mono-focused on his personal rivalry with Oppenheimer that, essentially, he missed the larger subject of their jobs over something as petty as office politics.
- Oppenheimer himself seemed to have torpedoed his chances at being a bigger force in post-war politics, souring Truman to him with his dramatics during their meeting, inadvertently turning Strauss against him with a wayward joke, and continuing his dramatics with the 1954 hearing, seeming to either martyr himself for the cause of non-proliferation or as an act of contrition to bleed off his guilt for making the bomb. If he had been less of an out and out idealist, too much of a poet, and played the politics game better, he could have kept a strong opposition to Strauss and the others who wanted to continue to push science regardless of the morals of the weapons they created.
- Early on in the film, Oppenheimer tells Lawrence that he thought he would have the perfect life if he could find a way to merge physics and the New Mexican landscape he dearly loved. He found a way, all right.
- Truman's lack of guilt regarding the atomic bombs, as well as the way he coldly dismisses Oppenheimer, putting a nail in his career's coffin.
- The Chevalier incident, which would eventually torpedo Oppenheimer's security clearance (and with it his—and Chevalier's—career), might never have been a problem if Oppenheimer himself hadn't drawn the military's attention to it.
- One recurring theme is whether the atomic bomb was the last shot of World War II, or the first shot of the Cold War. One thing that the movie does not mention, albeit somewhat justifiably because the work at Los Alamos had been done already, was that the Soviets declared war on Japan just a week before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. They attacked from the north and were able to take Sakhalin Island and control of other parts of the Kuril Islands. Being as the vast majority of Japanese defenses were to the south it's reasonable to say that the Soviets would've captured a lot of northern Japan. Had the war continued it's very reasonable to say that Japan would've been divided up the way Germany was, and Korea still is.
