What happened to the communities who lived near the Trinity test?
Did any Manhattan Project scientist suffer long-term health problems?
And how did the father of the bomb really die?
These are a few of the disturbing questions that "Oppenheimer" doesn't answer.
Some spoilers ahead for "Oppenheimer".
The most obvious exclusion in "Oppenheimer" is any actual depiction of the atomic bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But if you think about it for even a minute, you'll likely come to understand why Nolan
and his team opted to keep these events off-screen.
The mass murder of innocent civilians perpetuated by the United States in Japan is sickening,
and the film treats it with the gravity required.
However, going so far as to show the bombings may not have accomplished much beyond shock
value.
Threading the line between honest depiction and gratuitous dramatizing is tough.
Nolan clearly decided it wasn't something he wanted to tackle in this film, so instead
of crafting a controversial reenactment, he chose to convey the effect of the bombings
in other ways.
"You're the man who gave them the power to destroy themselves.
And the world is not prepared."
Jean Tatlock, with whom Oppenheimer has a longstanding affair, plays a relatively small
but incredibly important role in "Oppenheimer."
Jean's suicide is a major moment in the story, giving the physicist a glimpse of what it's
like to feel responsible for innocent death.
What the film doesn't get into is that Tatlock's death has been the subject of some big conspiracy
theories.
According to the book "An Atomic Love Story: The Extraordinary Women in Robert Oppenheimer's
Life," Tatlock's autopsy found traces of chloral hydrate in her body — a compound often used
at the time in combination with alcohol to render a person unconscious.
Other circumstances surrounding her death, such as the non-fatal dose of barbituates
in her system and the fact that her suicide note was left unsigned, have led some to question
whether or not Tatlock may have actually been killed.
Nolan slightly references the conspiracy theory that Jean was murdered with a short flashback
scene.
In it, Oppenheimer sees a black gloved hand pushing her head into the bathtub.
However, the film doesn't explicitly say that people thought she was murdered.
Of course, none of these theories have ever been proven, but they are an interesting piece
of the story that "Oppenheimer" leaves out.
Unless you're a World War II history buff, you might not have even noticed that Kurt
Gödel appears briefly in "Oppenheimer."
A famous logician, Gödel is in the scene where Oppenheimer consults Albert Einstein
in the woods about the dangers of an atomic detonation.
Einstein remarks that his friend Gödel, who was forced to flee Nazi occupation in Austria,
is still terrified that German spies will try to poison or assassinate him in America.
This was true of the real Gödel as well.
To try to assuage his fear and paranoia, he had his wife prepare or taste most of his
meals.
After she was hospitalized from a stroke in the late 1970s, however, Gödel's wife was
unable to fulfill these duties.
As a result, Gödel effectively starved himself.
He died from this self-starvation and malnutrition in 1978, with his wife ultimately outliving
him.
While Gödel's grim story would have been a bit of a tangent in "Oppenheimer," it shows
just how powerful the Nazi machine of fear and violence was.
Even when he was safe on the other side of the world and decades after the death of Adolf
Hitler, the esteemed logician couldn't escape the scars that the Nazi regime had inflicted
on him.
The Los Alamos facility depicted in "Oppenheimer" was intentionally constructed in a remote
area of New Mexico.
However, that didn't stop the fallout from the Trinity test from leaking out into the
surrounding areas of the state.
Because the U.S. government was determined to maintain absolute secrecy for the Manhattan
Project, no nearby ranchers or residents were warned of what was coming.
"Boom that thing exploded, and I mean it was a big explosion.
It wasn't like the regular ones we'd been hearing."
The explosion from Trinity was visible for miles around, but in the wake of the test,
the government claimed it was simply an ammunition accident.
The reality is much darker, of course.
Radiation from the test seeped into food and water supplies in neighboring communities,
leading to serious medical problems for residents.
However, because of the secrecy surrounding the project and the reluctance of government
officials to take accountability, the so-called Trinity Downwinders struggled for decades
to acquire adequate compensation.
Heart disease and various forms of cancer became highly prevalent in these areas as
a result of the test, killing locals who had no way of preparing themselves.
Frequently forgotten in larger discussions of the Manhattan Project, the Trinity Downwinders
are yet another group of innocents whose lives were irrevocably changed by America's insistence
on a nuclear weapons program.
Boris Pash is one of the more villainous key characters in "Oppenheimer."
He's an intelligence officer determined to root out any semblance of communist activity
surrounding the Manhattan Project.
In one scene, General Leslie Groves warns Oppenheimer that Pash is downright vicious
in his hatred of communism, and that he'd previously suggested highly immoral forms
of interrogation, including off-the-books torture and executions.
Pash's activity during World War II is represented pretty accurately in the film, but his activities
after the end of the war may well have involved some of the things Groves mentions in the
movie.
From 1949 to 1952, Pash worked for the CIA, specifically as the head of Program Branch
7, or PB/7 for short.
The official purpose of PB/7 was vague, as it served as a "catch-all" for any espionage
or counterintelligence duties not directly assigned to other branches.
According to an official U.S. Senate report from 1976, the group may have also been responsible
for potential assassination and kidnapping operations.
Though Pash denied this kind of work being done under his jurisdiction, his deputy chief
claimed the contrary, stating that PB/7 was directly responsible for "assassinations"
and "kidnappings," according to the Senate report.
This only backs up the film's portrayal of Pash as a brutal man with very few moral limits.
If you reach the end of "Oppenheimer" thinking how miraculous it is that no Manhattan Project
scientists died of radiation poisoning, well, we've got some bad news for you.
"Oppenheimer" is full of small details from the real history, but it leaves out several
gruesome instances of how dangerous building the bomb really was.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy's official Manhattan Project archive, several
workers were exposed to intense radiation while working with the uranium, though none
died.
In an ironic twist of fate, the project's first radiation fatality came after the end
of the war, when Harry K. Daghlian dropped some materials and ended up dying weeks later.
In 1946, another death came to the still-operating facility when physicist Louis Slotin also
dropped fissionable materials and received a heavy dose of radiation.
These instances may have been omitted from the film simply because the most fatal ones
took place after the war.
However, they still speak to the dangers of working with nuclear materials and the inherent
risk of being the first people ever to experiment with such technology.
Werner Heisenberg only appears in one scene in "Oppenheimer," years before the rise of
Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany.
Oppenheimer meets him during his training in Europe, and we're later told how he winds
up leading Germany's own atomic weapons program.
Like many other German scientists in World War II, Heisenberg avoided consequences for
his contributions to the Nazi war machine.
He went on to hold a number of prestigious scientific positions after the war.
In his later years, Heisenberg claimed that he helped drive German research and development
away from weapons specifically, as he objected morally to the use of an atomic bomb.
In more recent times, some historians and journalists have claimed that Heisenberg even
helped leak information about secret Nazi research to the Allied powers.
How true all of these claims are has been a subject of extensive debate for years, but
there's an undercurrent to them that gets more uncomfortable the more you look at it.
Heisenberg is the kind of person that history wants to exonerate.
It would be much cleaner if we could just focus on his Nobel Prize years and remember
him as a trailblazer in the field of quantum physics.
The problem is that there's a whole campaign of Nazi conquest, oppression, and genocide
in there too.
"Oppenheimer" doesn't spend much time on this part of Heisenberg's life, which makes sense
given his relatively minor role, but it's still a messy part of the history that's well
worth reiterating.
"Oppenheimer" briefly mentions that the area of and around Los Alamos was sacred, ancestral
land for local Native American tribes.
After the end of the war, Oppenheimer recommended that President Harry S. Truman give the land
back to its original Indigenous inhabitants.
Of course, by that time, the whole area was already changed beyond repair, because of
both the government facilities constructed there and the fallout from the Trinity test.
Los Alamos was home to a number of Pueblo communities prior to the Manhattan Project.
The construction of the government facility disrupted a long history in the area, preventing
traditional patterns of hunting, fishing, and various other rites.
Indigenous art and pottery became such a popular fad with the Los Alamos scientists and their
families that it fractured the very economy and ecosystem of the Pueblo tribes.
In addition, a number of Hispanic homesteaders in the area were essentially pushed off their
land by the U.S. government.
They were given no real choice and received far less financial compensation for their
acreage than their white counterparts.
Today, Los Alamos remains forever changed by these callous imperial actions.
You'd think that in the case of the Manhattan Project, beating the Nazis would be far more
important to the U.S. government than the personal lives of individual scientists.
"It's about unleashing the strong force before the Nazis do."
But this is the 1940s we're talking about, so you'd be wrong.
Recently declassified documents show that communism wasn't the only red flag intelligence
officials were looking for at Los Alamos.
The FBI also spent immense resources monitoring and investigating those workers suspected
of being gay.
Houses and facilities for the Manhattan Project were bugged, and the behavior of workers was
constantly being evaluated.
A group of women known as the "Manhattan Eight" received particular attention for being suspected
lesbians, which later led to the revocation of security clearances.
President Eisenhower officially outlawed gay individuals from serving in federal positions
in 1953, with queerness widely seen as "subversive" and frequently paralleled with other "anti-American"
groups like communists.
Given the sociopolitical climate of the time, this information probably isn't surprising
to anyone, but it does show just how invasive the FBI was during this era.
For better or worse, working on the Manhattan Project was seen by many as a huge service
to America.
However, anyone suspected of queer activity were treated more as enemies than national
heroes.
Though the film carries his name, it doesn't follow Oppenheimer all the way to the end
of his life.
We get a brief glimpse of his final years in a flash-forward that shows him being awarded
the Enrico Fermi Award in 1963, but the film doesn't show how Oppenheimer died.
In reality, he passed away shortly after that prestigious moment, succumbing to lung cancer
on February 18, 1967.
He was only 62 years old.
"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
Oppenheimer was a heavy smoker, as depicted in the film by the pipe he always seems to
be carrying.
In what could be seen as an ironic twist, he received radiation treatment for his condition,
seeking healing from the very thing he used to create a weapon of mass destruction.
Regardless, the treatment was unsuccessful, and Oppenheimer passed away the next year.
In a dramatized version of his life like Nolan's film, there's something interesting about
Oppenheimer's premature, relatively uneventful death.
But looked at as part of the larger history, perhaps it's not important enough to include
in a movie.