The pain and tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life, however, preceded his death by many years. A heavy focus of Christopher Nolan’s film is the exhaustive Senate hearings that eventually sullied his good name in his home country. Isidor Isaac Rabi (David Krumholtz) was quoted on this very subject, saying, “He was a man of peace, and they destroyed him. He was a man of science, and they destroyed this man. A small, mean group.”
While Oppenheimer had once been heralded as an American hero, speaking out against the development of the hydrogen bomb made him many enemies, and, as a result, he was the subject of the aforementioned Senate hearings. Of course, it wasn’t this that is seen haunting him at the end of Nolan’s film, but his own work and what he had unleashed from the Pandora’s Box of theoretical physics.
The debates about Oppenheimer still rage to this day as a result. While some see the scientist’s invention as a necessary force that was needed to end the WW2 conflict with Japan as peacefully as possible, others suggest that he was the architect of the destruction of the human race. The latter feeling is coldly summed up in one of his most famous quotes, which comes from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
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