Oppenheimer. Growing up downwind.

I’m interested in the Oppenheimer movie coming to theaters this week.

I’m interested enough that it may get me into a movie theater for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

A story in the New York Times today reports that the pandemic may actually be over for the United States, even though Joe Biden declared mission accomplished a year ago.

Robert Oppenheimer led the team that created the atomic bomb that President Truman ordered dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The United States is the only country to use the atomic bomb and used it on large civilian populations.

In the stories I’ve read about the highly anticipated film directed by Christopher Nolan, my understanding is that the movie mainly covers the period when Oppenheimer was at Los Alamos working on the bombs development.

I don’t know how much of the film will deal with the period whenOppenheimer lobbied for international control of nuclear weapons to avoid an arms race with the Soviet Union and opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb.

I wonder how much of it will tell about the time later when Oppenheimer was accused of being a member of the Communist Party and was revoked of his security clearance.

Will it show anything about those of us downwind of the testing sites?

From The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:

The test site—selected in 1944 from a shortlist of eight possible test sites in California, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado—had been selected, in part, for its supposed isolation. Yet in reality, nearly half-a-million people were living within a 150-mile radius of the explosion, with some as close as 12 miles away. Many, if not most, of these civilians were still asleep when the bomb detonated just before dawn. (See figure below.)

As I have written about before, in the years after the first above ground test, hundreds more took place until 1963 when the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to end above ground testing of nuclear weapons.

As the date ending above ground testing grew near, the U.S. tested bigger and bigger bombs resulting in nuclear clouds and fallout over wider and wider areas.

As a kid growing up in Southern California we were only 300 miles downwind from the testing grounds.

I’ll be interested to see if Oppenheimer shows that.

Probably not.