Two thirds of the way through Oppenheimer, I asked myself “Why did Christopher Nolan make this picture?” Because, except for a few cheesy nits, which I will most assuredly pick later, what we have gotten, about two hours in, is essentially a pseudo documentary, a laboriously accurate, $100 million reconstruction of the events leading up…
Tag: atomic bomb
Cutting Ike’s pages, and cutting Ike’s prose
I recently read a new book by Slate’s Fred Kaplan (if a webpub can be said to possess a man)—The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War—which is an interesting read, though I wouldn’t call it “definitive”, unless perhaps when Fred says he’s giving us the “secret history” he implies that he’s…
Once more into the breach, atom-wise
The 73rd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima has come and gone, prompting Stevens Institute of Technology professor Alex Wellerstein, self-proclaimed “historian of science, secrecy, and nuclear weapons,” to unleash a “debunking the myths” twitterstorm on the subject, prompting me to respond in near-knee-jerk reaction, since I’ve already debunked the debunkers before—mostly here, but also…
Myths in a Mist
For the past year or so, the Washington Post has been running five-minute history lessons in the form of a feature that always begins “Five Myths About …”. A more honest head would be “Five Strawmen About …” A case in point—and one that, naturally, got under my skin—is a recent one by Gregg Herken,…