#Cobalt bomb edward teller movie#

And Serber, who had a very dry wit, said, “It’s the least wrong of all those I’ve seen.”Īnd I think that applies here, because the difficult edges to Oppenheimer were, to some degree, sanded off.

Richard Rhodes: One time I asked Bob Serber if my portrait of Oppenheimer was anywhere close to the real human being. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Īlec Nevala-Lee: Do you think that the film’s picture of Oppenheimer is accurate? For the rest, viewers may need to return to Rhodes’s own wide-ranging work, which expands beyond even the largest IMAX screen.

#Cobalt bomb edward teller movie#

Given its relentless concentration on Oppenheimer, the movie necessarily leaves a lot out, including plenty of what Rhodes called “drama on the industrial side” and the perspectives of scientists and victims who fall outside its protagonist’s circle of consciousness. We also discussed aspects of the story that weren’t covered by the film, which Nolan adapted from the biography American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. “If anything, he was a little too confident. “It’s really first-class work,” Rhodes said, comparing it favorably with Roland Joffé’s Fat Man and Little Boy (“badly done,” from a technological perspective) and specifically praising Cillian Murphy’s performance in the title role. He was deeply impressed by the film, especially in light of earlier attempts to adapt the same material. The next day, curious about his reaction, I spoke with Rhodes by phone. Over the weekend, along with millions of other moviegoers, Rhodes saw Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s three-hour biopic of the physicist known as the father of the atomic bomb.

“It’s quite obvious why,” Rhodes told me. Rhodes’s comprehensive history, which won a Pulitzer Prize, is both a massive work of scholarship-the main text alone runs nearly 800 pages-and a literary feat that he conceived as “the tragic epic of the twentieth century.” Over the years, according to Rhodes, it has been optioned many times, but no film or television version has ever been made.

Robert Oppenheimer as Richard Rhodes, whose 1986 book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is widely regarded as the definitive account of the Manhattan Project. This article containers spoilers for the film Oppenheimer.įew authors have written as insightfully about the life of J.