Bruce Hunt was particularly tickled, when watching the movie Oppenheimer, by a quick moment, easily missed, when a man getting a haircut in a barbershop reads in a newspaper that scientists have first produced uranium fission. He jumps out of his chair, mid-haircut, and runs off.
“You have to know the story, or you won’t even notice it,” says Hunt, a historian of science and professor of history at UT Austin. “This is in January of 1939. They’re sort of panning down the street, following Oppenheimer and his girlfriend Jean Tatlock, and then somebody dashes out of a barbershop with the barber’s cloth still around his neck. That really happened. Luis Alvarez, who was later a Nobel Prize winner, was getting a haircut, and he read the news and ran back to the lab at Berkeley to tell Phil Abelson about it, because Abelson was close to discovering it himself.”
Since the late 1980s, Hunt has been teaching a course at UT on the “History of the Atomic Bomb.” It’s a perennially popular course with students, but it has a little extra frisson this year, says Hunt, in the aftermath of the film. In anticipation of increased interest, he raised the cap on the lecture to 150 slots, all of which have been filled.
Hunt himself enjoyed the film, which he saw with his wife and children at an IMAX theater in south Austin, though he has some small quibbles about its accuracy.
“I think it’s a very good movie, and more historically accurate than 90 percent of such movies are,” says Hunt. “The director jams an awful lot into those three hours. There are some things he quite deliberately adjusted, of course, but it’s not always the ones you might expect, and some of the events that seem pretty implausible really happened.”
In general, says Hunt, he wasn’t bothered by Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan’s strategic departures from historical fact. “It’s a movie, not a documentary,” says Hunt. One directorial invention that irritated him, though, was Nolan’s decision to dramatize the production of uranium and plutonium for the bombs by showing the scientists dropping red and blue marbles into two glass containers over time, as though there was a steady accumulation of the materials.
“No,” says Hunt. “It gives a totally deceptive impression of how the uranium and the plutonium built up. The way it worked is you had almost nothing, and then finally the production process works, and then zoom, you’ve got it all. So there was basically no U235 until the spring of 1945, and then very quickly they had the full amount. It was similar with plutonium. It’s not like they were slowly producing it over three years.”
One of the productive tensions of his course, says Hunt, is precisely in these disjunctures between the way we’ve narrativized the history in retrospect, often as a series of stark decisions and rational calculations, and how it was experienced at the time, in the chaos and uncertainty and fluidity of life in the moment. There were in fact moments when everybody knew that something dramatic had happened — the discovery of uranium fission, the first successful test of the bomb, the actual dropping of the bombs — but at other times the big shifts were clear only in retrospect. Hunt wants his students to imaginatively place themselves back in time, amidst the chaos, and then also to avail themselves of the benefit of retrospect to make analytical sense of the big picture.
For the main assignment in the course, for example, Hunt asks his students to write a brief as though they are an aide to Truman in July of 1945, tasked with giving him advice on what to do with the bombs vis-à-vis the war with Japan.
“I give a very specific date in late July,” says Hunt. “It’s at the Potsdam Conference after the Trinity test but before the Potsdam ultimatum is issued. They have to take a position. They have to give specific advice. They can’t just say, ’Well, there are many options.’ They have to say ’This is what you should do, Mr. President.’ And students take it very seriously.”
The irony, which Hunt points out to his students, is that of the various misconceptions we have about the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, perhaps the most persistent is that Harry Truman was a major player at all. Whether we imagine him making the call ruthlessly, with little self-doubt, or agonizingly, haunted by visions of the dead, we’ve got it wrong.
“Truman had almost nothing to do with it,” says Hunt. “In principle he could have stopped it, but there was no decision point in the sense that we imagine. He was briefed about it, ’This is what we’re going to do,’ but he wasn’t called on to make a big yes-or-no decision. In a sense the decision was made when the program was launched by FDR. After Roosevelt dies, it’s treated as a foregone conclusion that once they’re ready, they’ll be used. In general, bombs were dropped as soon as they were available.”
It’s important for Hunt’s students to know this history, he says, but he also wants them to use the additional perspective of the many decades since 1945 to think about what we might have done instead. In general, he says, students break down pretty evenly in their advice to Truman. About half recommend that he do what in fact was done, bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki without warning; the other half devise plans for dropping the bombs on less populated regions of Japan as warning shots, in order to demonstrate their destructive potential without killing as many people. “Very few students say the bombs should not have been dropped at all,” says Hunt.
There hasn’t been much of a shift over the decades, says Hunt, in student sentiments about the dropping of the bombs. “There was maybe a slight uptick in bloodthirstiness after 9/11, but even then, not too big a change.” When he asked for a show of hands on the first day of class this spring, almost all of the students said they had already seen Oppenheimer. He’s curious to see how the film will influence their perspective on the history of the period.
“Some of them may come in with more background knowledge than is typical,” says Hunt. “There’ll probably be some things that I have to correct too.”
To listen to an extended podcast conversation about the film, the history of the atomic bomb, and Hunt’s class, visit our Extra Credit Substack newsletter. To view a three-hour version of Hunt’s course, produced by the 92nd Street Y, visit https://roundtable.org/live-courses/science/ the-history-of-the-atomic-bomb.