“Oppenheimer” is a White-Jewish male view of history and that POV provides an old-fashioned slightly East Coast-biased or Anglo-centric view of history despite attempts to make the film fill its diversity quota. The film is disappointing in its blazing whiteness that blinds us to the truth of the world that J. Robert Oppenheimer worked in and, without the complications of racist reactions during a time of heightened hatred, the audience is misled to the historic conclusions.

• ‘Oppenheimer’ and the Communist Connection
• ‘Oppenheimer’ and the Obvious

The Plot

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, the film is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s 2005 biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Oppenheimer.”  The book was given the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. I have not read the book so I can only comment on the film and what secondary sources report.

Oppenheimer is portrayed as Jewish, but since he is portrayed by Irish actor Cillian Murphy, we should consider him as a white-passing Jew. We meet the 22-year-old J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1926 on a dark and rainy day. Before the title, a caption tells us: “Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.”

This young man is tortured by homesickness. He’s far from home (Manhattan) and studying under Patrick Blackett (James D’Arcy) at the Cavendish Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. Blackett, an experimental physicist, is reminded that Danish physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) is giving a lecture. Oppenheimer has broken equipment in his lab experiment and Blackett forces him to miss the lecture since he must, at the very least, clean up for himself. Out of spite, Oppenheimer uses a hypodermic to poison an apple left on Blackett’s desk. Oppenheimer catches the very end of the lecture, but asks a question, a question that he has asked before. Bohr made foundational contributions to the understanding of atomic structure and quantum theory for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. He had founded the Niels Bohr institute (then known as the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen) in 1920. 

The next day, regretting his decision to poison Blackett, he rushes to find that Bohr has the apple in his hand. Claiming there is a worm hole (the kind that involves a bug and not space), he quickly dispatches the apple to the trash and has a discussion with Bohr who asks “The important thing isn’t can you read music, it’s can you hear it. Can you hear the music, Robert?”  Oppenheimer is a lab disaster but he can hear the music of the universe and  transfers to the University of Göttingen, (officially the Georg August University of Göttingen).

While in Germany, he meets German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg  (Matthias Schweighöfer ).

After receiving his Ph.D., Oppenheimer returns to the US and begins teaching at both the University of California, Berkeley (UCB or UC Berkeley) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In today’s world, a one-way car drive from Berkeley to Pasadena in California would be about a 6-hour drive (379.8 miles). By train, that would take about 9.5 hours.  Oppenheimer meets his future wife, Katherine Puening (Emily Blunt), the once-widowed and currently married UCLA botany grad student (and ex-communist). But he also is having an affair with decade younger Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), a proud member of the Communist Party USA as well as a reporter for the party’s publication, “Western Worker” in Berkeley.  

In 1942, Oppenheimer meets US Army General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) and becomes involved in what will be called the Manhattan Project: The race to develop the atomic bomb before the Nazis. The Nazis have Heisenberg heading their nuclear weapons program. The US has many immigrant scientists, some who have escaped the Nazis by fleeing to the US or the UK. While Groves questions Oppenheimer about his communist activities, Oppenheimer assures him that this won’t be a problem. Yet, we know that in the future it will be and the future is represented in another timeline filmed in black-and-white.

Oppenheimer assembles a team that includes Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), Isidor Issac Rabi (David Drumholtz), Klaus Fuchs (Christopher Denham) and David L. Hill (Rami Malek)  at Los Alamos, New Mexico. He attempts to recruit Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), but fails. Los Alamos isn’t the only site, but the central location between UCB (Radiation Lab), Caltech (Project Camel), University of Chicago, Columbia University, Oak Ridge (Tennessee) and other locations. Oppenheimer has a love for New Mexico that predates the US entry into the war in 1941 so this is perhaps the real reason New Mexico was chosen over other desert states (e.g. Nevada, Arizona).

The whole project is so hush-hush that all team members must compartmentalize their lives. Yet although married, Oppenheimer continues his affair with Tatlock although he eventually begins to distance himself from her. When he learns of her suicide in 1944 (4 January 1944), he is devastated. His affair will come back to haunt both his professional and personal life. 

 The race against Germany becomes a moot point when Germany surrenders in the spring of 1945. For reference (but not present in the film), Benito Mussolini is executed 25 April 1945; Adolf Hitler commits suicide 30 April 1945. Oppenheimer still believes the atom bomb will be necessary for the war with Japan. Pressed to complete and test the bomb before the Potsdam Conference (17 July to 2 August 1945 meeting of Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and President Harry S. Truman in Potsdam, Germany) , the bomb is tested (Trinity Test on 16 July 1945) despite poor weather. 

As most audience members will know, the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945).  Japan surrenders. While Oppenheimer is portrayed as feeling haunted by the suffering caused by those bombings, despite some impressionistic CGI, the Japanese and the war in the Pacific remain an abstraction as do the causes of that part of the war. The compartmentalization of a White and Jewish society in California and New Mexico weakens the emotional impact audiences are supposed to feel about the destruction and the very real physical impact of the detonation and testing of the atom bombs  not only in Japan, but also in the US.  

In the post-war world, Oppenheimer is a hero, but after Oppenheimer embarrasses Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), also an American White-passing Jew, Strauss, as chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, works to remove Oppenheimer from his position of political influence. Strauss also believe that Oppenheimer turned Einstein against him. Strauss will ultimately pay for his pettiness and Oppenheimer is given recognition much later. 

Techical Aspects

According to AP, Nolan said:

I knew that I had two timelines that we were running in the film. One is in color, and that’s Oppenheimer’s subjective experience. That’s the bulk of the film. Then the other is a black and white timeline. It’s a more objective view of his story from a different character’s point of view.

Scenes in black and white (Kodak created and FotoKem developed black-and-white photographic film for IMAX) show a different timeline. That alone merits re-watching the film. 

You won’t be disappointed with the depiction of the detonation of the first atom bomb, but there will be other things that are disappointing despite obvious attempts to include diversity by showing African Americans in the backgrounds (as well as, according to IMDb on 31 July 2023, uncredited appearances of Ansa Woo as female student #70, Jack Wang as Cambridge student and Aamir Yusuf as Cambridge student) and including women as intelligent people. 

The Male Gaze and Gratuitous Nudity

What likely earns “Oppenheimer” its R-rating are the nude scenes with Pugh proudly displaying her naked breasts. India’s Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Anurag Thakur,  objected to the juxtaposition of lines from the holy Hindu scripture, “Bhagavad Gita” with sexual intercourse. As described by Variety: 

SPOILER ALERT: The sex scene features Cillian Murphy as Robert Oppenheimer and Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock. Pugh stops during intercourse, gets up and goes over to the bookshelf, picks out a copy of the “Bhagavad Gita” and asks Murphy to read from it. Murphy reads the line “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds,” the quote from the “Bhagavad Gita” that Oppenheimer famously thought of when the first nuclear bomb was detonated – as intercourse resumes.

While in a GQ interview Murphy says that the sex scenes were “vital” in this film because “the relationship that he has with Jean Tatlock is one of the most crucial emotional parts of the film,” the scenes are modest in their display of the male body. My husband thought this was to prevent an R-rating, but the film has an R-rating and comes 38 years after the nude scene in “A Room with a View” which featured Rupert Graves (as Freddy Honeychurch), Simon Callow (Reverend Beebe) and Julian Sands (George Emerson). That scene is non-sexual and makes the “Oppenheimer” scene where both Jean Tatlock and Oppenheimer are post-coital and having a discussion sitting across from each other with Murphy having his legs coyly crossed so that while the camera lovingly considers Pugh’s naked breasts, Murphy’s penis is well hidden by the carefully crossed and never uncrossed legs. (I’m thinking of Sharon Stone in the 1992 “Basic Instinct”). 

If there needs to be nudity, why are we only given female genitals to admire? Could there have been a discussion of the Hindu scripture at a bookstore or over coffee? Yes, but it would likely not have had the same memorable impact for heterosexual men. 

The nudity here only serves the heterosexual male gaze and thus, it would seem the nudity isn’t really vital because the display of male genitalia isn’t important to this film. If Oppenheimer’s genitalia don’t give us clues to his crucial emotional attachment to Tatlock, then the exposure of Tatlock’s breasts provide no clues either, particularly since we aren’t making a comparison between Tatlock and Oppenheimer’s wife. 

We don’t really meet his family, besides his brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold), or understand his entitled upbringing although it is alluded to. 

Art and Opening Pandora’s Box of Asian Complications

According to an Art News article, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s 2005 biography of Oppenheimer, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the book on which Nolan’s film is based upon, notes that Oppenheimer was raised in a Manhattan family whose art collection included works of Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Rembrandt van Rijn, Édouard Vuillard and Vincent Van Gogh. 

This exposure to art seems to be symbolized in the film by the appearance of painting that Art News identifies as Picasso’s “Woman Sitting with Crossed Arms.” The 1937 painting is currently at the Musée Picasso in Paris and is of Marie-Thérèse Walter, a woman whom “Picasso began seeing romantically when he was 45 and she was 17 in 1927.” The question then becomes why Picasso, particularly of a painting that was not in his family’s collection?

Early on in the film, Oppenheimer, as played by Cillian Murphy, rises as a physicist in training. He meets the legendary scientist Niels Bohr, who devised a legendary model for atoms that is still used today, and is turned on to the magic of the discipline. “Can you hear the music?” Bohr asks Oppenheimer at one point, referring to the imagined sounds of invisible particles going about their business.

Oppenheimer left Cambridge for the University of Göttinge. According to the Atomic Archive, Oppenheimer arrived at the German university in 1926 where he studied under Max Born. 

Writing for ArtNews, Alex Greenberger suggests that the choice may be “Pablo-matic.” Picasso’s behavior toward women was bad as was Oppenheimer’s. Oppenheimer’s philandering is portrayed in the film. My husband thought the Picasso painting represented Oppenheimer’s interests in the Spanish Civil War which would eventually get him in trouble. The year of “Woman Sitting with Crossed Arms” is the year that his father died and his father’s death, according to Britannica, “left Oppenheimer a fortune that allowed him to subsidize anti-fascist organizations.” Brittanica also notes that “the tragic suffering inflicted by Joseph Stalin on Russian scientists led him to withdraw his associations with the Communist Party” though Brittanica quickly notes that he never joined the party. 

The timeline Britannica presents is that in 1939, Oppenheimer began an affair with the married Katharine Puening–a botany grad student at UCLA whom he would marry in 1940. 

Yet by introducing art, London-born British and American director Nolan has opened a Pandora’s box. How can this Oppenheimer, a man aware of art be totally ignorant of Japanese influence in California? 

Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) was a member of the avant grade artistic group Les Nabis. According to TheArtStory.org, on “Japonism and The Nabis”: 

Japonism describes the influence of Japanese art, especially Ukiyo-e prints (literally, pictures of the floating [or everyday] world), on French artists in the second half of the 19^th century. These prints were first exhibited in the Japan Pavilion at the 1867 Paris World’s Fair, but also later at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890. The term Japonism was coined in 1872 by the French art critic Phillippe Burty to describe the influence of Japanese decorative objects as well as woodcuts on European art. Usually, the term is applied to the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, who were specifically influenced by the flat blocks of color, the emphasis on design, and the simple, everyday subject matter. However, the woodcuts of Vallotton also demonstrate this influence with their flat shapes and asymmetrical design, as do many of the works of Bonnard and Vuillard, who painted scenes of everyday life taken from unusual points of view.

The Van Gogh Museum visually shows how Vincent Van Gogh received “Inspiration from Japan.” In a report about a exhibition “Van Gogh and Japan,” Alastair Sooke wrote for the BBC (11 June 2018), 

Van Gogh considered Japanese prints a model of pure artistic expression, uncorrupted by Western modes of representation: “Japanese art is something like the primitives, like the Greeks, like our old Dutchmen, Rembrandt, Potter, Hals, Vermeer, Ostade, Ruisdael,” he wrote to Theo in July 1888. “It doesn’t end.”

Rather than simply continuing to copy Japanese prints, though, Van Gogh began experimenting with aspects of them in his own paintings, including the use of bright, flat colours and strong diagonals, close-up and bird’s-eye views, unconventional cropping, the omission of the horizon, and the isolation of prominent objects, such as large cut-off tree trunks, in the foreground. Inspired by the natural world, he painted flowers, including, on several memorable occasions, irises – comparing one of these springtime views to “a Japanese dream”.

While Van Gogh and Vuillard are not a presence in the film, the Mission style is. In “Oppenheimer,” evidence of the Mission style is used to represent Pasadena. While the Mission style draws from Medieval and Shaker furniture styles, it also draws from Japanese design. ModernBungalow.com notes in its 19 November 2021 article “The Japanese Influence on Mission Style: An Appreciation for Fine Craftsmanship Brought the Simplicity Japanese-Inspired Design to the Forefront of the American Arts and Crafts Movement,” 

The Japanese influence can be seen, and felt, in its simplicity and by incorporating themes from nature. Shibusa, or shibui in its adjectival form, is an important concept in Japanese aesthetics. While not easily translated, it has been described as a calm understatement, a quiet and sober refinement, severe exquisiteness and interesting beauty.

The Art Institute of Chicago noted in its description of the exhibit “Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts from Britain to Chicago” that in the UK and the US, the Arts and Crafts movement “coincided with the craze for all things Japanese.” 

Just as they sought to improve modern design by looking at previous styles such as the Gothic, Arts and Crafts practitioners embraced Japanese forms. They admired Japanese works because they, like medieval art, were thought to derive from a culture that was free from the depravities of modern industrialism. As designers grew more knowledgeable about Japanese art and culture they began emulating not merely the surface motifs they saw in the works, but their underlying design strategies.

Where Are the Japanese?

There are two California universities mentioned in “Oppenheimer”: the University of California, Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. It would seem disingenuous for the film to pretend that Oppenheimer and the rest of the scientists in California were unaware of the anti-East Asian racism present in Berkeley or Pasadena and the effects it had in these two institutes. 

Oppenheimer taught at UC Berkeley from 1929 to 1943.

In the spring of 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry in Berkeley had one week to pack and prepare for their forced trip to the Tanforan racetrack in San Bruno. They would be housed there for months in the horse stable stalls until they were transferred to remote areas. For Berkeley, that meant 1,300 residents. Those residents included UC Berkeley faculty (e.g. art professor Chuira Obata, who was at UCB 1932-1954) and staff as well as about 500 students. 

UC President Robert Gordon Sproul “wrote to more than 30 Midwestern schools in hopes of finding spots for UC Berkeley’s Japanese American students so they would continue their studies.” 

UC Berkeley was a center of political activity to aid the Japanese Americans. A student relocation council was formed to help Japanese Americans continue their college education, a Committee on Fair Play was organized “to speak out against anti-Japanese hysteria and advocate for the lease of Japanese Americans.”  The committee included Sproul, provost Monroe Deutsch, former UC President David Prescott Barrows, economist Paul Taylor and Taylor’s wife, Dorothea Lange. Lange photographed the removal as well as the lives of the people in the internment camps and her photos “were impounded and kept from view for more than 50 years.” 

At the UCB 1942 commencement, Sproul announced “That the senior class’s top student ‘cannot be here today because his country called him elsewhere.'” That student, Harvey Akio Itano, had three weeks earlier been sent with his family to an internment camp (Tule Lake). Itano, who received his BS in chemistry, had been chosen by the faculty as the University Medalist for 1942. He would become a professor of Pathology, ME, Ph.D. at UC San Diego. 

Oppenheimer was also present during that time period of heightened anti-Japanese and anti-East Asian sentiment in Pasadena. According to Calisphere.org, 

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s association with Caltech began in 1930, at age 26, when he became assistant professor in theoretical physics and taught such advanced courses as Statistical Mechanics, Quantum Theory, and The Quantum Theory of Radiation. Though the majority of his time was spent developing a strong physics department at UC Berkeley, Oppenheimer commuted back and forth between Berkeley and Pasadena throughout the 1930s and early 1940s usually spending one term each year on the Caltech campus. He became a full professor at Caltech in 1938, and continued in that position right through the war years, though from 1944 to 1945 was on leave to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. He would return to the campus in 1946 to teach Principles of Quantum Mechanics, before accepting a position as director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in 1947

At Caltech, there were also professors who worked to assist their students.  Professor Linus Pauling “fought particularly hard for two of his research assistants, Miyoshi Ikawa and Carol Ikeda. In both cases, Pauling’s intervention prevented these colleagues from being forcibly interned.” Pauling found Ikawa a place in the graduate program at the University of Wisconsin. Ikawa would return to do postdoctoral research at both Caltech and UC Berkeley before becoming a professor at the University of New Hampshire. Ikeda completed his Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska. He would later work at DuPont. 

Pauling was briefly a friend of Oppenheimer, having met him in Europe (June 1927). When Oppenheimer accepted the position that split his time between Caltech and Berkeley, the friendship was renewed. However, when Oppenheimer invited Pauling’s wife, Ava Helen to travel with him to Mexico, and she reported this to Pauling, Pauling “immediately cut ties with Oppenheimer.”  According to “The Pauling Blog,” Oppenheimer did extend an invitation for Pauling “to lead the chemistry division” for the Manhattan Project. After Oppenheimer was given a loyalty hearing before the Atomic Energy Commission, Pauling wrote an article that was published in “The Nation”: “A Disgraceful Act” (1 May 1954). 

Another researcher at Caltech, Robert A. Emerson, persuaded “government officials to permit rubber research to take place at the camps, and then he had to convince Japanese American scientists and nurserymen to join the project. Significantly, he enticed his former graduate student, Shimpe Nishimura to stay in the United States and eventually take over leadership of the Manzanar research.” People who worked on the project included chemist Kenzie Nozaki and Frank Hirosawa, Dr. Masuo Kodani, Homer Kimura, Shuichi Ogura and Frank Kageyama. 

Kodani was from Pasadena (born in Los Angeles) and had been a student at UCB, graduated in 1938. His German Jewish emigre advisor, Richard Goldschmidt, had tried to find him a position on the East Coast, but was unsuccessful.  Ogura was born in Pasadena and was a visiting student at Caltech. 

Nobel laureate Robert A. Millikan (Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923), then president of Caltech, was one of the prominent Californians who “insisted that interned scientists deserved funding and support.” 

While Manzanar was in California, there were three internment camps in New Mexico:Lordsburg, Ft. Stanton and Santa Fe. Lordsburg, NM is about 400 miles or 5-6 hours away from Los Alamos. Ft. Stanton, NM is about 220 miles or four hours. Santa Fe to Los Alamos is about 1 hour or 34 miles. 

Lordsburg (US Army-run internment camp) held Japanese internees from Hawaii, the continental US and Alaska from 1942-1943. The internees were moved, mostly to Santa Fe, so that prisoners of war from Italy and Germany could be held there. Ft. Stanton (INS) held mostly German seamen and German enemy aliens but was also a secret detention camp where 17 Japanese American dissidents were held for six months. The Santa Fe Internment Camp (INS) was located just 1.5 miles from downtown Santa Fe and eventually 4,555 male internees passed through. 

The Santa Fe camp was the cause for local concern according to Densho for the following reasons: 

1. Locals thought the internees were Japanese POWs.
2. Local survivors of the Bataan Death March returned to the area.
3. Large purchases made for the camp in 1942 strained local resources.
4. Locals were not in favor of Nisei children attending local schools when there was a consideration of making the Santa Fe camp into a family camp.

New Mexico is also the state where one city, Gallup, decided not to give up its Japanese American population. 

• A Tale of Two Towns: Gallup and Clovis

• Surviving internment. Japanese Americans shed light on a dark history

The New York Magazine article, “Who Are the Japanese in Oppenheimer?”  Ryu Spaeth, a features editor at New York Intelligencer wondered where the Japanese were in Nolan’s film. 

It is not Nolan’s job to faithfully depict the Japanese. He has made a movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer after all. But some common understanding of this faraway foil is necessary for us to comprehend this historical figure’s significance. Nolan is most concerned with the fact that Oppenheimer brought us into the nuclear age, which gave humanity the ability for the first time to destroy itself. The legacy of the bomb, however, is more specific and concrete than Oppenheimer’s final vision of a world engulfed in nuclear fire. At the very same instant that the bomb created modern Japan in a burst of light, it also gave rise to the America we know today — America as superpower. Two new nations were born from this expression of the bomb’s divine power, and the cost of this transformation, like some ghastly blood sacrifice, were those 220,000 human beings who were either incinerated or succumbed to radiation poisoning, human beings Oppenheimer said were necessary to target to show what havoc the weapon could really wreak, which is to say that the inauguration of the American century would not have happened without the Japanese.

But, of course, America does not see itself as sharing its history with anyone, let alone that it has a ghostly sibling on the other side of the world. Which is how Kai Bird, writing for the New York Times on the occasion of Oppenheimer’s release, can say with a straight face that the “real tragedy” of Oppenheimer’s life was that it discouraged scientists from standing up “in the political arena as public intellectuals.” Well, no — the tragedy is that his genius was literally weaponized against a country that may no longer have posed a threat to him or his country, against people who have been forgotten by their opponents, if they were ever known at all.

Would it really be possible for Oppenheimer to have been oblivious to the anti-Asian sentiment in California and the internment of Japanese American teachers, faculty and students from Caltech or UCB? 

The Issue of Race in Academia

Of course, concern from Oppenheimer’s “people” or Jewish people is acknowledge in the film. According to BerkeleyPlaques.org, 

Shamefully, anti-semitism emerged even there. When Oppenheimer recommended a top student, Bob Serber, to be hired, the appointment was blocked by department Chairman Raymond T. Birge, who wrote a colleague saying “one Jew in the department was enough.”

Racism wasn’t limited toward Jewish people. 

Moreover, “Oppenheimer” represents the project as mostly a men’s club. Looking at the US Department of Energy’s interactive history of the Manhattan Project, it seems the project was a boys club.

• The Manhattan Project

However, there were women involved and not just the one at Los Alamos who in the film notes she (Czech-American Lilli Hornig) was asked if she could type. Hornig, who is portrayed by Olivia Thirlby, was Jewish and had accompanied her husband, Donald Hornig (played by David Rysdahl) to Los Alamos. The film does include some debate on plutonium chemistry perhaps being too dangers for women (particularly in reference to reproduction). 

The film seems to forget that the other country that would become Communist is China, at that time an ally in World War II. There was a Chinese woman who studied at UCB and would eventually join the Manhattan project: Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu. When Wu graduated in 1940, according to Time magazine:  

But the world she graduated into, on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attacks, was rife with sexism and anti-Asian racism, and Wu found it hard to find a good academic position. 

• Women of the Manhattan Project
• The Manhattan Project Physicist Who Fought for Equal Rights for Women
• Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu, The First Lady of Physics

Wu married Luke Chia-Liu Yuan in 1942. Yuan received his doctoral training at Caltech under Nobel laureate Robert A. Millikan, an experimental physicist who was concerned about the Japanese Americans at Manzanar as mentioned above. Wu and Yuan were married at his home. They moved to the East Coast with Wu working as an assistant professor at Smith College in Massachusetts. Yuan found a job at RCA. Wu was working at Princeton University (New Jersey) when she joined the Manhattan Project in 1944, working at Substitute Alloy Materials Lab at Columbia University. There she helped “develop the process for separating uranium metal into U-235 and U-238 isotopes by gaseous” which was then “replicated at a grand scale at the K-25 Plant in Oak Ridge.” 

Because of World War II and the subsequent Communist takeover, she would never see her parents alive again. She is believe to be the only Chinese American working on the Manhattan Project. 

It would seem impossible for Oppenheimer and the rest of the physics departments to be ignorant of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in both Berkeley and Caltech, particularly since people like Sproul and Millikan attempting to ameliorate their situations. Yet, we don’t see any of this in Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” 

While I could not find any reference of Oppenheimer in relation to the Japanese internment, there is evidence that Oppenheimer was sympathetic toward the Chinese. In this Letter on the Oppenheimer Affair:

It was reported that in 1940 you were listed as a sponsor of the Friends of the Chinese People, an organization which was characterized in 1944 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as a Communist-front organization.

The second Sino-Japanese war had already begun in 1937 (the first Sino-Japanese War was 1894-1895) with the 29 July 1937 Tongzhou mutiny, then the Nanjing Massacre that began on 13 December 1937. The Chinese themselves were not a unified front having conducted a communist purge in Jiangxi-Fujian (1931-1935) and the CCP purged  Koreans (Minsaengdan incident)  suspected of supporting the Japanese occupiers (1933-1936). 

The wartime hysteria affected not only Japanese Americans, but also the Chinese and other East Asians. Remember, California had led or supported many anti-Asian legal initiatives from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to Alien Land Laws.  The wartime hysteria as well as the virulent anti-Asian sentiment in California is not mentioned at all in “Oppenheimer.”

If one cannot intelligently discuss World War II in Europe without touching on anti-Semitism in Germany, Europe and the US, then one cannot possibly intelligently discuss the war against Japan without discussing racism toward Japanese and East Asians in the US, UK and Canada. Even when someone mentions Pearl Harbor, perhaps the average person in the US  forgets that the population of Hawaii in 1940 was predominately Japanese (139,631 compared to Caucasian at 112,087). The Chinese were 27,179 and the Filipino population was 63,052 (Koreans were 6,851 and Native Hawaiian were 64,310). Mainland USA had racist laws targeting East Asians, Filipinos and Native Hawaiians as well as Latinos and Native Americans during that time period. 

Japan had been a US and UK ally in World War I so the question should be what soured that relationship. To understand the full impact and implications of dropping the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one has to discuss anti-East Asian racism in the US, UK and Canada. Post World War II, the Japanese (A crew of 23 men on the Daigo Fukuryū Maru 第五福龍丸were contaminated by the nuclear fallout on 1 March 1954) and Pacific Islanders were affected by 24 subsequent nuclear bomb detonations for testing between 1947-1958 at the Bikini Atoll. 

To understand the impact of the Los Alamos on New Mexico, racism toward Latinos and Native Americans in the West (California, Arizona, New Mexico, etc.) needs to be discussed. In the film, Murphy’s Oppenheimer blithely assures there’ll be no problem acquiring Los Alamos, “There’s a boys’ school we’ll have to commandeer, and the local Indians come up here for burial rites.” This is barren land, except it wasn’t. 

• The Atomic Bomb’s First Victims Were in New Mexico
• Oppenheimer’s Glaring Omission
• In the Shadow of Oppenheimer: How popular narratives of the atomic age obscure the bomb’s first victims. (16 July 2023
• Atomic Veterans Were Silenced for 50 Years. Now, They’re Talking. (27 May 2019)
•  

In Joshua Wheeler and Redo Sterchi’s article “In the Shadow of Oppenheimer,” 

There were, in fact, dozens of families within 20 miles, largely poor families of ranchers and farmers, many Hispanic and Indigenous, who unwittingly went about their daily lives in the first fallout of the atomic age. Now, those who were infants and children downwind of the detonation of the “Gadget”—a code name for the plutonium bomb used in the Trinity test—are nearing the end of a decades-long battle to be recognized and compensated for generations of illness they trace to exposure from radioactive fallout.

These were US citizens. Nadira Goffe’s article for Slate reports the film “glides over the fact that the government forcibly displaced the inhabitants of multiple areas of New Mexico—often for as little as $7 an acre for Hispanic homesteaders, compared to $43 an acre for an Anglo-owned ranch and $225 per acre for a school property. “

It should be noted that there was a Latino team member of the Manhattan Project: Luis Alvarez (portrayed by Alex Wolff). Wolff is not Latino, but his father was Jewish. Alvarez’s grandfather was a Spanish physician born in Spain who lived in Cuba before settling in the US.