What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in Oppenheimer?

What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in Oppenheimer?,Few films have ever been more based on a book than ‘Oppenheimer.’ Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography ‘American Prometheus’ manages the astonishing feat of distilling almost every single page onto celluloid.

What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in Oppenheimer?

Few films have ever been more based on a book than Oppenheimer. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography, American Prometheus, manages the astonishing feat of distilling almost every single one of the book’s 591 pages onto celluloid. Seemingly no bit of dialogue, nor stray anecdote, about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer goes unused.

In fact, Nolan’s chief creative license comes not in the film’s content but its form. While American Prometheus is told in rough chronological order, Oppenheimer skips around the timeline thanks to a pair of nesting framing devices built around a pair of 1950s hearings. Nolan also frequently cuts to fantastical imagery that attempts to dramatize what it was like inside Oppenheimer’s head. As Matt Zoller Seitz notes in his review, this method recalls the experience of getting through a book like American Prometheus: It “paradoxically captures the mental process of reading a text and responding to it emotionally and viscerally as well as intellectually.”

Nevertheless, Oppenheimer is still a movie, which means that even this most rigorous of biopics must at times employ shortcuts and shorthand. With American Prometheus as our guide, here’s a rundown of what’s fact and what’s fiction.

Did Oppenheimer poison his Cambridge tutor’s apple?

The early scene of Oppenheimer poisoning an apple belonging to Patrick Blackett, his Cambridge tutor, is so bizarre that it seems unlikely to have been a screenwriter’s invention. Indeed, it did happen: In the fall of 1925, Oppenheimer really did inject chemicals from the school lab into Blackett’s apple. No one, not even Oppenheimer himself, seemed to know why he did this. As American Prometheus notes, “Robert liked Blackett and eagerly sought his approval.” The attempted poisoning appears to have been a case of misdirected “feelings of inadequacy and intense jealousy.” Luckily, Blackett never consumed the offending fruit, though in real life the university found out about the incident. Oppenheimer’s parents intervened to prevent him from being expelled, and the young scientist was put on probation and sentenced to mandatory psychiatric counseling.

There are disparate opinions on whether the apple was truly poisoned with cyanide, however. Noting that instead of being tried for attempted murder, Oppenheimer got off with a relatively lax punishment, Bird and Sherwin conclude it was more likely he “had laced the apple with something that merely would have made Blackett sick.”

Okay, Einstein.Photo: Universal Pictures

What was Oppenheimer’s relationship with Albert Einstein like?

Tom Conti’s Einstein functions as the moral center of Oppenheimer, popping up every so often to provide words of wisdom. The film’s portrait of Einstein and Oppenheimer’s relationship is largely accurate. Scientifically, they were at odds: Einstein never got onboard with the quantum revolution, leading Oppenheimer to consider him a relic of an earlier age. Thus American Prometheus calls their relationship “always tentative,” though Einstein “eventually acquired a grudging respect for” the younger scientist. The specific interactions seen in Oppenheimer never happened, though the pivotal 1947 meeting that recurs throughout the film seems to refer to a real birthday celebration — which included a commemorative book full of backhanded compliments — that the Institute for Advanced Study threw for Einstein in 1949.

Was Klaus Fuchs the reason the Soviets got the bomb?

Klaus Fuchs was a German Communist who fled the Nazis and settled in England, where he became an acclaimed theoretical physicist and, thenceforth, a Soviet spy. (Funnily enough, actor Christopher Denham also played a spy at Los Alamos in the show Manhattan.) As a member of the British contingent, he “passed detailed written information to the Soviets about the problems and advantages of the implosion-type bomb design.” When Fuchs’s espionage came to light in 1950, Oppenheimer’s enemies naturally blamed the lab’s director and “demanded renewed scrutiny of Oppenheimer’s left-wing past.”

While the most famous, Fuchs was not the only spy at Los Alamos. A technician named Ted Hall, who feared a U.S. nuclear monopoly, passed detailed reports on the lab’s workings to the Soviets. As American Prometheus states, “Hall was the perfect ‘walk-in’ spy; he knew what the Russians needed to know about the atomic bomb project; he needed nothing himself and expected nothing.” A technician named David Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg, also passed secrets to the Soviets, which ended poorly for the whole family. Historians recently uncovered a fourth spy, engineer Oscar Seborer, who might have been the most important of them all. According to the New York Times, “His knowledge most likely surpassed that of the three previously known Soviet spies.”

Why did Lewis Strauss hate Oppenheimer?

After hiring Oppenheimer to run the Institute for Advanced Study, why did Lewis “It’s Pronounced Straws” Strauss devote years of his life to ruining the man? American Prometheus notes that, while the men were initially cordial to each other in Princeton, “the seeds of a terrible feud were born.” (Oppenheimer was not wholly innocent; at one point, he prevented Strauss from buying a house nearby by having the institute purchase it instead.) As the film depicts, Oppenheimer really did humiliate Strauss in front of Congress when the two men disagreed about exporting radioisotopes, a scene that is taken largely verbatim from the book. Afterward, the authors write, “Strauss was angry, and he would stay angry until he had settled the score … Oppenheimer had made for himself a dangerous enemy who was powerful and influential in every field of Robert’s professional life.”

Still, while Strauss’s feud with Oppenheimer was in many ways a petty power struggle, the men did have a very real disagreement about the hydrogen bomb. Strauss convinced himself that Oppenheimer was “sabotaging the project” and had paranoid visions of the doctor poisoning the scientific community against him. The film condenses the years of debate over the H-bomb, but the broad strokes are accurate, as are beats like Oppenheimer snubbing Strauss’s son and daughter-in-law at Strauss’s birthday party.

Who gave Oppenheimer’s security file to William Borden?

A WWII veteran obsessed with the Soviet nuclear threat, William Borden in the early ’50s became the favorite attack dog of Oppenheimer’s enemies. Oppenheimer treats the question of who provided him Oppenheimer’s security file as a big mystery, but if you’ve read American Prometheus, you’ll know the answer from the start: It was Strauss! (The film skips over the fact that H-bomb enthusiast Teller played an equal role in setting Borden against Oppenheimer, whispering in Borden’s ear about delays in the thermonuclear program and Kitty’s previous marriage to a Communist.) The book includes a pivotal meeting in April 1953, in which Borden and Strauss seemingly agreed “Borden would do the dirty work and Strauss would provide him access to the information he needed.” After examining the record of withdrawals of the file, the authors conclude the sequence “was surely coordinated; it could not have been a coincidence.”

Was David Hill’s testimony the thing that turned the Senate against Strauss?

The framing device around Strauss’s Commerce-secretary confirmation hearings is Nolan’s one major departure from American Prometheus, which devotes less than a page to Strauss’s comeuppance. While it’s true that a Manhattan Project scientist named David Hill, portrayed in the film by Rami Malek as a kind of Chekhov’s Eyeball, testified about Strauss’s obsession with destroying Oppenheimer, he was far from the only witness to provide negative testimony. As Slashfilm notes, Los Alamos scientist David Inglis had previously delivered his own scathing words about Strauss’s “personal vindictiveness.”

Furthermore, the scientists weren’t the only ones against him. Like Oppenheimer, Strauss also had made a powerful enemy: New Mexico senator Clinton Anderson. A contemporary report from Time called the confirmation battle the inevitable result of the “blood feud” between Strauss and Anderson, which “has gone far beyond the personal quarrel between two men; it has widened out to involve their friends and their associates, strained old ties and old loyalties, brought charge and countercharge, insult and counterinsult, rumor and counterrumor.” Rather than a stirring congressional speech, it was intense backroom lobbying from Anderson that truly doomed Strauss’s confirmation. But the bit about John F. Kennedy voting against him is real.