Having appreciated its splendid desert terrain, learned its early history, and protested continued focus on nuclear science on the hostile streets of Los Alamos, the world of Robert Oppenheimer has become a somewhat familiar place for me. The science is a different matter.

Like a number of you readers, I’ve been to see Christopher Nolan’s recent film. I didn’t like his filmmaking style and walked out before the popcorn was gone. Nolan made the Batman series and speaks of enjoying filming in an “operatic style.” The subject suggests something more of a contemplative, documentary approach. More than likely, I was simply exhausted by having had to sit through a full hour of advertising and previews before Nolan’s film appeared on the screen.

Nuclear fission, the process in which an atom is split, releasing an immense amount of energy and making possible production of a weapon of war, was discovered in Germany in December 1938. For starters, all of these scientists knew the 1934 death of researcher Marie Curie was the result of exposure to radioactive matter. The attempt to distort or suppress this information in 1945 gave another dimension to controversy over use of the bomb developed at Los Alamos.

Headed by Werner Heisenberg, Germany had a nuclear weapons program of its own. Albert Einstein knew as much and contacted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to warn him.

German potential posed the possibility they’d be the first country to produce a bomb and would use it to win the war. In Germany, Heisenberg made it clear that building a bomb would require massive industrial commitment. Hitler was more interested in development of rockets. Soviet physicist Georgy Flyorov urged Stalin to consider the bomb, but the urgency of combat limited the Russians to years of only gathering information.

Along with his family a member of New York’s Ethical Culture Society, American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer grew up steeped in a culture of responsibility and social justice. Care for an illness in his youth brought him familiarity with and love for the desert high country of New Mexico. His studies at Harvard, in England, and with major physicists in Germany prepared him for his 1942 appointment to head the government’s weapon physics research and design.

He was appointed director at Los Alamos Laboratory, a secretly developed, totally isolated and inaccessible New Mexico desert site, where he led design and testing of the atom bomb. Assembled and isolated with him were a talented group of men and women who would construct the bomb. In charge of the project and community was General Leslie Groves, an engineer. He hired Oppenheimer in spite of the physicist’s known association with communists.

It must be remembered the economic peril of that period had sent many people searching alternative political systems. Exposed to the failure of the capitalism they had experienced, many saw socialism as an attractive option.

Detonation of the first atomic bomb occurred the morning of July 16, 1945, 210 miles south of Los Alamos on the plains of New Mexico’s Alamogordo Bombing Range. Code name for the test was Trinity. Witness Oppenheimer relates, “We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter, and then it was entirely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.”

He recited a verse from the Hindu life guide, the Bhagavada Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Wrote historian Gar Alperovitz, “It is impossible to catalog, let alone know, the many ways information was quietly suppressed and favorable versions of events promoted after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki … which have contributed to the Hiroshima myth … excessive government secrecy and the routine classification of documents, for instance, obviously contributed to … the suppression of information.”

John Hersey’s brilliant and honest account of what happen at Hiroshima is the one all should read. Completely dismissing President Roosevelt’s war-long success in moderating Stalin’s nature and bringing the Soviet Union into a cooperative mode with the U.S., his successor Harry Truman, along with Winston Churchill, was distrustful and hostile. Together they created of Russia an enemy, and by their actions fashioned the Cold War. Japan invasion plans were many months in the future. Truman chose to impress Stalin with his new weapon.

A heroic figure, Oppenheimer had felt responsibility to apply his knowledge to defend the Allies. What an immense moral burden was put upon him, made all the heavier by his being finally distrusted, betrayed, and reviled.

Charlemont resident Carl Doerner is an author and historian, currently editing his new work, “Breaking the Silence: Revisioning the American Narrative.”