Award-winning filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer will open in theaters on July 21. The film is a dramatization of the story of Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist who in 1942 became the top scientist in charge of developing the atomic bomb as part of the U.S. government’s Manhattan Project.

The Manhattan Project developed and produced two nuclear bombs, code-named Little Boy and Fat Man. The U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, and the second over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. This was at the very end of World War 2 when the U.S. imperialists were about to defeat the Japanese imperialists in the war in Asia and the Pacific.

Estimates of the number of people killed immediately in these bombings range from 110,000 to 210,000,¹ and the effects on many more would last for decades—many of the survivors would face leukemia, cancer, or other terrible side effects from the radiation. This was an unprecedented crime against humanity.

Many people will see this film about Oppenheimer, and there is bound to be lots of discussion and controversy. Revcom.us will post more about the film itself and its impact after its release on July 21. This film could be a cultural phenomenon, especially at a time when the possibility of nuclear war looms large, and we urge our readers to see it when it comes out and actively enter into the debate and discussion of the film. See the Letter from Revcoms in NYC.

Given the subject matter of the film, here are some basic points about the U.S. dropping of atomic bombs:

1. The nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is best understood not as the end of World War 2 in the Pacific but rather the opening of the Cold War² between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The U.S. dropped atomic weapons as a “statement,” as a warning and threat, to the then-socialist Soviet Union—an act of what historian Gar Alperovitz has called “atomic diplomacy.”³

This was also a message to the whole world. The U.S. had emerged from World War 2 as top imperialist gangster—and the U.S. was telling the world “not to mess with us” or this is what you will get.

The evidence shows that the Japanese had already indicated through diplomatic channels their willingness to surrender. There was little direct military value in destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two largely civilian targets; and, obscenely, the gruesome patterns and effects of immediate destruction of the bombings were carefully studied by U.S. military experts for future application. This is an unspeakably cruel, large-scale, high-tech crime against humanity... for which no U.S. government and president, Democrat or Republican, has ever apologized.

2. Oppenheimer seems not to have regretted the bombings as such. But he was particularly concerned about the impending development of the even more powerful and destructive hydrogen bomb and the looming danger of nuclear holocaust. For this, along with his progressive sympathies and “guilt by association” with those who called themselves communists, he was persecuted during the McCarthyite period,⁴ especially as the Truman administration launched its aggressive counterrevolutionary “containment” policies and programs directed at the Soviet Union and radical and revolutionary struggles.

3. The scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project largely rallied behind a cause of defeating Hitler and what they saw as a “Nazi-fascist threat to human civilization.” But as pointed out by one of the scholars interviewed for the MSNBC documentary accompanying the film, they wound up developing the technology/weapon that could destroy civilization—putting it in the hands of the U.S. government. Against what might be described as their “better intentions,” they were tools of the imperatives and strategic objectives of U.S. imperialism and the furtherance of American empire—in particular, the U.S. imperialist goal of forging a hegemonic “American century,” in which the U.S. would be an unrivaled world power—politically, militarily, and economically.

4. The dominant line of radicals and progressives, including and especially the stance of the revisionist⁵ Communist Party, USA, was that World War 2 was, in its defining and principal aspect, an anti-fascist war, pitting democracy against fascism. And they led people under their influence to get unquestioningly behind U.S. rulers.

But the defining feature and principal aspect of World War 2 was that it was an inter-imperialist war between two blocs of major imperialist powers (Germany, Japan, Italy, on the one hand; and the U.S., Great Britain, France, on the other). They were fighting for global domination and for control over colonies and neocolonies in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. During World War 2, the Soviet Union, the world's first and only socialist state at the time, was fighting a just war for its defense and survival (though largely as a “patriotic” war) against German imperialism.

Bob Avakian has analyzed this period in various writings (see, for instance, Advancing the World Revolutionary Movement: Questions of Strategic Orientation, 1984); and the nature of World War 2 is gone into in chapter 2 of America in Decline (1984) by Raymond Lotta.

5. At the secret laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico (site of the Manhattan Project), the gathering together, cooperation, and esprit de corps among the physicists, the provision of massive financial support and technology, and the “leadership” of Oppenheimer and Lieutenant General Leslie Richard Groves, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officer who directed the Manhattan Project—all this contributed to the enormous and rapid enterprise of developing this monstrous weapon. A weapon in the service of America’s empire, a weapon that would come to pose an existential threat to humanity. These scientists became unhinged from the political and moral implications. Some of those involved expressed great regrets afterward, some became involved in post-war peace efforts, and some of them faced McCarthyite harassment.

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We urge our readers not only to see the movie Oppenheimer but also to correspond with us and share what kind of discussion and debate you have with people, even as they are coming out of the theater.