Author: Greg Mitchell

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

It was good to see Spike Lee offer this belated criticism/commentary on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer last week, even if cloaked in “massive” respect. Of course it is a point I have been making here (and here and much more) since viewing a preview and starting this newsletter back in mid-July:

Lee also called Oppenheimer a “great film” and Nolan “a massive filmmaker,” revealing that he showed Nolan’s World War II epic Dunkirk in the class he teaches at NYU.

With the caveat that “this is not a criticism, it’s a comment,” Lee said, “I would like to add some more minutes about what happened to the Japanese people. People got vaporized. Many years later, people are radioactive.

Continue reading “Spike Lee on What’s Missing in Oppenheimer“

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

Also posted today at my “other” newsletter.

If you’re like me, you may not have been aware that U2 is now playing one of those weeks-long “residencies” in Vegas, joining the likes of Elvis, Wayne Newton and Celine Dion. Another case of, if it pays i Vegas it stays in Vegas. And they are opening the new billion dollar “Sphere” performance space at the Venetian Hotel, where I resided about 20 years back only because it was the site of a media conference. (Oooh, Las Vegas – ain’t no place for a poor boy like me.) To top it off, they just released a new single to mark the occasion, a kind of a throwback to earlier U2 days, with hints of a muscular Blondie, but with overly familiar Bono posing.

That’s all fine, I suppose, but the title of the single, given my stated interests, caught my eye: “Atomic City.”

Continue reading “U2 Hails ‘Atomic City’ – Which Escaped Fate of Downwinders After Bomb Tests”

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

Here are some updates and links, and crucial background, related to my recent film Atomic Cover-up and the newly-updated book of the same title – what might be called the post-Hiroshima story (and with actual bomb survivors) left out of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

My 2021 film, which has appeared at 20 film festivals around the world and won three awards, is now available for free via Kanopy, if you have any sort of library card or school affiliation. It will also be coming to PBS and PBS.org, probably late this autumn. Right now it is available for purchase or rental for schools, community groups, or individuals from The Video Project. Here is the web site for the film, where you can watch the trailer and read background and dozens of responses from various notables.

Continue reading “The Greatest Film Never Made”

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

From a few years back, but little has changed, except nearly all of the bomb survivors, the “hibakusha,” have now passed away (but their children and other descendants continue to bear witness). All photos: my own, taken on that August day.

On the evening of August 5 we were told we ought to retire early and get up before five the next morning if we wanted to truly appreciate the occasion, before the TV cameras and the politicians horned in.  August 6 is not like any other day in Hiroshima.  It is not like any other day anywhere. What other city even has such a day to commemorate? More died in the siege of Leningrad, but the carnage occurred over many months. More died in the Holocaust, but the victims were separated by the miles between the death camps.

Continue reading “My First August 6th in Hiroshima”

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

Seventy-eight years have now passed since the United States initiated a policy known as “first use” with its atomic attack on Hiroshima. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, it was affirmed with a second detonation over the city of Nagasaki. No nuclear attacks have followed since, although many Americans are probably unaware that this first-strike policy very much remains in effect.

And that’s a problem.

The policy signals that any U.S. president has the authority to order a pre-emptive nuclear strike—not merely in retaliation if and when missiles start flying in our direction. Our warheads could be launched in defense of allies, after the onset of a conventional war involving our troops (think: Iraq, 2003) or in response to a bellicose threat posed by a nuclear (e.g., North Korea) or not-yet-nuclear state (e.g., Iran).

Continue reading “Dangerous ‘First Strike’ Nuclear Policy Adopted in 1945 Still Exists Today”

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

Back in July 1985, when I was editor of the leading antinuclear magazine Nuclear Times, the new issue of the venerable Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists landed on my desk in NYC carrying a startling article by a physicist I’d never heard of, revealing that he had walked away from bomb work at Los Alamos on principle.

His name was Joseph Rotblat and, as it turned out, he was apparently the only scientist who resigned his position in taking a moral stand. I had wondered where he was in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer but now we can view him in another film.

An article today at Literary Hub – which has published two of my Bomb-related pieces since 2020 – reminded me about Rotblat and I’d like to excerpt from it below.

Written by Lauren Carroll Harris, it holds the headline, “Beyond Tortured Genius: Science and Conscience in Two Rediscovered Oppenheimer Films.” One of the films you may know and it has drawn a lot of post-Oppenheimer attention: The Day After Trinity, by Jon Else, a celebrated doc on Oppie and the bomb, produced for PBS around 1980 when I first saw it. So let’s stick to the second, new to me, from 2008, The Strangest Dream, from Canada, which focuses on Rotblat.

Continue reading “The Physicist Who Quit Los Alamos, on Principle”