Author: Greg Mitchell

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

Today we present, for the first time, a guest contribution from someone I’ve known, if from a distance, for quite some time. Gene Dannen posted what follows as a Twitter (excuse me, an “X”) thread yesterday and I was so intrigued I asked him if I could use it, slightly adapted, here. Gene, who lives in Oregon, has researched and written about the life of Leo Szilard for many years, along with the decision to use the bombs in 1945. Now read this. Then subscribe if you have not, it’s still free!

By Gene Dannen

Fact-checking the Oppenheimer Film:

Lewis Strauss didn’t lose his confirmation hearings because of his persecution of Robert Oppenheimer, as the movie portrays it. I have Nolan’s screenplay, and a PDF of the full transcript of the hearings.

Strauss’ hearings are mentioned in a single paragraph in the book American Prometheus, on which the movie is based. They are a major, repeating central theme throughout the movie, as it shifts back and forth in time. It would be hard to exaggerate how much of the screenplay, and the movie, is taken up by the Strauss hearings.

Continue reading “Oppenheimer Hero: Making a Mountain Out of a Hill”

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

The much-praised screenplay by Christopher Nolan for his Oppenheimer has now been published in paperback, although out of stock at Amazon most days. I received my copy yesterday and will begin analyzing it in coming days here. It’s over 2oo pages and sells for $17.89. My friend Kai Bird, co-author with Marty Sherwin of the book on which the movie is based, American Prometheus, supplies an intro.

Skimming, it appears that it is almost word-for-word from the movie script. I see only very occasionally a line I don’t recall in the movie (on viewing it twice) or a few words missing. But extremely close to what was seen and heard on the screen, for better and worse. Yes, that sex scene between Oppie and Tatlock is even more awkward on the printed page, if such a thing is possible. (“Hot, sweaty, a little brutal.”) Ditto for Kitty imagining Tatlock straddling Oppie as he testifies at his security hearing.

Continue reading “Oppenheimer Script Published, New ‘Downwind’ Film Streams Today”

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

The letter addressed to Mrs. Donna Owen arrived at her oceanfront Santa Monica home on October 28, 1945. The return address on the envelope revealed that it came from her beloved high school chemistry teacher back in Denison, Iowa, when she lived on a farm and was still known as Donna Belle Mullenger. She had stayed in touch with handsome young Ed Tompkins for a few years after graduation, but then he suddenly vanished, without explanation, and had not responded to any of her letters.

This seemed odd. Tompkins (above with Donna and his fateful 1945 letter) had deeply influenced her outlook on life a decade earlier when she was an aimless sophomore, after he gifted her a copy of the popular Dale Carnegie self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People. In short order her grades soared, she secured the lead role in the high school play (Ayn Rand’s The Night of January 16), and she was voted Campus Queen.

Continue reading “78 Years Before Oppenheimer: When Donna Reed Inspired the First Atomic Bomb Movie”

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

In Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, we do not witness the twin, tragic, missions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki…the usual images of B-29s in flight, pilots in command and bombardiers finding their targets, and bombs away. (And, of course, no sign of what then happened on the ground). We never do meet the two pilots.

But I did. In fact, I wonder if I am the only person who chatted with both of the pilots as well as dozens of Japanese survivors of the payloads they carried.

Continue reading “Missing in Oppenheimer: The Pilots Who Dropped His Bomb”

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

Yesterday’s post on the first article from Hiroshima here. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free.

One of the great mysteries of the Nuclear Age was solved less than twenty years ago: What was in the censored, and then lost to the ages, newspaper articles filed by the first reporter to reach Nagasaki following the atomic attack on that city on August 9, 1945?

The reporter was George Weller (upper right), the distinguished correspondent for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News. His startling dispatches from Nagasaki, which could have affected public opinion on the future of the bomb, never emerged from General Douglas MacArthur’s censorship office in Tokyo.

Continue reading “Historic Stories From Nagasaki: Suppressed by US, Then Missing for 58 Years”

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

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is still going strong at the box office, returning to the #2 spot, after one week in third place, still behind heavy Mattel Barbie but now up to $264 million gross just in USA.

Press coverage continues constant, including new praise and firm complaints (often in the same article). Here’s one hit, from Stars & Stripes no less, claiming the film really underplays the role of female scientists on bomb project.

Continue reading “When First Foreign Reporter Arrived In Hiroshima – and Then Got Kicked Out of Japan”