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As the three-hour Oppenheimer shows, to build the first atomic bomb required the best scientific minds, the finest facilities, and the construction of an entire community. Today, a project of that magnitude would be doomed to failure.
The Manhattan Project scientists were pale males of European extraction. Such men are no longer acceptable, regardless of scientific merit and proven experience. Biden’s diversity forces would demand “scientists of color” and LGBTQ activists without regard to experience. This would be only one of the hurdles.
The candidates would need instruction in critical race theory, lest they hold mistaken ideas about their nation’s achievements. Scientists of Jewish and Christian belief, should they gain any consideration, would have to be screened for Islamophobia, lest they hold false ideas about people who seek to harm America in the style of 9/11. The medical standards would also be tough.
Joe Biden proclaimed that Covid was “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” and under Biden, Air Force pilots who resisted vaccination were discharged from the military. Regardless of past experience anyone who resisted vaccination, on any grounds, would not be allowed on a modern Manhattan Project. The “fully vaccinated” would also face a security test.
As Biden made clear last September one, those who want America to be great pose the greatest danger. Candidates for the new Manhattan Project would have to be screened for conservative types in general and Trump voters in particular. Anyone less than worshipful of the federal government would be rejected out of hand, regardless of scientific capability.
Such people, and parents who protest at school board meetings, are now branded domestic terrorists and violent extremists. Under Biden, they can have no place in weapons design and the military strategy, but there’s more to it.
Joe Biden is on record that the Chinese Communists are “not bad folks,” and the Biden DOJ is declining to prosecute Chinese scientists on visa fraud charges. The Chinese are setting up their own police stations and covert biological laboratories in the USA. Biden even allowed China’s surveillance balloon to overfly the nation’s most sensitive military bases.
The security check would disregard any collusion with China, and approval of these actions would be required for inclusion on any Manhattan Project that happened to arise. As for the real one, it didn’t happen quite like Oppenheimer shows it.
In the early 1960s, Robert Oppenheimer was director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. One of his students was William Happer, now emeritus profess of physics at Princeton and a specialist in radiofrequency spectroscopy of atoms and molecules, radiation propagation in the atmosphere, and spin-polarized atoms and nuclei.
According to Happer, Oppenheimer was an “outstanding theoretical physicist,” but had an “easy act to follow” when he took over from Gregory Breit in 1943. There is no Gregory Breit character in Oppenheimer.
Tom Conti plays Albert Einstein but according to Happer, the Manhattan Project was “not the result of a brilliant theory” and not made possible by Einstein’s E = mc² formula. What made it possible was “a rapid-fire series of accidental experimental discoveries in the 1930s, including a celebrated mistake.”
In 1932, James Chadwick discovered the electrically neutral projectile, the neutron, which could reach the surface of even the most highly-charged nucleus, uranium, with no hindrance from the nuclear charge. As Happer notes, “it was this accidental discovery that led to the Manhattan Project.”
Chadwick, a Nobel laureate for physics in 1936, was part of the Manhattan project and in 1944 lived at Los Alamos with his family. Chadwick witnessed the first atomic explosion but in Oppenheimer nobody plays Chadwick. This is hardly the only significant omission.
From 1941-1944, Stalin’s top spy in California was Grigory Kheifets operating under cover as a vice consul in San Francisco. Kheifets was tasked with obtaining atomic secrets, and in a cable Kheifets claimed Oppenheimer was one of his recruits. A film that wanted to get at the truth might have noted that, but there is no Kheifets character in Oppenheimer.
The film does reveal that Klaus Fuchs (Christopher Denham), present at Los Alamos, was in fact a Soviet spy. So were American Stalinists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Ethel’s brother David Greenglass, a machinist at Los Alamos. There is no Greenglass character in Oppenheimer. and the American atomic spies were more responsible for nuclear proliferation than anyone in history.
They helped Stalin explode his first atom bomb on August, 29, 1949. By that time, Stalin had absorbed Czechoslovakia, held Eastern Europe captive, and ramped up antisemitism by branding Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans.” In three hours of Oppenheimer, Stalin gets two brief mentions.
Viewers never learn that for nearly the first two years of the war, Stalin and Hitler were allies under the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Under this Pact, Stalin handed German Jewish Communists to the Gestapo. The Communist Party USA collaborated with pro-Nazi groups in America and did everything in its power to keep the United States out of the conflict.
In Oppenheimer, no Communist is asked to account for what he or she did during the Pact, and why they stayed in the Party after many others left, never to return.
For all its artistry – Bruce Bawer called it a “Dishonest Masterpiece” – Oppenheimer is like those 1960s beach-and-bikini movies. What they reveal is interesting but what they conceal is crucial. Oppenheimer mentions American GIs but viewers don’t see them fighting across the Pacific. Without these men, the USA doesn’t win.
Under Joe Biden, who never served, military leaders are basically zampolits, political officers imposing woke indoctrination that divides the ranks and forces out the best and brightest. If veterans thought that sets up the United States for defeat it would be hard to blame them.
The war against totalitarianism and socialism and for freedom, liberty, and capitalism is a philosophical, ideological war.
Ultimately it will not be won or lost with bullets and bombs but with a nuclear war of philosophy and ideas at the universities.
The atom bomb began as an idea in someone’s mind in an ivory tower.
“Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the intellectuals, originated, led and controlled by the intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs.” – Ayn Rand
Here’s your big chance T. A chance to take on the Muslims and Totalitarian Left with some seminars on Objectivism followed by a Q&A for the students at NYU. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Some real tough love. I’ll even give you the syllabus:
Altruism…bad.
Self-sacrifice…..bad
Jesus…..bad
Christianity…………bad
Judaism…….bad
Judeo-Christianity is Leftism……bad
Judaism and Christianity are oriental…..bad
Christianity prepared the ground for modern totalitarianism….bad
Medieval Christianity was a totalitarian system…..bad
God and magical thinking…….bad
Atheism….good
Greeks……good
Christian Dark Age….bad
Renaissance and enlightenment …..good
Greek philosophers……good
Christian philosophers…….bad
selfishness “properly defined”, rational selfishness….good
Objectivist reason and reality….good
Altruism…bad.
The List of Religious Horribles
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with a Talking Snake and a Fruit of Knowledge? Eve Made From Adam’s Rib? An Immaculate Conception? A Virgin Birth? Noah’s Ark? The Parting of the Red Sea? 72 Virgins In Paradise? Camel Urine Cures Cancer?
Go get ’em T. You be da boss man now.
Yeah, good points. Islam seems to arise from the culture, with assistance from Muslim preachers and traders and such, but heavily carrying along the pre-existing culture.
Yes, the culture which produced islam was depraved. Islam wasn’t conceived by Bedouin or Jews but by village dwelling camel jockeys. Islam is a product of their depravity.
The one thing that Objectivism never explains is why so many brilliant physicists and scientists, who were not “second ganders,” embraced Marxist political ideas. Why did their rigorous empirical observation, testing and logical analysis not prevent them from falling for the fallacies of leftist ideology. Worse, why is it that even today when the failures of leftist regimes are evident jn living memory that almost all atheistic academics embrace leftist ideology?
Good point! I have wondered that myself and my only conclusion is that they’re too brainwashed to actually take an honest look at reality! Marx made his philosophy sound so amazing, and these “academics” are so mired in their thought life that they never look at reality.
They lacked the benefit of indisputable historic record.
Wishful thinking became catastrophic failure and nowhere near the suggested utopia.
Flakes should never be trusted to set social policy.
There can be many reasons why an intelligent person accepts socialism as the morally ideal system. Why did Isaac Newton accept Christianity and believe in Alchemy? Why was Einstein a pacifist? Compartmentalization is one reason why men are rational in one area of life and irrational in another. They master their area of interest and remain ignorant in areas they have no interest in, that they mistakenly believe do not matter.
Moral cowardice is another reason. From the time that they are children intelligent people are subjected to attacks by the less intelligent. They are called “nerds”, “geeks”, “goody-two-shoes”. in the black ghettoes they are attacked for “acting white”. They are bullied and so intelligent children become moral cowards and choose altruism (self-sacrifice for others) as a form of appeasement. A successful businessman may also choose altruism and socialism out of moral cowardice and appeasement, fearing envy and resentment for his wealth and success, fearing retaliation, he will start to give his money away to “noble” social causes, he will capitulate to shakedown artists like Al Sharpton.
The most evil and most dangerous motivation for promoting socialism is the desire for UNEARNED spiritual values, admiration, respect, love, persuasion, influence and power over others. For instance, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, these are highly intelligent men who succeeded in business, they earned their material wealth. But now they want to have UNEARNED admiration, influence, and power over others. That’s a manifestation of altruism, “I’m great because others believe I’m great”.
Ayn Rand addresses and explains this issue in her essay “Altruism as Appeasement” which you can find in the book “The Voice of Reason”.
Oh yeah “The Voice of Reason”. I’ll get right on that….in about 100 years, if it’s still in print.
You definitely think you are subjected to attacks by the less intelligent. Here’s that Objectivism for Dummies list again:
Altruism…bad.
Self-sacrifice…..bad
Jesus…..bad
Christianity…………bad
Judaism…….bad
Judeo-Christianity is Leftism……bad
Judaism and Christianity are oriental…..bad
Christianity prepared the ground for modern totalitarianism….bad
Medieval Christianity was a totalitarian system…..bad
God and magical thinking…….bad
Atheism….good
Greeks……good
Christian Dark Age….bad
Renaissance and enlightenment …..good
Greek philosophers……good
Christian philosophers…….bad
selfishness “properly defined”, rational selfishness….good
Objectivist reason and reality….good
Altruism…bad.
Your point is well made, but you can’t go down that rabbit hole, Lloyd. While leftists love to say that America was never great, there were numerous inventions, creations and events in our history that prove the contrary…and NONE of them would have been accomplished under the current woke DEI climate we now face. When future historians (if indeed there IS a future) look back on this period and are honestly allowed literary freedom, the only accomplishment they’ll be able to document is our own demise.
Thanks Lloyd!!!
What they don’t know about Hiroshima and Nagasaki was things like the Bataan Death March the Rape of Nanking and of course Pearl Harbor and how they tried to stop the Emporer from announcing the terms of Surrender
“…there is no Kheifets character in Oppenheimer.”
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There is no Kheifets character in American Prometheus either, the book upon which the movie is based. The book does mention Peter Ivanov as an agent at the Soviet consulate in San Fransisco. Are they the same person?
“Why Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project would fail today.” Billingsley brings up several valid points in why the Manhattan Project would never go forward today. I would offer another fact on why the US could never win the World War II today. First, the news media would be our prime opponent undermining the war effort at home and abroad. Every tactical mistake and strategic error made on the battlefield would be magnified and transmitted around the world to provide aid and comfort to the enemy. Embedded reporters would divulge and broadcast sensitive information as news. This would be done until all support for the war effort at home was eroded away. Today’s reporters do not consider themselves Americans. They call themselves internationalists.
Japan refused to surrender after the bombing of Hiroshima. The military junta refused to surrender even after Nagasaki, and Emperor Hirohito had to intervene and surrender. The A Bomb ABSOLUTELY ended WWII.
And oh yeah, the Imperial Japanese military was murdering approximately 300,000 people every month, mostly civilians, near the end of the war. Mostly brown and yellow people but fuck them, right?
I haven’t seen the movie and won’t, but coming from Hollywood whose job is to lie about American history, I knew it would be a story twisted for leftist ideology. More sick propaganda.
The only reason to watch the movie, in my opinion, is the Academy Award acting performances by Downey and Daman. It had absolutely nothing about the Manhattan project from its inception up to the New Mexico explosion or about Oppenheimer’s early years.