‘Oppenheimer’ spurs childhood memories of ducking under a desk

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My Beautiful Mystery Companion and I stole away on a weekday afternoon before the semester begins and headed to the Robinson Film Center in downtown Shreveport to see Oppenheimer, the box-office hit starring Cillian Murphy of Peaky Blinders fame, Robert Downey, Jr., and Matt Damon, among others. The Robinson is a non-profit boutique theater celebrating its 15^th year.

Like many folks in this age of streaming, we rarely go to movies anymore. The Robinson is a comfortable venue that shows both new releases and classics. It makes for a pleasant date, especially when paired with a meal at either Abby Singer’s Bistro on the second floor, or the Superior Grill a few miles down the road. We visit the Robinson about twice a year.

At three hours in length, Oppenheimer threatened to challenge both my bladder and brain. That is a long time for me to sit still, and I sparingly drank water before we entered the theater. I have rarely watched a movie as nonstop intense as this film, with an amazing soundtrack and a fairly strict adherence to what actually occurred. Oppenheimer led a team of scientists ensconced in a hastily built village in Los Alamos, New Mexico to develop the atomic bomb.

This film is certainly more effectively seen on a larger screen, with amazing special effects that probably deserve those trigger warnings one often notices when watching a television movie. If Oppenheimer had such a warning, I didn’t notice it, not that this would have stopped us watching it.

It has been 78 years this month since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just three days apart in 1945. Japan finally surrendered after the second bomb. Almost miraculously, those are the last times nuclear weapons were used in a war. I began attending school as a first grader in 1961, a near-sighted 6-year-old attending Allenstown Elementary in New Hampshire. We had regular bomb drills where the teacher instructed us to get beneath our desks and cover our heads with your hands. Now we have active-shooter drills, which, sadly, are far more useful. They are designed to withstand a greater threat than a nuclear attack.

Even at the tender age of 6, I fully realized the futility of hiding under the desk in the event of a nuclear attack. Now that the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons, which was inevitable, especially after Klaus Fuchs, who worked on America’s Manhattan Project, passed along detailed information to the Soviet Union, the Cold War was well underway. Mutually assured destruction, with the appropriate acronym of MAD, seemed to keep either side from launching missiles at the other.

As a child, nuclear war always seemed to be a distinct possibility. By the time the Cuban missile crisis occurred the following year, when the Soviets deployed nuclear missiles to Cuba in response to American deployments of the same to Italy and Turkey, we appeared to stand at the abyss. I envied those few people who had fallout shelters. All we had was a moldy cellar. “Black Saturday” on Oct. 27, 1962, is considered the closest the world came to a nuclear catastrophe. Nuclear-armed Russian submarines jockeyed with American destroyers. Russian documents released and translated a year ago indicate just how close at least one submarine commander came to ordering the launch of a single nuclear missile aboard his vessel.

The threat seemed to lessen with a series of nuclear disarmament treaties over the ensuing decades. But earlier this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin formally suspended the last remaining arms treaty, New START, as tensions rose between Russia and the United States over the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I shudder to think about this, but there is a possibility that Putin will use “tactical” nuclear weapons to secure victory.

Watching Oppenheimer reminds us of the horrific power that nuclear weapons — now hundreds of times more powerful than those dropped on Japan — have to end life on this planet. It is terrifying enough to realize — as surely we have this summer — that climate change is having a drastic effect on our world. Even the remote possibility of the use of nuclear weapons is enough to send shivers down my spine.

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