This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labour of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being reviewed here wouldn’t exist.

As a child, I would often hear my grandfather say that with the creation of the atomic bomb, there wouldn’t be any world wars anymore. There would only be smaller wars. So far, he’s been right, although the prospect of a country using an atomic weapon on another has never left us. Even the threat of a so-called “dirty bomb” being used by a rogue organisation is a very real possibility that many governments fear and presumably have developed contingency plans for.

When University of California, Berkeley physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was recruited to head up the Manhattan Project, America’s program to design and build the world’s first atomic bomb, he, like many others, had visions of war being a thing of the past. That view changed, however, when he saw how destructive his creation turned out to be. The two atomic bombs that were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki incinerated both cities and killed between 150,000 and 225,000 people, with about half of those deaths occurring on the first day. Think about that. It means that about 100,000 people died of radiation burns and cancers in the days, months and years after the bombings took place. One can argue that the bombings hastened the end of the war with Japan but at what cost?

Coinciding with the release of Christopher Nolan’s new film, OPPENHEIMER, NBC in the US has released a feature-length documentary entitled TO END ALL WAR: OPPENHEIMER & THE ATOMIC BOMB. It follows Oppenheimer’s rise to the pinnacle of heroism in the eyes of most Americans and his subsequent fall.

Little known to most people these days, Oppenheimer was a tragic figure. Historians agree that his contributions to theoretical physics should have earned him a Nobel Prize if not for two things: the destructive nature of the bomb — the antithesis of why Alfred Nobel created the prize in the first place — and his outspoken opposition to America continuing its development of other weapons of mass destruction, the latter of which put him solidly in the crosshairs of Senator Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Prime Time Emmy Award-winning director Christopher Cassel (ROME) examines Oppenheimer’s early years as well as the legacy he left behind with a mix of archival footage, soundbites, animated scenes, heartbreaking footage of the blasts’ survivors, and interviews from Bill Nye (the Science Guy), Hiroshima survivor Hideko Tamura, grandson Charles Oppenheimer and Christopher Nolan among others. (If you’re wondering why Nolan would appear in this documentary, Universal Pictures, which is distributing his film worldwide, is the sister company of NBC.)

I now seen OPPENHEIMER and TO END ALL WAR complements the film rather than takes away from it. It’s a fascinating look at a complicated and tormented man at a time when his country wanted a hero more than it wanted a moral compass.

TO END ALL WAR is streaming now on Peacock, Fubo, DirecTV and Now where available. It’s well worth watching before you go see OPPENHEIMER in the cinema and maybe even after. (I’ll know for sure on Thursday night.)

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