383: The Manhattan Project in Oppenheimer with Alice Lovejoy

00:00:00:26 – 00:00:21:27
Dan LeFebvre
Let’s kick this off by getting an overall look at the Manhattan Project. Because if I were to try to summarize the movie’s depiction, basically it seems like a top secret program by the US military at the end of World War two to create an atomic bomb. Can you give us an overall explanation of what the Manhattan Project actually was?

00:00:21:29 – 00:00:55:27
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah, it was a project, as you say, during World War Two, to build an atomic bomb. And this is work that, played out mostly in the United States, but it involves scientists from Britain and from Canada as well. As well as is this is something we see really clearly in Oppenheimer, many, many European scientists in exile in the United States who are working on the project, who had been, you know, involved in, nuclear physics, who were bassists or chemists, you know, before they fled the United States and who were involved in the project, you know, working at places like University of Chicago, working at Los Alamos, etc..

00:00:55:29 – 00:01:23:02
Alice Lovejoy
And the basic idea behind the bomb is something that Oppenheimer details well, which is the idea, the discovery, really, that if you could split the nucleus of an atom of uranium atom, nuclear fission, you could create a chain reaction, a great amount of energy that would create a chain reaction that would split other atoms. And so this could be the basis for an extremely powerful weapon, really more powerful than any weapon that existed before.

00:01:23:04 – 00:01:51:26
Alice Lovejoy
So that’s the kind of science behind it. But the, the actual project itself, was huge for the size of atoms. Atoms are really, really small. And on a scale large enough to make enough fissionable material for a bomb, you needed, government and scientific cooperation and investment across multiple factories and multiple places. And so in Oppenheimer, we are focused on Los Alamos for the most part in New Mexico, which is where, our Oppenheimer worked.

00:01:51:28 – 00:02:22:04
Alice Lovejoy
It’s where a lot of the physicists were. But there was a huge amount of production work happening in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in Hanford, Washington, which were cities that were built for the Manhattan Project. But they didn’t exist before, as well as in Washington and then in university centers like Berkeley, which we do see in the film, and the University of Chicago, which we see briefly as well, underneath the football field, and in New York, places like Columbia and here at places like the University of Minnesota, it really was really across the, across the country and, universities.

00:02:22:04 – 00:02:24:19
Alice Lovejoy
But there were some that were more involved than others.

00:02:24:21 – 00:02:41:20
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, it definitely in the movie, it definitely focuses on Los Alamos, which is, I mean, it’s Oppenheimer, so it’s mostly focus on him. There is a scene in the movie, I think it’s a madman’s version of General Leslie Groves. He talks about buying like 1200 tons of uranium and how it’s being processed in a facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

00:02:41:27 – 00:03:00:21
Dan LeFebvre
But we don’t ever see Oak Ridge in the movie. It just kind of shows like two glass bowls. One of them is supposed to be Oak Ridge. One of them, I think, is Hanford. And one of them is the uranium in Oak Ridge. And then the other one is plutonium in Hanford. So they’re talking about making a fission bomb and a hydrogen bomb.

00:03:00:23 – 00:03:10:27
Dan LeFebvre
And so the impression I got from the movie, it sounds like not only are they doing something that’s never been done before and building an atomic bomb, but they’re trying two different ways to do it. Is that true?

00:03:10:29 – 00:03:35:12
Alice Lovejoy
So yes, I think there’s some nuance there. I think the the film gets that scene in the film is great because it gets at not just the scale. Right? How small the this the amount of materials that Hanford and Oak Ridge are able to breathe are so small. And yet they’re so hard to make. Yeah. And the scene gets at the fact that the Manhattan Project was working on two different kinds of fissionable materials for the bomb, so uranium and plutonium.

00:03:35:19 – 00:03:51:29
Alice Lovejoy
And this is all for the same kind of bomb, which is efficient bomb, and Oak Ridge, and Hanford were the places where this was happening. But because this was a project that was happening at such speed, because the war was ongoing, they were afraid the Germans would get the bomb, which is something that the film shows very well.

00:03:52:01 – 00:04:15:06
Alice Lovejoy
There was there were numerous ways of creating this material that were happening at the same time. So in Oak Ridge there were three plants. One of them was using the electromagnetic separation process, to separate fissionable uranium 2005 from uranium 2008. And then there was a gaseous diffusion process at another plant at Oak Ridge and at Oak Ridge.

00:04:15:06 – 00:04:38:03
Alice Lovejoy
There was also another plant that was transforming, spent uranium fuel slugs into plutonium. And then Hanford was working fully on plutonium. So we see a little bit of the electromagnetic separation process in Berkeley and an early scene in the film where, Josh Hartnett, who is playing Ernest Lawrence, shows us that machine. And that is what was operating a large scale at Oak Ridge.

00:04:38:03 – 00:04:57:25
Alice Lovejoy
And the electron and the white, all the electromagnetic separation plant. But the hydrogen bomb is something different. And this is a thermonuclear weapon. This is something that comes up in the film because, Edward Teller, the, physicist who kind of is at odds with Oppenheimer, throughout their time. And Los Alamos is really invested in this.

00:04:57:25 – 00:05:18:24
Alice Lovejoy
And hydrogen bombs work through, through fusion and not through fission. So thermonuclear bombs, hydrogen bombs, where something that became a reality in the 50s, and they were very, very dangerous. They’re much more powerful. They are much more powerful than the kinds of bombs that were being worked on at Los Alamos. And so I think this is part of the moral story.

00:05:18:27 – 00:05:37:00
Alice Lovejoy
Right, that’s operating in Oppenheimer at the same time as sort of scientific and industrial story, which is about what are the costs of working on a bomb this powerful. And so Teller’s character is there and to sort of, show what he would do later, which is accurate, right. Working on the hydrogen bomb really being responsible for a lot of that science.

00:05:37:02 – 00:05:54:18
Alice Lovejoy
But also to, to set up the, the, the ways in which this project would evolve and in, unforeseeable ways, right in the future that these bombs that they were making in Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, and Hanford would lead the way for things that couldn’t be seen at that point.

00:05:54:20 – 00:06:15:00
Dan LeFebvre
So because, yeah, they kind of they kind of talk a little bit about that. You know, I think the concept of the bomb just becoming a never ending explosion and that sort of thing is, is that kind of what you were referring to is, you know, some of the, the moral elements of it more than just, you know, World War Two, we want to end the war.

00:06:15:02 – 00:06:18:15
Dan LeFebvre
But what’s going to happen after that and that, that whole concept.

00:06:18:18 – 00:06:43:25
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah, I think that’s part of it. One of the the key parts of this film for me is that, is Oppenheimer is grappling with the the intersection between the scientific work he’s doing and the politics of this work and the real world consequences of this work. And we see that, as something that’s shared with the scientists as well, when they have a meeting, at Los Alamos and they say, hey, Germany has capitulated, why are we still making this bomb?

00:06:43:27 – 00:07:03:25
Alice Lovejoy
Right? You know how many people are going to be killed? And what does this mean for the future of humanity? That’s something that Niels Bohr, the, who the physicist who comes in earlier in a later in the film says, like who? What is going to happen with this? Are you going to destroy humanity with this? So it’s not just about the possibility that the film deals with, which is an uncontrolled chain reaction which could really destroy the world.

00:07:04:00 – 00:07:21:13
Alice Lovejoy
It’s also about, thinking forward to the arms race and to whether this would be used. And this is sort of one of the key debates of the Cold War, whether the existence of nuclear weapons would prevent countries from going to war or whether they would just create, more and more danger for the world.

00:07:21:16 – 00:07:50:00
Dan LeFebvre
You mentioned with Germany, the other the possibility of Germany doing it, too. And this is outside the scope of anything that we see in Oppenheimer. But it would they have the thought of, well, if somebody is going to do it, it might as well be us first, right? I mean, I know that’s a simplification, perhaps, but, you know, if they were afraid that Nazi Germany is going to be building this, then I could see how they’d be like, well, we want to do it first.

00:07:50:03 – 00:08:11:14
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah. And that is the logic right in there. And there was a logic behind this too, that, you know, there were people that this could end the war, it could end all war. And that we don’t want the Nazis to have, to be the ones to get there first, because it could be quite dangerous. And as we learn in the film and this is accurate, they were the Germans were not as advanced as people had feared, even though they had their Heisenberg.

00:08:11:14 – 00:08:30:09
Alice Lovejoy
And they had these, you know, great scientific minds working on the project. The allies were much more advanced with it. So it wasn’t, as much of a threat as had been feared. But there was a breakdown in scientific communication at this moment, too. Right. So people weren’t publishing in these international journals, as much there wasn’t as much circulation of knowledge.

00:08:30:09 – 00:08:48:18
Alice Lovejoy
And this is a real question, you know, in the history of 20th century weapons, it goes back to poison gas, right? Then the question of whether in poison gas for World War One was really the most destructive weapon. It was the thing that raised the most moral, qualms as well. Right? Because it’s a weapon of mass destruction.

00:08:48:20 – 00:09:05:25
Alice Lovejoy
And so there were discussions about whether this is, a weapon whose, development and circulation should be known about widely, so nobody else would develop it. Right, so the world could be protected. But those kinds of networks of scientific communication, which built up after World War One and after poison gas had really broken down by this point.

00:09:05:28 – 00:09:25:07
Dan LeFebvre
When you’re talking about how much goes into creating, you know, going back to the glass bowls and those being filled up, can you fill a little bit more? I mean, I, I don’t know much about what actually goes into creating those, but, I mean, it’s one thing that we see in the movie I it’s called Oppenheimer. Right?

00:09:25:07 – 00:09:45:09
Dan LeFebvre
So he’s he’s the main character, but it does kind of talk a little bit about what you’re, talking about before with what it takes to create these materials. You know, even at Los Alamos, which the movie focuses on, they talk about building a town, churches and schools and building this whole thing. You talked about, you know, Oakridge and Hanford being towns that they built in other areas.

00:09:45:09 – 00:09:50:18
Dan LeFebvre
So can you share some more historical context around the size of the Manhattan Project?

00:09:50:21 – 00:10:12:28
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah, it’s a great question because it was huge. And we see this, early in the film when I think, it’s a scene between when Leslie, our Groves, meets Oppenheimer for the first time, and Oppenheimer says, well, if we’re going to do this, we need to have these four spaces, and they need to be coordinated. And the the difference in scale between the number of marbles, you know, these tiny little marbles that you need to make enough charge material for a bomb.

00:10:12:28 – 00:10:36:09
Alice Lovejoy
And the the scope of the project across the United States is really a good way to look at it. So let’s just think about Y-12, the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, which is the one that I know the most about my my recent book, deals and in in detail with the history of Y-12. And it was run by the Tennessee Eastman Company, which was the main chemical subsidiary of the Eastman Kodak Company, the photographic and film company.

00:10:36:11 – 00:11:07:07
Alice Lovejoy
And at its height, there were 22,000 employees working for Y-12, 22,000, and this plant was only one of three at Oak Ridge. The plant itself was, at the time, I think, around 800 acres in size, which is, if we’re going to go by a football field, around 600 football fields, I think. And so there were multiple buildings within it, multiple calutrons, which are these, machines that separate, uranium 235 from uranium 238.

00:11:07:09 – 00:11:33:29
Alice Lovejoy
And all of these huge factories were what was needed to make this very small amounts of fissionable material. But that’s only part of it. Right? So it’s an engineering project. It’s a factory project. It’s a chemical engineering project. And you have major U.S. companies and, and, Canadian companies involved in this. Right? So not just Eastman Kodak, but DuPont, Stone and Webster Engineering for many, many other well known companies.

00:11:34:01 – 00:11:57:03
Alice Lovejoy
And, so this is a good example of the big science of World War two. And, and you bring up towns and that’s part of it too, right? Because big science and big industry is, something that, as they say, we can’t attract top scientists without bringing their families. So we need to make whole cities, that kind of company that can accommodate, these families, you know, these, civilians, really.

00:11:57:09 – 00:12:17:15
Alice Lovejoy
And so overnight, these cities are built and, since this is a podcast about movies, I can give you a statistic that at Oak Ridge there were seven cinemas plus a film society that were built to accommodate the 75,000 people who lived there at the town’s peak. And so the film society was showing all sorts of things.

00:12:17:15 – 00:12:48:02
Alice Lovejoy
They were showing 39 stops. They were showing Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, there. And this is just part of the leisure offerings that the town, offered at the time. So bowling alleys, baseball leagues, etc. people were working 24 hour, the factories were working 24 hours a day. There was a patchwork of shifts. So you see these towns built very, very quickly out of nowhere, really, to accommodate these massive industrial projects, which is where I think Oppenheimer doesn’t quite get this right.

00:12:48:02 – 00:12:54:21
Alice Lovejoy
It doesn’t quite get at the massive industrial scale of what’s happening because it it really is a film about, about Oppenheimer himself.

00:12:54:24 – 00:12:57:24
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. It’s it’s not called Manhattan Project. Right, exactly.

00:12:58:01 – 00:12:59:10
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah.

00:12:59:12 – 00:13:31:00
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, that’s it’s mind boggling the amount of work and effort to create, like you said, just this tiny little that you splitting atoms literally, like, and and the amount of effort. And then on top of that, being top secret, I mean, I can’t imagine you have you said there’s 22,000 people working and then 75,000 overall. So all these, all these families, were they essentially locked in?

00:13:31:00 – 00:13:44:28
Dan LeFebvre
They’re like locked it. I’m thinking of like a military base. You know, there’s there’s housing on base. But, I used to work in a military base and you could go in and out. You had to have credentials, obviously, but you can go in and out. It’s not like you’re you’re stuck in there. But base wasn’t top secret.

00:13:44:28 – 00:13:54:26
Dan LeFebvre
And dealing with this top secret things in the middle of a world war. And so what was it? I mean, again, this is way outside the scope of acting either, but it’s just fascinating how much goes into it.

00:13:54:28 – 00:14:14:01
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah. And I think they were closed me people came to work from outside Oak Ridge as well. And, you know, there were busses that went long distances and, and, you know, labor was a huge issue because you have to remember, this is the draft is happening. They’re relying primarily on to a large degree on female labor because that’s what’s available.

00:14:14:03 – 00:14:31:03
Alice Lovejoy
And so, people are, you know, coming in and out, the secrecy works in part through something that comes up a lot in the film, which is called compartmentalization. Right? The idea that one area doesn’t know what the other area is doing and very, very few people have a sense of what the whole is of the project.

00:14:31:10 – 00:14:40:03
Alice Lovejoy
And so, that was really important. And, you know, many, many people who worked at places like Oak Ridge didn’t know what they were involved with until the bomb was dropped.

00:14:40:06 – 00:14:49:14
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, okay. Okay. Would that be why they had Los Alamos and Oak Ridge and Hanford? I mean, they’re not close to each other geographically at all.

00:14:49:16 – 00:15:07:19
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah, that’s a great question. I don’t know the answer to that. I think part of it was about available space and proximity to and really remote spaces, right? Was what they were looking for. And so, in Oppenheimer and I don’t know exactly the story behind this, he, he has a personal relationship to this area near Los Alamos.

00:15:07:19 – 00:15:13:17
Alice Lovejoy
And so they they put the project there. In the case of Oak Ridge, it was, through farmland and towns.

00:15:13:19 – 00:15:28:00
Dan LeFebvre
One of the other famous people that we see in the movie is Albert Einstein. And from the movie’s depiction, it doesn’t really seem like Einstein is involved in the Manhattan Project itself. But he does help Oppenheimer with some calculations. When we were talking about earlier, you know, the thought of triggering a chain reaction that destroys the world.

00:15:28:03 – 00:15:37:24
Dan LeFebvre
But in the movie, it almost seems like Einstein is just someone that everybody’s going to know. And so they just kind of throw him in there. Was Einstein involved in the Manhattan Project at all?

00:15:37:26 – 00:15:56:07
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah, I agree with you that it seems like he’s put in there just because, you know, we know his face, we know his hair, we know what it looks like. But he didn’t play a direct role in the Manhattan Project. But he did, however, and this comes up in the film, he famously signed a letter written to President Roosevelt by the physicist, Leo Szilard.

00:15:56:07 – 00:16:13:16
Alice Lovejoy
Edward Teller, who we see in the film and at Zealand as well, we see in the film, and Eugene and Victor, who are all, Hungarian scientists, I believe, in exile, warning Roosevelt that it was possible that the Germans would create an atomic bomb and explaining what that kind of a weapon might be and what its dangers were.

00:16:13:18 – 00:16:41:23
Alice Lovejoy
I think as a film scholar, my reading of Einstein’s role in the film, goes beyond the fact that he is so well known. I think, you know, in my reading, Oppenheimer is a great man film great. It’s not a Tatian of the biography. American Prometheus, about Robert Oppenheimer, and one of the key dramatic arcs in the film, beyond this kind of story of the bomb and how it’s created, is the tension between Louis Strouse and Robin Robert Robert Oppenheimer.

00:16:41:25 – 00:17:04:20
Alice Lovejoy
Right. And so to give some background here, for those who might not have seen the film recently, the film cuts back and forth between the story of Oppenheimer’s education, how he comes to the Manhattan Project, the process of creating the bomb, and then, what happens afterwards when the Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss, attempts to discredit Oppenheimer?

00:17:04:23 – 00:17:27:26
Alice Lovejoy
Who has since the bomb was dropped, develops very strong moral qualms about, the potential of this weapon and what and what it represents. And so, you know, Oppenheimer wrote this for this point has developed cloud. He’s developed a certain amount of power. And Strauss, I think, finds this threatening. And Strauss also has different political, you know, idea of what bombs can do than Oppenheimer.

00:17:27:26 – 00:18:05:00
Alice Lovejoy
Right? He’s he’s more conservative. He’s a Republican. And again, party, the party questions don’t work exactly like they do now. But, that he was, somebody who advocated for, building up the U.S. nuclear arsenal and for using weapons like the hydrogen bomb, which were quite destructive. So the film intercuts between these two stories, and it ends at the end of the film when Strauss loses his bid to become secretary of commerce, and Congress, because it comes out that he has orchestrated this, essentially a closed door show trial against Oppenheimer that’s designed to discredit him and show to prove that he was a communist.

00:18:05:00 – 00:18:30:10
Alice Lovejoy
And remember, this is McCarthy, and this is the moment of McCarthyism. It’s a second red scare, etc.. So this brings us back to Einstein, because there’s a key moment in the film at the very beginning where Oppenheimer and Einstein have a conversation on the grounds of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Strauss is working there at the time, and Strauss has invited Oppenheimer to consider coming to work as well, which he eventually does.

00:18:30:12 – 00:18:56:03
Alice Lovejoy
So Strauss doesn’t hear what the two physicists say to one another. But, as we learn at the end of the film, he’s paranoid that they’re talking about him. And, it turns out they’re not talking about him. They’re talking about something entirely different. And what they’re talking about is that Eisenstein. I like Eisenstein to me, Einstein, is offering Oppenheimer a warning about what happens when you reach such achievement as he has.

00:18:56:03 – 00:19:23:06
Alice Lovejoy
Right. He says that this kind of achievement is followed by great punishment, public punishment, which we’ve just seen him endure in the film. And so there’s a frame right at the end of film where we see the three men, Strauss and Einstein, and often hammer together right in against the same background. And we can see how much this is a story about power, about the costs of ambition and about the idea of the great man, which is something that this film was playing with a lot.

00:19:23:09 – 00:19:43:18
Alice Lovejoy
And how it’s sort of, created in contexts that are complicated, right, that do have to do with power and other people’s ambition. And so Einstein, I think, is kind of a foil to these two men, Strauss and, Oppenheimer, who has relationships to what we might think of as greatness are very different. Right. Oppenheimer is a very ambivalent.

00:19:43:18 – 00:19:54:03
Alice Lovejoy
At least the film shows it to the idea of being kind of a great man, whereas Strauss, wants that, right? He wants power. He he is very, very ambitious. And ultimately it’s not about him.

00:19:54:05 – 00:20:06:15
Dan LeFebvre
It’s the mere fact that he thought that they were talking about him when I, when I when he said that in the movie, I was like, oh, this is one of those guys that thinks the world revolves around him. Everything is about him. So they must be talking about him.

00:20:06:18 – 00:20:20:12
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah. And so I think that’s I think that’s one of the, the key points of why Einstein is there. Because he is a great man, right? He is sort of somebody that everybody recognizes and knows. And it’s sort of yeah, puts that into relief and interesting ways.

00:20:20:14 – 00:20:42:20
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if you have back to the movie’s timeline, there is immense pressure to use an atomic bomb to end World War two. And in the movie, we see that the movie, their military has a list of like, love and Japanese cities. They want to drop bombs on two of those cities. And there’s a tight deadline. So first, they need to detonate an atomic bomb for the first time ever to make sure it works one and then gather data about it.

00:20:42:20 – 00:20:52:01
Dan LeFebvre
And that’s how we get in the movie. The Trinity test. And quite in the movie, at least, it seems to be a massive success. How well do you think the movie did depicting the Trinity test?

00:20:52:04 – 00:21:13:09
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah, I think what is effective about the way Oppenheimer depicts the Trinity test is that it really drills down on two things. The first, that no one there knew what they were doing or if it would work. Right. So this is a scientific experiment, much like a laboratory experiment. But but it’s operating on a huge scale with huge consequences.

00:21:13:12 – 00:21:49:28
Alice Lovejoy
And so that’s the second thing really, that perhaps somewhat unusually for these kinds of laboratory experiments, this lack of knowledge meant a lot. Right? So the film has already shown us again, that at this point, Germany has already capitulated. So there’s this question of whether it makes sense to use the weapon. And then, and I don’t know the accuracy of this timeline right before the test, General Leslie R Groves, played by Matt Damon, speaks with Oppenheimer about the non-zero chance that this explosion is will set off a chain reaction that will destroy the world and, I think that’s a moment where it’s a little too late, right, for those consequences

00:21:49:28 – 00:22:13:11
Alice Lovejoy
to become clear. And so, in a cinematic sense, it really makes sense to shoot this scene in a very stark, dark way, right? Because it’s, it’s all shot in at night. I mean, it was happening very early in the morning. The sound, is taken away. There’s no sound or very little sound. In the moments around the explosion, it goes into slow motion.

00:22:13:11 – 00:22:37:22
Alice Lovejoy
So it’s really telescoping. The moments around the explosion into a longer period. There’s low contrast until we get to the explosion, which is very, very bright. So I think what the film so that the film shows us a depiction of the Trinity test that is about Oppenheimer and his own experience of it and these sort of like these moral accompaniments to the scientific questions.

00:22:37:24 – 00:22:53:28
Alice Lovejoy
But, you know, in fact, this this test had been planned for over a year. The planning was meticulous. You know, the film shows us, a moment where they say, oh, we have to hurry. We have to get this thing tested in time for the Potsdam Conference. But in fact, it’s been in the works for for a while.

00:22:54:00 – 00:23:18:29
Alice Lovejoy
And so part of the goal here was not just to see if it worked, but also to document its effects and to study it. Right. This is a scientific, feat as well as a military, endeavor. And so part of this documentation involved cameras. There were 55 cameras, at the tests. Most of them motion picture cameras, which were designed to be started by the same mechanism that trip the bomb.

00:23:19:01 – 00:23:47:01
Alice Lovejoy
And so they were recording what happened. And so we don’t see a lot of that right in the scene. It really you just go into the, the, the, the moral, ethical, psychological questions that surround it. And I think it does a very good job of that. And I think this is also why we get that quote from the Bhagavad which, Bhagavad Gita coming up at the end, that Oppenheimer first encounters with Jean Tatlock earlier in the film.

00:23:47:03 – 00:24:01:03
Alice Lovejoy
Now I am become death. The destroyer of worlds. Right. So in reality, this is a much more planned, you know, carefully documented event. Even if it does have all this moral significance.

00:24:01:06 – 00:24:24:11
Dan LeFebvre
It sounds like, again, I mean, kind of what we were talking about with the Manhattan Project. There’s a lot more than what we see in the movie. But again, the movie is called Oppenheimer. It’s also not called Trinity Test, you know? So, you know, it’s showing it. But, from, I’m gonna say from his perspective, but more from his perspective than from anybody else’s or from, you know, the test itself or any of that.

00:24:24:13 – 00:24:44:29
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Well, during the Trinity test, the movie does show everyone’s watching the explosion using glasses to shield their eyes. Some of them take their glasses off, watch huge ball of flame. A moment later, the shockwave hits. And as I was watching this in the movie, I was thinking, what about the radiation? The movie doesn’t really talk about that that much.

00:24:44:29 – 00:25:04:03
Dan LeFebvre
And, you know, we think of the knowledge that we have now, you know, knowing that the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more recently, like Chernobyl or Fukushima, you know, these disasters on nuclear scale that, you know, the radiation is a huge thing. Was radiation a concern for the scientists working on the Manhattan Project?

00:25:04:06 – 00:25:27:09
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah, the radiation, dangers of radiation were known. There was something that the Manhattan Project had studied. The historian Kate Brown has written about this in her work on Hanford, showing that the project studied, what radiation could do to animals, even in a very small doses. But there was a prevailing sense that there was a level under which radiation was essentially harmless.

00:25:27:09 – 00:25:48:02
Alice Lovejoy
And this is known as the tolerance dose, at the time. So, you know, we do see them talking about the dangers of radiation earlier in the film where the scientist Lilli Hornick, who is, a woman working on Oppenheimer’s team, is sort of told you shouldn’t be working on this. It’s dangerous to your reproductive system. And she says to one of the men most equally dangerous to yours.

00:25:48:04 – 00:26:05:26
Alice Lovejoy
Which is true. And, and this might be why, in the scene of the Trinity test, we see most of the project scientists just lying out in the open, right? That there was the idea that there was a tolerance dose might explain this. You know, they’re lying down, so they’re not knocked over by the shockwave.

00:26:05:29 – 00:26:30:00
Alice Lovejoy
And they have welder’s glass to hold up against, the the explosion, which is the same thing that we used to look at eclipses now, but, and then there’s one person, I think it’s Edward Teller who puts on what looks like sunscreen against the explosion. But, you know, this also gives a sense of just how little was known about, they knew it was dangerous, but but they didn’t have a sense of what the explosion would bring.

00:26:30:02 – 00:26:49:20
Alice Lovejoy
But there’s something else here. Which is the scene ends as the sun comes up. The sun comes up, it’s in the desert. They’re all celebrating, or most of them are celebrating, and, the wind is coming up. All right. So, this is something that’s, crucial here, but it’s not discussed, because even though the wind just seems like atmosphere at this moment.

00:26:49:20 – 00:27:22:25
Alice Lovejoy
Right? It’s the desert. There’s wind. That wind is really crucial because, as the project would find out later, the same wind was carrying radioactive fallout from the test site across the country. So the effects of this, were, of course, particularly stark near the test site. And this is something that, especially as testing moves in about in a desert, we know the really horrible cases of who were called the people called the Downwinders, who developed really terrible cancers and other health issues from being, in proximity to radioactive fallout.

00:27:22:27 – 00:27:44:02
Alice Lovejoy
But one of the things that I talk about in my book is that the radiation from these tests and from Trinity tests, the Trinity test as well, the radiation traveled much farther than the test sites themselves, even though the AEC and the Manhattan Project thought that they couldn’t. Right. So they were found, in Indiana. They were eventually found in the East Coast and beyond.

00:27:44:04 – 00:27:58:19
Alice Lovejoy
And it was traveling the fall. It was traveling on the same wind that we see start up there. So I see that as a really important kind of moment in showing the the effects of these weapons that went well beyond what anybody had imagined just from the explosion.

00:27:58:22 – 00:28:06:07
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Yeah. You don’t really think about I mean, that’s one of those things. It’s a.

00:28:06:09 – 00:28:42:09
Dan LeFebvre
You don’t see it. So you don’t think that it’s something that will that will do. And I could see how, you know, back then this is one of those moments in the movie where it’s, it’s difficult to put myself back in the historical context of what it was like then, because we know so much. I don’t know a lot about the nuclear world, but, you know, things like Chernobyl and Fukushima, you know, hearing about that and learning about those, you hear about things like, I think with Chernobyl, if I remember right, you know, one of the reasons they learned about it was because other countries in Europe were detecting these things from the radiation

00:28:42:09 – 00:28:57:17
Dan LeFebvre
on the wind, you know, stuff like that, that obviously they knew more about then. But we’re talking, you know, in the 1940s, first, first time, I can’t imagine how much there was that. They weren’t they weren’t tracking it. So they would know basically. Right.

00:28:57:19 – 00:29:21:26
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah, exactly. And this is where Kodak comes in an interesting ways because, in after the Trinity test, Kodak realizes that there are spots of black spots or spots of radiation that are showing up on unexposed film. So film that’s been sitting packaged for a while, and they trace it back to, microscopic particles of radiation in the packaging material that’s containing the film.

00:29:22:02 – 00:29:38:05
Alice Lovejoy
And they realize that that material is from Indiana, and that it must have been harvested, it was made of straw, or it’s kind of straw bore that they had turn to after, cardboard waste paper during the war ended up having a lot of radium in it. Right. So they couldn’t use that either because it would expose the film.

00:29:38:05 – 00:30:01:08
Alice Lovejoy
So they started making the straw board and then the straw has radiation in it. And that is coming. They trace it back to the Trinity test. So that happens, in the late 1940s and then and the early 1950s, Kodak becomes really the first industrial site to alert the Atomic Energy Commission to just how far radiation is traveling, because our film factories are so attentive to radiation to begin with.

00:30:01:10 – 00:30:11:20
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. I mean, so that wasn’t even the you just mentioned. There were a lot of cameras there at Los Alamos. That wasn’t even the film that was there that was filmed. That was thousands of miles away anyway.

00:30:11:22 – 00:30:29:03
Alice Lovejoy
That’s right. Yeah. The film that was there was singed. It was burned. And so it definitely was affected by it. And they were doing everything they could to protect the film, you know, whether that was through glass or led led, cases for cameras. But this is something different where it shows up, really, as you say, invisibly.

00:30:29:05 – 00:30:33:01
Alice Lovejoy
And film becomes a way to, to track it that they didn’t, they weren’t expecting.

00:30:33:03 – 00:30:51:03
Dan LeFebvre
In the movie, the very next scene, after the successful military test, we see some military guys, saying with respect, Doctor Oppenheimer will take it from here. And then with that, they just pack up a bombs and drive away. It happened. So quickly in the movie. It’s almost as if, okay, we had this successful test and now Manhattan Project is over.

00:30:51:06 – 00:31:05:13
Dan LeFebvre
We don’t really see what happens to the town. Of course, we didn’t really see a lot of the town anyway, so we don’t really see what happens. We don’t see anything about what happened with Oak Ridge or Hanford. So can you fill in some more history around how the Manhattan Project actually came to an end?

00:31:05:15 – 00:31:20:08
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah, I think that’s I think you’re right that this is a moment that seems abrupt because it I think that’s what it feels like to Oppenheimer. Right. He’s all of a sudden this is a political thing. It’s a government thing. It’s no longer a scientific thing. And that’s really one of the tensions in the film, right, between Strauss and Oppenheimer as well.

00:31:20:11 – 00:31:46:01
Alice Lovejoy
But the, you know, all of the moral and scientific complexity that goes into this is kind of flattened by politics, right? You know, you have Germans saying, this is my weapon. You know, it’s my it’s mine now. And, and, you know, one of the thought things that film does, I think very well is to show us all of the sophistication of Oppenheimer’s thinking and how he was working within a context that had to do with modernist art, and that had to do with reading in multiple languages.

00:31:46:01 – 00:32:04:11
Alice Lovejoy
That had to do with poetry. That was really drawing on, multiple ways of thinking about the world. Whereas the world of politics is much more about power. Right. And Oppenheimer is not part of that world. So, we see that moment. I really think that’s a great scene because it just the weapon goes away and all of a sudden, it’s out of his hands.

00:32:04:11 – 00:32:23:16
Alice Lovejoy
It’s not his anymore. So the successor to the Manhattan Project was the Atomic Energy Commission, which Strauss was the commissioner of between 53 and 58. And the impression that we get from the film is that the AC was more directly politicized in the Manhattan Project, and I think that was true. Right. This is, again, the context of the Cold War.

00:32:23:16 – 00:32:43:22
Alice Lovejoy
The early 50s is the moment when, you know, the Soviets have the bomb. And so there’s the arms race. There is the anti-communist hysteria with McCarthyism in the US. And this really, changed, the context, right, for the kind of work that the Manhattan Project had been doing, which wasn’t about the Soviet Union, really at the time.

00:32:43:24 – 00:33:05:26
Alice Lovejoy
And so at the end of the film, we see this kind of abrupt ending, but it isn’t quite it wasn’t quite that abrupt. The Manhattan Project continue to work, continue to exist for a while. The AEC was founded on August 1st, 1946 with the Atomic Energy Act, and by 1947, the Manhattan Project’s work had been fully absorbed by the AEC.

00:33:05:29 – 00:33:30:29
Alice Lovejoy
But the Manhattan Project, was involved, for instance, with the atomic test Bikini Atoll in 1946, the operations crossroads tests, and eventually all of the infrastructure that the Manhattan Project had built. So at Oak Ridge, at Hanford, at Los Alamos was transferred to the AEC. And those installations still exist. And they’re a really important legacy of World War Two’s big science.

00:33:31:01 – 00:33:52:11
Dan LeFebvre
So it’s not like the the Manhattan Project name went away, mostly. But the technology or obviously the technology still exists. But, you know, a lot of even the facilities and things like that were just essentially transferred to, oh, now we had this new technology. Would it make sense? They wouldn’t have an EEC. There’s no Atomic Energy Commission prior to atomic energy not even being a thing.

00:33:52:11 – 00:33:56:10
Dan LeFebvre
So having that set up, I guess that makes sense. It just transitioned into that.

00:33:56:16 – 00:34:19:16
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah. So it’s really a governmental I mean, it’s it’s a it’s a movement from a wartime exigency. And an agency that is built really swiftly during the war by the Army Corps of Engineers, among others. And that’s coordinating things through this question of how do we institutionalize this now that we know we have this technology that’s both for weapons and for energy, and that’s the other part of the story that, you know, is crucial to how the AEC evolves.

00:34:19:18 – 00:34:48:06
Dan LeFebvre
Obviously, my audience is made up of a bunch of film lovers, and as I’m sure film lovers are aware, Christopher Nolan used Kodak’s 65 millimeter large format film to shoot Oppenheimer, and it was released and various other Kodak film formats for Imax in theaters around the world. So from a historical perspective, though, I found that kind of ironic that they used Kodak film to tell the story of how America entered the atomic age using technology from a company that was so closely tied to it all, Kodak.

00:34:48:13 – 00:34:58:24
Dan LeFebvre
And that’s something that you talk about in your book. Is it true that the actual Kodak film company was involved in the chemical production of weapons grade uranium back in the 1940s?

00:34:58:26 – 00:35:18:08
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah, yeah. And this is really at the heart of, of my my new book, Tales of Mines and Chemistry, which talks about how Kodak and specifically the Tennessee Eastman Company, which was its main chemical subsidiary. So how those two companies really one company, but two branches of one company came to run the Whitehall plant at Oak Ridge.

00:35:18:10 – 00:35:35:19
Alice Lovejoy
So again, Y-12 is a huge part of Oak Ridge. It has many, many buildings. It’s running the electromagnetic separation process. So why this Kodak, which is a company that we know for its film and for its cameras, is really the key figure in the history of photography, maybe globally. How does this come to play such a crucial role?

00:35:35:19 – 00:36:00:09
Alice Lovejoy
And the Manhattan Project and what’s interesting is that the answer to this stretches back to, the history of safety film. So the less flammable cellulose acetate film that has been basically universally used since the early 1950s and as a successor to cellulose nitrate film, which is, basically the same thing as nitrocellulose and was used in the first part of the 20th century, to make film based.

00:36:00:09 – 00:36:24:26
Alice Lovejoy
So the plastic that goes under film emulsion and what I point to in the book is that, so again, as you say, Oppenheimer, which is a story about one of the men behind the Manhattan Project, was shot on 65 millimeter, which is the Kodak format, on cellulose acetate that’s used, do one up to 70 millimeter production prints and 65 millimeter is the film that requires the largest amount of cellulose acetate.

00:36:24:26 – 00:36:48:07
Alice Lovejoy
And that’s the material that brought Kodak to the bomb. So there’s an industrial connection here that goes very quickly through weapons. Because safety film is made using cellulose acetate, safety film is made using the chemicals acetic acid and acetic and hydride. Those chemicals brought Tennessee Eastman from safety film to making the anti-submarine explosive RDX during World War two.

00:36:48:09 – 00:37:08:28
Alice Lovejoy
And this was happening at the Holston Ordnance Works in Tennessee, the world’s largest ammunition plant at the time, again operated by the world’s largest film manufacturer. And this is a project that was run by Leslie R Groves and the Army Corps of Engineers. And so Groves sees how well Tennessee Eastman is able to sort of build and operate the Holston Ordnance Works at the same time.

00:37:08:28 – 00:37:20:18
Alice Lovejoy
And he says, okay, this is a company that’s going to do a good job, running Y-12. They know how to put these projects together. They know how to operate factories. So let’s ask them to do it.

00:37:20:21 – 00:37:43:15
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Yeah. So it wasn’t completely random at all. It was they were already doing something beforehand. And then. Yeah, Groves comes in and asks him, wow, it’s fascinating. Well, after everything we’ve learned today, it seems obvious that Oppenheimer is just giving us a small peek at the true story surrounding the Manhattan Project. So let’s say you’re put in charge of making a movie all about the Manhattan Project.

00:37:43:15 – 00:37:49:12
Dan LeFebvre
It’s not called just Oppenheimer. What’s one approach that you would take to telling the story on screen?

00:37:49:15 – 00:38:08:29
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah, and it’s a great question because I would take a different approach in the great man approach, which I think Oppenheimer does really well. I think it goes into this all these questions, as I’ve said with Einstein, with Strauss as the foil, etc. it’s a really good adaptation of the biography, but I think the smaller stories are stories of smaller or less famous people are equally important.

00:38:09:01 – 00:38:37:03
Alice Lovejoy
Because these are stories that were crucial to shaping the Manhattan Project and making it what it was. So one of the characters that I follow in my book is a man, named Alfred Dean, who is, known as the Kodak Spy. So slack was an employee of Kodak who, started in the Rochester, New York factory, moved down to the Tennessee Eastman factories in Kingsport, Tennessee, eventually moved to the Holston Ordnance Works, and then works at Y-12.

00:38:37:06 – 00:39:03:09
Alice Lovejoy
And from his time in Rochester onward, he was spying for the Soviet Union. While he was at Kodak, whether that was giving the Soviets color film technology formulas or whether it was, in the case of Holston Ordnance Works actually giving them samples of RDX, this explosive. So slack was not a spy, though, in a way, we might want to show a spy, if you’re like a the genre of the spy film, right?

00:39:03:09 – 00:39:20:07
Alice Lovejoy
He wasn’t in it for the politics. He was in it for the money. He really didn’t want to be doing it. He was kind of like stuck in this relationship. He wasn’t a very good spy. He kind of like, talk too much. And there are these, you know, things said about him at the plant where he would, you know, he would chat about the atomic bomb even though you were supposed to be doing that.

00:39:20:10 – 00:39:50:01
Alice Lovejoy
And I think that story is interesting because he paid for this. I mean, he went to prison in 1915, again at the height of the Red scare. And his story doesn’t really neatly fit into Cold War narratives because, again, his betrayal was pretty mild compared with people like class folks who we do see in Oppenheimer, who was a Soviet spy who was there, or David Greenglass, who was also at Los Alamos, and who worked for the same Soviet handler as Alfred Dean slack.

00:39:50:03 – 00:40:08:01
Alice Lovejoy
And he’s also slack is also interesting because he’s one of those many, many thousands of people who are working on the industrial processes of the Manhattan Project who don’t have these kinds of big names, but were equally important. And there’s been some wonderful work done to by historians on the women who worked on the Manhattan Project, whose roles were were absolutely crucial.

00:40:08:07 – 00:40:16:26
Alice Lovejoy
But I think the smaller story is the stories of people like slack are, interesting. And they tell us they tell us a lot about the nuances of that period.

00:40:16:28 – 00:40:37:07
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. That’s fascinating. I guess. You know, there’s always there’s always people that, don’t love their jobs. But you can I think of, you know, as spies. You don’t think of a spy as somebody that. Why would you be a spy if you don’t want to? If you don’t love what you’re doing? It’s such a high risk. But I guess the reward, if the reward is there and it’s monetary and that’s what you want, then.

00:40:37:09 – 00:40:52:28
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah. And I think he was persuaded. Right. I think there was there was persuasion. And that happened by convincing handlers and so yeah, it’s it is one of those odd stories. And he really gets stuck in jail for quite a while. His life is and is ruined by this. And, you know, to be fair, he did spy right?

00:40:53:02 – 00:41:02:24
Alice Lovejoy
He he did it. But it is, in the context of early 50s, where everything is so heightened as we see in Oppenheimer, it can have these consequences that might not have occurred at a different moment.

00:41:02:26 – 00:41:24:21
Dan LeFebvre
That would be a fascinating movie. Speaking of other movies, is it all right if I shift the conversation away from the Oppenheimer movie for a moment? Yeah. I’d like to get your take on current events that I’m sure will be a movie in the future. As a history podcast, it talks about movies and TV shows. We have covered a lot of political events in history, from the Watergate scandal in all the president men to the more recent Nuremberg movie.

00:41:24:23 – 00:41:41:04
Dan LeFebvre
And even with today’s topic, as we talked about Oppenheimer, his political views impacted not only his own life and career, but also impacted how we view his part in history. And all of that is to say, this is not a political podcast, but I think the current events of today will end up in the movies at some point in the future.

00:41:41:09 – 00:41:57:19
Dan LeFebvre
And when it does, I’m sure the events that took place in Minneapolis will play a big part. So as a film historian who lives in Minneapolis, what do you want the filmmakers of the future to know about the true story right now that they should make sure to include in their movies?

00:41:57:21 – 00:42:20:20
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah. Thanks. That’s a great and a really important question because I think, there is a widespread sense, among those of us who live in Minneapolis, in the Twin Cities, and Minnesota, that we are living through history in a way that is, very pronounced right away. That’s not too different from what happened in 2020 after George Floyd was murdered.

00:42:20:22 – 00:42:47:04
Alice Lovejoy
In a lot. It’s playing out in the same area of Minneapolis, in south Minneapolis. So I think what’s interesting about this moment, watching it from the inside, is that there’s so much documentation, there’s so many cameras everywhere showing what’s happening, whether these are, observers, legal observers, with cameras, whether these are, body cameras on federal officers, whether these are drones coming out with their photojournalists.

00:42:47:06 – 00:43:09:28
Alice Lovejoy
And there’s also a lot of national and international media coming here, right, flying in to document what’s happening. And what a lot of what we see in the media is pictures of, physical brutality. We see a lot of pictures of, tear gas, federal forces, use of tear gas and pepper spray, chemical munitions, and all this is happening.

00:43:09:28 – 00:43:33:09
Alice Lovejoy
It’s as accurate, but it also leads to the war zone comparisons that are made by, many media outlets, which are not incorrect. Those are those are correct in many ways, but they’re, the media isn’t able to get, to aspects of what’s happening that I think are fundamental but are less, less, attractive as subjects of documentation of filming.

00:43:33:11 – 00:43:55:25
Alice Lovejoy
One is and I will say, some journalists have done a very good job with this. One is the experiences of people who are in hiding, who cannot go to school or cannot go to work, can’t buy groceries, can’t seek medical care because, they’re afraid of being detained, many simply for the color of their skin. And so this is a less again, it’s a less, it’s a harder thing to document, right?

00:43:55:25 – 00:44:28:22
Alice Lovejoy
When you’re on the streets, when you’re when you’re somewhere that you haven’t been before. Because these are stories of isolation and fear and often deep need. And they’re playing out, you know, in the space of a house or an apartment. They’re one of the central stories of this moment. The second thing is, I think the deep and really extraordinarily, supportive and enthusiastic networks of people who are just there supporting their neighbors and their communities, whether that’s through helping people with rent, helping people with food, and so on.

00:44:28:24 – 00:44:48:17
Alice Lovejoy
There’s a lot of solidarity and, cooperation that’s just about taking care of your neighbors. That’s less dramatic. And it’s also quieter. But I think it’s also an essential story to the moment. So I would hope that future filmmakers, can see that the war like aspects of what’s happening here are one part of the story.

00:44:48:18 – 00:45:10:07
Alice Lovejoy
It’s real. It’s happening. But, I would encourage them to have the courage to make a film that can be quieter and less dramatic. And that would also see all of what’s happening with and longer histories of racial injustice and of community organizing, in Minnesota that are really informing what’s happening here. And we’re not that far off from 2020.

00:45:10:09 – 00:45:30:21
Alice Lovejoy
And I say courage because. Right. More films sell. They sell better. They’re, you know, they’re easy to picture. It’s easy to to, you know, to make these kinds of dramatic images. But it’s harder to make a film that is quieter, right, that is playing out inside a house or an apartment or that’s about neighbors just working together.

00:45:30:23 – 00:45:46:27
Alice Lovejoy
I will say this film could still be made on 70 millimeter. I would love to see a quiet film about, a changed everyday life made on 70 millimeter because you can include so much detail, even everyday detail. But would it be a great man story? It would not be a great man story. And I think that’s the point, right?

00:45:46:27 – 00:45:50:29
Alice Lovejoy
That this is a story that’s holding out, in everyday life in many ways.

00:45:51:01 – 00:46:15:27
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Yeah, it’s it is easier to throw up, you know, action movies and explosions and, and big things that you see in war movies and, get an audience that way, as opposed to not saying the films can’t tell good stories, but it is difficult to tell a good story. And when you can just make big explosions, you know.

00:46:16:01 – 00:46:35:21
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah. I think there’s a commercial, right. There’s a, there’s a, you know, how do you make money making movies, too, is one of the questions. And I think, what happens if we make a movie that’s less dramatic but no less, urgent? Right. In terms of what’s actually happening? So I think it’s a great question, and it’s a question about and an accurate portrayal of reality that is many things at once.

00:46:35:21 – 00:46:37:21
Alice Lovejoy
And that’s hard to do in a film.

00:46:37:24 – 00:47:01:05
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, yeah. I’m just curious because something that we see in a lot of, historical movies especially, you know, talking about something like Oppenheimer, that’s, during World War II, you know, many decades ago is they use a lot of documentation. And for something, it’s I think it’s easier to do, like in a military film where the military documents everything.

00:47:01:07 – 00:47:21:14
Dan LeFebvre
So would you have a recommendation for what people now can do to help document some of those lesser known stories that aren’t going to get documented by, the military or the, you know, like in Oppenheimer. You know, they have documents of everything that happened there that filmmakers can then go back to, what do you think?

00:47:21:14 – 00:47:26:09
Dan LeFebvre
What would you recommend as being able to document some of those smaller stories for feature filmmakers?

00:47:26:12 – 00:47:48:27
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah, and I think part of this is about communities documenting their own work and individuals documenting their own work. We know that diaries have played a huge role. Written diaries have played a huge role in this over time. And Frank’s diary being sort of the most famous example of this. And, I think that the amount of, footage that’s being made every day will be crucial as well.

00:47:48:29 – 00:48:07:18
Alice Lovejoy
I think that, you know, the way we use images has changed a great deal, right? Images are being I as a huge part of this. But also the way images are being slowed down and analyzed forensically and used for identification and all sorts of things, you know, that law enforcement wears them too, like there’s all sorts of different ways that images are being used now.

00:48:07:25 – 00:48:21:24
Alice Lovejoy
And I think that’s part of the truth of the moment to the reality of the moment is that there are so many different ways it’s being, shown and represented. And the more that can be done to preserve them and to sort the I from the rest, I think that’s crucial too.

00:48:21:27 – 00:48:57:04
Dan LeFebvre
Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat about the movie Oppenheimer. Even though we’ve mostly talked about one movie today, it’s worth remembering that the entire cinema industry exists because of the chemistry and technology that made motion pictures possible. And when we’re watching a movie, a war movie like Oppenheimer, I think most people don’t really think about how the technology that made the movie itself possible intersected with war time weapon development, but that’s a connection that you’ve explored in your book called Tales of Militant Chemistry The Film Factory in a Century of War, and I’ve got a link to that in the show notes for everyone to pick up their own copy.

00:48:57:11 – 00:49:04:16
Dan LeFebvre
And while they do that, can you share something that you came across in your research that would come as a surprise to the average moviegoer?

00:49:04:23 – 00:49:30:22
Alice Lovejoy
Great question. I think beyond the fact that the Manhattan Project was so closely tied to Eastman Kodak and to film manufacturing, I think we can go back a little bit and think about George Eastman again, the founder of Kodak, somebody who was closely involved in, the the way that cinema evolved in the way it developed, that he, you know, he grew cotton, on a kind of gentleman’s farm in North Carolina.

00:49:30:22 – 00:49:54:20
Alice Lovejoy
Now, cotton as as many of your listeners will know, is a crucial ingredient in film. It’s, source of the cellulose that goes into much motion. Picture film. And it’s a it’s a material with a very, dark history, racialist history in the United States that goes back to, to, chattel slavery and, and to, to many, many other, you know, plantations, etc., and the United States.

00:49:54:20 – 00:50:20:12
Alice Lovejoy
And so thinking about those connections that, that existed between the, really the founder of film, somebody who made it into the mass of industrial products that became in the 20th century. And these materials is something that I wasn’t expecting to find. But that underscores for me just how, closely tied this material is to events in the 20th century that go beyond cinema.

00:50:20:12 – 00:50:34:06
Alice Lovejoy
Right? Which is something we see in Oppenheimer, to which we see, you know, the links between nuclear weapons and film is not something that we necessarily think of, but in my view, they are two of the most important technologies of the 20th century atomic weapons and film.

00:50:34:08 – 00:50:37:13
Dan LeFebvre
Well, I’ll make sure to add a link to that in the show notes. Thanks again so much for your time, Alice.

00:50:37:15 – 00:50:38:23
Alice Lovejoy
Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.