Katherine Slaughter has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest
Oppenheimer: Back to the Future
In the movie theater, I clenched my shoulders and hunched in anticipation of the blast; I could feel the tightness in my jaw. The time between the image and the subsequent sound of the explosion was akin to the space between a lightning strike and a thunderous storm: the interminable wait until the explosion erupted with all its furious sound.
Viscerally, I had a sense of generational deja vu.
I had grown up in the 1940s and ’50s in the shadow of Hiroshima and the ensuing nuclear age. I was five when World War II ended after the bombing of Nagasaki. I didn’t know about the Bomb then. With my parents and brother on vacation at Virginia’s Northern Neck, we experienced a joyousness in the small diner when we heard the news over the radio: the War was over. The waitresses, pouring coffee, danced behind the counter, my parents hugged each other and pulled us close.
We would no longer need to darken our windows with shades at night; I would no longer fear the sound of airplanes overhead, always thinking that they were about to bomb us. I knew my imaginary friends, Bee Chummer and Mary Jane Arjune, would also be happy. My battle-injured cousin, now in an Army hospital, would return home.
After the War, I realized it truly wasn’t over: we moved from the Norfolk, VA area to Washington, DC suburbs, where I learned that the Russians, now our enemy, would target the capital. I anticipated that planes would eventually drop an atomic or hydrogen weapon. Like others across the country, I crouched with my classmates under our school desks, away from windows, heads down, arms overhead, as though that position might save us from the force of the Bomb and its subsequent radioactive fallout.
During my years of high school and college, whenever the sound of approaching aircraft grew louder, the classroom would become strangely silent. A few times, we had shared immediate thoughts: “Is this it? An A-Bomb attack?” Even as remote missile technology developed, I visualized only the intimacy of airplanes dropping these huge explosives on us.
One night, I dreamed:
On a high vantage point looking down on the White House, I saw a blast of light, then heard, an explosion on the White House lawn. The sky lit up in rainbow colors that reflected on the building, but neither explosion nor heat destroyed the President’s House. It was all rather beautiful. I felt a slight tingle on my arms and hands, like that produced by fourth of July sparklers held too close to the body.
I exhaled — the Bomb was like fireworks; I could survive it.
Despite my youth, I understood this dream as reassurance that I would live beyond a nuclear attack. Yet the dream contradicted my observations of images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors. While Oppenheimer did not show the impacts on humans, I remembered photographs of disfigured faces and distorted limbs of the Japanese. The bomb’s heat tattooed imprints from their clothing onto skin; hunks of tissue peeled away from noses, eyes, ears, lips, arms, and legs. These nuclear victims even had a special name, the Hibakusha. Yet the film never depicts these direct effects.
Late in the film, the acclaim around the leader of the Los Alamos project turned to accusation, as a Congressional committee investigated Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Was he a security risk? Had he been a Communist? A spy? His wife and friends had been at least sympathizers, some were party members. Scared about the Bomb, many people suspected their neighbors or co-workers; we kids had wondered: would such people help destroy us? Oppenheimer retreated to Princeton, but many had not been so lucky. My friend Kate’s father, an educated man, was forced from his government job to work as a janitor because, gossip implied, he was a communist.
In our neighborhood, as we rode bikes by a nearby small white cottage, we whispered: A communist lives there. A witch’s lair in the forest: Did we dare ride up her driveway?
More than seventy years later, as the movie unfolded, I remembered both the suspected neighbors and the peeling bodies.
The film’s fragmentary images and noise became my memory’s soundtrack. From the start, the graphic images depicting nuclear fission and fusion and the Bomb itself were accompanied by the staccato of glittering lights, roiling flames, sparks of radiance, clouds of smoke, popping, shattering, exploding. The actual so-called Trinity test near Los Alamos created a force larger than anyone anticipated, with flashes of fires and lights illuminating the desert darkness, followed by a large gray cloud, a malevolent presence.
The soundtrack reverberating with foreboding and fearsomeness contrasted with my childhood dream of harmlessness. Watching the film, I closed my eyes and tensed my body: the sound surrounded me, the explosions were too close, the flashing lights too glaring.
As a young adult, I had gone on a first date with my husband-to-be to a summer stock play, Summer and Smoke. Afterward, we talked about our lives and about world affairs. Conversation turned inevitably to the Bomb, a word encompassing both the Atomic and Hydrogen versions: The background of our lives. After later dates, as we grew closer, we would deflect feelings about the bomb with humor: We might die in a nuclear blast, and if so, our angst about the future was irrelevant.
Ironically, the very day we decided to marry was marked by fear of the bomb. Before walking the few short blocks from my apartment to my editorial job, I read the Washington Post abuzz with rumors of a White House announcement about Cuba, which had been recently the target of an abortive US-supported invasion to overthrow the Communist regime.
Mid-morning, I got a call from my love to meet for lunch at a popular Greek restaurant on bustling M Street, midway between my office and his. He had received a job offer to do investigative reporting, then in its infancy, on environmental pollution. When we met we decided he must take this ideal job, and we would move our wedding from “sometime in the future” to three weeks hence. I would then relocate with him to the new city.
By the time we finished our moussaka and decided on the wedding date, our waiter confided that that the President had announced he would speak that evening on a broadcast to the nation.
After work, we met at the Georgetown house a fellow reporter and he shared. We watched the President’s TV speech: the Russians were building missile sites in Cuba. The President had presented an ultimatum to the Russian Premier: the existing weapons must be removed, and the US would monitor by sea any attempt at further shipments into Cuba.
It was a nuclear showdown: the moment we had dreaded.
At the end of the televised statement, we announced to our friend that we were getting married in three weeks, and, fools that we were, we were betting on survival. Also, we actually believed our President’s resolve would prove stronger than the Russians’ gamble to construct nuclear facilities so close to the US. Truly, love and hope won out over our usual pessimism about the Bomb.
Indeed, the Russians backed down, missiles were removed and a nuclear showdown averted. As planned, we married before a small group of family and friends on Armistice Day.
By November 23, 1963, when the President was assassinated, I was a mother of an infant son. As my husband and I lay in bed that terrible evening, we heard planes overhead. Was this it? Was the assassination a foreign plot, a prelude to an atomic attack on the nation?
Thankfully, it was not.
After seeing Oppenheimer in the context of North Korean missiles, Iranian nuclear experiments, and the Russian war on Ukraine, I thought about the so-called apathy of the 1950s when people conformed to the norms and didn’t question the status quo.
Then, I had worried about nuclear war beginning, but I had no model for change. During the post-war years, consumerism had taken over American consciousness: families bought houses and purchased new cars every few years. Our family got its first TV, which presented the antics of Ozzie and Harriet as the “normal” American family. Living under a nuclear threat had become the norm from which we sought escape through movies, TV, and radio.
I longed for the “normal;” my family was anything but. We had a battleground at home with my mother’s up-and down-mental health. During holidays, social drinking would transform her through hyperactive mood swings between jollity, frustration, anger, and sadness. Usually, she would pull herself together, return to her secretarial job, and what I thought of as her so-called “normal” home life. But once, when I was thirteen, it was different: She didn’t return to normal.
She sat bent slightly forward, with her head bowed, on the Victorian sofa in the living room. I seated myself next to her. I don’t know where my father or brother were. The space around us seemed very dark, although it was still light outside.
What’s wrong, Mama, I asked. Why are you so sad?
I don’t feel anything, she said. I can’t feel anything.
Her dead tone and slumped body appeared to me then, and now in recollection, as utter desolation. It both saddened and frightened me as I sat quietly beside her holding her hand.
When my father arrived home, he told me that he had arranged to take her to the state hospital for psychiatric care. I was to accompany them. Thus occurred my personal introduction to 1950s psychiatric therapy, including shock treatments, which scared me, but my father thought them a great salvation. She had experienced a previous breakdown after my brother’s birth, when I was only two. Then, he did not know if she would get well. But after nine months in a mental hospital, she had recovered—until this experience some ten years later. This time, after several months of hospitalization, she again resumed her life at the office and at home. She talked with us, hugged me, asked about my piano lessons, helped me improve my tennis.
But future times of disorientation and depression would lead to hospitalization—for shorter periods but still, away from us, away from me. Then, as psychotropic drugs became more available, she reached for them to adjust her behavior. Yet her psychological problems, the hospitalizations and treatments, and my feelings about her remained part of a secret life I never shared with even my best friends. This internal tumult was also part of the cold war I experienced around me.
Meanwhile, I was living my public life at school, playing basketball, singing in the church choir, hanging out at the pizza joint after school, discovering the outdoors with Girl Scouts, and spending free time reading novels.
Still, the threat of the Bomb loomed. The impact on my life and psyche cannot be overstated. Like me, others were fearful yet passive.
Except: the NAACP persisted in challenging school segregation, which existed in Virginia schools I attended. I began to grapple with the issue. Later, Dr. Spock and Martin Luther King, Jr. also led anti-nuclear protests.
People became less afraid of being called socialists or communists. Because of the moral courage of a relatively small group of Americans, things began to change. Eventually, I also would follow them. But it was slow progress as we marched, sometimes limped, into the decade of the 1960s.
After watching Oppenheimer, I felt wrung out, my head ringing from the too-loud soundtrack and the imagery of explosions. Even as I write this, I find my heart quickening, my eyes wanting to obliterate the images, shut down my mind, fall asleep, escape the war, the fear of the Bomb.
The North Korean leader continues to pledge support for the Russians against Ukraine. The Russian despot has long hinted at potential use of tactical nuclear weapons and has cancelled plans to extend anti-nuclear agreements. Similarly, the US Senate will not debate any testing bans, and China has joined the US and Russia as the biggest nuclear threats.
My own life has soared beyond the tribulations of my particular childhood history, and beyond the national insecurity that carried so much paranoia, and fear at home and abroad from the 1940s through the 1970s. Throughout those years, many Americans acting with courage in the face of hate and anger desegregated lunch counters and theaters, buses and trains, housing and schools.
Eastern European students helped destroy the Berlin Wall. Chinese students demonstrated at Tiananmen Square; a South African Black lawyer, freed from prison, helped dismantle apartheid as a state system; and recently, young girls dared to demonstrate in Iran and in Afghanistan. Still too late for some, and too slow for others, the status quo is being challenged.
Even so, change occurs slowly. For decades, atomic scientists have published a Doomsday Clock, whose setting indicates the world’s vulnerability to nuclear warfare or “miscalculations.” Over the decades, the clock’s hand has moved forward and backward, but now it points at ninety seconds to midnight.
Can Oppenheimer—beyond its Academy Award acclaim—create a larger audience to speak out against the widening nuclear threats? Can the film—can we—turn back the Doomsday Clock and save our resplendent world, this earth, our native home? After all these decades, I am still hopeful.
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This is so very interesting, Kay, beautifully written and in many ways parallels my own life experiences, memories that were triggered by the movie…although I have a more personal connection to Oppenheimer via family involvement that sometime we can talk about. Thanks foe writing!!!
Kay,
Strong stuff! Thanks for writing this moving and powerful piece.