Science & Technology influenced Oppenheimer

The physics is the plot. Nolan's film follows Oppenheimer from Göttingen through Berkeley to Los Alamos, and the pressure in it comes from the science being genuinely uncertain: whether the bomb would work, which design would, and the calculation about atmospheric ignition that had to be done before they could proceed. From the record: the recruitment of the Los Alamos physicists, the implosion lens problem, the Trinity test on 16 July 1945, the target committee, and the 1954 security hearing that stripped Oppenheimer's clearance. The Manhattan Project is also the film's moral subject rather than its setting: a piece of applied physics that its makers understood completely and could not control at all.