Oppenheimer. Quite good. The scale of it, the nuances, the setting, the replication by the filmmakers of the work of building a town in the middle of the desert—the same desert—it must have been uncanny. The cast and crew must have had a sense that the making of the film was a reincarnation of the Manhattan Project, only without the fact that in that project Oppenheimer et. al. were making something that could destroy humanity and possibly all life on Earth.

One thing I never really thought much about before, though I must have read about it: The Germans were working on their own bomb. And they had Heisenberg. Ergo, they had a chance of succeeding. Ergo, the Manhattan Project had to happen, despite the existential danger of it.

As to the Cold War that followed, what was that really about? (I mean, I know it was about the Bomb, but suppose there had been no Bomb? I think something akin to the Cold War, albeit, probably, of a less dangerous character, would have happened anyway.) I don't know the answer. One school of Marxist thought considered it a global class war, i.e. the interests of the global proletariat and the Soviet bloc plus Maoist China were the same. It is true, I think, that the state-socialist powers as such were something new under the sun. (Just how new is open to debate. See also Karl Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism, if you can find a copy.) But I don't know. There had certainly been “global” conflicts among “great powers” before, notable among them the one immediately preceding the Cold War, not to mention the one that birthed the USSR roughly thirty years prior—which had nothing to do with the politico-economic characters of the powers in conflict. Maybe the global class war tendency would have been correct if, and only if, Trotsky, with his orientation towards world revolution rather than Stalin's “socialism in one country,” had prevailed in the USSR after Lenin's death.