Nolan's film is a distinctive pop cultural phenomenon because it deals with the American use of nuclear weapons, a genuine rarity since ABC's 1983 airing of The Day After about the consequences of nuclear war.
A 2022 report by Ira Helfand and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimated that a "Limited" nuclear war between India and Pakistan that used roughly 3% of the world's 12,000-plus nuclear warheads would kill "Hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions" of us.
Victims of nuclear weapons development include people who were impacted by the fallout from U.S. nuclear testing in the Western United States and the Marshall Islands in the Western Pacific, uranium miners on Navajo lands, and many others.
According to nuclear expert Stephen Schwartz, author of Atomic Audit, the seminal work on the financing of U.S. nuclear weapons programs, through the end of 1945 the Manhattan Project cost nearly $38 billion in today's dollars, while helping spawn an enterprise that has since cost taxpayers an almost unimaginable $12 trillion for nuclear weapons and related programs.
The Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons reports that the U.S. spent $43.7 billion on nuclear weapons last year alone, and a new Congressional Budget Office report suggests that another $756 billion will go into those deadly armaments in the next decade.
Past experience - from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that helped persuade Christopher Nolan to make Oppenheimer to the "Ban the Bomb" and Nuclear Freeze campaigns that stopped above-ground nuclear testing and helped turn President Ronald Reagan around on the nuclear issue - suggests that, given concerted public pressure, progress can be made on reining in the nuclear threat.
On the global level, the 2021 entry into force of a nuclear ban treaty - officially known as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons - is a sign of hope, even if the nuclear weapons states have yet to join.
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