Oppenheimer or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

By Lee Pearson

J Robert Oppenheimer, virgin youth, floats free from his body at the apex of a troubled dream. White-hot solar light tumbles down through the spectrum, expanding, expending. He melds into the slow explosion, disintegrates into cosmic nigredo, then returns to the kiln from which all things, matter and mind, originate. His eyelids flutter to a humid Cambridge morning, to the pale gray peeking in through his fogged windows, portending downpour. The last descending notes of a symphony fade out as reality comes into focus. Bodily sensation ignites cold through his nerves, and he realizes his unconscious vision in the unseen womb-world of pure subjectivity and contradiction has, not for the first time nor the last, roused an emission. Hedonistic chemistries paint pearlescent ghosts across his bedsheets, vital DNA tincture double-helixing into the fine linen weavings and crusting cool until the healthy hundred-million swimmers doggy-paddle their last and die, crystalline nebulas, almighty potentials birthing and dying simultaneous from within galaxy-spanning pillars of flame, torrents whose arcs through space burn brilliant and vast for eons upon eons, dazzling advents fading in and out, bold pantheons rising and dying. He obscures the slow-waning vestiges of his hard-on from Niels Bohr as he persuades new answers to old questions, “How do I bring my beautiful dreams into reality? Should I bring my beautiful dreams into reality?” “You can lift the stone without being ready for the snake that is revealed.” Directed Deutchlandward, to Göttingen, to wise symphonist Max Born, where he learns of the occultic mysteries of quantum theory magicks, develops sounds and musics for instruments not yet devised even within the darkest imaginations of crazed engineers.

He studies for years, and when his pilgrimage through Europe reaches its end, his wayward heart yearns for home, for America, beckons Oppenheimer to evangelize at UC Berkley. But his German Zaubersprüchen only garners a small audience of morbidly curious virginals who have only heard of the new theories either through their own wet dreams and waking visions, or from the sparse distributions of Einsteinian hexecrations, eldritch eroto- science apocrypha. Next door to Oppenheimer’s Berkley temple, Ernest Lawrence constructs a dream-machine, The Cyclotron, occasionally attends mass to hear his own speculations echoed out the mouth of another like umbral prophecy. They contemplate their unknowable makers neither living nor dead, study the quantum machinations and horizonless scopes of influence, arriving at paradox, each answer evoking endless new questions. Orgies of telepathic masturbation break out amongst the attendees as they collectively wade into deep dream-realms of devoured universe, collapsing stars, hyper-cosmic death fornications and dissolvement back into primordia. In the carnal heat of ritual, they snuff themselves, their thoughts and their desires, into the churning waters where they dissolve. Every path forward and every path back, for all of existence as we know it: only different flavors of boundless death. Scattered scars of thoughtless creation in the derelict spans of void filled with the ecstasies and agonies of birth and death and birth and death until the universe finally reduces itself to cosmic ash, or unravels into expanses so frigid that nothing may be sustained.

The good word spreads with time, but Oppenheimer’s revolutionary discoveries in the quantum realm attract their detractors, callous enemies to the new abstract sciences seemingly closer to sorcery than to objectivity and reason. The knowledge becomes a threat to structure when it influences the perception of reality, opens new horizons of possibility, bold implications even outside the confines of icy science and academic theorizing. The FBI sends out their mindcrawlers to build themselves an adversary in Oppenheimer, his colleagues and his work. Oppenheimer is a man of science, as he asserts, stilted with talk of radical politics. The contents of his gray matter, those libated, hallucinatory dives into darkest thresholds of necromancy and Chthonia, are far beyond the comparatively mundane squabbles of republic and dictatorship, worker and owner, slave and master.

The ancient Permian horizon extends across the south of New Mexico, Los Alamos, sand and shrub and, forgotten advents pocketed in the sandstone beneath it all, oil. Oppenheimer is torn between his young brother’s desire for revolution and Lawrence’s pragmatist detachment. “All unseen space, the void between stars, may only be swallowed light,” Oppenheimer considers, “assimilated into the undetectable dark stars I see roiling serpentine in the murky nothing when I close my eyes.” If all of existence could be seen at once, even within the confines of his limited mortal frame of vision, it would sear the eyes from his skull. To bear witness to the colors from his dreams in reality would destroy him completely, his mind and his body. He contemplates the dying of the universe, that mankind is just the survivors of a ceaseless string of cataclysms with no beginning and no end. “We’re the sorry leftovers from a long-past rapture, and the progenitors of a next species that will all be gone in a similarly insignificant span of time.”

But, consulting the quantum gospels, for neutron bombardment to split a uranium nucleus in two is a material impossibility! Nuclear fission, a theoretical power only held by the gods! Theoretically! Yet the fission has occurred nonetheless, according to the trusted testimonies of German quantum realm warlocks, Fritz Strassman and Otto Hahn in Berlin, as well as the measures of acolyte Alvarez at Berkley. “More contradiction,” Oppenheimer thinks. “Boundless contradiction. The nonsense and chaos of dream manifesting itself into reality.” It is not long before the desire for conquest and idealistic purity twists the quantum gospels into foul wizardry at its place of origin across the Atlantic, Germany. A sober warning from sage Einstein: the Nazis may plan to bring the powers of mighty Apollo to war with nuclear fission bombs!

As Prague falls to the Blitz, America calls on Oppenheimer’s sorcerous services in hopes of beating the Nazis to The Bomb, who will undoubtedly destroy the entire earth if they get the opportunity. Luckily, the Nazis’ own dogmatic hubris has stunted their innovation, denouncing the quantum theory as heretical Jewish mysticisms. With their head start, a congregation follows behind Oppenheimer in the construction of a doomsday device. To win the war, they say, to end the war—and, perhaps, to end all war. But some are wary of this gross escalation in stately power. Haakon Chevalier’s Marxist outlooks on power and its consolidation begs of him to ask Oppenheimer to share his atom-splitting secrets with the world, with Soviet allies, rather than allow the United States to possess such enormous powers alone. “If the state has a monopoly on violence, that monopoly must be dissolved,” he proselytizes into Oppenheimer’s deaf ears. “Don’t you understand, Oppie? Only you, greatest quantum scholar, wisest seer and manipulator of unseen forces, can democratize and redistribute the means of destruction! The monopoly, Oppie! If one state wields these powers alone, the rest may as well be serfs! Even us, mere citizens and workers, we’ll be slaves! Any revolution to come will be made impossible! You’re building our future’s chains, Oppenheimer! Don’t you see how this may end all war to come? If everyone possesses this mighty power, destruction will be mutually assured, thus war will only be considered a last resort! Perpetual stalemate, Oppie! Uneasy, perhaps, but peace nonetheless! The means of destruction must be redistributed into the hands of every man and woman equally!”

The visions and calculations of adept Edward Teller tells of a grim possibility. To instigate a chain reaction within The Bomb may very well start an uncontrollable reaction of neutron-to-nuclei-to-neutron-to-nuclei smashing and splitting that never ends until all is annihilated, total atmospheric ignition. Hans Bethe figures it only a near-zero chance, per his own mathematizing, but still a chance. Fevered by the promise of peace in Europe, and perhaps peace until the end of time, they bring dream into reality, draw mad designs of uranium bullet guns and plutonium implosion devices, the deepest shadowy nightmare gadget being Teller’s deuterium fusion bomb whose hellish alchemies Oppenheimer considers too terrible and impractical to envision just yet. While the wizards work in relative secrecy for years, the Allies push Rommel out of North Africa, topple the fascists in Italy, invade France and work through the Pacific toward the Nippon mainland. In the spring of 1945, as Germany is squeezed from both the East and West, the Nazi leftovers flee or surrender, knowing their crass Master Plan and the death it sowed ultimately amounted to nothing. Berlin is in ashes, and Hitler is dead. Germany surrenders formally, less than a month after Franklin Roosevelt dies of a stroke. All the while, the Japanese seem to only become more bloodthirsted as their European allies are demolished and their stranglehold on East Asia and the Pacific begins to loosen.

As the gun-type using uranium is figured a guaranteed success, though wanting for destructive yield, Oppenheimer focuses development on plutonium implosion. A small pit of refined plutonium encases an initiator within a round tamper of depleted uranium in a truncated icosahedron made up of explosive lenses set to go off simultaneously to reflect the spherical high-explosive shockwave inward, crushing the plutonium into the Urchin, increasing its density to critical mass and instigating a brutal and violent nuclear reaction.

The Bomb’s absolute pristine symmetry, a necessity so that the blast from the reaction does not initiate early or inefficiently oblong, is inherently lewd to Oppenheimer. He sheds a tear and covers a growing erection in his trousers as the explosives are placed with such precise perfection around the core, its deathly, seductive beauty bound in lengths of wire spanned between each fuse. They entomb the unbirthed sun, suspended within a protective cask, then transport it to the Jornado Del Muerto basin in the southernmost deserts of Nuevo Mexico, The Path of the Dead. There, they lower the volatile plutonium supine into The Bomb’s depths, their alchemy complete, only awaiting a spark to bring it to life. The very pregnant husk rises above the sands, restrained at the top of a steel tower. As they prepare for the test, clouds gather low and dark, wind and rain encircling the construct. “A warning from God Himself, perhaps,” Oppenheimer wonders, a part of him reconsidering his staunch atheism. “But did Zeus not punish Prometheus for bringing knowledge to man? No fire, no plague nor even God has ever stopped us from chasing our destiny, no matter how terrible the path or the destination, and surely nothing will stop us now, not at this precipice into profoundest erudition, the key to a star in palm. At dawn The Bomb will drop, a light to spite the morning sun. And if there is a God, may He guide us through what comes after.”

At the flip of a switch, the timer begins. Flares criss-cross the obsidian sky, reflections catching in puddles across wet ground, ripples of phosphene crimson, rouge foreplay in Oppenheimer’s retinas. Thirty seconds and the detonator prepares to ignite the implosion. Welder’s glass obscures the night in even darker shades as Oppenheimer presses his body against the viewport walls, lips and tongue and tears smearing the glass. The distance between them breaks his heart, his dream out of reach. He could lay naked under The Bomb, die with it, dream with it into radiant abyss. He doesn’t want to grow old without having felt its warmth. He leaks diamond down his leg and his veins thrum with painful anticipation. Five seconds. He can’t breathe. Two seconds. The in between of his joints burn with darkest passion, thirst for annihilation. One.

At first, white. Perfect, blaring saturation. Nothing anywhere casts a shadow, pale heat, all-enveloping blanket. Oppenheimer unsheathes his eyes as the color warps down, roils up into pillars of flame, sucking the earth’s corpse into the heavens. Sparks dance together like children, innocent yet deadly. As the orb grows into its apex, mere nanoseconds, storm clouds disintegrate and scatter, the landscape painted with palettes previously unknown to any sober, conscious mind. Ears numb as the shockwave hits, dust and rock flying. Caustic smoke erupts in plumbs, casting the molten earth back onto itself. Oppenheimer sees his calculations draw across the basin skyline, his dream screaming into reality, the smashing and splitting, the unseeable realms of quantum possibility unfolding over on itself as the chains bind together and together, streaks of colorless thunders piercing with the fury and magnificence of solar flares. Ground zero expands over the basin, lich reaping life from soil and mountain, its necromancy devouring oceans. Oppenheimer climaxes as his body’s atomic structure unravels, fuel for the fire. Someone, though no one will ever know who, has won the war.

Lee Pearson is a writer from Northwest Arkansas. He has no real credentials or accolades, but some of his work has been featured with Cephalophore, SCAB, Back Patio Press and JAKE. Lee has been ineptly running God’s Cruel Joke literary magazine since late 2022.