Oppenheimer: A complicated moral conundrum with no easy answers

Christopher Nolan’s most political film to date paints an undeniably bleak picture, says Giles Gough, and asks some impossible ethical questions. Thank God for Christian hope

Unless you’ve been holed up in your own Barbie dream house for the past few months, you’ll be aware of the buzz surrounding Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Oppenheimer, released last Friday.

Nolan’s most overtly political film to date, a week has proved nowhere near enough time to process the existential dread provoked by this biographical depiction of J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist pivotal in developing the world’s first nuclear weapons.

How should a Christian respond to the moral questions posed in Oppenheimer? Should the atomic weapons have been developed at all? And should they ever have been used?