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b'In making \\u201cOppenheimer,\\u201d which opens in theatres this weekend, the director Christopher Nolan relied on a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of the father of the atomic bomb, \\u201cAmerican Prometheus,\\u201d by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. Bird is credited as a writer of Nolan\\u2019s movie, and he spoke with David Remnick about Oppenheimer\\u2019s life story\\u2014in particular, about the ambivalence that the scientist felt, and expressed publicly, about the use of the bomb, which led to a McCarthyist show trial that destroyed his career and reputation. \\u201cHe\\u2019s very complicated and he\\u2019s highly intelligent, so he\\u2019s capable of understanding and holding in his head contradictory ideas,\\u201d Bird says. On the one hand, \\u201cHe feared that if [the bomb] was not used, or the war ended without the use of this weapon, the next war was going to be fought by two nuclear-armed adversaries and it would be Armageddon.\\u201d On the other hand, after Hiroshima, Oppenheimer used his status as a celebrity scientist to educate the public about the dangers of nuclear warfare, a move that landed him in the crosshairs of federal officials. \\u201cWhat happened to him in 1954 sent a message to several generations of scientists, here in America but [also] abroad, that scientists should keep in their narrow lane. They shouldn\\u2019t become public intellectuals. And if they dared to do this, they could be tarred and feathered,\\u201d Bird notes. \\u201cThe same thing that happened to Oppenheimer in a sense happened to Tony Fauci.\\u201d'