this is the way the world ends
on watching oppenheimer in the age of climate crisis
Like most of the people who have gone to see Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer since its release, I walked out of the theater thinking about the end of the world. I suppose it’s impossible not to, given the film’s subject matter. As many critics have observed, Oppenheimer tells the story of the individual behind the single most destructive invention in human history with harrowing sincerity. At each turn, the viewer is forced to confront head-on the unspeakable man-made horror of the atomic bomb—the scene depicting the Trinity test, when J. Robert Oppenheimer and his associates at Los Alamos unleash for the first time powers of destruction that had once been thought of as falling squarely in the realm of the divine, is perhaps the most gut-wrenchingly powerful moment I’ve ever seen on screen.
And yet, while I stepped out into the sunlight after the screening with thoughts of the apocalypse whirling madly inside my head, I was surprised to find myself preoccupied not, strictly speaking, by nuclear disaster, but by something else altogether, something that is in many ways far more immediately relevant in the present moment—the ongoing and catastrophic changes in our planet’s climate, brought about by the same mortal hubris that, as Oppenheimer reminds us, dragged humanity irrevocably into the nuclear age.
In 1998, in the wake of the second set of Pokhran nuclear bomb tests carried out by India in a remote part of Rajasthan, the writer and activist Arundhati Roy published her now-famous essay “The End of Imagination,” which would eventually be compiled into an eponymous collection of her nonfiction writings. “If there is a nuclear war,” Roy wrote in the essay, “our foes will not be China or America or even each other. Our foe will be the earth herself. Our cities and forests, our fields and villages will burn for days. Rivers will turn to poison. The air will become fire. The wind will spread the flames. When everything there is to burn has burned and the fires die, smoke will rise and shut out the sun. The earth will be enveloped in darkness. There will be no day—only interminable night.”
Although, twenty-five years on, we have thankfully managed to avoid the terrible confirmation of a nuclear war proving or disproving the specifics of Roy’s predictions, an alarming portion of what she warned about in those prescient lines has nevertheless come to pass—albeit with a somewhat different cause. Oppenheimer was released in theaters on July 21, 2023. Just one month earlier, the skies over vast swaths of the United States were turning a sickening shade of orange as millions upon millions of people choked under a suffocating cloud of smoke, carried south by unfriendly winds from the wildfires that had engulfed Canadian forests—wildfires that are still burning as I write this. Four days after the film’s release, a study was published in the journal Nature which found that the crucial system of ocean currents underpinning the Gulf Stream is in danger of collapsing by the middle of this century—a collapse whose catastrophic consequences would affect every single human being on the planet. Two days later, amid a sweltering heat wave that has caused the highest global temperatures in 120,000 years and which is poised to affect as many as 275 million people in the United States alone, the United Nations Secretary General declared that “the era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”
As the film correctly highlights, J. Robert Oppenheimer never actually expressed remorse for the detonation of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Contrary to popular belief, as nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein points out, he always maintained that the bomb had been a necessary evil, the right thing to do under the terrible circumstances of the Second World War. In other words, it seems that Oppenheimer’s contrition about having developed the bomb stemmed less from what the most destructive weapon known to humankind had done than from what it might do—from the knowledge that, as he infamously quoted from the Bhagavad Gita, he had become death, destroyer of worlds. Perhaps, however, Oppenheimer would have done better to focus his regrets on the devastation that his life’s work had already wrought—bomb or no bomb, the world seems to be on the eve of destruction anyway.
There is something uniquely unsettling about watching a film like Oppenheimer at this particular moment in history. Though the nuclear threat of course persists, the current state of the climate crisis is a chilling (or perhaps, a boiling) reminder that as things stand, the man-made threat most likely to bring about the end of the world as we know it is of a somewhat less explosive nature than Oppenheimer’s bastard brainchild. Each year, without ever having to unleash that awful power wrought by the monstrous collective genius of the Manhattan Project, we are bringing this planet of ours closer to uninhabitability, pulling the lids of our coffins shut one inch at a time. The nuclear apocalypse remains a distinct possibility, but the climate apocalypse has arguably already begun. We don’t need to imagine what the end of the world might look like. The way things stand, we’re already living through it.
Decades have passed since the hair-trigger politics of the Cold War came to a formal end, and yet the prospect of nuclear annihilation continues to cast a looming shadow over our collective imaginings of what the end of the world might look like. From the rise of Trump to the invasion of Ukraine to the ever-simmering tensions over that murky region at the roof of the world where the borders of India, China, and Pakistan meet in all their terrifying uncertainty, it seems that each year brings new headlines reminding us in increasingly dire terms not only of whose fingers are hovering above the proverbial big red button, but of just how many big red buttons there really are.
The infamous false-alarm incident of January 2018, when residents of Hawaii received an erroneous emergency alert warning them of an incoming ballistic missile, was a painful reminder that even today, our very existence hinges on the decisions of a few powerful individuals hidden away in secretive government offices, engaged in high-stakes games of geopolitical chess that we may never even know about. (Of course, the same can be said of climate change. Though we are all complicit to some extent in the climate crisis, just as we are all complicit to some extent in fanning the flames of nationalism that bring countries to the brink of nuclear war, at the end of the day the policy decisions that have the power to either avert or accelerate this crisis—just like the decision of whether or not to drop the bomb—are made in rooms that the vast majority of us will never even be allowed to approach, much less to enter.)
It is, of course, terrifying to consider that the most powerful people in the world, with their hidden machinations and their jingoistic agendas, have the power to end life as we know it in the blink of an eye. And that is exactly how we most frequently seem to imagine it all ending—in the blink of an eye. Even when the end of the world is represented in media in non-atomic terms—a giant asteroid hurtling towards Earth, a rapid-fire series of devastating natural disasters, a deadly virus sweeping the globe—it is almost always shown with the same terrifying immediacy as a nuclear holocaust. The world ends in a matter of minutes, or days, or weeks at most. Everything is normal, until one day it isn’t. Rarely is our collective annihilation depicted in the manner in which it seems most likely to occur—not one massive disaster, but a long string of smaller, climate-driven catastrophes, playing out over the course of years or decades or even centuries, progressively making life on Earth more and more difficult until, eventually, civilization collapses in on itself.
It’s not difficult to understand why the end of the world is so often depicted in such an instantaneous manner—simply put, it makes for better TV. But it’s interesting that even now, as we find ourselves face to face with an unequivocally apocalyptic crisis of our own making—albeit one that runs on a considerably slower timescale than nuclear war—we still cling to these popular, sensationalized depictions as our framework for thinking about the end of the world. We pretend that when the end comes, instead of the drawn-out process that it is proving to be, it will be a violent and sudden event, wiping out humanity in one fell swoop. Perhaps this narrative persists because of a sort of twisted wishful thinking on the part of our collective unconscious. Perhaps we feel on some level that if the world really is destined to end by our own hand, as it seems inexorably to be, it would somehow be less horrific for that end to come all at once—one swift and terrible coup de grâce, rather than the protracted, torturous mass extinction that the climate crisis promises.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
In its obituary for T.S. Eliot, who penned those immortal lines as the final stanza of his 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” The New York Times called them “probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English.” They served as the epigraph for Nevil Shute’s 1957 post-apocalyptic novel On the Beach, which The New York Times called “the most haunting evocation we have of a world dying of radiation after an atomic war.” When, one year later, Eliot was asked in a 1958 interview by the writer Henry Hewes whether he would write this “famous prophecy” again, he said that he would not. “One reason,” Hewes explained, “is that while the association of the H-bomb is irrelevant to it, it would today come to everyone’s mind. Another is that he is not sure the world will end with either.”
Sixty-five years on, as the brutal reality of the climate crisis presents us with a long, unending march toward annihilation, it would appear that Eliot may in fact have been right. This, it seems, is the way the world really ends. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a terrible, drawn-out scream, its last excruciating echoes lingering in the air long after there is no one left to hear them.
culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer, essayist, and cultural critic Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox: