Robert Oppenheimer named the test site “Trinity.” The name was inspired by a John Donne poem, which Oppenheimer once shared with his fiancée Jean Tatlock. Trinity, a swath of New Mexico desert, would host the first nuclear detonation on July 16, 1945, the beginning of the atomic age and a culminating event in Oppenheimer’s research. By then, Oppenheimer hadn’t seen Tatlock since June 1943, when he visited her in San Francisco. “I felt that she had to see me,” Oppenheimer later said. “She was undergoing psychiatric treatment. She was extremely unhappy.” Tatlock took Oppenheimer to the airport the next morning. He never saw her again. She committed suicide the following year.
Tatlock would not live to see the consequence of Oppenheimer’s research, the subsequent bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that occurred just weeks after the test conducted on the site commemorating her romance. Still, Oppenheimer’s feelings apparently lingered for years.
Oppenheimer would have several lovers during his work on the Manhattan Project—a feature of his biography that director Christopher Nolan hasn’t overlooked in his new film Oppenheimer, which covers more than one affair. Alongside his wife, Katherine “Kitty” Puening, whom Oppenheimer married in 1940 (Kitty is played by Emily Blunt in the film), Oppenheimer was also involved with Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh) and Ruth Sherman Tolman (played by Louise Lombard), the wife Richard Tolman, a colleague of Oppenheimer’s and adviser on the Manhattan Project
“The love of the characters, the love of the relationships, is as strong as I’ve ever done,” Nolan