The critics rave—and I don’t disagree—that the box-office blockbuster Oppenheimer is the greatest film, or at least biopic, since Lawrence of Arabia. The cinematography is grand, the acting is fine, the pace is excellent, and the story has real importance. If, considered as a meal, most movies today are a bag of skittles, Oppenheimer is a thick juicy corn-fed Iowa steak. So, if all you need to know from a film’s review is whether you should go see it, the answer, in Oppenheimer’s case, is unquestionably yes.

But is Oppenheimer accurate? That’s the question that Claire Lehmann asked me to answer for the readers of Quillette.

I have some qualifications for such a role. I hold a doctorate in Nuclear engineering, and my Ph.D advisor, Fred Ribe, was himself the student of Sam Allison, who was a member of Enrico Fermi’s Chicago pile team. Allison was thus my academic grandfather. It was he, a professor at the University of Chicago, who recommended that Fermi’s Chicago Pile-1, the world’s first critical nuclear reactor, be built under the stands of University’s Stagg Field football stadium. I share his dislike of spectator sports. During the first test of Fermi’s atomic pile in November 1942, Allison stood by with a bucket of neutron-absorbing cadmium solution to throw on the reactor to shut it down if it got out of control. In July 1945, he was the man who threw the switch that ignited the first atomic bomb test at Trinity.