The best scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer comes towards the end of the movie. The titular physicist is talking to Einstein, recalling a previous conversation in which they’d discussed the possibility that an atomic bomb would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. ‘When I came to you with those calculations’, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) reflects, ‘we thought we might start a chain reaction that could destroy the entire world’. ‘What of it?’ asks Einstein, as the rain begins to fall. ‘I believe we did’, says Oppenheimer. Cue the movie’s final, surreal sequence: a fusillade of nuclear missiles spearing upwards through a canopy of cloud, shooting through space as Oppenheimer looks on from the fuselage of a military aircraft, and—the movie’s closing image—a tsunami of fire spreading over the Earth. The logic of nuclear proliferation rendered as apocalypse. [More here.]