The Manhattan Project in Media

The Manhattan Project in Media

This article relates to The Age of Calamities

"Choose Your Own Apocalypse" is a delightful name for a story all on its own; doubly clever when you learn it's about the Manhattan Project. But author Senaa Ahmad isn't making use of the Choose Your Own Adventure format for the sake of cheap juxtaposition. Sure, the real J. Robert Oppenheimer didn't become an eldritch abomination due to the corrosive force of the bomb (as far as we know), but Ahmad's approach—specifically, the fact that there is no good ending—reinforces the malefic influence of the Manhattan Project. It's a canny reflection of the fact that, to quote WarGames, "the only winning move is not to play."

The story comes downwind of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan's zeitgeist-capturing 2023 film about the father of the atomic bomb—indeed, it's hard not to hear Cillian Murphy's voice in your head when you read "Dr. O"'s dialogue in "Choose Your Own Apocalypse." The film is considerably more grounded than "Apocalypse" (nobody turns into a swarm of wasps), but a few key scenes dovetail with Ahmad's horror-filled approach: the hypnotic dancing flames of the first Trinity test, Oppenheimer's guilt-induced hallucinations of melting flesh and charred bodies, visions of the world consumed by fire. Towards the middle of the film, Manhattan Project scientists entertain the possibility that the nuclear test might destroy the world by setting the atmosphere alight; at the end, Oppenheimer sadly concludes that they ended up destroying the world anyway.

More surreal, but no less impactful, is David Lynch's depiction of the Trinity test in the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return. It reveals that the series' main villain, a monstrous denizen of the hellish "Black Lodge" named BOB, was born from the detonation of the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos. If you can't quite follow the episode's narrative, with its bizarre embryonic creatures and murderous soot-caked hobos, that's okay: it's one of the most avant-garde, boundary-pushing hours of television ever made. All you really need to know can be found in that slow zoom-in on a mushroom cloud in the New Mexico desert as Penderecki's "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" shrieks in the background. It's one of the most arresting images of Lynch's career, which has no shortage of arresting images: the stark black-and-white photography, and the mushroom cloud's gradual transformation from a tiny puff of flame to an all-encompassing inferno, makes it feel as though reality was ripped in two that day in July—which, in a very real way, it was.

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to The Age of Calamities. It first ran in the January 14, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.