2. November 2023: Oppenheimer (Garching, OV)

In a hearing on his appeal against the revocation of his security clearance, physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer looks back: on his beginnings, his private life and, above all, on the time when he is assigned scientific leadership of the Manhattan Project during World War II. At Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, he and his team are to develop a nuclear weapon under the supervision of Lt. Leslie Groves. Oppenheimer is proclaimed the "father of the atomic bomb", but after his deadly invention is used with serious consequences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the just jubilant Oppenheimer is plunged into serious doubts.

In the further course of the film Lewis Strauss is to be confirmed as Secretary of Commerce in the cabinet of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Soon it is also about his relations with Oppenheimer after the war, to whom he was superior as head of the Atomic Energy Authority. Thereby it concerns above all the reproaches to old connection to the communism which Oppenheimer is accused of.