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Vladimir Putin, film critic
This summer the only thing hotter than the melting planet has been the BOX OFFICES. Hear what esteemed film critics Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-un thought of the season’s blockbusters.
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MBS: A Barbie girl living in a Saudi world
A movie about building a dream world to explore fourth-wave feminism?
MBS will be first in line for tickets.
Watch more of GZERO's award-winning comedy series PUPPET REGIME!
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Norris Bradbury, group leader for bomb assembly, stands next to the partially assembled Gadget atop the test tower at Los Alamos in 1945.
Building the bomb, tickling the dragon
“Tickling the dragon’s tail.” That’s how the small group of physicists working at Los Alamos in the 1940s under the watch of Robert Oppenheimer described the dangerous job of assembling a nuclear core for the first atomic bomb. One wrong move and a chain nuclear reaction — the dragon — could have wiped them all out.
Even though the Manhattan Project was America’s most sensitive and secretive task — and the focus of the new Christopher Nolan film that opens tomorrow — Canada and the UK also contributed to the work. And at the very heart of it was a Jewish Canadian scientist named Louis Slotin, who emerged as the bomb assembler-in-chief. He worked with the radioactive material to build the core of the bomb — literally tickling the dragon by hand — a skill that led to his fame, but also to his gruesome, slow death by radiation poisoning in 1946.
Slotin was one of about 35 Canadian scientists working at Los Alamos. But Canada’s most crucial contribution — outside the academic work done in places like the famed Montreal Lab – was likely the Eldorado Mine on Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, which supplied uranium to the bomb project. Canada’s uranium was hauled down from the north and refined in a lovely little Lake Ontario town between Ottawa and Toronto called Port Hope, before being shipped to Los Alamos to be used in Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs that were eventually dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The US-Canada link was so strong that by 1944 the first nuclear reactor outside of the United States was built in Canada in a place called Chalk River, not far from Ottawa — which leads to another fascinating thread … In 1952, there was a nuclear meltdown at the Chalk River plant, and a 28-year-old American naval officer with expertise in nuclear power named Jimmy Carter — yes, the man who would go on to become the 39th US president — rushed in and prevented the accident from becoming catastrophic.
Still, as the new film “Oppenheimer” examines, developing the bomb remains a moral morass, one which Oppenheimer and Slotin openly struggled with. Were they, as Oppenheimer later claimed to have said, the destroyers of worlds, or did they save lives? That moral debate continues.
As nuclear fears reemerge with the war in Ukraine and the NATO alliance is reanimated in its purpose, it’s worth examining again how the world should handle its nuclear capabilities. While Oppenheimer’s later life was subsumed by political suspicion that he was a Communist (there is no evidence he gave the Russians any secrets), Slotin never lived to see that. In 1946, while working at Los Alamos, he was tickling the dragon’s tail by hand when there was an accident, and he was fatally irradiated. He cooked from the inside and slowly, painfully, melted down. His life is a stark reminder that the nuclear dragon is still very much alive, and as we covered recently on our GZERO World PBS program when Ian Bremmer interviewed the International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi, the dragon remains very, very difficult to tame.
The Graphic Truth: What Oppenheimer worried about
After months of anticipation, it's D-Day for “Oppenheimer,” the $100 million Christopher Nolan biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the celebrated American scientist who developed the first atomic bomb during World War II.
The journey of scientific revelation, brilliance, and execution is gripping enough, but an equally important part of Oppenheimer’s story is his postwar activism against the burgeoning nuclear arms race between Moscow and Washington. His calls to ditch nuclear weapons entirely helped to land him in the dock during the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s.
Was he right to worry? More than 75 years later, there are thousands of nuclear warheads in the world, each of which is vastly more destructive than anything Oppenheimer and his team worked on.
We take a look at who has the majority of those nuclear weapons today.
Where is China's foreign minister?
What are the consequences from Russia's exit from the Black Sea grain deal? Where is Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang? "Oppenheimer" is out. Will you be watching? Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
What are the consequences from Russia's exit from the Black Sea grain deal?
Well, a lot of antagonism from the Global South because prices are now going up. That's why the Russians hadn't wanted to leave. Look, I mean, there is an ammonia pipeline that was sabotaged that the Russians wanted to use traversing Ukraine, that hasn't gotten fixed. They also wanna be able to get back into SWIFT for the agricultural banks, and neither of those things happen. So they have pulled out of the deal. They are also now attacking Odessa, stepped up way, including grain capacity and blowing up a whole bunch of food. And this is, these are all war crimes. And now you've got a whole bunch of sub-Saharan countries in particular that are gonna be angry with Russia as a consequence, one of the places they've done comparatively well since the beginning of the war.
Where is Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang?
I have no idea, and especially because, I mean, I know him pretty well. When he was ambassador to Washington, I used to see him all the time and he is very close to the Chinese president. So the fact that it's been about four weeks now and he has not been heard from, initially, the Chinese government said it was a medical issue. They stopped saying that after the first couple of times. And the only thing we've heard is some scandals about, you know, maybe a relationship with some journalist. I have no idea, but clearly given who he is and his backing, it's going to be a fairly big deal. And some long knives from opponents have to be seriously out for him to be away as long as he has. Hopefully we'll hear about that soon because you need an effective foreign minister.
"Oppenheimer" is out. Will you be watching?
Well, I'm not watching "Barbie." I wasn't sure if I was going to, but then I saw my buddy Fred Kaplan, who wrote "Wizards of Armageddon" and is like probably one of the preeminent historians on the atomic bomb, he saw an early version of the film, all three hours of it, and said it was not only historically accurate, but also fantastic. And that makes me want to go see it, because let's face it, I mean, this is the guy, the father of the Manhattan Project, made the atomic bomb happen. He is a very, very controversial figure, and it's an issue we need to be talking a lot more about because we are facing much greater dangers from nuclear proliferation and from nuclear war today than at any point since 1962. So I'm glad it's coming out and hopefully it raises some awareness.
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Putin’s moment of truth has come
After many months, Putin has an important decision to make. We can all relate.
Watch more of GZERO's award-winning comedy series PUPPET REGIME!
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The geopolitics of "Barbie"
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here, and a special update, Quick take, I know you need to hear about this. The geopolitics of "Barbie".
"Barbie" is coming out. No, not in that way. Next week in the United States and the United Kingdom, massive launch. You've seen the dreamhouse, you've seen the buses, you've seen the excitement, and now you've seen the geopolitical backlash. It was not what you were expecting. I certainly don't remember there ever being a political science Barbie. Uh, there is a campaign manager Barbie that they made. That's, that's pretty much the opposite when you think about it. And there's also a Chief Sustainability Officer Barbie, that was of course, made of plastic naturally. But never a geopolitical analyst Barbie. Well, maybe that was a mistake, turns out there's a problem.
In the movie, there's a world map behind Barbie. Unclear why Barbie requires a scene with the world map. I'm sure we're all gonna learn this in a couple of weeks or maybe not. But there it is. World map in crayon. And you can see Greenland that's in yellow of course, and sort of a nine-dash line. Might there be a nine-dash line around Southeast Asia? Well, that's the big question. Vietnam banned the movie from its market saying that that indeed was what was being depicted. The upside is that China has not, it's the largest global movie market at the box office. And Hollywood Studios, of course, very frequently tailor movies to ensure that they get approval from the sensors. Now, the Philippines was also going to ban "Barbie." They've now decided against it as long as the map is blurred. So here's the map. Take a look again. Is Barbie supporting Chinese Neocolonialism? And would Ken approve?
Of course critical question here. Warner Brothers says that "this is a child-like crayon drawing" and it was not intended to make any type of statement that alleged nine-dash line is neither clearly located in the South China Sea region, nor does it have nine dashes. We look carefully. It's only eight. Only eight dashes. That's one fewer dash. Heck it's not even the only dashed line on the map. If you look closely, you'll also see that there's a Cambodia-sized turtle that's located nearby, right on the Asian landmass. And I'm pretty sure that that's already been eaten. But I do think the Warner Brothers folks did know what they were doing. I mean, you know, you're trying hard to get access to the Chinese market, but you don't wanna alienate anyone. So by putting these eight dashes off of Asia, it's an effort to get favor from the Chinese sensors, but also not antagonize the Southeast Asians.
Barbie, you think you're so clever. But this has happened before in 2022. Vietnam and the Philippines both banned Sony Pictures action movie "Uncharted" over their nine-dashed depiction. And that was pretty clear. It was very brief, it was very clear depiction. Also, they stopped screenings both countries of Dreamworks animated film "Abominable" in 2019 due to a scene that showed the nine-dash line. Malaysia made the studio cut the scene from "Abominable," and that's no joke. What the hell are all these people doing with nine-dash lines? Well, you know, all we can say, Fox News had a host that asked, is Barbie a communist? You be the judge. Pics on the spectrum, but it should help "Oppenheimer" at the box office.
That's it for me. Talk to you real soon.