Opening up Oppenheimer

July 29, 2023 | 2:00 p.m. CDT

Chicago, IL

Opening up Oppenheimer

July 29, 2023

2:00 p.m. CDT

Chicago, IL

Please join us for a 70mm film screening of Christopher Nolan’s summer epic Oppenheimer at Music Box Theatre on July 29, followed by a post-movie panel conversation. This special event is brought to you by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Japanese Arts Foundation, and the DePaul Humanities Center.

The panel and Q&A will include Sara Kutchesfahani, director of programs at the Ploughshares Fund; Yuki Miyamoto, peace ambassador to Hiroshima and director of DePaul Humanities Center; and Stephen I. Schwartz, nonresident senior fellow at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It will be moderated by Saira Chambers, the executive director of the Japanese Arts Foundation and director of the Japanese Culture Center, with welcoming remarks from Bulletin President and CEO Rachel Bronson.

Tickets for this screening are sold out. But you can still join us for our August 3 virtual program about Oppenheimer, the movie, and his impact.

Speaker bios

Sara Kutchesfahani is the director of programs at the Ploughshares Fund. She has close to 20 years of professional and academic experience in the fields of nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear security, holding research, analysis, teaching, and managerial positions at a national nuclear weapons laboratory, an NGO, a university, and at various think tanks around the world. She also teaches a graduate class on nuclear security at George Washington University. She has a PhD in Political Science from University College London and is the author of Global Nuclear Order (Routledge: 2019) and Politics and the Bomb: The Role of Experts in the Creation of Cooperative Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreements (Routledge: 2014), as well as numerous scholarly and policy articles.

Yuki Miyamoto is an ethicist whose work centers on nuclear discourse and environmental ethics through the framework of comparative ethics. Her book Naze genbaku ga aku dewa nainoka (Iwanami, 2020) illustrates the divergence of nuclear discourse in the U.S. and Japan, examining the American perception of “the nuclear” in religious, educational, and popular cultural scenes. Against the backdrop of the still unfolding disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011, she wrote A World Otherwise: Environmental Praxis in Minamata (Lexington, 2021) which investigates the environmental ethics that emerged out of a community that has suffered from methylmercury pollution in Minamata, Japan. Most recently, she translated Trisha T. Pritikin's The Hanford Plaintiffs into Japanese, Mokusatsu sareta hibakusha no koe: Amerika Hanfōdo seigi o motomete tatakatta genkoku tachi (Akashi shoten, 2023).

Stephen I. Schwartz is a nonresident senior fellow at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and an independent consultant. He previously served as editor of The Nonproliferation Review; publisher and executive director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; guest scholar and project director at the Brookings Institution; and Washington representative for the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability. He is the author of numerous articles and reports, including Nuclear Security Spending: Assessing Costs, Examining Priorities (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2009), and is the editor and co-author of Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Brookings Institution Press, 1998). Schwartz analyzes, writes, and speaks publicly about the history and costs of US nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs.

Saira Chambers, director of the Japanese Culture Center and executive director of the Japanese Arts Foundation, is a curator, educator, producer, and curriculum developer. Saira has been an active advocate for nuclear nonproliferation and has worked with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum on various projects including hosting the “Hiroshima Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Exhibition’ here in Chicago in 2016. Alongside Dr. Miyamoto, she co-taught a course at DePaul University, “Art in the Atomic Age” last spring as well. With an emphasis on community-driven and innovative exhibition models and programs, her work explores the art, history, and culture of Japan globally to bridge cultural competence and cross-cultural perspectives.

Rachel Bronson is the president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She oversees the publishing programs, management of the Doomsday Clock, and a growing set of activities around nuclear risk, climate change, and disruptive technologies. Before joining the Bulletin, Bronson served as the vice president of studies at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. She also taught “Global Energy” as an adjunct professor at the Kellogg School of Management. Prior to moving to Chicago, Bronson served as senior fellow and director of Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Bronson’s book, Thicker than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia (Oxford University Press, 2006), has been translated into Japanese and was published in paperback in June 2008.