It struck me watching Christopher Nolan’s masterful three-hour epic telling of the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, long labeled the Father of the Atomic Bomb, that this is a period piece with an exclamation point for audiences today. In the 1940s, Oppenheimer and a team of brilliant scientists traveled into the unknown to create the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, the A-bomb, but with the noble reason that its use could be an end to war, its explosive and wide-ranging ability to tear apart vast areas of the planet would be used ultimately as a deterrent, not an endgame. It...