But Oppenheimer turns out to be uncomfortably timely. At no point since the end of the Cold War has nuclear war felt more plausible, as the daily clashes between a nuclear-armed Russia and a NATO-backed Ukraine remind us. Beyond literal nuclear warfare, we are faced with a range of existential dangers—pandemics, climate change, and perhaps artificial intelligence—that will be managed, or mismanaged, by small teams of scientific experts working in secret with little democratic accountability. The ideologies, affiliations, and personalities of those experts are likely to leave their stamp on history, and not in ways they themselves would necessarily wish. Oppenheimer’s dark prophecy may yet be fulfilled.

-The New Republic