Article is a bit click-baity. Many of the survivors who saw the film were okay with its depiction and understood why the film presented the atomic bombings the way that it did. The film is ultimately about J. Robert Oppenheimer, and showing the physical outcome of the bombings would have itself been a potentially crass and shocking inclusion in a relatively subdued character study of a complex and tortured individual. Everyone knows that the physical outcome of the bombings on Hiroshima are shocking and terrible and left a lasting scar on the nation, coming to define the national identity of the Japanese, and especially Hiroshima natives that survived the blast, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. But it's sort of like The Wind Rises. Oppenheimer was a physicist, and a very talented one. That his work contributed to the horrors of war is part of the tragedy of the individual and their story, just like it was for Jiro Horikoshi, the designer of the Zero.

It's the one thing I think the movie totally dropped the ball on. There was an opportunity to show what happened in Hiroshima, and Chris didn't take it.

After seeing Oppenheimer I started reading Hiroshima Diary by Michihiko Hachiya, it's pretty harrowing stuff. And I was already aware through other cultural osmosis/research what conditions on the ground were like after the bomb. What a wasted opportunity.