The Demon core should have been mentioned in Oppenheimer, perhaps, as a driver of the movie replacing the trial. It would have been easy to show, and a good cinematic experience, especially since the death of Louis Slotin was associated with visible light from the core. It was mentioned in other movies under different names.
Slotin was using a screwdriver to prevent the core from going critical and produce a nuclear explosion, when moving to a neutron reflector. The screwdriver slipped, resulting in a brief pulse of intense radiation, that could have continued into a Nagasaki-like bomb. Slotin separated the parts with his hands, thus preventing a deadly accident, and shielded the rest of the scientists in the room with his body while receiving a deadly dose of radiation in the process.
Enrico Fermi (Nobel 1938) told Slotin and his friends that if they continue tickling the dragon's tail as they did for demonstrations and show, they will be dead within a year. Fermi was right. Nulcear bombs are not a toy, and should not be played with or kept around by any nation.
Slotin's life was short enough to be appreciated until the end. He was young, brave and reckless AND died early enough to not end up making those in power unconfortable as Oppenheimer and Turing did. Thomas P. Ashlock even wrote a poem commemorating Slotin in the Los Alamos Times:
May God receive you, great-souled scientist!
While you were with us, even strangers knew
The breadth and lofty stature of your mind
Twas only in the crucible of death
We saw at last your noble heart revealed.
The 12423 Slotin asteroid is named aftern him.
Last but not least, I should add that Chris Nolan implies that Oppenheimer was the first to predict the existence of Black Holes, a quarter of a century before John Wheeler coined the term.
It was, however, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a 19 years old Indian immigrant, who on the boat to England first made this prediction. It was a longer, yet safer journey than the one made by "boat people"/immigrants today since Chandra's boat was sea worthy. Chandra went on to win the 1983 Nobel Prize primarily for this particular calculation. If Holywood used this example instead of simply being wrong, perhaps they may have played a role in stopping so many deaths at sea.
