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Over the fourth weekend of July, many moviegoers will be flocking to “Oppenheimer,” the much-anticipated new project from British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan (2008’s “The Dark Knight,” 2010’s “Inception”). Though many of the film’s details have been shrouded in secrecy in the lead-up to its release, it ostensibly will be a straightforward biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, given the “father of the atomic bomb” honorific because of his leadership in the hush-hush Manhattan Project, with a particular emphasis on the years that recast his name in infamy.

For those who tend to recall the rudimentary narrative rather than the minutiae of the Manhattan Project, it might not be known that Oppenheimer and co.’s work has crucial ties right here in Washington. Established in 1943, the Manhattan Project’s Hanford Site is bordered to the southeast by the Tri-Cities. The site hosted the world’s first full-scale plutonium reactor, which, in turn, was responsible for producing the plutonium used not just in the very first atomic bomb (tested not in Washington but at a Jornada del Muerto site about 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico) but also in the “Fat Man” bomb detonated over Nagasaki in August 1945.

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