From a Washington Post story by Mark Johnson headlined “How Oppenheimer weighed the odds of an atomic bomb test ending Earth”:

In a chilling, existential, bizarrely comic moment, the new movie “Oppenheimer” revives an old question: Did Manhattan Project scientists think there was even a minute possibility that detonating the first atomic bomb on the remote plains of New Mexico could destroy the world?

The long, strange history of what came to be known as the “atmospheric ignition” scenario has been distorted over the years, and the movie distorts it further.