Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie (1995)
This is a documentary about nuclear and thermonuclear weapons. It has interviews with key players from the 1940s and 1950s, including Edward Teller, and footage of dozens of tests. For someone like me who grew up in the shadow of these things, the explosions are eerily fascinating. A huge dome of fire expands in every direction and then dissipates to reveal a core of impossibly intense light that rises and becomes a roiling torus of ordinary fire surrounded by clouds. Then the shock wave comes at you, quite visible and moving very quickly, here it comes, here it comes -- and everything is blown to bits. The violence of these things still has the ability to shock. An ordinary school bus, very much like the one that picks up my kids every morning, suddenly starts smoking and then bursts into flames, and a few seconds later an invisible baseball bat wielded by an invisible giant whacks it broadside, caving in one whole side, and knocking it over and sending it sliding. There's footage of an atomic cannon firing a shell at a distant target which, after maybe ten seconds, is obliterated in a 10 kiloton explosion. There's footage of explosions in space, 50+ miles up: pure globes of fire, sans mushroom cloud. There are air blasts that bash in and then suck up cubic miles of land; and underwater explosions, captured by robot cameras and microphones inside robot submarines. One thing that seems so obvious now is that the scientific and military value of many of these tests (apart from scaring the bejeezus out of everyone) was nil. It was more like a bunch of boys blowing up toilet bowls with M80s. "What happens if we pen a dozen pigs 1000 feet from ground zero?" "What happens if we set one off under the water right next to a submarine?" Narrated by William Shatner. (IMDB thefan-2)
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