Review: The Atomic Cafe (1982)

[jeriendhal]

Summary: Using un-narrated archival footage from the forties through the fifties, this 1982 film gives a look at the combination of terror and naivete that the United States approached the problem of nuclear weapons and nuclear war.

Review: Oh god, we were such idiots back then.

Okay, to be perfectly honest, this movie doesn't play fair at all. It cherry picks the footage it and makes careful use of music and sound editing to give the maximum impression that the US government and Hollywood were run by a bunch of people who were either naïve morons or criminally hostile to the idea of giving America the straight truth about the chances of us surviving a nuclear war.

Still, even taking the footage at face value, it's hard to watch this and not feel a little sick to your stomach as the Navy shoves Pacific islanders off their homes for nuclear tests, or the Army gives a briefing to a bunch of enlisted men who may or may not have graduated from high school, telling them calmly that just because they were going to be at the edge of a nuclear bomb detonation and then be ordered to walk into the blast zone afterward, that they really had no reason to be concerned.

You have to wonder if anyone in the Reagan administration ever watched this, and whether they looked at the marvelous “Star Wars” defense system with less enthusiasm afterward.

Comments

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

yeah, *depressing* film

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

FWIW, here in Germany it transpired that the one terminal storage for nuclear waste we have - a former salt mine - is getting waterlogged and possibly leaky. The current government still seems to plan to extend the operation time of nuclear power plants, which the previous government put a cap on. Seems idiotic to me, to produce nuclear waste with no place to put it.

Also, I heard Rhineland-Palatinate is going to sue, since a change of plans like that would be a disaster for local power providers, whose preparations for the future relied on the decision to have all nuclear power plants stop operating by 2020 or thereabouts.

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

And now they want to hand over responsibility for terminal storage to private companies. Private companies, who tend to value their bottom line over everything else. GOOD DOG, how can anyone who didn't spend the last half-year under a rock and thus didn't hear of that little oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico think this is a good idea. @_@

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Oh, we've been producing nuclear waste with nowhere to put it all this time too. The arguments over a central storage site have gotten insane, with the one place the Energy Dept. had settled on being argued over because we can't be sure what's going to happen there 50,000 years from now. Also of course it's not safe because every terrorist in the world will know where it is. As if having it stored in tanks in at a couple of dozen nuclear power plants is so much more sensible...

[jvowles.livejournal.com]

The "in 50,000 years" argument is the extreme end of the spectrum; the real problem is the NIMBY crowd, because they persist in their illogical objections long after the extremists have had their crazy dismissed.

For about 5 years I watched people debate what to do with old chemical weapons and decontaminants. Everyone agreed they wanted them gone, but the only effective way to do that was to incinerate them, and the NIMBYs fought it tooth and nail. Not only didn't they want them burned in place near where they were stored, they ALSO didn't want them to be shipped through their jurisdictions to a central location out west.