Some were less than a half-mile from ground zero. They include members of the flight crews and, most chillingly, survivors from Hiroshima. The Smithsonian Channel’s take, “The Day the Bomb Dropped,” which it shows on Sunday night, also treats the subject as ancient history, but it’s more absorbing because it relies much more on the personal accounts of witnesses. It’s as if “The Bomb” doesn’t want to intrude on the present by reminding us that the genie released 70 years ago is still at large.
There’s a brief suggestion that if India and Pakistan ever go at it the whole world will suffer from collateral damage, but the thought doesn’t linger. The arms race is dutifully chronicled and the anti-nuke movement too, but only in its final minutes does the program get around to noting that nuclear bombs are still with us and that countries other than the United States and Russia have them. Yes, it’s amusing, but we’ve been laughing at 1950s and early ’60s naïveté for a long time. For instance, a test supposedly proved that unkempt homes were more likely to burn up in an atomic blast than well-kept ones. It also leans too heavily on those funny vintage clips that make everyone back in the early days of the Cold War look like idiots. Behls and too many talking heads, most of them stating the obvious. “Here’s this major sitting behind a desk,” Hal Behl, an aeronautical engineer, recalls of his introduction to the project, “and he said, ‘I have a very unique job for you, but we only take volunteers.’ I said, ‘Well, tell me about it.’ He says, ‘I can’t.’ ‘Tell me where I’d be.’ He says, ‘I can’t.’ I say, ‘Tell me what I’d be doing.’ He says, ‘I can’t.’ ”ĭid the pitch work? “The next day I was on my way to Oak Ridge, Tennessee,” Mr. Recruiting for the project, which was shrouded in secrecy, must have been a ridiculous thing to witness. That, of course, led to the Manhattan Project, and the best parts of “The Bomb” are the recollections of people who were part of it. We hear about the race to develop an atomic bomb that could be used against Germany before Germany developed one that could be used against the Allies. And that history, especially for people old enough to have lived it, is very familiar.
It was an opportunity to bring us up to date on whether nuclear weapons should still be in our Top 5 Things to Worry About, but the program is virtually all history lesson. “The Bomb,” Tuesday night on PBS, devotes two hours to the subject.
This summer is the 70th anniversary of the first atom-bomb test and of the weapon’s first use in wartime, and TV loves anniversaries. Build a bomb shelter in this century and you end up on “Doomsday Preppers,” coming off as a bit kooky.īut nukes reclaim the spotlight over the next few days, or at least the attention of television. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State and climate change and hackers are what give us the jitters. Sure, there’s the current kerfuffle over Iran’s nuclear program, but American schoolchildren aren’t exactly diving under their desks about it.
Somewhere along the line nuclear weapons became the Rodney Dangerfield of global threats.