This is a superb documentary and a very sombre film perhaps to be expected from the subject matter. With World War II over, the United States now engages in peaceful testing of atomic bombs, and the film documents the first of the post-War tests, on Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. The tests were probably inevitable. Once the genie had been let out of the bottle with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it wasn't going to be stuffed back in. After watching this, you do perhaps wish it had been though.
You're first disturbed at the uprooting of the inhabitants of Bikini. They have nothing to do with this; they had nothing to do with the recently ended war; they want to be left alone. But the US military forces them off Bikini, because for whatever reason, Bikini is deemed the perfect place to do ongoing atomic testing. You can't help but feel sorry for these people. There are the shots of animals being chained to poles on derelict ships around Bikini Atoll, in preparation for the dropping of the bomb, just to see what will happen to them. I found quite haunting the words of the narrator on a newsreel from the time as the plane carrying the bomb approaches Bikini, "these animals are about to draw their last breaths in the service of humanity." And then there are the American sailors on board the ships that are conducting the testing. They're given no protective clothing. After the second (underwater) test radioactive water is brought into the ships for them to drink and shower in. Was this just ignorance - or were the sailors themselves being used as guinea pigs - as unknowingly as the animals who had just been incinerated? And, of course, there was John Smitherman - a veteran of the tests, who had lost both legs over the years as they had swelled up and eventually burst open, and whose left hand was now swollen and barely recognizable as a hand - a victim of the radiation. Sombre, indeed.
As backdrop, there's some of the diplomatic manoeuvring going on, as the United States wants to share this with the world, and the Soviet Union says it has no interest in the bomb. A truly superb documentary. (8/10)