![]() Most of all, the footage of the explosions-never less bloodcurdling no matter how often you’ve seen them-exposes the futility of this flood of government misinformation. ![]() They aren’t even equipped with sunglasses. In one astonishing sequence shot in the American desert, a company of men with no special protective gear crouch in trenches as a mushroom cloud hurtles skyward in the distance, then climb up and run toward the towering column of smoke. The safety of even American soldiers appears to have been an afterthought. By implication, it’s a narrative of a nation moving from jingoistic dominant-country pride to Cold War dread a collective psyche whose only defense, like a picnic blanket thrown over the head of a duck-and-coverer, is a weave of patriotic-religious bluster and morbid humor.īut The Atomic Cafe wordlessly validates the underlying fear and guilt with footage of the Bomb’s victims: scorched and poisoned bodies in Hiroshima, radiation-burnt Pacific Islanders near the test sites. Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Pierce Rafferty’s cine-essay splices newsreels, US army training films, and educational clips that show the government’s efforts to give the public an illusion of control over the most terrifying force ever developed. But as the classic collage documentary The Atomic Cafereveals, US military and civilian authorities long belittled reasonable fears about radiation, particularly in the two decades after World War II, where such concerns would have interfered with the rush to test ever more powerful nuclear weapons. In a news release, the EPA quoted a University of Massachusetts scientist who has stated that a little radiation is healthful. Trump’s EPA recently moved to weaken rules that may affect how radiation exposure is regulated.
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