The Cold War tensions between the US and Russia were at an all-time high when the 1982 documentary The Atomic Cafe was originally aired. The Atomic Cafe, a compilation of original materials, examined the nuclear weapons race in the past with equal measures of dread, criticism, and amusement. It depicts a time when the risk of a nuclear holocaust was seen as a real and present danger, and the documentary was published as these anxieties were beginning to resurface.
To find footage for their film, The Atomic Cafe’s creators filtered through thousands of feet of army footage, newsreels, government propaganda, and vintage television broadcasts. The film, which lacks a narrative and merely serves as a record of how the bomb entered American history, is presented as such. Songs, political speeches, and scary pictures of US soldiers protecting themselves against an atomic bomb and later exposing themselves to radiation that neither they nor their leaders understood were all included in the documentary (Legolas Greenleaf, 2019). In the film’s most tragic sequences, children are seen participating in civil defence initiatives. Powerful people give youngsters lectures in instructional film stills but learning about the likelihood of surviving a nuclear war was hardly comforting.
People have praised nuclear weapons without much regard for the human toll since the Trinity tests, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the productive experimentation at Bikini Atoll. The filmmakers examine the relentless savagery left behind by such attacks on both humans and animals, while the audio recordings of the interview discuss the health hazards linked with nuclear fallout (Legolas Greenleaf, 2019). When government groups started to propose that imported food and drink may have margins of radiation while still being deemed acceptable for human consumption, it was ignored at the time and was much more ignored after that.
My understanding of that era’s nuclear warfare was changed by the movie. The Atomic Cafe expertly illustrates people who are terrified of the unknown realities of a nuclear war, which for some seems inevitable. The most illustrative was the comprehensiveness of the preparations for the nuclear blasts. Girls in a household healthcare class displayed cans of food made to last in a nuclear war, but it is obvious that they have no idea how they will survive in the nuclear disaster (Legolas Greenleaf, 2019). Another footage showed soldiers, scared of their inability to counter the threat with the means they were trained for (Legolas Greenleaf, 2019). Even though the perception of nuclear energy was ambivalent, the general perception of it as the greatest threat did not stop the development of this type of weaponry.
If this movie has a message, it is far more subdued than the apparent one that nuclear war will be horrific, and the civic defences will be inadequate. This serves as a reminder that, despite its futility, the government at least committed a sizeable amount of its resources in the 1950s to prevent the threat of nuclear war. The Atomic Cafe is nevertheless a succinct, perceptive, and meticulously made documentary that essentially tells its own tale. Although obtaining some of the video utilized in The Atomic Cafe is undoubtedly far more challenging today than it was thirty or seventy years ago, the worries that gave rise to such footage and sources have not decreased in the slightest. The Atomic Cafe once more provides spectators with a clear picture of where mankind may be headed in the not-too-distant future rather than serving as a weird time capsule.
Reference
Legolas Greenleaf. (2019). The Atomic Cafe – 1982 Documentary [Video]. YouTube. Web.