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Fifty years ago, on July 16, 1945, the first nuclear weapon exploded into the desert sky at Trinity Site - Alamogordo, New Mexico. Jon Else's Academy Award- nominated documentary is the definitive record of the building of the bomb and a penetrating portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, its brilliant and elusive architect. Nobody knew whether the bomb would work at all, or work so well that the atmosphere itself would ignite (the night before, physicist Enrico Fermi was taking bets on the odds of incinerating the State of New Mexico). With the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the buoyant spirit of the war effort yielded to the grim reality of the Cold war, the McCarthy Era, and the elegiac interviews of an extraordinary scientific elite, The Day After trinity achieves an emotional force and focus which no other work on the subject even approaches. The CD-ROM features the complete 88-minute film in Quicktime video,
running commentary by director Jon Else and historian Michael Renov,
declassified military and FBI documents, a photo gallery of over 100 images,
complete transcripts of all interviews excerpted in the film, biographical notes
on everyone who appears in the film, and a complete glossary of terms. |
