A peace activist’s harrowing account of nuclear war is a visceral case for disarmament

In the wake of the Manhattan Project, humanity, for the first time in its existence, became eminently capable of its own destruction. And it’s a reality we’ve been living with ever since. In fact, as the Australian physician and anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott details in this Oscar-winning short documentary from 1982, in the ensuing decades, the threat of annihilation became even more pronounced as new generations of nuclear weapons exponentially increased in destructive power. Filming Caldicott as she delivers a lecture on the history, threat and potential consequences of nuclear war, the Canadian director Terre Nash (then going by Terri Nash) intercuts brutal images of injuries caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She juxtaposes these sequences with scenes from Second World War-era propaganda films from the United States, which portray the development of nuclear weapons as an exceptional accomplishment in US ingenuity. While inevitably an artefact of its time, watched four decades later, Caldicott and Nash’s unapologetic argument for nuclear disarmament remains a dire reminder of the unimaginable horrors that a full-scale nuclear war would truly entail.