Product Details

• Actors: Artist Not Provided
• Format: Black & White, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Mpi Home Video
• DVD Release Date: November 26, 2002
• Run Time: 58 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: B00006I04O
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #109,278 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

• This item is part of The Lifting the Fog Series.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover
A provocative investigation into the historical motives that led to the building of the first atomic bomb and the final decision to drop the bomb three months after the war ended with Germany.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Astinishingly fake, February 3, 2007

By	Stephen Foster (Seattle, WA United States, via Scotland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm sorry. I can hear different viewpoints, different attitudes. Sometimes hearing them can change my viewpoint in fundamental ways.

And I am very interested in the decision to atomic-bomb Japan. What happened to make decent people decide to annihilate civilians? It was a difficult decision to make. At the time, it seemed simple.

So I was very interested in viewing this "documentary." What first gave me pause was that I could hardly believe that Leslie Groves, the overall director of the Manhattan project, would say such cutely-incriminating things on camera.

Or that Leo Szilard (no, I did not spell-check his name - I know it) would look so youthful, in colour no less.

Or that the whole thing, and all the cute quotes, would have such a 1990's feel to it.

Finally woke up, and realized that I was looking an utterly fake work of well-intentioned propaganda. Propaganda by any other name is still propaganda. It is not the truth.

This subject needs the truth. Simpler than that: this thing needs to be honestly identified as fiction, with fake actors playing parts, while displayed in glorious Technicolor that was not available back then to capture the conflicted people who made difficult, conflicted decisions, and paid the price for their decisions. Instead, you have actors, saying nasty things, while placards describe them as being the actual people who made really difficult decisions.

They didn't hire an actor to play a fake Robert Oppenheimer. Perhaps they couldnt duplicate his porkpie hat exactly. More likely they couldnt find an actor who would have the exact haunt in his eyes. When he visited Hiroshima, a Japanese father asked if he felt bad about what he had done. Oppenheimer responded that he didnt feel any more bad about it than he would feel for every day of his life.

This is not even remotely a documentary. This is misguided nonsense. Perhaps some people will cheer it, because it agrees with their idea of what the world is about.

To them, I say that it was a truly difficult decision, perhaps wrong, but they need to consider that, given the time, it might have right. It might have been wrong, but please allow that it might have been right. I have no idea, but at least consider it.