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100 Years of the Atom l ARTE Documentary

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On the 6th and 9th of August, 1945, the USA detonated two nuclear weapons over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The 20th century will be remembered for a scientific break-through of untold significance: splitting the atom marked the dawn of the nuclear age. Kenichi Watanabe’s documentary focuses on the real impact of the darker side of nuclear power: the accidents exposing people to radiation from Chernobyl to Fukushima, the full extent of which were often covered up.


Since the discovery of radium and its radiation at the dawn of the 20th century by the couple Curie and Henri Becquerel, the risks associated with the atom have been systematically minimized and the contaminations it has generated have been hidden. Today, the victims of Fukushima are engaged in lawsuits against Tepco, the company that operated the plant. The plaintiffs also include American soldiers from the aircraft carrier Ronald-Reagan, exposed to the radioactive cloud, when they came, in the aftermath of the disaster in 2011, to provide aid to the victims of the tsunami. Their officers remain confined and take iodine to guard against radiation, without informing or protecting their men. Military or industrial secrecy, disinformation, concealment ...the history of the atom is dominated by manipulation, favoured by the invisibility of radioactivity. As early as the 1920s, the radium girls, American workers who made radium watches, were contaminated by refining the brush they used with their lips. Two decades later, after the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, during the American nuclear tests in Bikini, Japanese veterans and fishermen were radiated. The context of the Cold War silenced all protests with a lot of propaganda supported by film studios, such as Disney. In 1986, the USSR would use similar methods to silence the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster.

Our friend the atom
Documentary by Kenichi Watanabe (France, 2020, 57mn)


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#Hiroshima #Nagasaki #atomicbomb
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