Downwind

7/11/2024

When testing a new technology, one might realistically think that its creators should be able to evaluate its effectiveness after a reasonable number of evaluations, such as, say, several dozen trial runs. But, if that’s genuinely the case, then why did it take American nuclear weapons developers 928 tests to do figure out that their devices indeed worked? That’s not an unreasonable question, but it’s one of many such issues raised in this often-shocking documentary from directors Douglas Brian Miller and Mark Shapiro. According to the film, between 1951 and 1992, the US government detonated 100 aboveground and 828 underground nuclear weapons at the Nevada Nuclear Testing Grounds, with fallout from these blasts spreading downwind from the detonation site (and not just in the immediate vici