Mark Cunliffe 🇵🇸’s review published on Letterboxd:
On 6 August 1945, the US dropped an atomic bomb called “Little Boy” on Hiroshima in Japan. Three days later a second atomic bomb called “Fat Man” was dropped on the city of Nagasaki.
The firestorm in Hiroshima destroyed five square miles of the city. Almost 63% of the buildings in Hiroshima were destroyed after the bombing and nearly 92% of the structures in the city were destroyed or damaged by blast and fire. Estimates of deaths in Hiroshima range from 100,000 to 180,000, out of a population of 350,000. Casualties from Nagasaki are thought to be between 50,000 and 100,000. By 1950, over 340,000 people had died and generations were poisoned by radiation.
Next Monday is the 73rd anniversary of the bombings.
When filmmaker Peter Watkins made The War Game in 1965 it was just three years after the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world seemed set for nuclear war. At the time many in the west believed a war was not only likely but necessary to 'sort the Russians out'. The real horrors of what that kind of war would be like was something many were blithely ignorant of, despite the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki almost twenty years earlier. Watkins' quasi-documentary film, using a mixture of statistics, quotes and vox-pop style face-to-face interviews, depicts and East-West conflict that leads to a nuclear bomb striking the UK. The film explores the impact of a blast in Kent and follows closely the events and facts in 1945 Japan. The film dared to tell the truth and was subsequently banned by a BBC cowing to political pressure, enraging Watkins who subsequently took exile in Scandinavia. His film was not transmitted until 31st July, 1985, twenty years later and approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time, it seemed that another nuclear war was very likely.
As I write, the threat of such inhumane carnage looms over us all the more thanks to the fractious and unpredictable relations between the the West and North Korea and Russia. Watkins ends his film with the chilling truth that the stockpile of nuclear weapons are still steadily growing...they've grown a lot more since then and will continue to do so. The UK continue to commit to Trident, whilst Trump's reckless rhetoric of 'fire and fury' ring loudly across the world.
The world must say never again.
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