Carl Robichaud
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Yeah, my pleasure.
I'm a big fan of the work you're doing.
I've seen it twice now, and I'm going to go back a third time.
I found it very moving.
There's a high fidelity to the source material.
And it's based on this book, American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Marty Sherwin.
And if you've read that book, you'll see that many of the quotes in the scenes are lifted directly from the book and from the historical record.
So it takes its source material very seriously, which I appreciate.
And I think it also is just an incredibly relevant film today because just as in the period covered in the film is in 1945 and 1955, we are now facing this new nuclear arms race.
And it's the central question, can we head off a new competition that threatens to make us worse off?
So I think it's a phenomenal film.
But because of the way the story is told, it leaves out some important details.
And one of those is the effect on the downwinders, as they're called.
These are the people who lived in the proximity of the Trinity test.
And the New York Times ran an article the other day and talks about how there were 500,000 people who lived within 150 miles of that Trinity test site.
And none of them were informed before the test or after the test.
And a lot of them continue to suffer from health consequences related to that initial test.
And there's another whole part of the story that's excluded, which is
Los Alamos was only part of the Manhattan Project.