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Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie
1995 · Film · documentary · 92 min
Part of The Atomic Bomb Collection
Directed by Peter Kuran
"Trinity and Beyond" is an unsettling yet visually fascinating documentary presenting the history of nuclear weapons development and testing between 1945-1963. Narrated by William Shatner and featuring an original score performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, this award-winning documentary reveals previously unreleased and classified government footage from several countries.
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13 comments on Hacker News
Reading that book inspired me to watch the documentary Trinity and Beyond(https://youtu.be/p4yXfrYSmuA) a fascinating Shatner-narrated dive into the cold war era of nuclear testing and proliferation.
Only documentary I've ever bought the soundtrack to.
“Trinity and Beyond: the Atomic Bomb Movie”
Narrated by William Shatner, using declassified, high quality footage of nuclear tests.
Nuclear weapons is humanities biggest existential threat, and few people talk about it in popular culture. At any given point in time, we're 30 minutes away from the complete destruction of civilizations we know it today. I highly recommend diving into the movies & books below to begin understanding the issue and simply be in awe that humanity is capable of creating such horrific and destructive weapons.
First, watch "Trinity And Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie" [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114728/]. It gives a great overview of the nuclear weapons program history and his incredible video footage of tests.
Next watch "Threads" [https://archive.org/details/threads_202007]. Be warned, it's depressing, but it does a great job dramatizing what a nuclear attack might look like, including its generational impacts.
Finally, read "Command and Control" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book)]. The book discusses how nuclear weapons are actually secured and designed to prevent accidental use. A movie was created if you prefer to watch that [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5598206/].
When you get through these three pieces of material, you'll have a much better understanding of the history behind this weapons, how destructive they are, and hopefully think critically about whether or not they're worth the risk.
The thing I worry the most about is unintentional or accidental use of a nuclear weapon quickly snowballing into something that ends humanity within 30 minutes. That's what's at stake.
May I also add the supurb documentary Trinity and Beyond. I've watched it several times and always come away simultaneously parts awed and terrified.
Wonder if there are more examples of this hiding, intentionally or not. I recently could not find the Trinity and Beyond [0] movie on DDG, because all hits were of some family vlog (though I still find it on Google first page).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_and_Beyond
For the record, that's a segment from the documentary movie Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie [1]. It's an incredible documentary and I thoroughly recommend anyone interested in the development of atomic weapons finds a copy of it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_and_Beyond
I assume the original commenter meant maximum specific damage - essentially the air detonation causes a bunch of shockwave structure (pre cursor waves I think?) that result in much increased overall damage over a much larger area at the cost of a reduction in direct damage at the point of detonation (essentially vaporising basically just a few buildings/block vs functionally demolishing an entire city). There’s a documentary called (iirc) “trinity and beyond” that covers a lot of this a at least to the level of understanding of a non-physicist like me :)
Check out the documentary "Trinity and Beyond" - it has a lot of quality footage, much of it colour.
Trinity and Beyond is occasionally available on Netflix and Amazon streaming. If you catch it, watch it. It's a mesmerizing documentary composed entirely of restored atomic test footage with spare narration by William Shatner and an eerie score from the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.
Peter Kuran, the director, worked as a VFX specialist on The Empire Strikes Back and he's done some other nuke-related documentaries too. He's also working for the subject of this article.
If you enjoyed this article, the documentary "Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie" was great - decent footage and a great soundtrack.
For further information about the atmospheric test years topic I'd recommend the movie 'Trinity and Beyond' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqaq59whOa0). It's build upon declassified military material. Years: 1945 to 1963, Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Finding good and solid information about the russian test program is very hard. There's no "complete" documentation about the whole programm. Most documentaries focus on the ~50MT device the USSR built and detonated.
If you haven't seen a lot of atomic blasts, look up Trinity and Beyond. It's a documentary about nuclear warhead development and testing, with a lot of historical footage of the blasts themselves. In fact, I think the clip you reacted to is from that documentary.
Anyway, the damage you're seeing isn't actually typical for a nuclear blast. It's an effect called the precursor wind, and is in fact one of the distinctive things tested by shot Grable.
A precursor is a very strong dynamic wind caused by the shell’s oblique angle of approach, and its high horizontal speed. The nuclear explosion essentially inherits the shell’s forward momentum, which sweeps across the landscape causing extensive drag damage in addition to the typical destruction. For instance, a jeep which had been left virtually untouched by the much more powerful Encore device was completely torn apart by the artillery blast, and thrown a distance of about 500 feet.
http://www.damninteresting.com/atomic-annie-and-her-nuclear-projectile/
I've seen most of these in "Trinity and Beyond" - a movie I cannot recommend highly enough.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114728/trailers
Recently declassified footage... digitally remastered... score by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra... and narrated by William Shatner -- so good in a horrifying way.