Making Prime Work, Part XII

Part One: Tickling the Dragon

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at how much “Fat Man and Little Boy” is an anti-bomb film as much as it is an historical drama.

Because while many of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project were highly curious to know if they could master nuclear fission, there were many who also recognized that whether they mastered it or not, building the bomb was a mistake – there could be other, much more peaceful uses for the technology they were developing.

But the dissociative approach taken to building the bomb – putting the theorists in Los Alamos and Chicago, creating the uranium in Oak Ridge, the plutonium at Hanford – contributed greatly to the secrecy that ultimately made the bomb possible.

We still witness the fallout of that dissociation. Today, I’m employed at a plant where the byproducts of nuclear weapons production are being cleaned up, more than sixty years after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I suppose we should be proud that, as a planet, those have been the only bombs deployed in wartime. And yet we should also be ashamed at the time and energy that’s gone into nuclear weapons production, and is still going into it, long after the fact. We still very much like the sound and feel of clubs smashing skulls.



Dwight Schultz – best known to me as the crazy guy in A Team – does a great job as Robert Oppenheimer, capturing both the gee whiz of the scientist and the gravitas of the human trying to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle.

Part Two: Savannah Smiles

I said when I started using Prime Video that I was not going to use it to re-watch movies I’d seen before. However, since it’s been decades since I’ve seen this particular film, I thought it could be the exception. Besides, I want to see those funky Salt Lake City police cars again.

I have vague memories that Peter Graves is in the film (thought he was Savannah’s father, alas, he is the private dick they hire to find her). No recollection of Pat Morita in the film, or Donovan Scott. So it’s fair to say I enjoyed watching this.

The scene I remember most (and the song I still sing, on occasion):



Looking forward to finishing this one.