WEISGALL: Yeah, I’ve been representing the people of Bikini Atoll for twenty-six years now. Quite some time.

BAKER: How did you come to do that?

WEISGALL: Well, the Bikinis were moved off their atoll in 1946, to facilitate Operation Crossroads, which was the first of the postwar nuclear tests. They have been off their atoll, actually, now for fifty-four years. The United States conducted twenty-three atomic and hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, the last one being in 1958. President Johnson announced in 1968 that the people could go home again. And they were put back on the atoll, some of them went back, beginning in 1969.

I became involved in late ’74, when I brought a lawsuit on their behalf. They were, some of them were back at Bikini, but they were being told by visiting scientists, not to eat the coconuts, to go easy on their intake of local foods. Clearly, there were some concerns being raised about radiation levels at Bikini. So I brought a lawsuit, simply seeking an environmental impact statement, which in this case would have been a radiological survey. The survey showed radiation levels at Bikini were well in excess of federal standards, the people were moved off in 1978, and they have been working ever since at trying to get appropriate funding for a radiological cleanup of their islands. So it’s been a long, tortured process of trying to get them back home.

BAKER: And presumably, many of your clients have been born since the actual testing was conducted, yet are still impacted by it.

WEISGALL: Yeah, the impact is really quite severe. In 1946, there were only 167 Bikinians, who were evacuated from the atoll. Of that number, approximately half, a little over half, actually, are still alive. The ones who really recall Bikini and how pleasant it was, is an ever-dwindling number, because presumably, you were at least ten or fifteen years old at the time, to have remembered that. So you’re getting up in years at this point.

The population today is more than 2,500. And in fact, Bikini for some is a little bit like a land of milk and honey. They hear the stories from their elders of how wonderful it was, they do go back, it is beautiful, it is pristine, you can throw a fishnet out in the lagoon and haul in fifty lobsters without even trying. But that’s because it has been, it’s been abandoned for so many years.

But the impact continues to be felt. The health effects seem to be minimal. The people were back there for only a short period of time, and there have been, it’s hard to see any direct health, adverse health impact on the population that lived up there. There have been a couple of leukemias, statistically it’s very hard to show this impact, in the absence of a larger sampling.

BAKER: To watch these films that I sent you, these government films, you get the sense that the effects of the nuclear tests in the Pacific were brief and are long gone. I mean, is that the case?

WEISGALL: Well, the, first of all, you really, you have to, you really have to compare the two sets of tests. The ones that were held on the continental United States and the ones out in the Pacific. Out in the Marshall Islands, there were sixty-seven separate tests conducted between 1946 and 1958, at Bikini and Inouwatuk Atolls. In the United States, in the Nevada proving grounds, I don’t know the number of tests, but the number is much, much higher than in the Marshalls. I mean, you know, in excess of 700 tests. Ninety-nine percent of the megatonnage was in the Marshall Islands; one percent was in Nevada. Bikini, for example, was the site of the Bravo shot, a 15-megaton shot, the equivalent of nearly 1000 Hiroshimas. So the physical impact on the islands is permanent in the sense that complete islands were vaporized, both at Bikini and Inouwatak.

The short term adverse effects are largely gone, in the sense that people always ask me, you know, well what about the fish? Well you’ve got, you know, a fish, a tuna that is in Hawaii today will be at Bikini in a week... highly migratory species move all over the place. The Atolls’ waters have been flushed pretty well over the years. Diving is not a particular danger, it’s no more dangerous than anywhere else in the world.

One remnant that has stayed has been this very insidious radiation in the soil. And what has happened is, these soils are terribly deficient in minerals. And soil likes potassium, it likes fertilizer, nitrogen phosphorus, potassium, these kind of, the elements that make up fertilizer. Well, one of the byproducts of these nuclear tests is cesium137. Which is radioactive, and cesium and potassium have very similar properties. They appear above and below each other on the table of periodic, on the periodic table of elements.

BAKER: Let me interrupt. We’re getting too technical for me to be able to use it.

WEISGALL: The relevance is, let me just summarize your, the answer to your question is that lingering radiation remains in the soil at Bikini Atoll. And because plants concentrate those radioactive materials, it is not possible for the people of Bikini to live there today, if they want to eat local food.

BAKER: Thanks. In one film that I didn’t include on the reel, but I referred to, it shows King Judah, boarding a U.S. Navy ship, right before, I think the Baker test.

WEISGALL: That’s correct.

BAKER: Crossroads, and watching through a pair of binoculars.

WEISGALL: Named after your father.

BAKER: Right. The film says it was he, King Judah, who unselfishly gave his island to the United States in order that these experiments could be conducted. And later on it shows another angle of the blast is photographed from the Mount McKinley, and King Judah displays a marked interest in the proceedings. Is that how it was? Did he give up his island kingdom, selflessly?

WEISGALL: Well, he gave up his island kingdom, and there was certainly a selfless quality to it, but it was under duress; there’s just no question about it. When the Bikinians were evacuated, there were something like fifteen Navy ships in the lagoon. Navy personnel were already detonating, oh, pinnacles that were sticking up in the reef... They were preparing for the tests. President Truman approved the tests at Bikini in January of ’46. The Navy came to see the Bikinians two months later, to ask if they’d be willing to leave their atoll. Well, you didn’t have a whole lot of bargaining power at the time, and to stand up there and say no was certainly out of the question.

So there was, you know, there was staged propaganda, there’s really no other way to describe it. It’s much like a lot of the films that you’re showing. It’s a similar, it’s in a smaller mold, where a Navy commodore stands up and through an interpreter, asks would your people be willing to leave? And King Judah pops up and says no problem, or, you know, that’s fine, everything is in God’s hands. And they taped this forty, fifty times, over, because the commodore kept screwing up his syntax, and it didn’t work right, and he’s say oh, cut!

And they’d do it again, and these islanders sitting out under the trees on some hot day, and the Navy wants to document how selflessly these people are acting. Well, you know, they’re being filmed, and they had no choice, the alternative of saying "I’m sorry, would you go test your bombs somewhere else," is completely out of the question.

Having said that, I think the Bikinians did act in a very selfless manner. They gave up absolutely everything they had, their land, to the United States. And it is that moral imperative that I still try to focus on today. The deal was, we give up our land, so that you can conduct your tests, you take care of us. Well, the first part has been fulfilled; the second part still has not been fulfilled, and these people are still not home.

BAKER: As I understand it, you had already mentioned that the 1954 Bravo H-bomb test produced an explosion almost three times larger than they predicted it would be.

WEISGALL: Correct.

BAKER: So, nine megatons, or perhaps 700 Hiroshimas bigger than they thought. It was also conducted under adverse wind conditions. What was the effect on humans and the environment from that test, and did the U.S. government knowingly cause that damage?

WEISGALL: Well, Bravo was, I think, probably the greatest disaster in, certainly in the U.S. nuclear testing program. The party line, as spouted by AEC Chairman Admiral Straws in a White House press conference a couple of weeks after the test, was, the winds unexpectedly shifted; instead of going north, they headed due east. They headed several hundred miles east, dropping fallout not only on about 240 Marshallees, Marshall Islanders on Rongulopp and Utrick, but on about thirty U.S. servicemen as well.

And we’re looking at 7000 square miles of highly contaminated parts of the earth. Now, luckily, almost all of that was open sea. But if you take that cigar-shaped pattern from the Bravo shot, and run it from Washington up to Boston, you’d be wiping out a good chunk of the Eastern seaboard of the United States. I mean, this was staggering! The lethal radiation. And in fact, if this cloud had passed just a couple of miles south, over the Atoll of Rongelap, the people, most of the people would have been killed. They were hit with substantial amounts of fallout, over, up to one hundred REM. Well, what does that translate into? It translates into being almost a mile from the Hiroshima blast.

So not death, but there have been very serious health effects. For example, and I think I’m pretty sure on these statistics, there were twenty-one children on the island, on Rongelap Island, who were under the age of ten. Nineteen of the twenty-one have had their thyroids removed, since the time of Bravo. I mean, there’s no question that there have been adverse health effects. Servicemen were removed, people of Utrik were affected, a little bit less, one, you know, parts of Bikini were completely vaporized. By going east instead of north, the fallout showered Bikini and Enu Islands, and it is really that one shot that is the reason the Bikinians cannot go home today. The other twenty-two shots had a profound effect, also, but not as bad as Bravo.

BAKER: Let’s see. In watching the film on the Bravo test, they very dryly acknowledge some miscalculation, and downplay it. I believe they say, none of the doses appeared to reach levels of immediate combat significance, nor did the people suffer severe effects. While they’re saying this, the picture shows us a young woman or girl islander whose skin has lesions on it, that are obviously an effect.

WEISGALL: Yeah. Well, first of all, the, you asked an earlier question that I did not answer, which was: was this deliberate? There’s no smoking gun that shows a deliberate irradiating of people. Having said that, the weather forecast at midnight clearly showed that the winds were headed east and not north. And every update showed that the winds would be headed in the wrong direction. In fact, U.S. ships east of Bikini were ordered to move south. So a) we knew the wind was blowing the wrong way, b) we, the United States, took action to protect sailors on ships. I would add a point c) which is the Marshall Islanders on Rongalup and Utrick were not evacuated for a couple of days. Point c), it took several days to evacuate the Marshall Islanders on Rongelap and Utrik Atolls. So at that point, we had a pretty nice laboratory of exposed people.

The newsreel is staggering; I mean, when the people got to Quaderlain Atoll, the U.S. military base a couple of hundred miles away, they were, they were showing all the symptoms of acute radiation sickness: nausea, vomiting, lowering of white blood cell counts, and loss of hair. And these, as I said, this was the equivalent of being about a mile from Hiroshima. So, from the get-go, the U.S. reports were false. Now, you know, did anybody die? No. But anyone looking at this situation could tell that there were going to be serious effects, as there have been in that population, over the years.

BAKER: Now, as I understand it, shortly, I don’t know if this is getting off the track for you, but the other tests they did in the Castle series, suffered similar miscalculations.

WEISGALL: They had this tritium bonus, they apparently didn’t understand, was going to double or triple the yield, the Romeo test, and a couple of the others.

BAKER: Am I supposed to believe that they did a test that was nine megatons bigger than they thought it was going to be? And a few days later, did another one, and made the same mistake, and kept making the same mistake?

WEISGALL: Well, there were, they had to make some quick decisions about what to do with the rest of the test series. You know, there were scientists twenty-four miles away from the Bravo shot, in a bunker, with six-foot concrete walls, who detonated the shot. And about three or four minutes later, when the shock wave hit, this bunker was physically lifted up and moved. And these guys had to be evacuated within a matter of hours, by helicopters that flew in. And their lives were imperiled. That obviously threw off the rest of the test series, because you couldn’t have anybody either on Bikini Island, or Enu Island, which was used as a kind of base of operations.

So everything was thrown into a cocked hat, and yet the United States went forward and did detonate, on schedule, the rest of the tests in the Castle series. Quite remarkable.

BAKER: Was this, was there something organic about the schedule that couldn’t be changed? I mean, was the winter coming or something? I don’t understand.

WEISGALL: No, I mean the, the climate is always the same in the Marshall Islands. There was always talk of windows of opportunity for good weather. But generally you’ve got tradewinds blowing at that time of year, in a way that is not a problem. This is an area that does not get a heck of a lot of rain. You’re talking maybe twenty, twenty-five inches a year. And when it comes, it comes in very quick squalls. I mean, I’ve been to Bikini probably fifteen or twenty times, and believe me, you need a whole lot of sunblock when you go to Bikini Atoll; it is aptly named. So, the weather, no, would not have been a factor.

I think a greater factor is, was probably budgetary considerations. You know, you had a whole lot of folks out there, not unlike 1946, in Operation Crossroads. When you’ve got 40,000 men out there, and there was a whole lot of concern about what to do. Now, you may recall in ’46, the third shot there, Test Charlie, was cancelled. I mean, they had a disaster on their hands, of a minor scale, in ’46. 1954 was a disaster of major proportions, but they had fewer personnel. Nevertheless, I think budgetary constraints, I think the Cold War imperative probably played a factor. And they had a schedule of shots to detonate, and by golly, they stayed on schedule.

BAKER: The train ran on time. In looking at many of these films, especially in some of the other ones about civil defense, they seem designed to allay fears, to downplay fears of annihilation, suggest that a calm and rational approach to thermonuclear war will serve us best. To you, what does that kind of thinking reflect about the government that made these films?

WEISGALL: Well, I was, I had not seen quite a few of this film footage before. I had seen footage a lot like it, but to me, quite a bit was new. To me, this film footage underscores the same ignorance and arrogance that characterized the U.S. nuclear testing program from its birth. The import of what I saw was "don’t worry about anything, we know what we’re doing," and it implied, not exactly sure how to express this, but almost an implied threat of, don’t question what’s going on. There was certainly, by having an appeal to the patriotic side of, you know, we’re doing this for the defense of our country, we know what we’re doing... The flip side of that is, if you do question what’s going on, Soldier, you’re showing a level of disloyalty. So that’s an added element.

You didn’t see that, I didn’t see that, at least in the 1946 documentary footage of Bikini Atoll shots. But still, the ignorance and the arrogance was amazing! These references to the fact that, that everyone on the ground, the ground troops are okay, or that the radiation will dissipate to the upper atmosphere, and there won’t be any problems for the ground troops. Well, that’s right, in an air shot, most of the radiation dissipates into the upper atmosphere, but, you know, Hiroshima was also an air blast. The bomb detonated at 1,200 feet, and if I recall correctly, 80,000 people were killed, outright. So there were adverse effects on soldiers.

It’s really extraordinary to watch some of this stuff, and, and, and to take all that in. Or, you know, the fury of the bomb was, you know, affected everyone, but no one was injured. Well, you know, technically that’s accurate. No one died instantly from the blast, or the heat, because the soldiers were far enough away. By the 1950s, people knew that there were long term, cumulative effects of radiation, and that these guys were going to get hit with a certain level of radiation.

So, I, I was, just once again shocked, by what is nothing more, and what was nothing more than propaganda. You know, we watch these old Soviet films and we laugh, and I mean, they’re not very well made, and they’re so, the propaganda’s just overwhelming, of Mother Russia, and, you know, we’ve, you know, the Cold War’s over, and you can look at it with a sense of humor. Well we were doing the same thing on our side. We were putting out propaganda films, and the propaganda, the story, was largely false. That there’s nothing to worry about, everybody’s going to be safe, this is just another weapon, it’s another arrow in our quiver. Well it was not, and is not another arrow in a quiver; it is a separate, extraordinary weapon, that has profound effects, beyond military applications.

BAKER: Good. You seem to have addressed some of your quotes there.

WEISGALL: Yeah, I think I got off most of what I wanted, yeah.

BAKER: In fact, you--

WEISGALL: I’d just add one other point, if you want to just splice it in. One of the other clips talked about how there was no harm to the troops on the ground. Well again, short term, that could have been the case. Long term impact of low-level, you know, exposure to certain levels of radiation, is still not known. And by the way, that’s part of the problem we have today. There is still an ongoing debate on the long term effects of exposure to low-level radiation. And the fact of the matter is, you can line up fifty PhDs on one side of the issue, and fifty on the other, and we still don’t have answers. And we even see that out in the Marshall Islands today, with survivors of the Bravo shot.

The U.S. government can call in its experts, to talk about very low-level effects. What is perceived as the left, can bring in other experts to say that this is not the case. One thing I can tell you is that in the last twenty years, we’ve had about a thirty-fold decrease in international standards, saying what should be exposure levels to the public. And in the fifty years since the first tests at Bikini, those exposure levels have gone down by a factor of more than 300.

For example, the tolerance dose at Bikini Atoll was the equivalent of 100 millirem a day. Today, 100 millirem a year is deemed to be the maximum anyone should get, and actually for cleanup standards, it’s as low as fifteen or twenty-five millirem. And I’m talking 100 millirem per day, at Bikini. And there were sailors at Bikini who were exposed to 18,000 times the daily tolerance dose. Well, multiply that by 365, and you’ve got, in my opinion, some pretty severe radiation effects on people.

BAKER: What has happened to those sailors, and is it possible to...?

WEISGALL: Well again, there have been mortality tests done, and you know, another problem you’ve got with cancer is it doesn’t carry a flag, and it doesn’t say, hey, this cancer was related to exposure to that radiation. You come down with cancer, you don’t really know the cause. There are certainly some types of cancers, myeloma, leukemia, that are statistically deemed to be linked more to radiation exposure. Certainly thyroid problems, with iodine, which is a short-lived isotope, was clearly the case in the Rongalap case, in the Rongalap people, where you can see that direct link. When nineteen of twenty-one people have their thyroids removed, there’s no question.

With the Crossroads survivors, the one study that I’ve seen does not show any statistical aberrations. But it’s also, the report has been attacked because of the number included in the study. And I’m not an epidemiologist, and I really don’t feel qualified to comment on that.

BAKER: I mean, even in the 1962 test, I think, where, of all people, Robert Kennedy is observing the test, the Davey Crockett, a battlefield nuke... they show the soldiers, who ran into the cloud as part of the exercise, at the end being brushed off with kitchen whisk brooms, and there’s some comment that, you know, a couple of trucks needed washing down, but everyone was cleaned up. Was that consistent with what we knew to be true about radiation at that time?

WEISGALL: No, not at all. I mean you’ve got, you have the same thing back in 1946. You’ve got sailors swabbing the decks of ships that were exposed, that were the guinea pigs in the 1946 test. Instead of sailors and soldiers, we used ships, and animals, back in 1946. But you have the same scene. With, you know, some narrator with, for all I know, you know, Anchors Aweigh playing in the background, saying well, the old tried and true method of swabbing the decks is one way of getting rid of the radiation. Well, when you’ve got a wooden deck, and the radioactive material sinks into, this is organic material, you’re not really getting the job done. You’re getting rid of something, sure, you’re getting rid of some of the radiation, but you’re not really getting rid of all of it. And yet, this was the way to get things done. One aside. And it’s an awful thing to say, but it’s something you may want to consider.

The only positive aspect I can think of, of people like Robert Kennedy, or other policymakers witnessing these atmospheric tests, was the impact it must have had on them. Because there was a certain horror to them. I’m struck by the fact that, that, that strategic arms negotiators today by and large, are of an age where they haven’t seen an actual nuclear detonation. I know that the SALT I and SALT II negotiators knew whereof they spoke. They knew the horror and, and they knew the terror, they knew the impact of what these shots were like. If there’s any benefit to these folks having witnessed an atmospheric shot, it was that first-hand fear and terror that went along with the obviously beauty and bizarre excitement of one of these tests.

BAKER: One gets a sense in watching these films on nuclear testing that there was this kind of boys and their toys syndrome, that they were doing things with nuclear explosions just to see what would happen. Tests in outer space, tests to see if they would burn the rabbits’ retinas. They did, surprise. Tests to see if we could build tunnels or dams with nuclear weapons. I mean, can you give our viewers any insight into the mindset of the both government and scientific community at the time, with regard to the nuclear tests?

WEISGALL: Well, there is an element of what you say. I mean, it’s kind of like boys playing with matches up in the attic. In the historical research I did on the 1946 Crossroads test, I think I devoted even one or two chapters to this very issue. It was staggering. The most interesting document I came across is a letter in May of 1946, from Robert Oppenheimer, the basic Father of the Atom Bomb, certainly, in charge of the Los Alamos lab that built the bomb. A letter from Robert Oppenheimer to President Truman. Oppenheimer was asked to participate in a review committee on Operation Crossroads. He didn’t want to have any part of it, and he wrote a letter to Harry Truman, and I could quote it verbatim. He said “if you drop an atomic bomb on a ship, you will sink it.” Why, he asked, do you need to spend $400 million, take ninety-five ships to Bikini Atoll, and 40,000 men, and spend all that money to see what the effects are going to be? You’ll sink it. You drop a bomb on a ship, trust me, it’ll sink. That was his message. You know?

Now, a lot of it, to answer your question, a whole lot of politics. In the late '40s, what my research showed, was these tests were a little bit, they were less about the effects of atomic weapons, than they were interservice rivalry between the Army and the Navy. You have to remember that the, it was the U.S. Army Air Force that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We didn’t have an Air Force branch until 1947, so we had what was called the AAF, the Army Air Force. The Navy didn’t have the bomb. There were a lot of people after the war who were saying, what do we need a Navy for? All we need is a couple of airplanes, get a B-25, stick an atom bomb in it, fly it over Russia, what’s the problem? And of course, we were cutting the budget quite a bit.

So the Navy needed to show that, that it could withstand the bomb, the Navy wanted to be part of this new weapon. And I think that you saw that throughout the Cold War, that there was more than just testing going on. There were vested interests, vested parts of the military, that wanted to play on ongoing role with this weapon. That’s where the dollars were. And some of the dollars were leaving conventional weapons. Truman after the war cut the budget, cut the military budget drastically, but did increase spending for an Air Force that would be able to deliver an atomic bomb.

WEISGALL: The fact of the matter is, there was a saber-rattling aspect to all of these tests. Certainly at Operation Crossroads, the documents, the documentary history clearly shows one part of this was, send a signal to the Russians. Now mind you, mind you, this was a unique period of history, where we had the bomb and they didn’t. Nevertheless, the ongoing atmospheric tests, I think, did also maintain a certain saber-rattling quality -- Or, the, you know, here is the snake, and believe me, this rattlesnake can bite, you’ve got it.

I think you also have to put these tests, and these archival films that you are showing, in their historical context. Today, we don’t worry about the Cold War. I was just out in Los Angeles this weekend, and was at someone’s house, and they showed me their, the fallout shelter that came with the house. It was built in the early '50S, and there was a fallout shelter. People built fallout shelters in the 1950s. There was genuine concern that there might well be atomic warfare with the Russians. Eisenhower, I think, on five separate occasions, in the course of about six or nine months, was urged to use tactical nuclear weapons, by all of his military advisors. Eisenhower had the common sense to say you’ve got to be kidding! That’s another rabbit hole that we don’t have to go down, but, you know, kudos to Ike for not using tactical nuclear weapons.

In the 1950s, there was a very serious arms race, and the Cold War was at its height. Throw in a little bit of McCarthyism, and you’ve got a mandate to test weapons, and a mandate to put out these kinds of films that show that the weapons are good, that they’re strong for America, that they’re protecting us, that "don’t worry, Soldier, all of this is good, this is a little bit like Mom and apple pie, we’re beating the Russians..."

I can’t begin to tell you the number of veterans I have met over the years, who believed in the bomb, who also never even told their spouses what they were doing. There was a secrecy about all of this, but they were true patriots, they believed they were foot soldiers in this Cold War, and they were doing the right thing. That was the mindset at the time.

BAKER: Do you know much, can you comment much about the outer space explosions?

WEISGALL: No.

BAKER: Okay. That, I mean I didn’t even know we’d done that, really, until I got these films.

WEISGALL: Yeah, I do know, well, there was one, I do know there was one that knocked out all the electricity in Honolulu for a couple of days. The one that was set off at Johnston Atoll was at high altitude. It was not in outer space, I think it was about a 105,000 feet, it was detonated, which gets you well above, well into the stratosphere. And it could be seen in Honolulu, and I believe did knock out the lights, but I can’t really help you on the rest of it.

BAKER: I think most people would just be kind of stunned to realize we were, and it wasn’t just one or two. I forget the numbers, it was fifty, sixty, maybe a hundred even.

WEISGALL: I wasn’t aware it was that much.

BAKER: Some big ones, I mean four megatons. Well I’m, my only, I have kind of a broad question. I’ll state it, but I think you’ve kind of addressed it already. Maybe you’ll, it’ll trigger something for you. But broadly, wait, before I get to that, the other one I wanted to know, if you could comment on at all is the Canecan test, in ’71, I think it was, the Alaska test. I showed the otters, and they move the otters away, and then they did this five-megaton underground test, that just happened to be fairly close to the Soviet Union.

WEISGALL: You don’t want me for that. I mean, I know about some of the stuff, and I didn’t really respond to your, your Operation Plowshare, of using the atomic bomb to build harbors and you know, blow up --

BAKER: Right, well I don’t want you to emplace this, but feel that you’re outside of your--

WEISGALL: Yeah, I don’t have much more, Project Hope and all that.

BAKER: Broadly, then, what do these films say about us as a country, as a culture, and about the time in which they took place?

WEISGALL: Well, it says we loved Hollywood. I mean, they are a fascinating bit of cultural history of the United States. I mean, they really capture the mindset. And the mindset was fascinating. There was a belief that, there was a belief that these weapons really could be used. I mean, again, in a 2000 perspective, it’s extraordinary to think about it, but the fact of the matter is, in the 1940’s, '50s, and through the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was a very real threat that either tactical or strategic atomic weapons would be used in warfare.

And again, you’ve got to understand the mindset of the Soviet Union. The fact of the matter is that here the Soviets had lost 27 million people in World War II, they had survived, they had triumphed, they had marched west. They had achieved expansion beyond the tsar’s wildest dreams, and yet what happened at the end of the war? The United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and I think the mindset in the Soviet Union is that the United States would not hesitate to drop atomic bombs on the Soviet Union, in order to win a Cold War. That as much as anything, triggered Stalin’s fear, triggered the arms race, triggered this nuclear testing, that we have so amazingly captured in these films, which can only be called propaganda films, but are just a unique insight into the mindset of the United States in the 1950s. Which, I’d now be repeating myself, but it was, I think I’ve said it, a mindset that accepted the bomb, and that recognized that the bomb could be used in warfare. I mean that’s what I get out of this stuff.

BAKER: Mr. Weisgall, thank you very much.