The Atom And Us

National Geographic 2011 Documentary on the World's Biggest Bomb (UK).

Documentary telling the story of the rise and fall of a daring experiment into atomic energy as the history of the Dounreay fast reactor is charted by the pioneers involved.

This film shows how far we have come since the cold-war days of the 50s and 60s. Back then the Russians were our "enemies". And to them the Americans were their "enemies" who couldn't be trusted. Somewhere in all this a young girl in Oklahoma named Shannon set her sights on becoming one of those space explorers, even though she was told "girls can't do that." But she did.

In August 1962, director Leslie Woodhead made a two-minute film in Liverpool's Cavern Club with a raw and unrecorded group of rockers called the Beatles. He arranged their first live TV appearances on a local show in Manchester and watched as the Fab Four phenomenon swept the world. Twenty-five years later while making films in Russia, Woodhead became aware of how, even though they were never able to play in the Soviet Union, the Beatles' legend had soaked into the lives of a generation of kids. This film meets the Soviet Beatles generation and hears their stories about how the Fab Four changed their lives, including Putin's deputy premier Sergei Ivanov, who explains how the Beatles helped him learn English and showed him another life. (Storyville)

With access to recently-opened court files, Julie Etchingham reveals some of the Stasi's UK operations and asks why its other secrets are yet to be revealed.

Portentously portrays the evacuation of Portland, Oregon, when threatened by a nuclear attack on its state-of-the-art civil defense system.

U.S. nuclear tests in space, and the development of the military intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

Documentary portrait of Karel Köcher, supposedly the most important communist agent to infiltrate the CIA.

The Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the May events in France, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the Prague Spring, the Chicago riots, the Mexico Summer Olympics, the presidential election of Richard Nixon, the Apollo 8 space mission, the hippies and the Yippies, Bullitt and the living dead. Once upon a time the year 1968.

For most of us, including actor Fred MacMurray who presents the film, the noun atom and the adjective atomic are synonymous with devastation, period. Of course, there was Hiroshima and Nagasaki but atomic energy is also - at least according to Father James Keller, who produced the documentary - "a Gift from God". For atomic power can also (and should only) be beneficial for mankind. In 1952, it is already effective in various fields, such as industry, agriculture and medicine. Let the atom be a blessing instead of a curse.

Made at the height of 'cold war' paranoia, this drama-documentary shows the work of the UK Warning and Monitoring Organisation, who's duties included the issuing of public warnings of any nuclear missile strike and the subsequent fallout.