Tackling the subject of a crucial international threat—the renewed atomic arms race—former ABC News executive producer Robert E. Frye's documentary serves up a parade of talking heads who happen to be among the world's foremost experts on nukes, weighing in on the thorny issues surrounding disarmament negotiations and prevention. But this is, unfortunately, a monotonous film, a ceaseless string of commentary in which everyone speaks over an incredibly annoying piece of piano music (“Nuclear Requiem”) by composer Alain Kremski. The Nuclear Requiem offers an overall general assessment of where the world is at some 70-plus years after the U.S. launched the atomic age by bombing Japan twice. It's not pretty: North Korea is unconstrained in its nuclear goals, Iran was talked into a deal that many do not support, the U.S. and Russia are modernizing their arsenals at the exact moment that tensions are higher than ever, and pockets of regional arms races (India and Pakistan, for instance) are intensifying. The good old days of treaties that ensured transparency, de-escalation, and entire classes of weapons being canceled now appear to be the stuff of nostalgia. Frye goes on to look at the reasons behind the current malaise: there are today many more players, nukes are now accompanied by other kinds of catastrophic weapons (cyber, biological, etc.), and East-West geopolitical maneuvering (think Crimea) is destabilizing broad swaths of the world. What to do? One thing Frye focuses on is educating a new generation of experts in non-proliferation about various ways to address problems while keeping in mind the opposition's point-of-view, and there is diplomatic hope in gestures such as Barack Obama visiting Hiroshima. But one has to tease these golden strands out from the talky blur of this documentary. A strong optional purchase. Aud: C, P. (T. Keogh)
The Nuclear Requiem
(2016) 90 min. DVD: $89: public libraries & high schools; $295: colleges & universities. DRA. The Video Project. PPR. Closed captioned. Volume 32, Issue 2
The Nuclear Requiem
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