I grew up fearing a demon. I wasn't alone. Many of us learned, whether in school or through the news, that this demon was out to get us. The demon was different than us. They didn't believe the same as we did. They wanted to hurt us, hurt us so much that they had these horrible weapons pointed in our direction. The demon was called the United Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

A specter of nuclear war hovered right outside my young mind. I didn't know why the USSR was the demon. No one ever took the time to actually teach me anything at all about the USSR. I just knew I was supposed to be scared. I also knew that I wasn't supposed to like "those" people.

My knowledge of the USSR? Minimal. Really none. My eighth grade history teacher, known for coming to class in a Elizabethan period outfit, skipped the lesson on the Soviet Union to "punish" us. He was mad, for some reason now faded from my memory, and refused to teach us. "This will be important stuff to you some day," the teacher said. "You'll be sorry you didn't get the lesson. We'll sit here in silence today."

Yeah. My public school wasn't the most progressive experience. I've come a long way from Center Junior High School. Hopefully they too have come a long way.

We have new demons to fear now. The process, however, is still the same. The xenophobia and ignorance is still the same. Children raised in the world since the World Trade Center came down have been taught by fearful adults to enact xenophobic fears toward people in Muslim countries--and people of the Muslim faith who are our neighbors in our own country.

The cycle continues. Someday a new demon will rise and replace our fear of Muslim people. When we turn our eyes away from the Muslim world they too, might turn their eyes away from us. They'll grow fearful of another demon as shall we.

We seem to be unable to find our way out of this cycle of fearing that which is different.

You can find this same xenophobia in the movie Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie. Narrated by William Shatner, Trinity offers up stunning visual imagery of the destructiveness of the weaponry. It provides an engrossing and terrifying spectacle of destruction. The movie fails to question why the bomb was really developed. Maybe the horror is enough. The demon unleashed from the atom speaks for itself.

I wish the documentary moved beyond "othering" those outside of the United States. The same tired old xenophobia is laced through the movie. The bomb was developed, as suggested in the movie, to end a terrible war with Japan. It also makes allusions to needed to protect ourselves against the danger of another more ominous other, the Soviet Union. The most haunting image of all was at the end of the documentary. Horses raced onto a mock battle field, faces and eyes covered with gas masks. Riding the horses were similarly masked human soldiers. When the mask was removed we saw the rise of a new other--the Chinese tested their own nuclear bomb.

The horrifying cycle continues. German. Japanese. Soviet. Chinese. Muslim. We can't seem to find a way to see the other as part of ourselves.

See http://irreverentpsychologist.blogspot.com/2012/07/demons-of-sixth- grade-red-circles-of.html for more

This film would have been nothing were it not for the outstanding scoring by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. The music amplifies the horror, the bizarre and grotesque beauty, the grandiose irony of this film and its subject. Shatner's fact-like voice is like monochrome, and never distracts from the subject with character. It is a purposefully amoral film to good effect. Without stretching far beyond the immediate implications of a nuclear blast, and by staying devoid of ideology, we are left with the terrible phenomenon itself - the atomic blast.

To me, this was a real horror movie... sitting paralyzed, bug eyed, shocked, mouth agape and all that, complete with surround sound and weighty, ponderous Russian orchestrations in grotesque minor keys. You pray to God they make presidents watch films like these.

I also thought the ending "However..." sequence was perfect. To say that weapons find rest in the hands of fools becomes a truly shocking understatement when you see the sheer unhinged lunacy of the final scene.

Excellent documentary narrated by actor William Shatner about the dawn of the Nuclear Age with the detonation of the first Atomic Bomb in the New Mexican Desert in he early morning hours of July 16, 1945. With the Atomic bomb in US hands it wasn't long before it was dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing as much as 130,000 people and thus ending the Second World War.

It was after the war that the US started to test the atomic bomb in a number of islands and atolls in the vast Pacific Ocean which proved just how dangerous and destructive it was by vaporing both islands and ships, surplus destroyers battleships and even aircraft carriers, that the bomb was targeted at. It wasn't until late August 1949 that the US lost it's monopoly on the Atomic Bomb with the Soviet Unions detonation of its own in Eastern Siberia. With a major enemy the USSR now having the bomb which secrets was stolen from the US, by the likes of pro communists Klaus Fuchs and US Army Sergent David Greenglass and the Rosnebergs Julius & Ethel, from right under its nose the US was now determined to start testing bigger and far more destructive atomic or nuclear bombs. That in order to keep the Russians for gaining the upper hand over it in the race with the USA on the dead end road for achieving mutual destruction" or a Thermo Nuclear war which no side could possibly win.

The film documents the tests conducted by the US and USSR of nuclear weapons that by 1963 at the signing by the two nations of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty well over 330 atmospheric nuclear bombs were tested by the US Governemnt alone! If you add up all the other US nuclear tests,underwater and underground,they amount to some 1,000! That's not counting those conducted by the USSR and other nations with nuclear capacity, Britian and France, the number of nuclear tests reach almost 2,000 in just under 20 years after the first atomic bomb was exploded! It's a wonder that the world was still around by then since there was enough nuclear bombs exploded, one a monstrous 57 megaton blast by the Soviet Union, to have destroyed the Earth a couple of times over!

With all the nations with nuclear weapons coming to their senses in how dangerous they are and trying to stop making and testing them Communist China suddenly and unexpectedly joined the nuclear club on October 16, 1964 with an Hiroshima type blast in the Gobi Desert making whatever gains in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons a mute point! With Communist China's leadership not willing to stop making and testing their new discovered toy or WMD: Weapon of Mass Destruction.

One of if not the best documentary ever made about the both Atomic & Hydrogen Bomb with first time never before shown rare US and USSR as well as Communist China government footage that brings out just how destructive these devices are. Even in peace time nuclear tests have destroyed and polluted, with nuclear radiation, thousands of square miles of sea and land making it both uninhabitable and void of any signs of life. You can just imagine what a real nuclear war could do if a world leader of a country that has the bomb is crazy enough to start one.