“The Atomic Cafe” was released in 1982 and was produced and directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty. It is an American propaganda documentary. The film documents the account of America’s journey from the creation of the atomic bomb in the mid-forties through the cold war to the late fifties and the development of the hydrogen bomb. The story is told through various propaganda means. On the menu are clips of training films, newsreels, public service announcements and cartoons. The film also includes a section that depicts a mock attack on U.S. shores. There is no other narration in the film other than what was already in any of the clips used.
It’s a combination of horror and farce in real life during the cold war. Videos of civilian public service announcements with silly jingles and lively music are combined with stark scenes of American soldiers indifferently walking toward mushroom clouds in the distance, showing the absurdity of the casualness given to such a deadly weapon. Apparently, war is good.
Although the film’s clips themselves were created as educational and serious, they also showed how the government gaslit the public, and its own soldiers, into believing that fallout from the use of atomic energy was safe and easy to avoid. The government’s lies also claimed that citizens could survive fallout by hiding under blankets, beds and desks. America’s con job was also inflicted on Marshallese Islanders in the Pacific where testing on Bikini Atoll blew radioactive dust on unsuspecting islanders. Clips also include footage from the 1945 Trinity Test of the Atomic bomb, which hailed the beginning of the end of WWII, as well as documentation of the devastation resulting in the using the bomb on Japan.
Various well known political, military and civilian people appear in the clips including, Nikita Khrushchev, Ronald Reagan, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Joseph Stalin, Douglas MacArthur, Harry S. Truman and the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, who were responsible for giving the Soviet Union classified plans for nuclear weapons. The Rosenbergs were the first American citizens convicted and executed for traitorous acts during peacetime.
Currently nine countries are known to have nuclear weapons. Iran is not one of them. The known countries are Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea. Russia and the U.S. have 90% of them.
The Hydrogen bomb is the next generation of thermonuclear weapons. The Atomic bomb used fission or the splitting of atoms to release energy whereas the Hydrogen or H-bomb uses a two-stage process of a fission explosion to trigger a secondary fusion reaction of hydrogen isotopes to produce an explosion thousands of times more powerful than the A-bomb. (So far only atomic bombs have been used in war. Hydrogen bombs have only been tested.) H-bombs are sometimes referred to as city-killers.
In 2016, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.