The New York Times ran an article on Sunday, July 11, on a trifecta of Cold War films scheduled for release on July 23. They are Farewell, an "espionage drama" set in the end of the Cold War, Salt, which stars Angelina Jolie as a CIA officer accused of spying for the Soviet Union, and Countdown to Zero, a documentary on the nuclear peril we face today.
After the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, film studios moved away from making movies about the Cold War and shifted their focus to the Balkans. Today, Hollywood's interest in the Cold War has been rekindled, and the recent arrest of 11 people accused of being Russian spies will make the release of these films particularly timely.
Thomas C. Reed, who spoke at the Atomic Heritage Foundation's "Revisiting
Reykjavik" symposium in March 2009, was a special assistant to
President Ronald Reagan and is an expert on Cold War history. Reed
authored At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War. His
book provided the account for the Farewell case, which is the codename
of a KGB colonel who decided to "change the world" by passing classified
information on defense technology to French intelligence. He also
provided the French with a list of highly placed KGB agents who had
inflitrated the West. According to Reed, the film gets the espionage
aspect right, but presented a highly compressed version of the political
events that surrounded it.
Please click here to read the New York Times article on these movies.
Links to the official websites of the three movies described in the
article are provided below:
The Atomic Heritage Foundation
910 17th Street, NW
Suite 408
Washington, DC 20006
202-293-0045 info@atomicheritage.org
Atomic Story of the Week
There were a lot of rumors about what was going on at Hanford. Everything was coming in, nothing was going out. And some people said, "Oh, that's a sandpaper factory. They hold up a glued sheet of paper and the dust coats it." Others said that the gigantic facilities rising from the desert were going to be FDR's winter place. At a show-and-tell session at school, a kid says, "I know what they're making. They're making toilet paper. My dad brings home two rolls in his lunch bucket everyday."
I remember an incident when one of the workers was leaving the plant with a bunch of copper wire wrapped around his waist. A patrolman noticed him, gave him a pat search and said, "Step over here, please." The rest of us went on. We never saw the guy again.
ROGER ROHRBACHER, HANFORD
Did You Know?
"It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them." (J. Robert Oppenheimer, Scientific Director, Manhattan Project)
