Bobby McFerrin - Don't Worry Be Happy (Official Music Video)

Added later for those for whom the joke is too complex and the many English letters are overwhelming. A one-page article from a May 1940 scientific journal reassures readers about the circulating rumors about a supposedly possible nuclear chain reaction. The author of the article reassures readers. Don't Worry, Be Happy! The latest data from Joliot-Curie's laboratory show that the chain reaction, which had begun, is in fact dying down. So there's no need to worry about the possibility of a nuclear explosion! Don't worry! There won't be any explosion (or bomb)! :)

For those who dare to read this one-page article from the distant, hot May of 1940, I suggest playing "Don't Worry, Be Happy!" by Bobby McFerrin as background music. The sarcastic atmosphere for the reader burdened with knowledge of the future will be absolute. :)

A cursory google search didn't turn up much discussion of Downwind on this sub (or reddit more generally) so I thought this content might be welcome.

Downwind focuses, really to the exclusion of other important information, on so-called "Downwinders:" people who have suffered as a result of American nuclear testing. And, to be clear, there are a lot of people who have suffered as a result of that testing. Atmospheric nuclear testing lofted huge amounts of exciting radioisotopes into the air which settled down onto people, animals, crops, water sources, and wilderness over the course of several decades.

People died and I do not mean to undersell the gravity of that. The documentary does a great job of addressing the seriousness of the health concerns that radioactive fallout presented, especially to people in Utah and other areas immediately downwind of the Nevada test ranges.

What it does not do is adequately represent the difficulty of the choices facing the US government at that time. The documentary portrays the American military, Department of Energy, and the nuclear testing program in general as somewhere between indifferent ecoterrorists and mustache-twirling villains. What little voice is given to this other side of the story is that of Darwin Morgin who worked as the Director of Public Affairs for the Nevada Test Site. Morgin is offered as a kind of a foil for the aggrieved widows and first nations' representatives and his interview really seems to exist to illustrate government disinterest in their plight.

While I would have liked to see a more nuanced take on nuclear testing and the moral quandaries it presents, I can also understand why that might not have been of interest to the filmmaker. What I can not understand is the willingness to repeat factual inaccuracies as if they are truth.

Two really stood out to me.

The first is the conclusion of the interview with Claudia Peterson. Peterson's case is especially brutal; she lost essentially her entire extended family to various testing-related cancers. Towards the end of her interview she expresses frustration with the frequency of American testing, asking what could possibly be learned by the 10th, 11th, or 12th test (nevermind the 900th) which wasn't known in the 1st or 2nd. Allowing that to stand unanswered rather than explaining the role of testing for miniaturization and the development of specialized designs would constitute journalistic malpractice in a different medium. Ignoring the importance of testing in the pre-simulation era and allowing the audience to conclude that these detonations were instead the result of mania or corruption cheapens the rest of the film.

The second is an off-topic digression into mocking the "Duck and Cover" drills of the 1950s. Now, I understand why this segment was included. Lewis Black does a hilarious bit about Duck and Cover and he was willing to be interviewed for the documentary. I too would move heaven and earth to get Lewis Black into my documentary. But Black is comedian and it's his job to tell funny jokes about the futility of Duck and Cover.

It is a documentarian's job to tell the truth. And the truth is that, because of the way the area of a circle works, for any given nuclear detonation, there is a heck of a lot more area in which "hide under a desk" will save your life than there is area in which it is a useless gesture. Duck and Cover was a sensible policy in the 1950s. Had there actually been a war with the Soviets it would have saved a lot of lives. The filmmaker sought to use this as another way to show the government as callous and manipulative rather than acknowledging the different strategic reality faced by 1950s America and how the vision of nuclear war changed over the next several decades (necessitating, one might note, further nuclear testing to develop the weapons with which it might be fought).

Overall I found the whole piece just a little too similar in tone to a Captain Planet cartoon.... which is why I was also surprised that they left out perhaps the most poignant story of Downwinders in the history of the American nuclear program. Trinity, the very first nuclear test, took place in a remote corner of New Mexico but not remote enough. Ash from the explosion wafted down from the sky onto the teenage girls at the Carmadean Dance Camp in Ruidoso, New Mexico.

Of the 12 girls at the camp that day, only one lived past the age of 30.