Roots of Radioactivity

Watched the new Amazon movie Radioactive with Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie with great interest, knowing relatively little about the lives of the Curies and exactly how they discovered radium.  Expected a good bio-pic with a fine actress and indeed it was well done if not fully developed.  But what was rather shocking was how often it flashed forward to the rather negative results (along with the positive) of her work.

So we saw the pilot of the Enola Gay carrying the first atomic bomb to Hiroshima--and remarkably a rather view in America of a Hiroshima street scene with average folks about to be pulverized.  A little later in the movie we are at a U.S. nuclear test site in Nevada in 1961 with people paying to watch the blast and a fake suburban village constructed to absorb the blow.  Then, a little later: Chernobyl.    A Hiroshima victim re-appears in a fantasy sequence at the end of the film.

That's more "Hiroshima" content than we have seen in a mainstream in America in...decades.  And that's the very subject of my new book.