A Short History Of Nuclear Folly

director: Rudolph Herzog
DoP: Henning Brümmer
narrator: Eva Mattes
Ilona Grundmann Filmproduktion for ARTE and ZDF Enterprises

In the spirit of “Dr. Strangelove”, the film tells stories such as that of the accidental drop of a nuclear weapon on the house of train conductor Walter Gregg. “We heard a loud boom!”, says his son. “First daddy thought a jet had crashed. But then it turned out that a plane had dropped a nuclear bomb in our backyard”. In similar incidents during the Cold War, 40 nuclear weapons were destroyed or lost. Some of them are not accounted for to this day
Based on Rudolph Herzog’s recent critically acclaimed book, „A Short History of Nuclear Folly“, the film uses recently declassified footage from Russia and the U.S. and interviews with eyewitnesses to illustrate some of the strangest and scariest episodes of the Cold War Era – from the filming of a John Wayne movie in a radioactive canyon, to the loss of four hydrogen bombs in Greenland.