Life as we know it almost ended in 1980. At a Titan II complex in Damascus, Ark., a technician dropped a wrench during routine service of one of the missiles. It bounced down the cavernous silo and punctured the missile's fuselage. Rocket fuel poured out, and desperate efforts began to prevent the warhead - 600 times greater in explosive power than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima - from detonating. With reenactments the equal of any thriller and gripping interviews with participants, experts, and survivors, Robert Kenner's Command and Control" shows how close we came to the brink of annihilation, and how likely the chances are of such an accident occurring again - with potentially catastrophic consequences. While "Command and Control" tells the story of a nuclear catastrophe that nearly happened in the past, Peter Galison and Robb Moss's documentary "Containment" shows how the distant future - as in hundreds of thousands of years from now - might be a little dicey, too. The problem is the hundreds of millions of gallons of nuclear waste, some with a half-life in six digits, the residue of weapons making and reactors, that litter the landscape. Not only must secure places be found to store it, but some way must be devised to warn future generations who might not share the same language as us. Moss and Galison employ startling documentary footage and scintillating sci-fi-like animation in examining the danger.
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