Documenting the effects of nuclear energy on the screen is itself as old as the discovery of radiation and the invention of the motion picture (Broderick 1995b). Following academic Eric Barnouw's lead with Hiroshima- Nagasaki – August, 1945 (1970), filmmakers in the 1970s began to access and distribute previously classified nuclear footage, including suppressed images of the human effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Hirano 1996; Nornes 1996). During that decade, documentarians produced a ‘surge of investigative filmmaking’, where both military and civilian nuclear energy ‘came under sharp scrutiny’ (Barnouw 1993: 308–9.) These whistleblowing films, aired on both American public television and by commercial broadcasters, revealed the industrial and corporate negligence in producing, stockpiling and safeguarding nuclear materials. By the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, nuclear narratives became the focus of multiple documentary approaches, ranging from point-of-view advocacy, to satirical found footage compilations (‘collage junk films’), to performative and journey films (Bruzzi 2000: 39). The 1980s was the zenith of documentary production on all matters nuclear. Increasingly, the dangers of civilian nuclear power production were intrinsically linked with weapons production and the military-industrial complex, including No Nukes (Goldberg, Potenza and Schlossberg 1980), Dark Circle (Irving and Beaver 1982), America: From Hitler to MX (Harvey 1982) and Sherman's March (McElwee 1986). A decade of domestic and exported neoliberal economics under the Thatcher-Regan administrations reenergised Cold War hostilities with the Soviet Bloc; geopolitical antagonisms that were reconfigured in revisionist historical documentaries, such as Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang (dirs Willis and Landau, 1980), Backs to the Blast (dir. Bardwell, 1981), The Atomic Café (dirs Rafferty, Loader and Rafferty, 1982), Half Life (dir. O'Rourke, 1986) and Radio Bikini (dir. Stone, 1988).

Despite the tragic fire and mass contamination from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster impacting the Ukraine, Belarus and Europe, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the embrace of free market capitalism, fears of nuclear war and reactor accidents were quickly replaced by mounting concerns over anthropomorphic global warming and climate change. Nuclear fear was quickly transposed onto a new existential threat (Weart 2012).