will.

The film was made during that brief interval between the end of the World War and the onset of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. As a result, the script is freed from political constraints that would have colored the account had it been made, say, five years later. Thus there's a hopeful air that the new technology will be used for peaceful purposes now that war has become "unthinkable".

Perhaps the film's chief value lies in just that sort of comparison between the onset of the nuclear age and present day. In fact, war was not made obsolete by nuclear technology, but limits were placed on how far the combatants should go in pursuing their aims. Even so, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 came apparently withina hair's breadth of a nuclear outbreak, while civil defense drills of the 1950's emphasized surviving a nuclear exchange. Clearly, the Cold War had not fulfilled the hopes expressed in the film.

Note also the welcoming line accorded the moguls from America's major industries, e.g. General Electric, who were being recruited to help with the project. Cynics might regard the coming together of big government and private industry as the symbolic beginning of the now notorious "military-industrial complex" that dominates so much of the contemporary economy. Note also how easily government seizes property and relocates its owners to other locales. Here the seizure is portrayed in a cooperative and problem-free manner for understandable reasons. The subtext, however, clearly implies the growth of government in the name of national security.

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