With the Bush administration’s lingering hysteria over those elusive weapons of mass destruction, it is both timely and prudent to revisit the original weapon of mass destruction pioneered in the 20th century: The atomic bomb.

Original Child Bomb is a documentary — a mélange of declassified footage, animation, spoken word, media clips, still footage, statistics, interviews with current high school students, and assorted contemporary footage — that takes its inspiration and its name from the Thomas Merton poem of the same title.  

The film functions, as the original poem’s subtitle indicates, as “points for meditation,” about the nuclear age “to be scratched on the walls of a cave.” Director Carey Schonegevel’s film focuses on the bombs that America rained on Hiroshima and Nagasaki almost 60 years ago, and it examines how America has portrayed — through journalism, schooling, and the nebulous but powerful collective consciousness — America’s development of the atomic bomb and its lethal deployment in Japan.

Original Child Bomb also speaks to the lingering threat of nuclear armaments and the attendant misinformation that circulates around subject; it is, then, a heart-breakingly relevant reminder of and meditation on the nuclear age and the harrowing traumas of war.

Mimi Hanaoka