On May 23, government officials from the Republic of the Marshall Islands traveled 6,000 miles to commemorate their country’s Constitution Day in Dubuque. The Iowa city has gathered to mark the Marshallese holiday since 2005. “Today is more than a national celebration,” Isaac Zackhras, Vice Speaker of the Marshall Islands’ parliament told the crowd in […]
Nuclear disarmament
Donna Reed and her Iowa science teacher sought to spotlight the horror of the atomic bomb. Then the White House got involved.
The studio promised it would be a prestigious motion picture, with big stars and stunning visual effects. The movie would tell the true story of the creation of the atomic bomb, and give people a fuller understanding of what it means to live in a world with such weapons. It was 1947, 76 years before […]
As ‘Oppenheimer’ drops, local cinemas focus in on nuclear films, Iowa’s atomic history
With the highly anticipated premiere of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer on the summer calendar, FilmScene staffer Lee Sailor decided to curate a Nuclear Movies series over a few weeks in July. The Iowa City cinema’s series typically last longer, but “we were slightly concerned about how many people would want to go see the world end […]
Eight minutes to live
On Nov. 26, 2017, the Hawai’ian government reinstated the “attack warning” siren amidst growing fears of a possible missile attack from North Korea. My wife, Julia, and I were living in Wailuku, a town on the island of Maui. Along with the rest of the citizens of Hawai’i, we had watched with growing apprehension as Trump and Kim Jong Un began their volley of insults and threats with our islands stuck in between.
Atomic forum to address ongoing global nuke threat
Talking about nuclear assault on a Sunday morning might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but lest we forget, an atomic massacre took place 70 years ago today. The Japanese city of Hiroshima received the first deadly payload, followed by a second bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later…




