The film covers the beginnings of the era of nuclear warfare, created from a broad range of archival film from the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s - including newsreel clips, television news footage, U.S. government-produced films (including military training films), advertisements, television and radio programs. News footage reflected the prevailing understandings of the media and public.
Between 1960 and 1966, France carried out four atmospheric nuclear tests and another thirteen underground ones to the south of Reggane (Algerian Sahara). The first was called Blue Jerboa and was four times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. For the first time, French and Tuareg survivors speak of their fight to have their illnesses recognized as such, and reveal in what the conditions the tests were carried out. Fifty years later, the French Army still refuses to acknowledge its responsibility towards the populations exposed to the radiation.
A narrator begins the piece by relating what an atom is and how atomic energy can be harnessed by man to produce "limitless" energy. Dr. Atom (a caricature with an atom for a head) then explains the similarities between the solar system and atomic structure. He then goes on to relate how the atom is made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. After this, the narrator explains how there are more than 90 elements with many possible isotopes for each.
Filmed in black-and-white with a running time of just under 50 minutes, The War Game depicts the prelude to and the immediate weeks of the aftermath to a Soviet nuclear attack against Britain. A Chinese invasion of South Vietnam starts the war; tensions escalate when the United States authorises tactical nuclear warfare against the Chinese. Although Soviet and East German forces threaten to invade West Berlin if the US does not withdraw that decision, the US does not acquiesce to communist demands and the invasion takes place; two US Army divisions attempt to fight their way into Berlin to counter this, but the Russian and East German forces overwhelm them in conventional battle. In order to turn the tide, the US president authorises the NATO commanders to use their tactical nuclear weapons, and they soon do so. An escalating nuclear war results, during which larger Russian strategic IRBMs are launched at Britain. The film remarks that many Soviet missiles were, at the time, believed to be liquid-fuelled and stored above ground, making them vulnerable to attack, and hypothesises that in any nuclear crisis, the USSR would be obliged to fire all of them as early as possible in order to avoid their destruction by counter-attack, hence the rapid progression from tactical to strategic nuclear exchange.
Ce film documentaire a été réalisé et produit par John Else en association avec la chaîne de télévision publique KTEH de San José (Californie). Le film raconte l'histoire de Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), le physicien qui joua un rôle prépondérant dans le développement de la première bombe atomique, testée en juillet 1945 au centre d'essai nucléaire de Trinity au Nouveau-Mexique.