Fact and Fiction on the Nuclear Age

Brace yourself for gobs of mushroom clouds if you decide to watch the 13-part PBS series War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, which began Monday evening January 23. Don’t be put off, though. The series is much better than you’d expect.

This extravaganza—costing $7 million, footed in part by seven separate foundations—is always gripping, continually educational, and mostly accurate. Billed as a blockbuster, it is. For here is television doing what it does best, conveying not information so much as emotion. Snuggled in your living room, you can feel the presence of the Bomb, whose birth and development coincided with that of television itself.

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Kenneth Adelman

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Brace yourself for gobs of mushroom clouds if you decide to watch the 13-part PBS series War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, which began Monday evening January 23. Don’t be put off, though. The series is much better than you’d expect.

This extravaganza—costing $7 million, footed in part by seven separate foundations—is always gripping, continually educational, and mostly accurate. Billed as a blockbuster, it is. For here is television doing what it does best, conveying not information so much as emotion. Snuggled in your living room, you can feel the presence of the Bomb, whose birth and development coincided with that of television itself.