Nuclear weapons“Cold War warriors”: Sandia’s decades in nuclear weapons

Published 19 May 2016

“Cold War Warriors,” a 32-minute historical documentary, traces nuclear weapons testing from the first nuclear detonation in southern New Mexico in 1945 to the final test in September 1992. The story is told largely by forty-four Sandia Lab field testers, the people video producer Myra Buteau calls “game changers in the evolution of nuclear weapons testing.”

Sandia National Laboratories video producer Myra Buteau swept a hand toward the top shelf of a bookcase stuffed with black cases of high-definition tapes. The biggest challenge in telling the story of Sandia’s years of above-ground and underground nuclear weapon field tests, she said, was condensing the 100 hours of interviews on those tapes into a 32-minute historical documentary.

Cold War Warriors traces nuclear weapons testing from the first nuclear detonation in southern New Mexico in 1945 to the final test in September 1992. Buteau narrates, but the story is told largely by forty-four Sandia field testers, the people she calls “game changers in the evolution of nuclear weapons testing.”

“I wanted to create a documentary that not only showed the significance of their contributions but also gave the essence of who these nuclear weapons field testers were,” she said.

Sandia Lab notes that the film opens with a montage of historical photos and documents and progresses into interwoven interviews about nearly fifty years of nuclear tests in New Mexico, south Pacific islands and the Nevada Test Site, now the Nevada National Security Site. It includes footage of the tests and the political events that shaped the era. Buteau calls the field testers “behind-the-scenes heroes on the world stage during a frightening time in American history known as the Cold War.”

Told by those who built the legacy
“It’s important for people to see the legacy of the labs and the people who built that legacy,” she said. “I really wanted to pay tribute to the individuals who dedicated their lives, who had such a passion for this work, and to the families. There were a lot of stories of people who’d go away to testing and they’d be gone three weeks, four weeks, five weeks. It was a huge effort.”

The first interview shown is with the late Ben Benjamin, who teases that the filmmakers really wanted J. Robert Oppenheimer or Gen. Leslie Groves, the men who headed the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb. But they died decades ago, forcing the interviewers to go down a list until “you finally got to a technician who was there, and that was me.”

For Buteau, Benjamin “epitomized the field test, the can-do attitude, the esprit de corps mindset and the get-the-job-done motto.”