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'The Bomb' on PBS summarizes the Atomic Age but lacks depth

What do power and fear look like? For several years, starting in the 1940s, they took the form of an expanding mushroom cloud and an eerie orange glow, cloaked in strange code names like Trinity and Crossroads.

The Bomb, an ambitious documentary premiering Tuesday on PBS and KERA-TV (Channel 13), provides the eerie and iconic visuals along with a surplus of historical and scientific context. It covers the race with Germany to build the first atom bomb and the game-changing transition from uranium to plutonium. We hear from scientists who conducted the research that would change the world - the bomb did that, as narrator Jonathan Adams tells us over and over again. Eminent authors chime in, including Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which remains the definitive book on the subject.

This is a solid, workmanlike doc, even if it feels rushed at times. You could turn any number of the plotlines here, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the atomic age of pop culture and the shameful witch hunt of bomb architect J. Robert Oppenheimer, into a free-standing documentary. Taken as a whole, The Bomb could easily stand up to the six-hour miniseries treatment granted PBS' recent cancer study, The Emperor of All Maladies.

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But you take what you can get, in this case a fine Cliffs Notes summary of what the film argues is the most important discovery since fire.

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Fatman
Fatman(Courtesy of Los Alamos National Library)

The bomb introduced the threat of the fast, cataclysmic strike to warfare and international relations. It was both terrifying and somehow sexy: The inventor of the bikini named his new bathing suit after Bikini Atoll, where the United States detonated 23 nuclear devices between 1946 and 1958. It seems he thought the new fashion craze would create an explosive impact. For the record, he was right.

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The Bomb works best when it incorporates such human touches. Personality conflicts flare up throughout. Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, resented the preening intellectualism of the scientists he recruited to join the team. Oppenheimer was a source of suspicion from the start, and when he spoke out against the hydrogen bomb, his opponents went in for the kill. Physicist Edward Teller and Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss led the charge to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance and drag his name through the mud. Bomb politics, like most politics, could be ugly business.

The Bomb touches on the fear and panic that pervaded every element of life at the height of the Atomic Age, the sense that it all could end at any moment and the dubious idea that you might survive if you ducked under your school desk. But the film never quite drives into the palpable anxiety of the period, the existential dread. The Bomb is engineered to speak to as many people at the same time as possible, not to probe the heart of darkness suggested by the possibility of complete annihilation. Then again, maybe we don't need that right now. Our current events are scary enough.

The Bomb

7 p.m. Monday, Channel 13. 114 mins.