"Who is shooting where"

Could an odel pit be converted into a fallout shelter? The expert on the phone
advises the caller to visit the
neighbor's cellar because of the potentially toxic gases. A mother, worried that her children
would be cut off from her at school in the event of a nuclear attack, is reassured by the expert who points out that
an emergency is always preceded by a period of preparation in the form of a crisis. Clearly
relieved, the woman hangs up the phone. These question and answer games about the atomic bomb
come from the BR radio program "Das Notizbuch" (The Notebook), and they seem no less absurd
than the excerpt from an American training film from the 1950s that demonstrates
survival at a picnic: The family throws dishes and food into the air
and crawls under the tablecloth.

Such scenes can be found in the documentary Who's Shooting Where by the video cooperative
B.O.A, which first of all makes it urgently clear that weapons technology has constantly evolved in the
almost forty years that we have been living with the bomb,
while the conversation about the protection of the civilian population has come to a standstill at the 1950
level. However, this insight does not result in the demand for more effective civil protection
: weapons of destruction can now be deployed so quickly, with such
precision and such destructive effect that protective measures would be pointless from the outset
. The only remedy against nuclear war is to prevent it. In view of the
"feasibility" of small, limited nuclear wars, as Robert Jungk puts it in this
documentary, the peace movement has become a survival movement.
To show how and why we are dependent on armaments, and what new dependencies
the further armament brings with it - that is the main focus of Who is shooting where.
The documentary works for the most part with material from German television; it
shows in a startling way how often images
are used to emphasize the aesthetics of modern weapons systems, even in critically intended contributions. But there are also
excerpts from programs that cannot be shown often enough: For example, the
interview with one of the fathers of the neutron bomb, who explains quite matter-of-factly that this
weapon was never intended for defense, but for attack from the very beginning. This is precisely
the special merit of the documentary: to bring together information that is publicly accessible but
otherwise too scattered and to gain new insights into
from it. Finally, the footage shot by video groups of the most recent
peace demonstrations in Munich, Bonn and Berlin illuminates the
dark spots in official reporting.

Who shoots where reflects the current state of the debate and establishes connections
that cannot be seen on television. The documentary is therefore also a
successful example of how groups that have little access to the media can create
publicity for themselves. (In Munich at the Werkstattkino, a cassette with the
documentary can be borrowed from the video cooperative B.O.A.).

CHRISTIAN BAUER, Süddeutsche Zeitung