Fear, something that I have never really thought about and when I did, I found it fascinating in every way. In this unit of fear, we explored it with the perception of nuclear technology. Anything we did with fear, the teachers connected it to the fear of nuclear technology expressed by historical fears and also current fears.

Some of the most notable assignments was watching the film “The China Syndrome” and the documentary, “Nuclear Nightmares”. After this, we came up with a question that was connected, I came up with the question of how nuclear disasters affect decision making.

The field study for this unit was the best of the two that I have been on. All the attractions, from the AMARC boneyard to the Mob Museum in Las Vegas were interesting and well chosen. Lots of destinations really got me hyped and interested like the Pima air and space museum and the Hoover Dam. I never thought that Las Vegas had anything else other than adult entertainment. The main highlight for me on this that is also beneficial to my final project is the visit to the Titan II Missile Museum. Seeing a Cold War era missile that could cause the end of the world is a chilling and awesome sight. Realizing the significance of how it can also explode within the United States was also key to my final project as the driving question centers upon it.

For my final project, I worked with a friend Luciano who did not go on the trip. The project was to answer develop and answer a question in relation to something we saw on the trip. The question went through many revisions and even another one after the trip. The final question came to how safe were these nuclear Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles stored in their silos. Our answer to this was that while there are many safeties to activating the nuclear warhead on these missiles, there is always a chance that another part of the missile can fail and inadvertently detonate the nuclear warhead. Using this question, we determined that the fuel, flaws in building the warhead, and the missile being a target for preemptive disarming of the American arsenal by the Soviets could cause a nuclear detonation on the United States. Video below,

This project was a very big hassle as our driving was revised after the trip which basically made my interviews and footage useless. Luckily there were some pictures and videos that our class took. In the spirit of my growth mindset, I tried to use Adobe Premiere Pro to put together project. I realized later that I may have went to deep and went a program too complicated to learn in the span of time that we had to put this project together but I did it anyways. The video lacks the finesse of any of the other PLP students but hopefully now that I have learned the program, I can use it more effectively in the future. Editing took a surprisingly long amount of time because I had no help from my partner who did not have a computer to do the work. The audio had many issues where I had to balance it all out because the recording hardware was different between Luciano and I. Something I learned from this project is to be happy with what I have got and not nitpick too much because sometimes the part but we wanted to change it all again because the changes did not make the desired effect.

In the end, the trip through this project was gruelling, partly because the video took a long time to make and I had to learn a new program. The end result is a video that I have tried very hard on among all the other things I had going on. It is something that I have to be proud I made it.