Soon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie that studio chief Louis B. Mayer called “the most important story” he would ever film: a big-budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the revolutionary new weapon. Over at Paramount, Hal B. Wallis was ramping up his own film version. His screenwriter: the novelist Ayn Rand, who saw in physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer the model for a character she was sketching for ATLAS SHRUGGED. Greg Mitchell’s THE BEGINNING OR THE END chronicles the first efforts of American media and culture to process the Atomic Age.

In the summer of 1962, the year after the rise of the Berlin Wall, a group of young West Germans risked prison, Stasi torture and even death to liberate friends, lovers and strangers in East Berlin by digging tunnels under the Wall. NBC and CBS funded two separate tunnels in return for the right to film the escapes, planning spectacular prime-time specials. President John F. Kennedy, however, was wary of anything that might spark a confrontation with the Soviets. So he approved unprecedented maneuvers to quash both documentaries, testing the limits of a free press in an era of escalating nuclear tensions.