In case it has slipped your mind, Robert (Merchants of Doubt) Kenner’s doc is here to remind us that nuclear technology inspired the very acme of human scientific stupidity and arrogance.

With slick re-creations shot at a decommissioned silo, we learn about the men—barely in their 20s, for the love of God—who dealt with a nightmarish accident at a Titan II missile complex in Damascus, Arkansas, in 1980. That already redundant piece of technology could have wiped out most of the continent with its payload of over 650 Hiroshimas, and very nearly did. For their pains, those involved—still physically and emotionally scarred by the experience—were subsequently treated to the finest in CYA military abuse. That’s all depressing and frightening enough, but Command and Control really drives its point home with talking heads like the grim former project leader from Sandia National Laboratories, who unblinkingly assures us that our luck with these crazy fucking doomsday machines and the kids who maintain them is inevitably going to run out.