DVD Review - Weapons Races

Current events are plagued with paranoia over who has what weapons. We left a Black Hawk helicopter in Pakistan! Iran has nuclear weapons! And while those fears are of course legitimate, putting them in a historical context sometimes makes them less scary. That's perhaps why Weapons Races is here; to show us just how many times the world has grappled over military technology.

The three disc set from Acorn Media's documentary imprint Athena hits shelves on Tuesday, June 21. Seen on Discovery's Military Channel, Weapons Races details just how fighter jets and atom bombs came to be, and all the times the winner of that particular weapons race could have been someone else entirely. Each episode chronicles the creation of another war machine; from radar to strategic ballistic missiles, there's not much that isn't covered in the set, right up until the 1990s, when this documentary was made. It's fast-paced and informative, especially for military or history buffs.Special features are limited to on-screen biographies of the inventors shown in the program and a sixteen-page viewer's guide to the series, which reads like a small textbook.

The set is fairly interesting from a variety of perspectives, and military buffs will marvel at just how far weapons of war have come.

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