Life Was Good is a moving portrait of one American family whose lives were tragically altered by the misfortune of living next to the Nevada Test Site. At the center of both the film and the family is Claudia Peterson, a 40 year old cashier at a supermarket in St. George, Utah. "I thought I would grow up, get married, have children and live happily every after," Claudia says in the film's opening sequence. "I was living the American dream."

In telling Claudia's story, the film unravels a single strand from the tangle of cold war history to reveal a stark personal history of the atomic bomb and the damage inflicted on the lives of the citizens it was designed to protect. It chronicles Claudia's life from her seemingly idyllic childhood in the rural town where she grew up, through her adult realization that the threat to her family's health and happiness came from her own government's atomic testing program, to her unlikely transformation from Mormon housewife into political activist. Weaving together historical footage with a highly personal account, Life Was Good offers fresh insight into the long-term consequences of international politics on individual lives.

A production of NHK HI-VISION
Produced in association with KCTS, Seattle