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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
"The Day After," for all its dated special effects and insufficiently blasted landscapes, is branded in the imaginations of millions of Americans. The reader reviews posted on the film's Amazon and IMDb pages testify to its harrowing effect on many young minds. (Ironically, those kids whose parents didn't allow them to watch it may have found speculating about it even more terrifying.) But there was one viewer in particular who was moved by the film in an especially momentous way.
A screening of "The Day After" is listed by DeGroot as one of three events that led to a "strange transformation" in late 1983. "Reagan the warmonger morphed into Reagan the peacemaker," he explains; the president began to tone down his bellicose posture toward the Soviets. The other two factors in this change were the downing of a Korean airliner mistaken for a hostile aircraft by a Soviet pilot and an incident when the Soviets almost responded aggressively to a NATO exercise that at first appeared to be preparation for a nuclear strike. These real-world accidents showed Reagan that the Soviets sincerely believed the U.S. to be capable of an unprovoked attack and how easily a fatal error could be made.
It took "The Day After" to impress on Reagan just how dire the consequences of an exchange of nuclear weapons would be for average Americans. "By all accounts," DeGroot writes, the film "left Reagan severely depressed and determined to 'do all we can ... to see that there is never a nuclear war.'" There's something grotesquely comic about the power Hollywood movies had over Reagan, but it also goes a long way toward explaining why he had such rapport with the American public. It was a susceptibility they shared with him. The intelligentsia could wring their hands over "The Fate of the Earth," and Middle America had "The Day After."
We complain today of fear-mongering in the media and the government: news reports that create the false impression that crime is rampant when it's not and vague homeland security alerts that accomplish little more than raising the general anxiety level. It's worth remembering that the nuclear fears of the Cold War were qualitatively different.
A terrorist, even one equipped with a dirty bomb, might succeed in poisoning a city and even in killing hundreds of thousands of people over time, as the effects of the bomb's radioactive fallout emerge. But knowing this just isn't the same as knowing that a superpower has a vast phalanx of intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with thermonuclear warheads pointed at your entire nation and all of its allies. Or that your nation is pointing even more missiles back at the enemy and their allies. When, in "The Day After," a spooked college student suggests that rural Kansas, "the middle of nowhere," might go relatively unscathed, Lithgow's character reminds him that they're surrounded by missile silos. "There is no nowhere," he says bitterly.
He didn't know how right he was. In the last stretch of the arms race, as new, more powerful weapons were added to arsenals already capable of destroying the enemy several times over, the older ones were re-aimed at lower-priority targets. Even so steely a hawk as Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, was "shocked" in 1991 to discover the "idiotic redundancy" in the targeting of these bombs, their massive firepower directed at innocuous radar stations and even shoe factories. As part of the policy of MAD, these missiles were kept on a sort of hair trigger, set to automatically launch even if command centers and major cities had already been vaporized. It was widely known that human or computer error might accidentally set off this system. In yet another Hollywood movie from 1983, "War Games," Matthew Broderick plays a teenage computer whiz who inadvertently begins the automated sequence and has to shut it off again before the world is destroyed.
Ironically, an individual Westerner is probably more vulnerable to politically motivated violence now than during the Cold War. The nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union -- as well as the scientists and technicians who built them -- are indifferently tended. Fortunately, as DeGroot notes, "bombs have a limited shelf life." But if the weapons themselves are decaying into uselessness (we think -- no one really knows what happens to aging bombs), the fissile material within them is another matter. "All the plutonium from all the dismantled weapons is still stored in bomb-ready form," DeGroot writes, and figuring out what to do with it is a puzzle that so far no one's been able to solve to everyone's peace of mind.
Rogue nations, religious fanatics, bizarre cultists like Japan's Aum Shinrikyo, these are just a few of the bad actors who have tried to get their hands on nuclear devices. Most are still trying. They are more menacing than the Soviet Union because we can't assume their behavior is ruled by rational self-interest. And if one of them does decide to, say, smuggle a dirty bomb into a major U.S. port via the largely unpoliced container shipping industry, retaliation is a lot trickier than it used to be. "The terrorist," DeGroot points out, "has no return address." As mad as MAD seemed at the time, there are some situations even madder.
Nevertheless, today's maniacs would count themselves fortunate to get their hands on a single suitcase nuke; commanding an arsenal of missiles, bombers and nuclear submarines like that of the former Soviet Union is beyond their grasp. It's one thing to know that, as a New Yorker or a Washingtonian or an Angeleno, you might be killed in a terrorist attack, or even that your city might be poisoned. It's another to realize that your nation might be destroyed. And it is yet another order of fear to realize that human civilization, possibly the human race itself, could be obliterated in a day or two. This is dread on a supraexistential, species level, and even beyond this fear, we glimpsed the nightmare of Earth rendered uninhabitable by anything but cockroaches.
Are second-graders still filling their poems and stories with visions of the end of the world? Probably not, or not as often, and however urgent lesser threats may be, that's a change for the better. Another nuclear superpower and a new Cold War may emerge. If not, the day will eventually come when the last person to remember what it felt like to believe a nuclear apocalypse might come at any moment will die, just as the last survivors of the Holocaust are dying now. Global nuclear war was a holocaust that didn't happen, but since the future offers no guarantees, the lesson is still the same: Never forget.
