My point is that I'm stunned -- and very concerned -- to hear many people in government or military posts, in America or elsewhere, speaking of using nuclear weapons, "tactical" or otherwise, as if this could be done in a
limited way.
It's like they have completely forgotten what almost everyone knew as long ago as 1950:
Once a single nuclear warhead is unleashed, anywhere, by anyone, the entire world is at deadly risk due to the danger of counterstrikes, escalation, and the spread of fallout.Why would any thinking person believe that it might be even remotely rational to launch a nuclear strike? Has it been so long since the Cuban Missile Crisis that most people have forgotten
why it was such a dangerous moment for everyone on the planet?
Do the world's citizens now think it really might be possible for nukes to be used without endangering us all?
On another thread yesterday LonelyLRLiberal reminded us of the stunningly frightening TV-movie called
The Day After, which ABC aired in 1983. I feel sure many of you here remember that movie well, as I do, because not only was it scary as hell, it was truly a major event at the time, sparking a lot of controversy and serious discussion worldwide.
To refresh memories (or inform our younger members), here is some info about this historic movie from the Website of the
Museum of Broadcast Communications.The Day After, a dramatization of the effects of a hypothetical nuclear attack on the United States, was one of the biggest media events of the 1980s. Programmed by ABC on Sunday, 20 November 1983, The Day After was watched by an estimated half the adult population, the largest audience for a made-for-TV movie to that time. The movie was broadcast after weeks of advance publicity, fueled by White House nervousness about its anti-nuclear "bias". ABC had distributed a half-million "viewer's guides" and discussion groups were organized around the country. A studio discussion, in which Secretary of State took part, was conducted following the program. The advance publicity was unprecedented in scale. It centered on the slogan "THE DAY AFTER--Beyond Imagining. The starkly realistic drama of nuclear confrontation and its devastating effect on a group of average American citizens..."
The brainchild of Brandon Stoddard, then president of ABC Motion Picture Division, who had been impressed by the theatrical film The China Syndrome. Directed by Nicholas Meyer, a feature film director, The Day After went on to be either broadcast or released as a theatrical feature in over 40 countries. In Britain, for example, an edited version was shown three weeks later, on the ITV commercial network, and accompanied by a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament recruitment drive. It was critically dismissed as a typically tasteless American travesty of the major theme--in a country which had yet to transmit Peter Watkins' film on the same theme, The War Game.
Wherever it was shown, The Day After raised questions about genre--was it drama-documentary, faction (how do you depict a catastrophe that has not yet happened?) or disaster movie? It could be seen as stretching the medium, in the lineage of Roots and Holocaust, manipulating a variety of prestige TV and film propaganda devices to raise itself above the ratings war and the attempt to address a notional universal audience about the twentieth century nightmare.
ABC defined the production both in terms of realism--for example, the special effects to do with the missiles and blast were backed up with rosters of scientific advisors--and of art, as a surrealist vision of the destruction of western civilization--as miniaturized in a mid-West town and a nuclear family (graphically represented in the movie poster). Network executives were particularly sensitive to the issue of taste and the impact of horror on sensitive viewers (they knew that Watkins' film had been deemed "too horrifying for the medium of television"), although, contradictorily, the majority of the audience was supposed to be already inured to the depiction of suffering. The delicate issue of identification with victims and survivors was handled by setting the catastrophe in a real town with ICBM silos and by using a large cast of relatively unknown actors (though John Lithgow, playing a scientist, would become more famous) and a horde of extras, constellated around the venerable Jason Robards as a doctor. Time magazine opined that "much of the power came from the quasi-documentary idea that nuclear destruction had been visited upon the real town of Lawrence, Kansas, rather than upon some back lot of Warner Brothers."
You can read the rest of the Museum's article on it here:
http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/D/htmlD/dayafterth/dayafter.htmI thought it was important to provide DUers some detailed info on this film because you don't see movies like this anymore. Just three years before
The Day After, there had been the theatrical release called
War Games, which many probably recall too. Such films as these made all of us very aware of the dire dangers of nuclear weapons arsenals on hairtrigger alert systems -- if we weren't already smart enough to fear the prospects they held for all humankind.
Back in 1983, with ranting, raving Ronald Reagan at the helm in the U.S., most citizens were still -- or maybe I should say
again -- very afraid of and worried about the potential for global thermonuclear war. It was then only two decades since the Cuban Missile Crisis which had scared most of us "beyond imagining," and Reagan's threats aimed at the Soviet Union brought back a lot of that real, deep-seeded fear.
Nowadays when we get a movie about the use of nukes, such as, say,
The Sum of All Fears, we see Ben Affleck running unprotected right into the middle of an urban area immediately after a nuclear strike hits it, as if the irradiated fallout at Ground Zero were merely a nuisance.
And similarly, all the talk recently among the military powers of the world about "tactical nuclear weapons" and "dirty bombs" has also served to downgrade our reasonable and justified fear of the dangers of any nation EVER using nukes. The line between "conventional" bombs and "low-yield" tactical nukes has been deliberately blurred by the Bush administration and its Pentagon, as well.
Yet I just did some research (just Google "tactical nuclear weapons" and check some of the obviously reputable sites for detailed info), and all the military's talk of "survivability" regarding these supposedly "safer" nukes is exposed for the hogwash it is.
I have to wonder, would even Israel seriously think that it could hit Iran's deep-bunker nuclear plants without any need to worry about radiation blowing back over their own citizens?
And does anyone with one brain cell left really believe that if ANY nation actually used a nuclear weapon on another, that would be the end of the exchange? Do they think, for instance, that Russia would let the U.S. nuke Iran, a solid ally and crude oil provider of theirs, without putting our facilities (and troops) in Iraq in danger of nuclear retaliation? And what might
that escalate into?
To conclude with a couple of rhetorical questions:
Why on earth are people all over the planet sitting around waiting for the first insane launching of a nuclear weapon in the powder-keg Middle East or elsewhere, like we'll just "see what happens next"? Have we all lost our collective minds?
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