Nicholas Meyer, the director of The Day After, incautiously admitted to what he thought was a well-disposed journalist that he made this miniseries to destroy Ronald Reagan’s chances in the 1984 Presidential elections. He misread not only the American people, but Reagan himself, as this well-written article shows.
Ronald Reagan was nowhere near as simple-minded as he was portrayed in a largely hostile visual media. The Day After caused him to use our parity in theater nuclear weapons to bring the Soviets to the negotiating table, and the result was the INF Treaty (which, according to experts interviewed for an Aviation Week article, is being effectively voided by Russia).
Another made-for-TV movie broadcast shortly after The Day After, the BBC’s Threads, is also a docudrama, but one which is less a political drama and more a documentary. Threads very calmly examines the assumptions on which British civil defense planning was based and plausibly discredits them. It was clearly better-researched than The Day After and does a better job of rubbing the viewer’s nose in the reality of the post-nuclear world.
I am a certified radiological monitor under the old Federal/state civil defense program, and have read the literature of arms control and nuclear warfighting theory extensively. This isn’t impressive compared to the qualifications of some of the “arms control wonks” who implied to reporters before last year’s elections that there was nothing preventing the President of the United States from ordering the use of our nation’s nuclear arsenal without a good reason — that hasn’t been true since the Nixon administration — but I’d like to share my perspective, anyway.
While arms control advocates are correct in saying that movies like The Day After and Threads show that the notion of “winning” a nuclear war is a dangerous fallacy (for painfully obvious reasons), they’re economical with the truth about what happens when one side in an arms control treaty obeys it, and the other chisels on it.
Herman Kahn devoted an entire chapter of his On Thermonuclear War to Germany’s covert rearmament after World War I, when the Treaty of Versailles should have prevented Germany from starting World War II. The Germans were ingenious in concealing violations of the Versailles Treaty before Hitler’s rise to power, while afterward Hitler’s brinkmanship and audacity largely allowed him to openly defy the treaty.
The parallels between Germany between the wars and Russia now are striking. Biopreparat was established in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention almost before Leonid Brezhnev’s signature on the treaty was dry and energetically churned out mass quantities of biological weapons for nearly twenty years (until two of its top administrators defected to the West and revealed its existence). In the post-communist 1990s, money from the Nunn-Lugar Threat Reduction program was used to develop and manufacture some of the advanced “Novichok” nerve agents in secrecy, formulated to evade the provisions of the Chemical Warfare Convention.
All this was before Vladimir Putin. Like Hitler, Putin’s an autarch who can clamp down on dissent, jail or kill domestic critics (or even those whose fortunes his cronies covet) and break arms treaties with impunity. And, like Hitler in the 1930s, Putin has been able to invade neighboring countries and engage in other foreign adventures with impunity. Unlike Hitler, Putin has a nuclear arsenal at his disposal. His greatest ally, China, has the world’s largest army backed by the world’s largest economy — and its own nuclear arsenal.
We might benefit from another docudrama, one for our times, which shows the world we’re headed for if we don’t take some responsibility for our future. It should not be based on “High Frontier” space-based defense, calls for a renewal of the last Cold War’s nuclear arms race, or appeals for more arms control when our existing “partner” in arms control has decided to violate the spirit of existing treaties and increase the number of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons and delivery systems it has.
This new docudrama ought to contrast our current status of no effective civil defense and only a token strategic missile defense (forcing us to go back to the idea of mutually assured destruction) with an alternative. It ought to show that with moderate expenditures, we could have radiation shelter for everyone in the country and reasonably effective blast shelter for those who live in probable nuclear target areas.
The Swiss have such facilities, and more. Former Los Alamos mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson was quietly consulted by people in the Swiss civil defense agency during the Cold War and asked to examine their plans for protecting their populace and comment as candidly as he could without violating any US weapons secrets. Dyson read through the plans, found them to be sound, and asked why they asked him for advice when they were clearly on the right track. The Swiss officials told him that they’d observed that US civil defense clearly was not seriously planned to protect the nation’s citizens, and they wondered if the US knew something about nuclear warfare they did not.
The nation’s about to embark on a massive program to replace our old nuclear weapons and delivery systems with new ones. While such a program may be called for, it’s not going to protect our citizens from enemies who won’t be deterred as easily as the Soviets were — and in the Cold War, the Soviets were the only serious nuclear threat we faced.
Without belaboring a point all too clear to those who are following the news from North Korea, we face at least one nuclear power run by a man widely considered to be irrational, who murders his own generals by aircraft cannon and his own relatives by nerve agents smeared on them by women in his employ. He’s not deterred by our massive nuclear superiority over his country from making violent threats against us.
Countries like Pakistan that writer Willian Langeweische calls “the nuclear poor” use money wrung from their people and aid money from wealthy nations to get nuclear weapons. They are expanding “the nuclear club” from its current probable ten members to twenty or more.
We may find that, like Kim Jong-Un, some new owners of nuclear weapons don’t worry enough that we’ll retaliate when they bomb one of our cities. Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia are governed by fundamentalist Muslims. Eventually one such country may share its nuclear arsenal with Islamist terrorists.
The next “The Day After” ought to talk about how much cheaper concrete is than nuclear weapons. The most effective deterrent against enemy nuclear attack might just be a new triad — our existing nuclear arsenal in the most survivable form we can devise economically, a system of blast and fallout shelters for our country, and a robust conventional military which is also, as far as we can manage, protected from surprise nuclear attack,
This is deterrence that actually means something. Our cities may still be devastated, but our people should be able to survive and rebuild our country (Herman Kahn showed how to make sure they have the supplies and tools to do the job in On Thermonuclear War). Enough of our nuclear arsenal should survive to punish our attackers. Enough of our conventional military should survive to protect our homeland from invasion and punish our attackers.
The aftermath of a nuclear war after preparations like those would still be grim. I flew to New Orleans from Colorado to visit my son a year after Hurricane Katrina. Looking down from the aircraft, I was stunned at how worse the damage was than Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the atomic bombings.
Ten years earlier, I’d asked a climatologist working across the hall from me at Stennis Space Center whether nuclear explosives could be used to disrupt hurricanes at sea before they made landfall. He told me that a hurricane, by the time it got to be that size, had such destructive power in its winds that thermonuclear detonations were relatively minor phenomena.
I grew up twenty miles outside New Orleans. I remember the fury with which Hurricane Betsy passed over my town. The oil-fired power plant ten miles away as the crow flew (over swampland, lakes and cane fields) might as well have been on the Moon until the transmission lines were repaired three weeks later, during which time I did homework by kerosene lantern. Civil defense — funded relatively well compared to FEMA and its state affiliates today — was there with ice to keep food cold and edible, water for drinking, and a reasonable amount of supplies. We got by.
330 million people live in the United States. The size and skill set of our population is our strongest deterrent to military aggression. Our economy supports the world’s largest military.
Our would-be attackers ought to be sure that those who survive a nuclear attack on us will still have the world’s largest economy after a nuclear war — and will respond in ways they won’t like. The best way to deter a nuclear attack isn’t just to stack up weapons to retaliate with, but to show would-be attackers that even if their weapons land on us, we’ll still be a first-rank economic and military power, one disposed toward revenge.
