Nuclear threat: a rich source of inspiration for the film

‘The Russians are nuking us!’ is heard from the school’s loudspeakers in the latest South Park-episode. Children run in panic to the gym, hiding under the stands. It’s an exercise: school psychiatrist Mr. Mackey is overcome with Cold War nostalgia. Just like Vladimir Putin, who dances through the Kremlin with bare torso on Two Tribes from Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

No one jumped on current events as quickly as the makers of South Park: the episode ‘Back to the Cold War’ (season 25, episode 4) was shown in the United States on Wednesday, March 2, and was broadcast in the Netherlands on Comedy Central last Saturday.

“Children need to know what Russia is capable of,” Mackey screams South Park against the school principal. The school psychiatrist demands the construction of a bomb cellar and orders twenty videotapes (“VHS is the best”) of Red DawnJohn Milius’ 1984 patriotic war film, in which American students encounter Russian and Cuban paratroopers who land on the lawn in front of the school and place their parents in re-education camps.

Other eighties classics also pass by: Mackey infiltrates the American missile system with an antique DOS program, much like the hacking boy in WarGamesand speaks a little Russian thanks to watching the nuclear submarine thriller ‘two hundred times’ The Hunt for Red October†

Help comes from Mackey’s elderly mother, who knows where the Cold War mania comes from. Spoiler: her son is just afraid of getting old and frustrated with his penis that has not functioned optimally for years. And Putin recognizes this ailment: “da…†

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Armed nuclear weapons, sold-out iodine tablets, opinion pieces about the sense and nonsense of mutually assured destruction: the threat of nuclear devastation is back, like a dormant volcano that suddenly hums again and coughs up lava.

In the mid-20th century, Hollywood was fast following the successful trials of the Manhattan Project and the dropping of the first atomic bombs on Japan. In Fritz Langs Cloak and Dagger (1946) a handsome nuclear physicist (Gary Cooper) tries to prevent the Nazis from constructing an atomic bomb towards the end of World War II. The screenwriters of that film were later blacklisted and prosecuted by the Communist-hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities (a committee of the House of Representatives). That they made the physicist at the end (cut from the film) bitterly remark that America probably wouldn’t be the only nuclear power for long (“God help us if we think we can keep this a secret”) became as ” considered anti-American.

After the Russians dropped their first successful test bomb on Kazakhstan in 1949, the stream of Hollywood films really got going: hundreds of titles, spread over the decades. Many speculated about the fallout and the few survivors in the world after a nuclear war, such as the survival drama five from 1951: ‘Four men… alone with the last woman on earth’. Or the grim film adaptation of Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach (1959), in which the last remnants of humanity last a little longer in Australia, until the radioactive clouds do their work there too. Also within the fantastic genre radioactivity turned out to be a useful storytelling tool: good for the birth of all kinds of monster mutants, such as in Day the World Ended and Teenage Caveman, cheap science fiction films from exploitation film king Roger Corman. And Ishiro Honda articulated Japan’s perspective on the nuclear arms race in godzilla (1954), about the giant monster created during a nuclear test and both perpetrator and victim of the nuclear devastation.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the mutual missile threat between the Soviet Union and the US intensified more than ever before, gave new impetus: now the films became more realistic. BBC staffer Peter Watkins clashed with the UK government and broadcaster over his 44-minute pseudo news report The War Game from 1965, in which the chaos and aftermath of an atomic attack on British soil was reenacted with an amateur cast. The camera that drives past the corpses and burnt faces of the citizens, the shock on the faces of the children with horrific radiation injuries: the BBC and the regulators went way too far, this film could well disrupt the morale of the population. The scheduled broadcast of The War Game was cancelled; it was only in 1985 that the BBC dared to show the film on TV.

Watkins, furious about the broadcaster’s ‘betrayal’, was allowed a selective theatrical release in 1966. In 1967, the banned film was able to win the Oscar for best documentary. John Lennon was also inspired: Watkins was the one who moved him and Yoko Ono to demonstrate (in bed) for peace.

When Stanley Kubrick conceived the plan for a film about nuclear threat and “mutually assured destruction” (Mutually Assured Destruction), the filmmaker encountered a dilemma: the fact, although realistic, turned out to be so absurd and paradoxical that it could hardly be grasped in a ‘serious’ scenario. This is how he came up with the idea for his ‘nightmare-like comedy’ dr. Strangelove †or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb†

That film from 1964 is still the most instructive ever made about the nuclear threat of war, says Danny Pronk (49), nuclear weapons expert at the Clingendael Institute. “The dynamics of nuclear deterrence, the logic or rather the lack of logic behind it, are so cleverly woven into Kubrick’s film,” says the former defense officer, who also worked at Volkel Air Base (where, although never officially confirmed, US nuclear weapons are located. ).

Pronk cites a quote from core expert and presidential adviser Dr. Strangelove, one of the roles of Peter Sellers: ‘Deterrence is the art of instilling fear in the mind of the enemy, the fear of attacking’. Pronk: ‘That is so sharply formulated. Comes to American Universities dr. Strangelove still over in gun control classes. Also the scenes in the war room are well taken: the importance of direct contact between leaders during a crisis situation, calling what later came to be called the ‘red telephone’.’

Another ‘favourite’ of Pronk is the American television film The Day After, which on its first broadcast in 1983 taught some 100 million American viewers how little America would be left if things really went wrong. That was also the year of the demonstrations and the song The bomb from Doe Maar. We now know that in 1983 East and West were the closest to nuclear weapons conflict since the Cuban Missile Crisis. There were several incidents that year.’ (For example, a Russian radar system incorrectly reported that the Americans had fired intercontinental missiles.)

The nastiest images from the TV movie were censored by the ABC channel: no melting eyes, no skin falling off the body. Nevertheless, The Day After deep impression. Pronk: ‘We know that Ronald Reagan watched from the White House and was very shocked by what he saw: the consequences of a nuclear war. He later wrote that in his memoirs: that the film had made him think. Then, in his second term as president, he took a different tone towards the Soviet Union; he stopped talking about a evil empire†

After the Iron Curtain came down, Hollywood didn’t immediately stop making films about the nuclear threat of war. They were popular and were part of the fixed arsenal of narrative forms, certainly within the thriller genre. However, some adjustments had to be made in the post-Soviet era. Now the threat often came from misplaced portable nuclear weapons, known as suitcase bombs, or from third parties, such as neo-Nazis or crazed Russian colonels, who surreptitiously tried to bring the two world powers to war. In Crimson Tide (1995) a lieutenant commander (Denzel Washington) just manages to prevent an American nuclear submarine from entering World War III. And in The Peacemaker (1997) a lieutenant colonel (George Clooney) and a nuclear weapons expert (Nicole Kidman) search for stolen Russian nuclear bombs that have fallen into the hands of terrorists.

‘At that time there were the wildest rumors about nuclear weapons in suitcases,’ says Pronk. “Very exaggerated: even in the darkest days of the Russian Federation, in the mid-1990s, those weapons were quite chained. And if you were to steal one, you can’t just activate such a bomb. You need keys and codes for that.’

The Day After was also broadcast on Russian state television in 1987, as part of the rapprochement between the two world powers. The first time Vladimir Putin dr. Strangelove saw is captured on camera: director Oliver Stone showed the nuclear comedy to the Russian president for his documentary series The Putin Interviews (2017). Putin looks on impassively as the president (Peter Sellers) calls his Russian colleague about the American missiles whizzing – unintentionally – his way: “Hello Dimitri? Dimitri, you know how many times we’ve talked about the possibility that something could go wrong with the bomb? (…) the bomb, Dimitri, the hydrogen bomb…’

Although made up, ‘certain things’ in Kubrick’s film from the sixties are thought-provoking, Putin concludes dryly afterwards. ‘Nothing has changed.’