The Minuteman Missile Museum
WAR GAMES (1984) and THE DAY AFTER (1983)
Nuclear weapons are worse than measles. Like measles, we’ve collectively forgotten how bad it is, and so people refuse vaccinations that could save their kids’ lives because meh, what are the odds? And eh, it’s probably not so bad? Humans are forgetful creatures. But we do better if we remember. And while measles is probably worse than you think, nuclear weapons beggar the imagination.
It’s easy to forget the opening scene of WAR GAMES (1984): a frozen wasteland, an unmarked pickup truck, a little farm house on the endless snow-blown prairie; two airmen exit the truck and run thru the hostile cold; they enter the house, and the house, turns out, is a camouflaged military installation, and the mirror on the wall, turns out, is two-way glass, and the door is a secured door, and the rest of the scene shows the two airmen, one younger, one older, making their way down to the bunker to relieve the other team and begin their long underground shift. Then outta nowhere an alert comes in: the two airmen are supposed to launch their warhead, but one of them can’t bring himself to do it; the other one finally points a pistol at the resistant one, yelling “turn your key, sir!” And the film cuts to the title under a jeep headed to the NORAD base where they’re deciding to remove the unreliable humans from the chain of command and replace them with theoretically-more-obedient code.
Even if you re-watch the opening, it’s easy to ignore what the two airmen are talking about while all this is being shown; it’s just background chatter as you’re observing the more fascinating environment of the secret missile-launching installation hidden behind the rural vibes and the granny decor. But the older airman, the one who will find himself unable to turn the key, is telling the younger airman about getting high with a woman. The younger airman is just listening, he seems to have no relevant experience to share. Experience is the operative word here: if you grew up in the 1980s you will not forget that your older generation was the Vietnam War Generation, and everyone had their war stories, even if they didn’t personally serve: stories of friends lost, of brothers who came home not right, laughing about things that happened that weren’t funny. The whole generation was carrying around that “experience” — and the wisdom that comes with that experience. Later in the film, the hero, a very young Matthew Broderick, expresses his desire to live, to get to grow up, by declaring that he’s never kissed a girl: sexual experience means “life experience” in this story, and rightly so, because sex is a life-affirming and often life-creating kinda thing!
So they wrote the older, more “experienced” airman, the one who knows about drugs and sex and probably (just because of his age and when the film is set) served in Vietnam, as the one who can’t turn the key. He’s the one who is contemplating how many people he’s about to kill by turning it, instead of just turning it. The younger, less experienced officer is the one who is not just ready willing and able to turn the key, but he is also ready willing and able to pull a gun on the man who can’t.
In the context of the film, youth and inexperience are developed as themes: they refer casually to the AI that’s trying to start World War III in the film as “Joshua” because that’s the system’s backdoor password (not at all weird — who doesn’t refer to their device by it’s password?) And “JOSHUA” is the password because that’s the name of the system designer’s son (and that doesn’t make it even weirder in the slightest!), who died as a small child (ghost in machine? naaaah). So it’s a generational theme and a “youth vs. experience” theme, and ultimately what makes the film fascinating is the idea that the machine that has control of the nuclear launch system is “a child” who “doesn’t understand,” who “lacks experience” and is therefore capable of destroying the world “by accident” (sowwy!) because it doesn’t understand the difference between a simulation and real life. Youth can be dangerous. But youth can learn. This develops into the core meaning of the whole film.
Because after “experiencing” countless iterations of “Global Thermonuclear War,” the machine concludes that it is “a strange game”: “the only winning move is not to play.”
Or, in less catchy phrasing:
At least two generations of Americans grew up during the Cold War and none of us has dealt with it. On the US or “Western” side, the Cold War ended well — so what is there to deal with? But do you really think you can grow up always knowing that the total obliteration of all life on Earth could come at any moment by the whim of a red-faced “dad”-type and then that knowledge kinda fades but doesn’t go away and sure yeah, this is fine, you’re totally okay?
So when I realized that driving thru South Dakota on a family trip would take us right by the Minuteman Missile Museum, I insisted that we visit it. I wanted to explore this little piece of BIG history that was part of my reality all thru elementary and middle school.
Look at this:
There’s the Cold in a nutshell for you: the US missiles were smaller but more precise, housed in high-tech camouflaged underground silos; the Soviet missiles were TEN TIMES the size, some of them moved around on trucks, designed to be lobbed in the general direction of things and destroy as much as possible.
Call me an American who’s biased towards America (guilty!), but to me there is a big moral difference between the two approaches to war: one is near-indiscriminate killing, blunt force methods intended to wreak maximum death and havoc. The other is trying (at least TRYING) to aim only for military targets and limit the damage as much as possible. The most righteous gunman still faces a dilemma: you know the killer is in the crowd, but do you snipe, or do you spray? The decision isn’t truly yours in the moment; it was made in advance, by what gun was put in your hands before the situation even unfolded. (Perhaps NO gun was put in your hands: that’s a viable choice too.) The methods define the madness. War is always bad, destruction is always a waste, death always a tragedy, and in the fog of fear individuals do terrible things. But in the strategy-planning stages, decisions are made calmly, with forethought, and so carry more moral responsibility.
With nuclear war, ALL the stages are supposed to be those morally-responsible “strategy-planning” ones. A nuclear war that HAPPENS has failed. Like Sun Tzu proposed: the point of an “ultimate class of warrior” is not that they fight, it’s that they end all fighting. When in WAR GAMES, the AI “Joshua” determines that the “only winning move is not to play,” he’s not (just) throwing up digital hands at the futility of nuclear war, he’s declaring the openly-acknowledged theory of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), which is that the point of nukes is NOT to use them, it’s to make the whole potential theater of combat so overwhelmingly catastrophically apocalyptic, that no one should ever dare “turn the key.” Anyone who depends on the planet Earth to stay alive has a vested interested in de-escalation.
Still, one of the (many) problems with nuclear cold war under the theory of MAD is that there’s no deterrent unless the threat is credible. If we believe that you’ll NEVER launch all those nukes you have, you might as well not have them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In the 20th Century, the world found itself in a decades-long nuclear stalemate, all the warriors of Sun Tzu’s “ultimate class” watching one another vigilantly, keenly aware of how dangerous they-themselves are, and of how dangerous the others are, and so all they could do is increase their numbers, deter in the face of deterrence, and pray that no one moves.
The most overwhelming display at the museum is a long curved timeline showing the number of nuclear warheads possessed by the US and the USSR during the cold war. In the pic, Blue is the US, and yes, the peak for the USSR goes over 60,000!
But as you can see towards the right/foreground of this picture, which creeps closer to our present day, the numbers of nukes went down. That wasn’t a lucky happenstance. That was the result of negotiated nuclear non-proliferation treaties. There are far fewer nuclear warheads in the world today than there was when I was my kids’ age. Fewer is better. But at its peak there were enough of them to destroy the whole world many, many times over, leaving lifeless, scattered, ragged asteroids where Earth used to be. The power to destroy all life on Earth still exists, if fewer times over, and it is still in human hands.
I’m thinking more about nuclear weapons lately of course because of the questions about whether Iran was/is about to have them, and whether Israel and the US have effectively stopped them from having them. And some people cry “hypocrisy” because the US and Israel have them, but there’s a logic to this: these are weapons whose purpose is to never be used. If they fall into the hands of someone who you believe will actually use them, you can no longer depend on the power of stalemate to save the mad, mad, mad MAD world. And once a bad actor has them, they become untouchable. Consider North Korea.
And every few years, something happens between India and Pakistan to stir up those old childhood feelings of nihilistic anytime-now DOOM. Plus, Putin likes to threaten the world with nuclear weapons in Ukraine from time to time. Let’s face it: there are too many nutbags with nukes (and I’m not excluding the current US president).
In the 1980s, people wondered with reason whether there would BE a future, whether a “21st Century” would ever exist. The tv movie The Day After which aired in 1983 is not “great cinema” but it is a must-watch, a fascinating document of mainstream fears felt worldwide in those times. It imagines in raw detail the suffering of Americans who survived a nuclear attack, but in a way, it imagined a rosier scenario than was likely, because in the movie anyone, and the world, existed at all. In those days, the minuteman missiles were locked and loaded, armed and manned, ready to launch in a minute and soar to the other side of the world to eliminate targets in a flash of unthinkable force and heat. And there were a lot of them. And they were ready to cross paths with even more numerous missiles that might be less accurate but made up for that with ten times the blast. The idea was, there would be nothing left.
And yet, that didn’t happen. There were treaties. People talked. Compromises happened, and some of them weren’t great, but even the worst deal is better than total annihilation. And here we are! Alive. A lot of us who grew up not sure there would be a future have children. And some of our children are starting to have children. All of this Cold War stuff is, for them, Ye Yon Olde Hystoire! And that is as it should be. Let this be the past. But since you can’t put toothpaste back in tubes, or genies back in bottles, we can’t just hope nukes will fade away. If the bombs have once been made, the MAD game must forever be played. We should hopefully just get better at playing it, which means keeping the stakes lower. Keeping the number of players lower. Talking. Negotiation. And in a game where survival depends upon reason, where peace depends on calculation, where all the “ultimate class of warriors” must know better than to use all their might to strike, we also must put a premium on keeping smart, human-survival-aligned actors involved, whether they are themselves human, or something else.
