President Vladimir Putin of Russia has the dangerous habit of threatening the rest of the world with nuclear war when he isn’t getting the geopolitical respect he thinks he deserves. This keeps happening as he drags on the war in Ukraine.
The threats began as soon as the invasion started. It was Feb. 24, 2022, and Mr. Putin sent his troops into Ukraine, warning the West that a response would face consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history” — an opaque nuclear threat. His repeated nuclear blackmail over the coming days, months and now years has helped raise the risk of nuclear war to the highest in decades.
If he acted, even if he lobbed a single tactical warhead into Ukraine, the effects would be catastrophic: Tens of thousands of people, if not far more, would die. The global economy could tank. And the nuclear taboo, which has held tenuously since 1945, would end. The use of nuclear weapons could mean, as Mr. Putin said himself, “the destruction of our civilization.”
That all sounds bad. But can we really imagine what that would be like?
Against this backdrop, I can’t stop thinking about a scene in the new film “A House of Dynamite.” A clean-cut U.S. Navy officer sits in a limousine with the American president as a missile of unknown origin streaks toward the United States. The military, the officer says after pulling a binder from the nuclear football at his feet, “requests authority to initiate a counterstrike.” (Mild spoilers below.)
His delivery — mechanical, matter-of-act — masks the gravity of the moment: The binder is filled with potential targets on the other side of the globe for U.S. nuclear-tipped missiles. But the viewer never knows with certainty, not really, if the missile hits its mark in the United States or if the president responded in kind. The film is talked about as a warning, billed as a flashing red light of the rising danger, but in the end, it turns away. What might have been intended as an artful rejection of spectacle, perhaps an avoidance of lurid computer-generated imagery disaster movie thrills, is, I would argue, instead a dereliction of moral duty, a failure to vividly depict the aftermath of nuclear annihilation.
Ever since the end of the Cold War, filmmakers in Hollywood have mostly averted their gaze from the gruesome reality of nuclear devastation. The stuff that makes you squirm in your seat and sends you marching into the streets yelling, “No nukes,” has often happened just off screen, beyond our gaze. This might seem surprising given how eagerly filmmakers are willing to blow up the landmarks of New York City for a super hero war, or for an alien invasion, or even a zombie apocalypse.
Yet our task and perhaps our only hope to not destroy ourselves is “imagining the real,” that is, to confront the grotesque reality of nuclear death head on. That’s what the psychiatrist Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, who died recently, argued in the 1980s, when U.S. and Soviet arsenals reached astronomical heights, an incomprehensible abstraction that turned us numb. “Awareness, then, involves the full work and play of the imagination,” he wrote. “It means imagining danger that is real, but also imagining possibilities beyond that danger.”
“Oppenheimer,” the other serious recent movie billed as the calling card of our nuclear doom, wasn’t much better in showing us the human toll. By my count, the film clocks the effects of the weapons in Japan only twice: Through the face of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the bomb’s creator, and his compatriots, as they see images from Japan, where America dropped two A-bombs. And through his hallucination, when he imagines the skin of a woman peeling off and a charred body on the ground, as he gives a speech to rousing cheers for the bomb’s success. Perhaps the director, Christopher Nolan, thought that a more complete showing of the aftermath wasn’t needed.
Last year, the United Kingdom rejected the creation of a U.N. panel to study the effects of nuclear weapons, saying that they were already well known. But outside of a relatively small cadre of experts, the reality of nuclear weapons and their devastation is not well understood, apparently even at the highest levels of American government. Just last month, President Trump confusingly called for a restart in nuclear testing to match that of China and Russia. The only problem? Neither country explosively tests nuclear weapons, nor have they for three decades, same as the United States. Perhaps he was thinking about recent Russian tests of a nuclear-powered cruise missile and underwater drone, neither of which involved actually blowing up a nuclear device. (The Department of Energy has since tried to walk back Mr. Trump’s comment.)
The last time the possibility of nuclear annihilation visibly hung over humanity, during the Cold War, films like “Testament,” “Threads” and “The Day After” put the feared devastation onscreen and helped move the public needle against growing stockpiles. “The Day After,” a made-for-television movie from 1983, depicted Soviet warheads turning Kansas towns and farmland into a hellscape of rubble and death. “I’m glad I watched, because now I understand more about nuclear war,” a seventh grader named Matt told The Times soon after it aired on ABC. “I think I’d want to die instantly.” In the weeks after watching the broadcast, people were more likely to say they’d join the antinuclear movement than they had been before seeing it, according to a study from 1989.
The real-life effects of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have mostly remained undepicted in American film. “Bombshell,” a new documentary about the early attempt by the United States to control the story of those weapons, shows how the first major Hollywood film about the bomb, a docudrama from 1947 called “The Beginning or the End,” was largely a work of propaganda. The White House apparently pushed changes, as the Truman administration sought to cement the story of the A-bomb’s wartime use as necessary and downplay reports of illness in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes,” a 1990 made-for-television movie about the dropping of the bomb, and “White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima And Nagasaki,” Steven Okazaki’s 2007 HBO documentary, are two that had the courage to show what happened. But efforts to depict the aftermath of those American bombs — notably by the Smithsonian with an exhibition planned for 1995 — have at times triggered criticism that doing so is somehow unpatriotic. In the United States, World War II remains the “good war,” though recent polling has shown that Americans have a mixed view of the bombing. (One can devote a whole library to American films giving a bird’s-eye view of the strikes, and another to Japanese movies depicting the human toll on the ground.)
There is the fear that to depict horrors will inure us to brutality on the screen, especially in our viral age, where we face a steady stream of war footage and clips of assassinations on social media. The gruesome can become banal. It also risks downplaying just how bad it would actually be. Even “The Day After” ended with a title card that said the events depicted were “in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States.”
In a conversation with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Kathryn Bigelow, the director of “A House of Dynamite,” explained that for artistic reasons her film ended without depicting a nuclear weapon going off. “With an explosion at the end,” she said, “it would have been kind of all wrapped up neat, and you could point your finger — ‘It’s bad that happened.’” She let the viewers fill in the blank themselves. But it also meant she could avoid confronting viewers with traumatic violence.
Now, the director James Cameron, of “Titanic” and “Avatar” fame, is set to make a film adapted from the books “Ghosts of Hiroshima” and “The Last Train from Hiroshima,” about Tsutomu Yamaguchi, an unlucky soul who survived the American bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It could break what has seemingly become Hollywood’s unconscious censorship against grappling with the gruesome aftermath in the two cities.
Yet even Mr. Cameron has said that he is still figuring out how to “shield people from the horror, but still be honest.” The sad truth about Hiroshima and Nagasaki — as I’ve learned in numerous discussions with survivors — is that the most honest depiction would be uncomfortable. That confrontation with reality is what we need to prevent the past from turning into our future.
Spencer Cohen is an editorial assistant in Opinion.
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