Sometimes movies — novels, even — can address larger cultural and political issues that have been forgotten about on the Opinion pages. Or on talk radio, “Meet the Press,” in academic discourse.
We move on to hotter, seemingly more immediate topics even if the previous ones have not been solved. To have a limited attention span is only human, even in the face of imminent disaster.
I’m sure there are people who have been able to keep up the existential worry about nuclear war between the superpowers — or involving non-superpowers such as North Korea and Israel — all these many decades since the H-bomb made prospects even worse than the A-bomb did. Since “Dr. Strangelove” caused us to laugh while we whistled past the graveyard. Since Jonathan Schell’s “The Fate of the Earth,” with its warnings of a nuclear winter, created a new public consciousness about a problem in one book-length New Yorker article — like Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” before it and Bill McKibben’s “The End of Nature” after it.
It’s not as if those of us not acutely focused on some new apocalyptic possibility had thought that nuclear weapons had gone away. But with the end of the Cold War, we who grew up worrying about either a nut in the Kremlin or a nut in the White House pushing the button capriciously, who performed elementary school drills that had us jumping for cover under our desks not because of a possible earthquake but because of a possible mushroom cloud, had our minds eased, somewhat. Or we just got tired of worrying about it.
As if that desk was going to protect us, anyway.
In the 1999 movie “Blast From the Past,” a character who has lived his entire life in an underground bomb shelter is sent to the surface with instructions to find a “nice, non-mutant girl from Pasadena” with whom to repopulate the world.
And, when I was a young reporter in the late 1980s, I wrote a story about the remaining public bomb shelters in my hometown, which I grew curious about after seeing that some street corners downtown still had air-raid sirens on them, with signs giving directions to the nearest such shelters. Inside them — in Civic Center basements and such — we found boxes filled with deteriorating toilet paper, and meals ready to eat. Perhaps they are deteriorating still.
Anyway, life imitates art, and just as Kathryn Bigelow’s new movie “A House of Dynamite,” which tracks a ballistic missile, presumably nuclear-armed, heading for the United States from a mysterious source, hit the big and little screens last month, so was there new sabre-rattling about the The Bomb by people who could actually make it go boom.
“Russia draws up plans to conduct nuclear tests after Trump announcement” was the headline on a Fox News story. NBC called that move “a direct response to President Donald Trump’s surprise instruction for the United States to begin testing for the first time in more than 30 years.”
That’s because Trump had announced last week that he had told the Defense Department to “immediately” begin preparing to test our own nuclear weapons “on an equal basis” with other nations.
Since it’s the current president, and not a rational actor, making such a statement, you have to take it with grains of salt, so to speak. That there were no other nations preparing to test their nuclear weapons is not of concern to him, although it should be to us. No nation has done any nuclear testing since China and France last did so in 1996.
Declining entirely to bring any clarity to his dangerous game, when asked whether he planned to resume explosive nuclear tests underground, the president told reporters, “You’ll find out very soon, but we’re going to do some testing, yeah,” adding, mysteriously, “Other countries do it. If they’re going to do it, we’re going to do it.”
Other countries don’t do it. No other country had said that it would.
Now, obviously, the president of the United States has access to information — I was almost going to say intelligence, but that’s the wrong word in this case — that the rest of us don’t.
But there is also the very real possibility that this president instead simply doesn’t understand the importance of threatening to start nuclear testing. Or that he unilaterally decided the threat would halt his frenemy Vladimir Putin’s musings about using nukes against Ukraine.
Just as the more worldly Dick Cheney sometimes scrambled to explain what W. actually meant to say, so Trump aides now claim the president really meant tests of “nonnuclear explosions.”
Whatever. So long as this sorry world of ours lets men as unholy as Putin and Trump be the masters of our fate, we need to renew our commitment to nuclear disarmament.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.