Soldim
02-10-05, 04:16
RAIN AND FIRE
Movie screenings in private theatres for invited audiences, with drinks, canapés, and opportunities to schmooze with stars and directors, are a favorite tactic of the Manhattan branches of Hollywood’s publicity machines. The goal is to generate buzz, which, with any luck, will trickle down to the ticketbuying masses. Early autumn is a big season for new releases, and last week, what with the opening of the New York Film Festival and all, there were lots of such screenings around town.
One of them was different. Its setting was a modest auditorium in the immodest East Side mansion that houses the Council on Foreign Relations. The audience consisted of diplomats, military officers, international bankers and lawyers, and think-tankers. The speakers after the lights went up were white-haired gentlemen in business suits: Pete Peterson, the council’s chairman; Ted Turner, the billionaire philanthropist and founder of CNN; Warren Buffett, the folk philosopher and fabulously rich investor; Richard Lugar, Republican, the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Sam Nunn, Democrat, the retired chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and now head of a nongovernmental organization called the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
The film, “Last Best Chance,” was a bit unusual, too. You might even say it isn’t really a movie at all—it just plays one on TV. Set in the near future, it takes the form of a slick international suspense thriller, the kind that cuts from a rainswept warehouse in a bleak corner of the former Soviet empire to a dimly lit White House Situation Room. It has no sex scenes, no car chases, and no wisecracking sidekicks, and it is only forty-five minutes long, but it lays out a frighteningly plausible narrative of how terrorists might buy or steal the makings of a nuclear bomb, assemble one, smuggle it halfway around the world, and send it on its way to an American city in an S.U.V. The closest thing to a star in the cast is Fred Thompson, the lawyer turned actor turned Republican senator from Tennessee turned actor again. Thompson plays the President of the United States, and his character is mature, wise, and serious—the one jarringly unrealistic note in the picture.
“Last Best Chance” was made not by a movie studio but by a singularly unraffish indie producer: Nunn’s Nuclear Threat Initiative, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the MacArthur Foundation. The blurb on its poster comes not from Ebert & Roeper but from Kean & Hamilton—Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chairman and vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission. Its grosses are zero. For the past five months, it has been distributed free on DVD. Now it has been taken up by HBO, which plans to show it repeatedly, beginning on October 17th.
“Last Best Chance” is entertaining, in a grim sort of way, but entertainment is not its raison d’être. Its purpose is to stimulate public support and political pressure on the Bush Administration and Congress to do something serious about the terrifying danger of nuclear terrorism. And this is a scandal. It is scandalous that at this late date, four years after the attacks on New York and Washington, people like Nunn, Lugar, and Buffett feel it necessary to go to such unorthodox lengths to get the attention of Washington’s responsibles. “Last Best Chance” is a symptom of an immense failure of national, and especially Presidential, leadership. “As short a time ago as nine years or eight years,” Turner said in his remarks after the screening, “I still thought that nuclear weapons, biological and chemical weapons, was an area that the government took care of.”
One of the attendees at the screening was Graham Allison, the founding dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the director of its Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, who held high Pentagon posts under Reagan and Clinton. Allison’s “Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe,” which has just been published in an expanded paperback edition, is the indispensable text on the subject. “Americans are no safer from a nuclear terrorist attack today than we were on September 10, 2001,” he writes. “A central reason for that can be summed up in one word: Iraq.” The invasion and occupation have diverted essential resources from the fight against Al Qaeda; allowed the Taliban to regroup in Afghanistan; fostered neglect of the Iranian nuclear threat; undermined alliances critical to preventing terrorism; devastated America’s standing with the public in every country in Europe and destroyed it in the Muslim world; monopolized the time and attention of the President and his security team (for simple human reasons, an extraordinarily important factor); and, thanks to the cry-wolf falsity of the claims about Iraqi weapons systems, “discredited the larger case for a serious campaign to prevent nuclear terrorism.”
On the “positive” side, the Iraq quagmire has obliged the Administration to postpone its latent dream of regime change in North Korea (a beautiful dream, but not as beautiful, perhaps, as the reality of that country’s nuclear arsenal is ugly) in favor of diplomacy—diplomacy that, last week, yielded what may be the beginnings of a deal to induce Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear outlawry. But, over all, war on terror or no, the nuclear danger remains an almost invisible priority.
A little unilateralism—the President’s favorite mode of leadership—might be in order. The United States still has some ten thousand nuclear bombs in its inventory; Russia has at least seven thousand, plus unknown thousands of “tactical” weapons, many as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Both countries still keep vast numbers of them on hair-trigger alert. All this made a twisted kind of sense during the Cold War; now it is irrational to the point of insanity. “We should take most of those weapons off high alert,” Nunn said after the screening. “We should take them off for our own security interests. The Russians should take them off for their own security interests.” In 1991, thanks to the initiative of Senator Lugar and then-Senator Nunn, the United States launched a program aimed at giving the Russians financial and technical help in “locking down” their bombs and other weapons-adaptable nuclear material subject to theft or diversion. Fourteen years later, half of Russia’s material is still unsecured, and at the present rate the job won’t be finished until 2022. We don’t have that long. If the President cared to make the effort, it could be finished in four years or less. Also in urgent need of attention are about a hundred civilian laboratories and reactors in dozens of countries, including the United States—all containing bomb-grade material, some protected by no more than a night watchman and a chain-link fence. Even of an Administration so benighted that it spurns the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and pursues plans to build new generations of “bunker-busting” nukes, this is not too much to ask.
After the September 11th attacks, Condoleezza Rice said that no one had imagined planes being smashed into buildings. After Hurricane Katrina, President Bush said that no one had imagined the breach of the levees. These statements were untrue, of course, but Rice and Bush probably believed them at the time. What no one can say, or can have said in good faith for many years, is that no one has imagined nuclear terrorism, and not just onscreen. With another hurricane about to make landfall in this strange season of apocalypse, the old spiritual’s prophecy of the rainbow sign to Noah should not be forgotten: no more water, the fire next time.
— Hendrik Hertzberg
The New Yorker Issue of 2005-10-03
Movie screenings in private theatres for invited audiences, with drinks, canapés, and opportunities to schmooze with stars and directors, are a favorite tactic of the Manhattan branches of Hollywood’s publicity machines. The goal is to generate buzz, which, with any luck, will trickle down to the ticketbuying masses. Early autumn is a big season for new releases, and last week, what with the opening of the New York Film Festival and all, there were lots of such screenings around town.
One of them was different. Its setting was a modest auditorium in the immodest East Side mansion that houses the Council on Foreign Relations. The audience consisted of diplomats, military officers, international bankers and lawyers, and think-tankers. The speakers after the lights went up were white-haired gentlemen in business suits: Pete Peterson, the council’s chairman; Ted Turner, the billionaire philanthropist and founder of CNN; Warren Buffett, the folk philosopher and fabulously rich investor; Richard Lugar, Republican, the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Sam Nunn, Democrat, the retired chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and now head of a nongovernmental organization called the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
The film, “Last Best Chance,” was a bit unusual, too. You might even say it isn’t really a movie at all—it just plays one on TV. Set in the near future, it takes the form of a slick international suspense thriller, the kind that cuts from a rainswept warehouse in a bleak corner of the former Soviet empire to a dimly lit White House Situation Room. It has no sex scenes, no car chases, and no wisecracking sidekicks, and it is only forty-five minutes long, but it lays out a frighteningly plausible narrative of how terrorists might buy or steal the makings of a nuclear bomb, assemble one, smuggle it halfway around the world, and send it on its way to an American city in an S.U.V. The closest thing to a star in the cast is Fred Thompson, the lawyer turned actor turned Republican senator from Tennessee turned actor again. Thompson plays the President of the United States, and his character is mature, wise, and serious—the one jarringly unrealistic note in the picture.
“Last Best Chance” was made not by a movie studio but by a singularly unraffish indie producer: Nunn’s Nuclear Threat Initiative, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the MacArthur Foundation. The blurb on its poster comes not from Ebert & Roeper but from Kean & Hamilton—Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chairman and vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission. Its grosses are zero. For the past five months, it has been distributed free on DVD. Now it has been taken up by HBO, which plans to show it repeatedly, beginning on October 17th.
“Last Best Chance” is entertaining, in a grim sort of way, but entertainment is not its raison d’être. Its purpose is to stimulate public support and political pressure on the Bush Administration and Congress to do something serious about the terrifying danger of nuclear terrorism. And this is a scandal. It is scandalous that at this late date, four years after the attacks on New York and Washington, people like Nunn, Lugar, and Buffett feel it necessary to go to such unorthodox lengths to get the attention of Washington’s responsibles. “Last Best Chance” is a symptom of an immense failure of national, and especially Presidential, leadership. “As short a time ago as nine years or eight years,” Turner said in his remarks after the screening, “I still thought that nuclear weapons, biological and chemical weapons, was an area that the government took care of.”
One of the attendees at the screening was Graham Allison, the founding dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the director of its Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, who held high Pentagon posts under Reagan and Clinton. Allison’s “Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe,” which has just been published in an expanded paperback edition, is the indispensable text on the subject. “Americans are no safer from a nuclear terrorist attack today than we were on September 10, 2001,” he writes. “A central reason for that can be summed up in one word: Iraq.” The invasion and occupation have diverted essential resources from the fight against Al Qaeda; allowed the Taliban to regroup in Afghanistan; fostered neglect of the Iranian nuclear threat; undermined alliances critical to preventing terrorism; devastated America’s standing with the public in every country in Europe and destroyed it in the Muslim world; monopolized the time and attention of the President and his security team (for simple human reasons, an extraordinarily important factor); and, thanks to the cry-wolf falsity of the claims about Iraqi weapons systems, “discredited the larger case for a serious campaign to prevent nuclear terrorism.”
On the “positive” side, the Iraq quagmire has obliged the Administration to postpone its latent dream of regime change in North Korea (a beautiful dream, but not as beautiful, perhaps, as the reality of that country’s nuclear arsenal is ugly) in favor of diplomacy—diplomacy that, last week, yielded what may be the beginnings of a deal to induce Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear outlawry. But, over all, war on terror or no, the nuclear danger remains an almost invisible priority.
A little unilateralism—the President’s favorite mode of leadership—might be in order. The United States still has some ten thousand nuclear bombs in its inventory; Russia has at least seven thousand, plus unknown thousands of “tactical” weapons, many as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Both countries still keep vast numbers of them on hair-trigger alert. All this made a twisted kind of sense during the Cold War; now it is irrational to the point of insanity. “We should take most of those weapons off high alert,” Nunn said after the screening. “We should take them off for our own security interests. The Russians should take them off for their own security interests.” In 1991, thanks to the initiative of Senator Lugar and then-Senator Nunn, the United States launched a program aimed at giving the Russians financial and technical help in “locking down” their bombs and other weapons-adaptable nuclear material subject to theft or diversion. Fourteen years later, half of Russia’s material is still unsecured, and at the present rate the job won’t be finished until 2022. We don’t have that long. If the President cared to make the effort, it could be finished in four years or less. Also in urgent need of attention are about a hundred civilian laboratories and reactors in dozens of countries, including the United States—all containing bomb-grade material, some protected by no more than a night watchman and a chain-link fence. Even of an Administration so benighted that it spurns the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and pursues plans to build new generations of “bunker-busting” nukes, this is not too much to ask.
After the September 11th attacks, Condoleezza Rice said that no one had imagined planes being smashed into buildings. After Hurricane Katrina, President Bush said that no one had imagined the breach of the levees. These statements were untrue, of course, but Rice and Bush probably believed them at the time. What no one can say, or can have said in good faith for many years, is that no one has imagined nuclear terrorism, and not just onscreen. With another hurricane about to make landfall in this strange season of apocalypse, the old spiritual’s prophecy of the rainbow sign to Noah should not be forgotten: no more water, the fire next time.
— Hendrik Hertzberg
The New Yorker Issue of 2005-10-03