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In 1965, the British government blocked the BBC from broadcasting The War Game, a pseudo-documentary film it had commissioned depicting just what a nuclear attack on the UK would entail. The film, the government judged, was simply too “horrifying” for the public. Two decades after that, The War Game finally aired, prior to the release of the 1984 film Threads, which, in imagining the aftermath of a nuclear attack on the UK, was the first movie to deal with the scientific reality of nuclear winter.
When I was 11, I had nightmares for a few weeks after seeing a trailer for a nuclear doomsday film (The Sum of All Fears) that ran prior to a cinema screening of The Fellowship of the Ring (I had just read the three Lord of the Rings volumes). The Nazgûl were disturbing, of course, but they were not of the real world, unlike nukes. This January, I was confronted with The War Game at an exhibition on The Atomic Age at Paris’s Museum of Modern Art; I finished the exhibit in near silence. A week later, I watched Threads; it ruined the remainder of my afternoon.
Both films are the bleakest things I have ever seen – enough to induce nightmares in any adult. It is fitting that words fall short of the power of their imagery in revealing the pointless atrocity that would end healthcare, agriculture and even language itself for the mentally ruined, deformed, illiterate generations that would linger on, subsisting through a collective non-life.
During the cold war, the world narrowly escaped that fate more than once. Among the near misses, two are particularly harrowing. In 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, 36-year-old Vasili Arkhipov, a senior officer on a Soviet submarine, averted nuclear conflict after his two fellow commanders thought non-lethal depth charges exploding around them were the outbreak of war. In 1983, the Soviet officer Stanislov Petrov refused to believe that a launch warning flashing on a radar system was actually an American first strike, and simply decided not to report the incident up the chain of command.
A decade later in 1994 Ukraine, which had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, relinquished its nuclear warheads as part of a complete nuclear disarmament. It did so in exchange for iron-clad security guarantees from the US, UK and Russia. Donald Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine (or, worse, active sabotage by cutting it off from some intelligence sharing) and in-process realignment of the US with Vladimir Putin’s geostrategic objectives guarantees that no state will ever do anything similar in the future.
For months, maps floating around the Maga-sphere have shown quite clearly what the Trump regime’s vision of the world is, and what its intent is. It’s a vision Trump has made little effort to conceal. As if they were playing the board game Risk, they have decided that the “winning strategy” is to take and hold North America. The first economic shot has been launched at forcibly making Canada the “51st state” – and during his address to the US Congress, Trump was equally explicit that Greenland (“we’re going to get it one way or another”) and the Panama canal will be next.
Their dark vision is that an imperial America will do as it wants in its corner of the world, as will China and Russia in theirs. The European Union, however, will be a special target of their hostility, ire and predation because it stands for everything that they appear to want to bury: the rule of law, constraints on the powerful, equal sovereignty for the small, government as a bulwark against corruption rather than its enabler, multilateral action to tackle grave ecological and climate crises instead of the wanton spoliation of the earth.
With the US under Trump rapidly backsliding on democracy, drawing from an authoritarian playbook and verging on open hostility towards its former allies, the logical conclusion with regard to nuclear weapons – almost miraculously limited to just a handful of states today – doesn’t take much stretch of the imagination. Japan, South Korea, Australia and Canada all have clear reasons to pursue them, and if Iran reached the breakout point, Saudi Arabia would quickly join the race.
Europe’s leaders seem to have understood the seriousness of this swift-moving moment. “I want to believe that the United States will stay by our side, but we have to be prepared for that not to be the case,” said Emmanuel Macron in a broadcast to the French nation on Wednesday night. Macron opened the door to the “European dimension” that France has historically maintained with regard to its nuclear deterrent being made more explicit. France is the only EU country with nuclear weapons.
However, even if in the short term France’s deterrent – so wisely kept fully independent – is extended to the rest of the EU, would that be sufficient for European states under more immediate threat? Faced with an imperialist Russian regime that has repeatedly invoked nuclear blackmail in its war on Ukraine, chances are the EU will have to seek its own EU-level deterrent at some point in the future.
This is the tragedy that Donald Trump has wrought: the world will rearm, defence stocks will soar. Perhaps we’ll find a new balance; if not, there will be war. Precious resources that should have been used to heal, feed, educate, create, conserve and explore will be redirected to a world order the United States once knew well enough to do away with.
It wasn’t just nightmares when I was a kid – I also dreamed of going to space.
As we all try to grapple with the shifting of what we thought our world was, and would be, I find myself thinking about these reckless, dangerous, small-minded men – Putin, Trump, Musk – obsessed with ideas power and grandeur. I would trade my own childhood dream of orbiting the Earth for them to go to space instead, in the hope that they too would look back at our bright blue orb of a planet and be transformed in the way so many real astronauts have been. Perhaps they would come away with a lesson Samantha Harvey offered us in her Booker prize-winning novel about astronauts, Orbital: “Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.”
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Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist
