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April 10, 2000
Long after Cold War, The Bomb Chills
As TV audiences gathered to watch Sunday’s all-star cast perform a remake of the 1962 Cold War film Fail-Safe, some were drawn to the project’s star power (George Clooney and an A-list of supporting actors including Richard Dreyfuss, Harvey Keitel and Brian Dennehy), and others to the excitement of seeing a live theatrical event beamed into their living rooms.
But still others see the new Fail Safe as a chance to send a political message.
Project Abolition, a coalition seeking mainstream support for nuclear disarmament, organized Fail Safe viewing parties to draw attention to its cause. “Our estimate is there will be at least 200 of these watch parties, some at people’s homes, but others at churches or colleges” around the country and in Canada and Argentina, says Kevin Martin, the project’s Goshen, Ind.-based director.
“Young people haven’t grown up knowing about the threat of nuclear weapons, with the Cold War having been over,” Martin says. “I think it’s important they’re exposed to it. If it takes TV to do this, that’s fine with me.” But Martin, stressing that thousands of nuclear weapons remain deployed around the world, hopes viewers don’t perceive the Fail Safe remake – still set in the early 1960s – as an anachronism.
In Fail Safe, Clooney plays a bomber pilot mistakenly ordered to drop a nuclear warhead on Moscow while the U.S. president and the Soviet premier attempt to avoid World War III.
Organizers of the watch parties believe that the numerous nuclear weapons accidents that have occurred in the past 50 years are proof that leaving Russian and U.S. nuclear warheads on permanent alert poses an unnecessary risk to global security.
“Ten years after the end of the Cold War, we have the opportunity to eliminate the scourge of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth, if enough people demand it,” Martin says.
For Clooney and CBS, Fail Safe represents a gamble of another kind.
The network already is gearing up for its next live event, On Golden Pond, starring Julie Andrews.
And if a live Cold War drama can bring audiences to the TV set Sunday night, other networks will follow the lead of Clooney and CBS and take chances on similar events in a crowded TV landscape.
Veteran actor Norman Lloyd, 85, who appeared in Sunday’s production as the secretary of Defense, distills the draw of live TV.
“You’ve got to know your lines, because you can’t fumble, turn and say, ‘Line, please.’ You have to listen very carefully, because your cues will come up and not stop for anybody,” Lloyd says. “Actors love this, and that’s why so many name actors have signed on for this project.”
© Copyright 2000 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Posted by zack_allen
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April 05, 2000
Fail Safe Remains a Tale for Our Times
SAN FRANCISCO — This Sunday, a live television drama will reintroduce millions of viewers to the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. The CBS television network will broadcast a remake of Fail Safe, the 1964 best-selling novel and subsequent film about how a nuclear war could be launched accidentally.
In the novel by Harvey Wheeler and Eugene Burdick, a computer glitch leads the United States to launch a nuclear attack against Russia. In response, an American president accedes to a Russian attack on New York City in retribution for the destruction of Moscow.
It’s a tale from the tense days of the Cold War. Unfortunately, despite the progress that has been made in nuclear-arms reduction since the book was first published, the dangers it depicts are as great today as they were 36 years ago.
The reality is while the world has so far managed to avoid such a nuclear catastrophe, there have been more than 1000 false alarms leading to the mistaken assumption that one super power had launched a weapon against the other. At least three of those incidents came dangerously close to triggering a nuclear exchange.
Today, the United States and Russia continue to have more nuclear warheads than actual targets. Both maintain their bristling nuclear arsenals on a state of hair-trigger alert. Both continue to adhere to the Cold-War era doctrine of launch-on-warning. This policy gives either the U.S. or Russian president only 15 minutes to evaluate whether an apparent nuclear attack is real.
While the danger of an intentional nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia has declined since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the potential for an accidental nuclear strike has actually increased in recent years. The chaos within Russia has led to a sharp decline in that nation’s command-and -control system, as well as the deterioration of its early-warning systems. Both raises the potential of an accidental or unauthorized launch.
Meanwhile, the threat of terrorists or rogue states buying or stealing weapons from Russian soldiers and scientists, many of whom remain unpaid, continues to grow. Former Russian defense minister Igor Rudinov warned in 1997 that Russia could “lose control over its nuclear arsenal for lack of funds.”
Fail Safe hearkens back to a time when the danger of nuclear war was a prominent topic of political debate. Now, it is past and present military leaders who warn that the use of weapons of mass destruction is actually more likely today than it was during the Cold War.
Former Secretary of Defense William Perry has cautioned that “It isn’t a question of whether, but of where and when” such weapons will be used. Gen. Charles Horner, who commanded allied air forces in the Gulf War, has said he expects a nuclear weapon will be exploded in some city, probably American, within 10 years.
Ironically, it is the U.S. military leaders who once controlled the nation’s nuclear arsenal — including former generals Colin Powell and Andrew Goodpaster — who have become the most passionate advocates of the elimination of the nuclear arsenal.
As retired Gen. Eugene Habiger, former commander of U.S. nuclear forces, recently said, “We have reached the point where the senior military generals responsible for nuclear forces are advocating, more vocally, more vehemently, than our politicians, to get down to lower and lower weapons levels. Think about that.” His predecessor as commander at the Strategic Air Command, retired Gen. Lee Butler, warns that “We cannot at once hold sacred the miracle of existence and hold sacrosanct the capacity to destroy it.”
As the world’s sole remaining superpower, the creator of the nuclear bomb and still the only nation ever to use it, the United States bears a special responsibility to lead the world away from the brink of Armageddon not only by removing its arsenal from hair-trigger alert but by redoubling its efforts to reduce the total numbers of weapons, with the ultimate goal of their total elimination.
The recent rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by the U.S. Senate, the fact that Russia’s parliament has yet to ratify the START II agreement and the Clinton administration’s continued pursuit of a missile-defense system all show how Fail Safe remains a tale for our times. Perhaps Sunday’s dramatic presentation of the dangers of either an intentional or accidental nuclear attack will reawaken efforts to eliminate these weapons entirely.
Former Sen. Alan Cranston, D-CA, served from 1969 to 1993. He is currently the president of the Global Security Institute in San Francisco.
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Posted by zack_allen at 11:34 AM