The year before I was born, the world almost ended. Twice.
In September 1983, sunlight reflected off a patch of clouds, fooling a Soviet missile-warning system into detecting the launch of five US intercontinental ballistic missiles that never were. A colonel in a bunker ignored the alarm on a 50/50 hunch, narrowly averting a nuclear holocaust.
Two months later, US forces staged "Able Archer 83" — a massive nuclear-strike drill on the doorstep of the USSR. Soviet commanders panicked at the show of force and nearly bathed America in thermonuclear energy. Once again, an act of human doubt saved the planet.
Today these and other chilling tales seem like dusty history to half the world population — people born after the Cold War and those too young to remember its close calls.
But the grave nuclear threat persists.
Aging weapons systems, evolving terrorism, and a worrisomely hackable digital infrastructure make the danger perhaps even greater today. And that's the message that the makers of "The Bomb" — an ambitious new documentary premiering April 23 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York — hope to make breathtakingly real.
"Nine countries have 15,000 nuclear weapons. That's an existential threat to mankind," says Eric Schlosser, a filmmaker and author best known for "Fast Food Nation," but also the author of "Command and Control," a Pulitzer Prize-finalist investigation into nuclear weapons accidents.
To write "Command and Control," Schlosser spent more than six years steeped in declassified government materials and interviewed military experts, scientists, and "broken arrow" eyewitnesses.
"The Bomb" is an unnarrated, non-linear, and yet immensely powerful film that riffs on the major themes in Schlosser's book. It uses tons of archival nuclear weapons footage — roughly a third of which the public has never seen before — overlaid with Cold War-era documents that are brought to life with eye-catching animation. And it's all synced to a trippy electro-rock musical score.
The film's creators — co-directors Smriti Keshari, Kevin Ford, and Schlosser — told Tech Insider that their ultimate goal is to get people to feel something they will never forget. And then do something about it.
Not your father's nuclear weapons documentary
I've seen the film, but only the "flat" version: on a computer monitor.
In its true form, "The Bomb" is an immersive, 360-degree experience that can travel from city to city. The movie will project onto a huge wraparound screen while the band The Acid jams out a live score in the middle of a performance space.
Keshari, Ford, and Schlosser say this experience is what makes "The Bomb" unlike any film before it.
"Being surrounded by 30-foot-high screens upon which nuclear explosions are being projected, while really loud music plays," Schlosser told Tech Insider, "I think that's going to be a memorable life experience for anyone who sees it."
Keshari likened it to a form of "shock treatment," meant to help people feel something about nuclear weapons instead of dismissing their existence.
"These weapons are literally buried underground. They're out of sight, out of consciousness," Keshari told Tech Insider. "It's shocking how many we have, the countries that have them, how powerful these are, how much money is spent on them. And yet we're in complete denial of it."
They have a point.
I exist at the older edge of the so-called "Millennial" generation, which has never experienced the dread of imminent thermonuclear war. For me, the existential threat of nuclear weapons didn't really click until a few years ago, when I wrote a feature story that focused on a byproduct of the nuclear arms race.
Consider me biased — I'm a friend of Keshari's, and am wary of the need for nuclear weapons (despite North Korea's recent actions) — but "The Bomb" is not your standard, long-winded, made-for-TV-with-commercial-breaks documentary about nuclear weapons that puts your dad to sleep on the couch after dinner.
Roughly 30% of the movie is new footage that the public has never seen, thanks to 11 months' worth of digging through declassified films.
"Poor Kevin [Ford] has watched more nuclear weapons footage, I think, than any living person," says Schlosser.
Ford says that dive into the archives will always haunt him.
"The testing footage is what really stuck with me. The effects on people and on animals is just devastating," Ford says, noting he's "ruined dinner parties" by talking about his work. "It's like the kid who's frying ants with a magnifying glass just to see what will happen."
The end product of that nearly year-long effort, "The Bomb," is a non-chronological yet meticulously edited stream of detailed blueprints, harrowing Cold War test footage, modern-day nuclear armament grandstanding, and foreboding music.
Some raw moments of history shown in the film are so shocking or absurd they're almost comical, but in the big-picture context afforded by the 56-minute movie, they make the hair of your skin stand on-end. (The film does not, however, present the more disturbing clips seen by the filmmakers.)
"People may have different feelings about 'The Bomb' when they see it, and that's legitimate," says Schlosser, noting its experimental approach. "But I feel confident nobody will have ever seen anything like this before."
The world is the target audience
Today's nuclear arsenals are packed with a variety of exceptionally deadly weapons.
Enhanced warheads, for example, are dozens of times more powerful than the relatively crude bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fusion bombs are also on alert and ready to launch, and they are thousands of times more powerful than any nuclear weapons detonated during World War II.
The US and Russia together harbor roughly 90% of the world's supply of 15,350 nuclear weapons, and they're maintained under tight systems of control. The US is also spending $1 trillion to upgrade its devices.
But the central thesis of "The Bomb," and one Schlosser made strongly in "Command and Control" (which also premiered at Tribeca as a documentary film adaptation), is that mortifying accidents have happened, and will happen again: People are human and nuclear weapons are machines.
"They're they deadliest machines ever made. And like all machines made by human beings, they're inherently flawed, and imperfect, and go wrong," Schlosser said. "They get connected to other machines — computer systems, nuclear command and control systems, early warning systems — and those all have problems in them. And that just makes those deadly machines all the more dangerous."
The film's target audience is younger generations who will inherit these decades-old nuclear arsenals. The filmmakers hope to feed the movement to not only reduce nuclear stockpiles, but eventually to abolish nuclear weapons altogether.
"The [US] military is trying to minimize civilian casualties and use precision weapons. And nuclear weapons are the opposite of that," says Schlosser.
"The Bomb" hopes to cut through the overwhelming amount of technical, confusing information out there about nuclear weapons and display them for what they are: machines. Beautiful, powerful, flawed, and indescribably dangerous human creations.
"They're looked at as status symbols. They're looked at as heroic. And really, they're demonic," says Keshari. "They do nothing but kill, and kill humans in the millions."
As of this posting, all but one of the Tribeca showings at Gotham Hall are sold out. But Keshari said "The Bomb" is going on tour soon — part documentary, part rock show, part life-changing experience.
"We're looking at Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Berlin, and Paris. We also have some interest in Sydney, places in Santa Fe, museums in Boston. We really want it to travel," she said. The filmmakers are also pursuing a digital distribution deal to give anyone the aforementioned "flat" experience, on demand.
However people watch "The Bomb," its makers hope the film doesn't bum anyone out.
"There's no point in that. For me, this sort of knowledge should be empowering. Because to live in denial is a much greater danger than to have your eyes open and have the ability to do something about it," says Schlosser. "It helps you enjoy the day. It puts a lot of bulls**t worries into perspective and helps you not take anything or anyone for granted."
Disclosure: The author of this post is friends with Smriti Keshari but has no financial stake in "The Bomb" or any of the companies involved in its production or distribution.
