With a good number of ICBMs these days being mounted on big trucks (TELs, erector launcher vehicles,) I wonder how plausible it would be to false-flag by driving an ICBM into an enemy nation undetected, then launch an ICBM from enemy soil against a nation like the United States, to get America to nuke that enemy nation? The ICBM could also be concealed in a shipping container.
The enemy, of course, would have to be a nation known to have its own nukes, in order for the false flag to be believable.
Same. I know this thread is focused more on the technicalities, but as a film I think it fell short due the the release of tension by showing the same event 3 times (at the starting of the third time, I was like, ‘I get it’.
Also, felt the ending was a let down. I’ve read the interviews with the director and the screenwriter, and I get what they were going for, but to build up that much tension and then cut to credits? Bad screen writing. Showing a nuke hitting Chicago (or not) would not have undercut what we saw in the film.
Or show us both outcomes. Don’t just leave us hanging.
I agree that General Brady spoke of “rehearsing” for the situation, but it pretty much seemed like lip service. The choices offered were fairly broad (do nothing, strike somebody as a best guess, threaten everyone, etc.) and certainly not communicated very well. I would expect something much more structured and planned, with strong step-by-step recommendations.
It’s not like we haven’t been under threat from ICBMs for more than 60 years or anything.
IIRC, the only nations with some sort of mobile or rail-launched ICBM capability are Russia, China, and maybe (probably?) NK. Assuming it’s even possible to launch from the neighboring country undetected, I don’t see how that works out for anyone.
China sneaks a mobile ICBM into Russia and launches - under MAD doctrine, everybody dies.
Russia sneaks a mobile ICBM into China and launches - under MAD doctrine, everybody dies.
NK sneaks one into either China or Russia and launches - under MAD doctrine, everybody dies.
China or Russia sneaks one into NK and launches - I can’t imagine a scenario why either would want to do that, but this is the only scenario that might not result in “everybody dies”, because the US would likely consider a NK launch to be a singular rogue event not followed by multiple other launches designed to prevent a retaliatory second strike. So we wouldn’t be launching a massive response designed to wipe out anyone else’s launch capability, but NK as a nation will cease to exist. I don’t think it will be a nuclear response (wouldn’t be great for SK) , but an invasion and removal of the NK regime will certainly happen.
An undetected launch from the Pacific Ocean leaves things much more ambiguous. Once you are tracking a ballistic missile, it’s relatively trivial to determine its point of origin in the ocean, but you don’t know who launched it. In this movie, Russia and China deny it was them, which still pretty much leaves maybe NK. But you don’t have proof, at least not until it detonates - once that happens, you can collect the radioactive isotopes present in the fallout and figure out who built it. But in the heat of the moment, you don’t know for sure - Is Russia or China lying, or was it really NK? Or some rogue launch from a British or French sub? Crazy, but you never know… So I think that scenario did a plausibly good job of setting up the uncertainties around how/when the US responds before the missile hit Chicago. I wish this were played out a bit more and explored rather than showing the same chain of events from three different perspectives. This was my biggest complaint with the movie. IMO, they generally got a lot of the little details right, but the overall writing of the story could have been more interesting.
Part of the issue is it costs roughly 10 million dollars a year to maintain one nuclear weapon. When the USSR collapsed, Russia was spending less than 10 billion a year on their entire military for several years. Its impossible to know how many Russian nukes are still operational. However I’m certain they kept at least a few working.
I believe the US spends close to 60 billion a year to maintain our nuclear arsenal. Russia’s entire military budget was about 60 billion before the war in Ukraine started. Plus Russia’s military is full of corruption.
I definitely felt the same initially. But now I’m glad it was shown that way. The biggest point for me was to make a huge decision without knowing why you were making that decision. Had we known what happened to Chicago, that would undercut the toll of having to make the decision to retaliate or not (ie, that was the right decision, wrong decision, etc.) - I think the point is there is no right or wrong decision to be made but a decision must be made all the same.
If we are truly deterring by saying we will nuke you if you launch a nuke at us (not whether it detonates or not), then, while a super hawkish policy, we need to retaliate in a meaningful way. Or change the policy so we don’t have to bluff. Or prepare someone for what that policy actually entails in order to carry it out.
To achieve that policy of we will launch when you launch at us, whether we have to actually launch our nukes once we know one is headed our way but before it hits - I don’t know if that’s real-life protocol or not to not be bluffing on our policy, or just a movie invention to build suspense in the movie world.
If you mean communicated well to the audience, I think that was intentional - we didn’t get much details and there wasn’t much time to go through them.
If you mean communicated well to the President, I think the point was it’s madness to learn this stuff in real time as it’s happening. Maybe spend more than 15mins on it to be “prepared” (the President mentioned something like that in the movie). It’s not good that he was as prepared as the audience and was learning this along with me. It’s a world ending/changing scenario that is out there ready to happen and the people who make the impossible decisions are unprepared and calling family for advice. That’s what I took, and why I immediately thought we need the decision maker to be way more prepared - like the level of preparation it would take an astronaut to fly and walk on the moon type of prepared. If you could have a NASA type of agency/person in control of this, they would at least be prepared and able to communicate effectively.
I can only report what I felt. And I felt disappointed. According to what I read on the internet, I’m not the only one.
Nor do I know, but I strongly suggest it was to build suspense. Clearly they knew there was only one in the air at that time. Cooler heads (in a real scenario) would have just said, lets wait till it hits and see… or so it seems to me.
It’s entirely possible that nothing happens to Chicago beyond localized impact damage. The warhead could be a dud, something non-nuclear, or even dummy used for testing. It could land in Lake Michigan and kill no one. There’s no way of knowing until impact and there’s no real disadvantage until waiting. Waiting or not waiting both have zero impact on Chicago. This was even mentioned in the film.
Plot hole. People arriving at Site R with in 20 minutes of launch detection? Its 75 miles from DC to RR. Even with blades turning (10-20 minutes for a cold start), no helicopter will get you there soon enough. You still have to get to the chopper from wherever you are (or vice versa). Or are they supposed to be arriving after impact?
I have no special knowledge but to notify people, and get them to some pre-determined point to get on a bus that, itself, has to located, staffed and at said point that also has to be staffed with security etc. when they arrive would take many hours in the best of circumstances.
I think the point is that you can prepare all you want for the actual logistics, but when it comes down to “we are under attack and you have to 15 minutes to decide whether to start a nuclear war”, no amount of preparation matters there.
Yea, I mostly agree. This is more a movie about failed process, than people. The people were presented as reasonable.
Putting a process in place that would allow an unprepared decision maker to be on a basketball court, and then having 20mins to make a decision about whether to launch nukes is a failed process. Because that type of situation is reality, then no one who designed the process really thinks anyone will launch a nuke at the US. Not really. It’s a process that sounds good and reassuring on paper, but you can’t actually implement it.
I think it’s an insane situation for sure no matter how it goes down, but disagree that no amount of preparation matters. I think some decisions can lead to a situation where countries start launching nukes at each other and life is not even close to how it is now, but that other decisions would not lead to that. Based on the decision, the scale of bad and who the bad happens to is meaningful. I think the US response in all this is the most significant.
Late: I’ll just add that me saying things with conviction doesn’t make them remotely valid. Just my reaction/two cents to the movie. I clearly had a strong reaction to it, lol.
One could argue that all those war games and OPLANs are preparation. Not that one is going to “actually implement” Global Thermonuclear War; the only winning move and all that.
Except that the President, who is the ultimate decision maker, almost never actually participates in any kind of wargame simulations, and very few have had anything but a cursory understanding of the SIOP/OPLAN; not just out of a lack of intellectual curiosity (although definitely true of some Presidents) but because it is a lot of very dense technical information that requires an large prerequisite of specific knowledge to really understand that isn’t really relevant to any other part of the duties of the Office of the President. (You occasionally see in fiction that the president isn’t allowed to participate in such simulations because of the insight that might give an opponent but that isn’t true; a president could opt to participate in a plan or even order a specific simulation if they were so inclined.)
So, while those simulations and plans are preparation for the people carrying out the orders (and are useful for improving and updating new operational plans) they don’t actually inform the key decision maker. In the film, seeing Idris Elba’s President turn to the 30-year-old Lt. Cmdr who was tasked with carrying the “Football” for recommendations in absence of guidance from the Secretary of Defense or National Security Advisor is pretty plausible; in the scenario of the film he has just minutes to pick an option that will result in many millions of deaths and potential escalation to the end of civilization. In reality, unless there was actually evidence of a mass attack on the continental United States I think any sober president would take the time to convene the National Security Council, senior national intelligence members and their senior staff, and pertinent members of their Cabinet before making such a monuments decision.
It should be noted that during the Cuban Missile Crisis (which occurred at the beginning of the true ‘nuclear era’ where the United States and Soviet Union had the capability of launching such a mass attack on relatively short notice), President Kennedy had all members of his Cabinet and senior advisors in the White House advising him (mostly to stand firm and prepare for general warfare), and it was Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson (not to be confused with the GWB-era HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson), a diplomat and US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who advised restrain and specifically to accept the first placatory cable sent from the Kremlin and to ignore the second and far more threatening one which Thompson (correctly) judged was coming from Soviet military leadership. So, it is not inconceivable that such an escalating conflict could be diffused by wisdom, knowledge, and empathy. But it takes some willingness to reflect and consider a broad range of different and diverse views under an enormously stressful situation, and Kennedy didn’t govern in a world where that decision had to be made in a handful of minutes before potential annihilation.
Just watched and didn’t like it at all. For two reasons:
So many people just gawping or freaking out, or focusing on the safety of their own families. Yes people are people, and we all have fear and loved ones. But I’ve been in situations where people in responsibility have to make life or death decisions, and every time people have done their duty. Give someone a title, training and responsibility and most people do what they’re called on to do.
I don’t mind them having one or two characters who freeze but the skew here was way on the Hollywood side and difficult to watch.
To the extent it went into nuclear strategy at all, I think again it leaned too much on drama tropes.
For one thing, it seemed implicit throughout that there is some crucial strategic difference between launching a minute before seeing if something detonates over Chicago, and a minute after. But in terms of the effectiveness of the response, it’s not that significant; at the point where there’s, say, three minutes to impact you may as well wait, and continue trying to figure out what’s going on.
It seemed they really wanted a “bomb timer ticking down to zero” style of suspense, I didn’t buy that that makes sense here.
Furthermore, in the extreme scenario they are depicting here, with zero knowledge of who might have launched the missile and why, I’m not buying “just strike at everybody” as an option that that many people would take seriously.
It’s a movie, but I did see some truth in to why that was portrayed that way.
Before or After Detonation: For deterrence, it’s US policy to retaliate to the act of a nuke launch at us before it detonates. We shoot when we know one is coming; not after it lands or detonates or not. I took the General Brady/countdown as embodying that very general policy and the madness of it. Whether that policy in real life applies to one nuke of unknown origin I don’t know. However, a decision could have been made pre-detonation that we would not be following that policy and would wait, etc (you can’t make that decision after). That would have been fine and why I was frustrated with the lack of preparation by the decision makers.
Strike at Everybody Option: For the sake of the movie, he was presented with options appropriate for what was happening in a timeline consistent with our retaliation policy. But you’re right. These are preset well-thought out and planned options. They have been prepped so they are ready to be done on short notice (some of it is the physics in being able to do it). No a la carte options in 20mins. There would need to be a preset strike option on Russia, China, and NK (or whoever). But again, I know some about the 1960s options (like 3 total; and due to that limitation China got nuked whether they did anything or not), and nothing about today’s more complex or flexible preset options. It’s certainly plausible, for the movie, there might be an option(s) that took out military targets versus population centers in multiple countries. For me, it’s knowing we are now striking first against some countries and how that could escalate - the chain reaction inside a house of dynamite.
Late: I really want to keep this about the movie, but I’ve been reading up on all this stuff. I think the movie was meant to spark that, but also trying not to get very political.
I’m aware that there is an argument for striking immediately, on first detection – to take out enemy launch and command facilities as quickly as possible. However “ASAP” =/= “the exact second that there’s a detonation over a city”.
Let’s say they detect the missile at 7:30 and it’s due to impact chicago at 7:45. At t=7:41, say, there can be people still advocating for launching retaliatory missiles right now. But it doesn’t make sense for people to be implying that the president only/still has 4 minutes to decide whether to retaliate.
Why? It’s not going to make any difference as to whether Chicago gets nuked or not. And it’s primarily a population center, not a critical nuclear strategic target. In terms of strategy, the only difference between firing at 7:44 and 7:46, is that in the former case you’re doing so without knowing whether anything was even going to detonate.
I’m not sure that you followed me on this either. Sure, there are planned out options, and the president would be briefed on them, and not in the weird way in the movie where no-one was given any basis for choosing any particular option.
But the option: throw nukes at all potential nuclear adversaries would be way down the list of options, and one I would think the president would largely be steered way from. It really does guarantee oblivion.
In the book, if you want to take it as loosely related even though there is no real reason to do so, the American President authorizes a massive retaliation against North Korea, the Russian President, with all the miscommunication, decides to launch a counterstrike, and you can guess the rest. But the book includes descriptions of horrible death and devastation to make its own points against nuclear war, while Bigelow et al.'s movie is not about that aspect of it. It also brought to mind the screen from Balance of Power:“You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure. End.” Especially since maybe the President didn’t accidentally set off a global catastrophic war. Maybe he did not even Launch on Warning. It is left entirely up to your imagination, and the uncertainty, like the uncertainty that came before, is the point.
I thought if this were a short film about the first cycle through the 30 minutes it would have been brilliant. The movie as it was though was just okay. Each cycle through had diminishing returns and three times was definitely at least one too many. The tension was fully deflated by then.
I also think that had the film only been one cycle through you could get away with not showing what happens in Chicago but after three times, not showing anything just felt anti climactic. They could have even shown the daughter and her boyfriend walking on the street and a vague flash to white (to not fully reveal if it went off or not) and that would have been enough but the way it actually ended was unsatisfying.
I felt like Marvin Martian, “Where’s my kaboom?!”
For the discussion earlier in this thread, you should seek out the book Warday, a novel from the 1980s. It’s a travelogue about an America after a “limited” nuclear war where only a half dozen war heads went off all on the east coast and midwest.
Even without total destruction, it’s not so great for America. What is left is close to a third world country being exploited by Europe and Japan as they “help”. California is really the only part that survived intact and zealously guards its borders while it is on the verge of seceding into independence. Pretty grim but interesting stuff.