A Petition in Response to a Movie about Nukes
by Stanley Heller, Promoting Enduring Peace
It may seem like a simple ask, a call to have the president take part in a nuclear war drill. Actually, it could have enormous consequences. On Oct. 24, Netflix streamed the movie A House of Dynamite. At one point the fictional president says, “I had one briefing when I was sworn in…one.” In an interview, a technical advisor for the film said that no president since Ronald Reagan has taken part in the national security drills involving nuclear war. Annie Jacobsen makes the same point in her 2024 book Nuclear War: A Scenario. She quotes President Reagan’s memoirs, “Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to release Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?”
So, after talking with folks from Back from the Brink, our organization came up with a petition, “Urge President Trump experience a nuclear war drill to see the folly of nuclear weapons.” You can see it on Change.org. Here’s a quick link: tinyurl.com/nuclear-drill.
It may seem futile to try to educate Donald Trump about anything given his politics and his persona but the 1980s have an interesting lesson for us. Ronald Reagan came in with far-right views and made all kinds of aggressive threats. He faced pushback from the Nuclear Freeze movement and the million-person anti-nuke rally in NYC in 1982. Two movies were produced in the ’80s: WarGames and The Day After, both with stark messages about the results of nuclear war. Reagan saw both movies and they strongly affected him. Within a few years he negotiated with Gorbachev and came up with a treaty that sharply reduced the number of nuclear weapons.
The petition background lists a number of interim measures that could make the world safer, like taking weapons off hair-trigger, abandon “launch on warning,” pledging no first use. Please sign the petition and spread it around.