Description
Pop culture is increasingly recognized as an important site of political power. Building on this research, I apply interpretive content analysis to popular western films with nuclear weapons, problematizing presentations of launch decisions in entertainment-fiction. Many films about or including nuclear weapons rely on the narrative device of ‘system failures’ in order to prompt the action of the plot. Whether via computer malfunctions, human error, disrupted communications, direct manipulation, or mechanical failures – films incorporating nuclear ‘system failures’ allow audiences to engage with questions of what nuclear security should look like, even if the science or policy in the film does not match the ‘real world’. But what does this trope imply about the positionality of the ‘decision maker’ in these stories? While ‘simply’ entertainment, these stories allow a form of access to the structure versus agency debates in international politics, particularly when a ‘system failure’ forces a decision-maker-as-protagonist to reconsider their original reliance on that system to manage the power of nuclear weapons. The majority of the most popular or influential films agree on the exceptional destructive threat nuclear weapons present, so the relatively frequent incorporation of ‘system failures’ allows viewers to consider the possibility that the systems put in place to keep us safe may, in fact, be designed to fail. As the memories of nuclear destruction fade, and the policies of nuclear security are shrouded in secrecy and jargon, popular films about nukes become useful and perhaps even necessary spaces for building our shared nuclear imaginary.
