Top Gun: Shooting the Hopes for Nuclear Disarmament Out of the Sky
A general view of participants during the opening session of the Treaty of the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. 23 April 2017. UN Photo / Jean-Marc Ferré.
Every year when summer break kicks off, many rush to the cinema to watch the latest blockbusters that Hollywood has to offer. Granted, these movies are not usually famous for their minute understanding of international politics, but their gross misrepresentation of world issues can be harmful. “Top Gun: Maverick” is a prime example of this phenomenon. In this movie, Tom Cruise and his team of fighter pilots tackle the ages-old dilemma of nuclear proliferation in a literal way by exploding an unsanctioned uranium enrichment plant in an unnamed “rogue state.” Yet however exciting this movie may be, it misrepresents the nature of the nuclear problem as well as the solution to that problem. This distorted depiction could undermine public awareness of both the threats linked to nuclear weapons and our ability to properly assess the means available to eliminate them. As such, cultural products that deal with these issues should be re-examined in a way that does not hamper efforts toward safely resolving them.
Misrepresenting Nuclear Proliferation
What exactly is the problem facing our protagonists in “Top Gun: Maverick’s”’ plotline? Without much hesitation, we might answer that it is nuclear proliferation, but that would only be partially true. This is because the movie only focuses on what is known as “horizontal” proliferation, or the proliferation of nuclear weapons across different countries. This problem generally attracts the most media coverage, ranging from North Korea conducting nuclear tests as early as 2006 to the more recent tensions over the Iran Nuclear Deal. Yet, horizontal proliferation is not as historically prevalent as the lesser known “vertical” proliferation, which occurs when countries already possessing a nuclear arsenal set out to increase their stockpiles—sometimes through extensive modernization programs.
This is an important yet frequently overlooked point when reckoning with the power of popular culture, because vertical proliferation has its own dangers. In periods of tension, state leaders often lessen the safety measures of their arsenals to fire weapons more readily should the need arise—experts often call this practice “hair-trigger alert” in the most extreme cases—which could lead to escalation and perhaps even spiral into an arms race. Risks of unwanted explosions also increase in tandem with the number of weapons as the nuclear establishment grapples with the mismanagement of stockpiles, risks of unauthorized use, and unpredictable accidents. On this point precisely, history is full of nuclear mistakes which nearly turned into major disasters, but public awareness of these events still remains low today. For instance, one could be surprised to learn that in 1961, the state of North Carolina narrowly avoided disaster when a crashing B-52 accidentally dropped two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs over the city of Goldsboro. Although there are mechanisms built to avoid unwanted detonations under these circumstances, declassified documents on the incident later revealed that one of the bombs came uncomfortably close to exploding as three out of the four triggering mechanisms required to detonate the bomb activated during the fall. Unlike most people, organizations can also be slow to learn from their mistakes. Political scientist Scott D. Sagan wrote extensively about this subject, explaining that in cases of failure, bureaucratic establishments usually put the blame on individuals for threatening the safety of the arsenal instead of investigating their own structural deficiencies. This is a worrying sign moving forward insofar as Sagan believes that this history of failures is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Instead of alerting the public about these issues, movies like “Top Gun: Maverick” tend to play into the usual—and much more sellable—narratives about horizontal proliferation springing from realist thinking. They tell us that states want to acquire nuclear weapons in order to gain power and prestige and that it is therefore natural that emerging states will try to acquire nuclear weapons if left to their own devices… Never mind the fact that many developing powers have in fact chosen not to acquire nuclear arms systems. Some, like South Africa, even renounced their nuclear programs to become outspoken advocates of nuclear disarmament. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly formed states of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus also willingly gave up the Soviet nuclear weapons present on their territories and pledged not to develop a nuclear program of their own. In the eyes of much of the world, nuclear weapons are thus not the ultimate tools of power that everyone secretly wishes to possess—as the narratives pushed by movies like “Top Gun” would lead us to believe. For proof, look no further than the 122 states that signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Popular culture and narratives like “Top Gun” decidedly play a part in feeding the persistent fear that an enemy state might willingly use the nuclear bomb against us when the real danger will most likely come from within.
Misunderstanding the Solution
Beyond the problematic representation of nuclear issues in popular culture, “Top Gun” and the likes also offer a no-brainer solution to the nuclear problem. This solution usually comes in the form of the hero trope, which features one or multiple unique individuals swooping-in to save the day. The protagonists’ selfless deeds leave the audience with a sense of fulfillment—a short-term satisfaction that will help them sleep soundly later that night. In “Top Gun,” this is possible in part because nuclear weapons in themselves are not portrayed as a threat to human security. To fulfill that role, look instead to the antagonist who manipulates them—in the movie, they are the nameless, faceless fighter pilots working for the shady and equally nameless state. Here lies the danger of combining real nuclear dangers to otherwise fun fictional stories: made-up villains are easily vanquishable, nuclear proliferation much less so, and the less informed the audience is about this issue, the more likely it is to equate the two.
The hero trope present in “Top Gun” and other military-oriented Hollywood blockbusters encourages the audience to praise the actions of brave people ready to sacrifice their lives in order to protect their country, but when dealing with nuclear weapons, this entirely misses the point. What’s worse, it conceals the only realistic way in which safety from nuclear weapons may ever be achieved, that is through diplomatic efforts between world leaders to achieve universal disarmament under the watchful eyes of their citizens. This last part is especially important because the emphasis on individual heroes in these movies also lessens the responsibility of the state in removing the nuclear threat. States are unlikely to abandon the status quo without public pressure, and as people living in nuclear weapons states (NWS) become less and less interested in these issues—nuclear disarmament is absent from the principal issues that matter to our generation—the arms control regime we inherited from the Cold War stagnates. Not only has the abandonment of arms limitation agreements like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty fueled vertical proliferation, but NWS have also adopted an unfavorable attitude toward ambitious new agreements like the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons because the treaties and their supporters are not “pragmatic” enough in their eyes.
Action movies and their fast-paced storylines can give us the sense that the international community is much too slow to act on these issues and that compromise simply cannot be reached when dealing with “rogue” states and other traditional antagonists. Yet history has shown time and again that expected veto players—the states and actors which would normally not cooperate on arms reduction matters—are in reality, much more amenable to discussion and compromise than previously thought. Ironically, when Reagan’s advisor Richard Perle supported the “zero option” plan in the 1980s—a proposal that the US would not deploy its Pershing 2 and ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe if the USSR agreed to give up its intermediate range missiles—he did so thinking that the Soviets would never accept it, yet Gorbachev concurred and the plan became part of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty framework. With new nuclear actors like China now devising increasingly threatening delivery systems for their weapons, discussion is once again of the essence to prevent a nuclear exchange over the Indo-Pacific.
The Media Plays an Important Role
Popular culture needs to be better at highlighting the necessity of nuclear disarmament. A team of fighter pilots cannot protect us against nuclear weapons, and we cannot quick-fix proliferation by dropping a bomb on whichever “rogue” state builds an uranium enrichment facility first. “Top Gun” and the likes are works of fiction, but the depiction of nuclear weapons as such hinders progress toward their elimination. Products of pop-culture are often the first to introduce the public to an issue, influencing people as high up the chain of command as the President of the United States himself. In his autobiographical book “An American Life,” Ronald Reagan thus recounted how watching the nuclear apocalyptic movie “The Day After” left him depressed for days and pushed him to realize that nuclear war was in fact, not “winnable.”
Vouching for works of popular culture to offer a more accurate depiction of the nuclear problem is not an impossible task, and as the gathering of world leaders at the United Nations for the annual review conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons last month proves, it has indeed become an urgent task. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres did well to remind us of the persisting dangers of nuclear weapons in his opening remarks, stating: “we have been extraordinarily lucky so far. But luck is not a strategy… Today, humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”
Anna Bartoux is a columnist for CPR and a senior studying Political Science at Columbia University’s School of General Studies. She is particularly interested in studying nuclear weapons issues and policies.