How Storytelling Prevented Nuclear War

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Coming up on StarTalk, we’re exploring the Future of Life Award.

Who gets it?

People who had something to do with the preservation of civilization.

And most recently, it was given to storytellers.

The writers, directors of the 1980s film War Games and The Day After.

We’re going to find out why they are celebrated now in the 40th anniversary of the appearance of those films and what that had to say for the preservation of life, society and civilization as we know it.

Coming up on StarTalk.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here.

You’re a personal astrophysicist.

And of course, I got Chuck Nice with me.

Hey, Neil.

All right, man.

And you know what we’re going to talk about today?

The Future of Life Award.

Oh, wow.

You know, I would think that just getting to go into the future is an award.

Oh, an award or reward for life hard earned.

Let’s find out more about this and bring in our two guests.

First, Larry Lasker.

Larry, welcome.

Nice to be here.

Yeah.

You are a 2023 recipient, co-recipient of the Future of Life Award.

You’re a screenwriter, producer.

I know some of your work.

You’re co-writer of War Games.

That was an important movie back in the 80s.

We’ll get back to that.

We also have with us Walter Parkes.

Walter, welcome to StarTalk.

Nice to be here.

Co-writer of War Games with Larry.

That’s just by luck.

We happen to be on the same podcast.

And co-recipient of the 2023 Future of Life Award.

Also a producer, screenwriter, media executive.

More recently, co-founder of Dreamscape Learn.

And this is immersive virtual reality education.

But also, the two of you produced Awakenings.

I remember that film explicitly.

We can talk about that.

That received three Oscar nominations and co-wrote the film Sneakers.

I remember that.

That had Sidney Poitier in it.

I remember that movie.

So, let’s go back in time.

Now, 2023 is the 40th anniversary of War Games.

Matthew Broderick.

Remind me, was that before or after Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?

I think it was before.

It was right before, yeah.

Just before Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

And United Artists, Sherwood Productions.

And who else was in that?

We had John Wood, Dabney Coleman, and…

Ali Sheedy.

Oh, yes, of course.

The girlfriend, Ali Sheedy.

And…

Barry Corbin.

He played the general.

I did not remember.

He was in that.

He was in the general.

Yes.

And he plays that role well because he reprised something like that in that long-running series, Northern Exposure.

He was an astronaut military vet.

He played that.

He puts the chewing tobacco in, and he’s ready to make important military decisions.

So, remind us of the plot.

He improvised the line, God damn it, I’d piss on a spark plug if I thought it would do any good.

He came up with that on the set.

Oh, so Larry, if I remember correctly, he was based on the actual commander of NORAD, who he met, General Harpichich.

Yeah, and we named this one, this character, Baronsville.

Wait, wait, so guys, just remind us all, 1983, we are still in the Cold War.

So, this is the landscape on which this movie arrives.

And it’s not just grownups doing their grownup things.

It involves kids.

And so, I thought that was a brilliant juxtaposition, because they’re the next generation, and how does it affect them?

How are they thinking about the problem?

Just remind us of the climate, the geopolitical climate, and then tell us what was the thinking behind this film.

Well, I’ll tell you, as is become appropriate for a show that’s hosted by a physicist, one of the two pillars of that really was another physicist.

Larry had been particularly interested in Stephen Hawking.

I saw a documentary on TV about Stephen Hawking, and the idea that he could figure out the unified field theory, but because of his condition, he wouldn’t be able to communicate it.

I found a fascinating existential dilemma, and it suggested that he needed someone to pass on his knowledge to, a kid who could understand him.

And that character became the character in War Games, a juvenile delinquent type whose problem was that he was too smart for his environment.

Quite unbeknownst, I had come across a book about a middle class family, I think, in Kansas who had a child that turned out to be a super genius, and about what the travails of what it was like to grow up having that intelligence.

So it was sort of two pieces of a puzzle there.

And what’s interesting, Neil, is that you asked about the geopolitical climate.

It really began as a character premise between these two characters, a kid who really needed a mentor and a super genius who needed someone to pass his knowledge on to.

So all of the geopolitical stuff and all of the ideas about super nuclear war and about computers really came out of research.

Larry had a background in journalism and mine was in documentary films.

But it really started with a character story, which is, I think, one of the reasons why it’s still valid.

Well, give me a three sentence review of the plot.

So we’ve got a kid in high school who accidentally hacks into NORAD.

Yes.

And thinking about unintended consequences, he hacks into what he thinks is a game company just wanting to play the coolest new game and inadvertently hacks into NORAD and runs a simulation which is mistaken by NORAD as an actual missile attack.

And it sort of becomes a story there which unbeknownst to him or anyone, he’s actually triggered an AI program that was left over in the system by its original creator who cannot or that cannot discern the difference between reality and simulation.

And so it unfolds from there and the government pick them up and they chase them.

It’s a chase scene, helicopters, you know, and so…

And it’s Matthew Broderick who’s a completely lovable character and you’re cheering from him the entire time.

Yes.

And so this…

So the moral to the story then was what?

Don’t have a computer.

Stop.

Well, I think we stumbled upon something that, you know, it seems simplistic, but it sort of landed.

There is a moral that you take away with the certain games in which the only winning move is not to play.

Yes, that was the computer’s bit of wisdom.

And it was illustrated in a game of Tic Tac Toe, but then sort of generalized to the whole idea of thermonuclear war.

And again, it sometimes, you know, simple as best.

And I think we were able to kind of boil down some complex ideas to a simple enough premise that it landed with people, particularly in the government as it turned out.

And how telling is it that all this time later, the fact is that the AI knew better than we do.

OK, that’s number one.

And number two, the fact is that you’re looking at right now, there seems to be a push towards proliferation once again.

You know, where for many, many years what nuclear proliferation for many years, it’s been let’s reduce, let’s reduce, let’s get rid of, let’s let’s move towards a place where, you know, we make this as minimal as possible.

And now we’re actually going in the opposite direction.

Well, in many ways, we’re going in the opposite direction.

Yeah, yeah.

So explain to me now what the Future of Life Award is and what you guys did to earn it.

Well, it’s the most prestigious award that no one has ever heard of.

No, can I?

Says two recent recipients of the award, yeah.

Okay.

Well, listen, it’s put, given by the Future of Life Foundation and, you know, which is an extraordinary group that, you know, perhaps had one lapse in judgment, which is deciding to give it to two screenwriters.

It’s really been given to some extraordinary people, including Carl Sagan, I think, received it.

For a number, I think the idea is that it’s given to people who in retrospect have made substantial contributions to sort of the life of the planet or the quality of life on the planet.

But were not recognized at the time.

And if you go on the website, there’s some extraordinary stories there, including actual Russian…

Yeah, two of them.

Yeah, who refused to accept an order that was ordering a launch.

And I think that in this case, with both us and with Dick Meyer, who directed The Day After, they’re acknowledging the role of narrative and popular culture in spreading certain ideas and making them accessible to people that now in retrospect were sort of foundation.

So what you’re saying is the Future of Life Award has opened up its criteria to recognize how significant the effect of storytelling can be on the sentiment of a nation and of the world.

Larry and I were beyond honored and surprised to be given this award, but listen, complex issues are difficult for people to grasp and whether they’re policy makers or the public at large, so there’s certainly a role of story in all of that.

Stories can be very powerful things, powerfully good, powerfully bad, for a time of a lot of very false narratives carrying a lot of weight.

So I think in this case, the Institute was just trying to, I don’t know, acknowledge that when done right, and hopefully we did, you know, a story in pop culture can be a way of educating the public about very serious things.

Well, on StarTalk, we’re all for that, because I think people come for the pop culture and humor, but they stay for the science, right?

I mean, the attractors are something that matters here.

Otherwise, you have no influence on anybody, all right?

Because they’re not always looking where you need them to look, but they will come to you if there’s a pop culture vessel that they can react to.

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When I think of this movie, I wasn’t thinking this at the time, because it was just a movie and I was enjoying it, but a lot of themes are intersecting here.

So you have the geopolitics of just nation against nation.

You have the Cold War nuclear arsenals.

You have game theory.

You have computing power.

You have power struggles.

How does a military force interact with a genius who doesn’t care about whether you’re general or corporal or private?

They just know what’s true.

And then you have kids caught up in the middle of it, genius kids.

All of that was happening at once.

And it blended and became a coherent story.

So I just want to congratulate the two of you on that.

I want to know, did the government actually learn anything from you?

Yeah, we screened the movie for the President Reagan at the time at Camp David, the opening weekend of the war games.

And I had known the Reagans growing up.

So because he was a movie star, right?

So did you know him through the California connection?

He was he and Nancy were friends of my parents.

My mom was a movie star, and they would come to our house for Saturday night parties.

And my parents often showed first run movies.

So Saturday night movies was a theme.

And the Reagans were always the first to arrive.

Seven o’clock on the nose, ding dong.

And so when the movie was coming out, I actually happened to run into Nancy Reagan.

And I said, I got this movie coming out.

She said, let’s screen it.

So we sent it to Camp David.

And the following week, Reagan comes into the meeting of his generals and says, has anyone seen this movie War Games?

You know, a kid could start World War III by accident.

And it really got him thinking.

And his generals looked into it and said, oh yeah, it could happen.

Oh, that’s comforting.

So when was the concept, forgive me for not remembering this, the concept of mutual assured destruction?

That was around that time.

Oh, it had been around for years.

Oh, it was around for years.

And it’s not a very encouraging strategy, I would think.

But it worked.

Well, it worked.

Look what’s happening without it in terms of world conflict.

But ironically, yeah, as Larry said, President Reagan asked the generals about this, and it’s been written about quite a lot.

There’s a book that reported this quite extensively, and as it turns out, that a lot of even the current cybersecurity laws that are on the books in the US government sort of have their foundation in that screening and in what happened as a result of that.

It was a real sort of case study in, again, as you’re talking about, Neil, how popular culture and story can actually have an effect on policy because it presents ideas in a way that can be understood.

Right.

And it reminds me, you know, I was on a White House commission studying the future of aerospace in the nation and in the world, and we visited an air show, and I had, I boarded one of these military Air Force jets, and this very early in the Internet, I mean, very early, everything was dial up and things.

And so I actually, while I was there, just on this tour, I hacked into the Internet of that airplane, and I saw a couple of things.

So then I told them about it, and they said, oh, you can’t do that.

And they got angry, and I said, wait, dude, like…

Why would you leave this perfectly secure computer terminal sitting here for me to access if you didn’t want me to compromise nuclear secrets?

What I’m saying is there is, am I the enemy, or did I just do them a favor by finding this weak spot on that plane?

And so I don’t think people knew how to react to that kind of breach at the time.

And so, yeah, you pick them up, you try to, you know, there’s a chase scene, there’s a, you know, you had all the right movie elements to make it an exciting story.

It’s funny you say that because now the government actually hires hackers to try and break into things.

That was actually…

They didn’t offer me a job at the time.

I’m sorry.

That was the premise of our next movie together called Sneakers, which are really about tiger teams that are hired to test the security of installations or computer systems without the targets knowing in order to reveal, you know, where the insecurities might be, where the vulnerabilities might be.

Sometimes I think that, you know, did we do the world a disservice by igniting all sorts of, like, hackers, like doing, you know, bad things?

Or was this a good thing to draw attention to the fact that these systems are vulnerable?

The future of life believes it’s a good thing.

I’m kind of thinking that.

So if he worries about now security, so you’re saying Reagan started thinking about cyber security at that time.

That would have been an early time to think that way, correct?

Absolutely.

Yes.

Yeah, it was the first law about cyber security on the books.

Okay.

But it also led to his trying to reduce the threat of nuclear war with the Russians or the Soviets at the time.

You know, I think it’s great, though, because when you think about it, when I don’t think it’s hyperbolic, you know, when you look at the premise of this young kid doing this, I think that, is it a good thing that, you know, from a pop culture standpoint, we started thinking that way?

Like, what if you could break into, you know, the government and you could, you know, get nuclear codes or start a launch?

Sure, that’s unlikely, but just thinking about it in that way, I think creates a better arena for security.

And you look at it today, we look at AI, and I’m going to say if it weren’t for James Cameron looking at AI in such a way where, you know, you have a singularity, you have the machines take over, we wouldn’t be thinking about AI right now and the way that we…

Oh, you’re talking about Terminator.

Yes, thank you.

I should have said the movie.

Right.

I was thinking of Titanic.

I remember when the AI was dying on the board floating and Rose was saying…

It’s great that you get people to think a certain way and then that becomes a collective consciousness because…

And it affects who they vote for.

It triggers an entire sequence of shift, a zeitgeist shift, which is important when you need it.

It is funny when you think back then, there were sort of a spate of those movies, ours being kind of the tail wagging one of them, which has to do with digital technology run amok.

I think of Robocop as one, actually a favorite movie of mine.

The first one, not the second one I present.

But the first Robocop is fantastic, Terminator, in a funny way, War Games.

And I think there is something about demystifying all of that.

In other words, becoming aware of that so that we can actually deal with both the opportunities afforded by digital technology or AI, but also be very aware of the potential dangers.

Nor can we forget the film Manhattan Project, which is also a high school kid who invents an atomic bomb.

And there was another one just sort of in that genre.

So I’m wondering if all that was partly influenced by the John Hughes portfolio, which showed teenagers in high school as the primary protagonist in every story that unfolded, with the adults as the immature idiots.

I’m going to say that it was just a market employee to get teens out to the movies.

So after you screened it for Reagan, presumably others in the government would then have interest.

So what was the path that came out of that screening room in the White House?

Well, other people wanted to see it.

Reagan actually started telling the meeting of generals the plot.

And they all said, please sir, don’t tell us anymore, we want to see the movie.

And then the MGM screened War Games for Congress.

Oh, okay.

Interesting.

And what about this very scary prospect, which Chuck has been hinting at this whole conversation?

In your movie, the computer, this AI machine, had power over the launch codes so that it could make an autonomous military decision about a strike.

And that is a scary prospect, then and now.

Probably more now.

And even before the AI part of it, Larry, you know the anecdote better, we actually, while we were working on the film, there was a near-war-games-like scenario that took place where a simulation was mistaken by command and control as an actual attack.

Yeah, we were actually in my apartment in Santa Monica working on the script, and we were going, is anyone going to believe that this could happen?

And I turned on the CBS Evening News, and it was Walter Cronkite.

The top of the news was, for three minutes yesterday, the United States went on a full-scale nuclear alert.

It turned out it was a simulation tape that had been left in a computer, and it completely freaked out the military, because they thought we were under attack, because the simulation was of a full-scale Russian missile attack.

Fortunately, someone caught it before we volleyed our missiles back.

So, then we turned off the TV and said, yeah, people will believe it.

Yeah, let’s keep going.

Keep on the script.

Neil, you brought up the zeitgeist, and you’re talking about why kid characters, and we had a really interesting experience.

What was it about five, I forget how many years ago, where we were featured at the founders’ lunch they do at Google, to have a conversation about war games, because it turns out it was an early important film for a lot of the people who worked there.

And at the time, looking back, we realized we got all sorts of things wrong, but we got one big essential thing right in that movie, which was that the, and this is going to your idea of the young characters, that the world wouldn’t be changed by the US government policies or by IBM or by Ma Bell, but would be young people either in their garages or in their bedrooms using these extraordinary new digital tools.

Please tell everyone what Ma Bell is.

Yeah, back when there was one.

When there was one telephone company, AT&T was Ma Bell.

But the point is, there is a, David Lightman, the character, our main character did have his roots in being kind of a punky, you know, anti-establishment kid.

And we certainly understood that, you know, that in this case, innovation didn’t come from institutions, didn’t come from the government.

It actually came from, you know, the ground up and from kids who had a sort of intuitive understanding of what these tools could be.

And so if you look then over the next, you know, five, 10, 15, 20 years, most of the innovation did come from outside of big companies.

In fact, a year later, the Macintosh was introduced.

Correct.

You know, and wired in a garage.

The timing of our work on beginning this screenplay was quite propitious.

The first thing we did when we got the deal, the next week, I called SRI, Stanford Research Institute, and talked to the public information guy there, told him a little bit about what we’re working on.

And he said, all right, you want to come up Tuesday?

And I said, sure.

And we went up there and he had like five meetings set for us to meet smart people who basically told us why we had come and what questions to ask, and all we had to do was take notes.

And the last meeting was with a bunch of futurists.

And one of them, Peter Schwartz, said, you know what Atari is up to?

Yeah, video games.

He says, okay, well, the military is trying to biggie back onto them.

And I think that’s where your kid and your dying scientists are going to hook up.

There it is.

And then…

Because at the time, adults didn’t really play video games, right?

It was just getting going.

And then during research, when we discovered that home computers could hook up over phone lines to big computers, we thought, well, there’s our movie.

I mean, that was a major revelation.

That’s how the kid alone in his bedroom could get caught up in the world of high tech and science.

And the third movie I was saying in this kid genre was, it was your movie War Games, there was Manhattan Project, a high school kid, and of course there was Real Genius, which were young college kids trying to outsmart the military, the US military.

So, given your life experience here and that you’re at least celebrated, if not in the day, certainly later when people reflect on how different the world might have been had that movie not been made, is there some movie you think that needs to be made today that isn’t, that we need?

And even if there isn’t some, what movie would you make today?

I’ve been given it some thoughts.

I haven’t come up with a definitive answer yet, but I better keep trying.

You still think, okay.

You know, here’s the thing about writing movies, and it really goes back to the fact that we didn’t set out to do a movie about super nuclear war or geopolitics or about the emerging computer revolution or AI.

As I said, it was a movie about an idea about two characters, and luckily, we had the background in The Time to Kill to do a lot of research so that we sort of had an emotional foundation.

Yeah, we were open to what was going on in the world.

And then we got some really good informants, too.

David Lewis, who was at the UCLA Computer Club, and he was a hacker, and he just took us through every step of what a hacker would do, and I could call him up when I’m writing a scene and say, well, how do you get a computer to play itself?

Number of players?

Zero.

Okay, thanks, David.

And then Willis Ware, who was at the Rand Corporation, was our advisor on sort of the computer systems, and he had actually designed the computer system in NORAD.

And when we said, unlike some experts who tell you why you can’t do whatever you want to do, Willis would say, what do you need?

He said, well, we need the kid to be able to access a top-secret computer.

And he says, yeah, you could do it.

He says, they tell you those computers are absolutely standalone, isolated, bullshit.

Everyone wants, if they want to work from home on the weekend, they set up a little back door.

You’re playing that back door.

It’s a back door all the way.

And the programmer of the software can leave a back door without telling anybody else.

Yes, absolutely.

But just to go back to Chek’s question, so I don’t think you can ever decide I’m going to make a movie about a concept.

Or it just turned out to be sort of, I don’t know, rigid.

But we are at a moment in terms of AI that we’re pretty much depending on tropes of the last 20 years.

We brought up Jim Cameron’s movies, et cetera, and it’s a much more complex issue than that.

And I wonder if there’s a way to go after that idea with a narrative.

As you could imagine, Larry and I over the years have been brought more than our share of ideas for wargame sequels.

But in a funny way, the idea that there would be an intelligent program, our Joshua program, that’s been alive out there in cyberspace for the last…

Joshua was the name of the program for those who didn’t cover this.

That’s been out there learning and navigating the cyberspace as the distinction between the virtual world and the physical world becomes less and less.

There is probably a good story to be told there.

If you make the sequel, you got to bring Matthew Broderick back as the general.

That would be good.

That’s an implicit endorsement.

Not that any of you all asked, but I served on a board of the Pentagon, a Pentagon Innovation Board, where we thought deeply about what role emerging technologies, computing and otherwise, would or should play in national security.

And we tackled AI in a statement and a report where we said, AI is fine for identifying targets and all this sort of thing, but there must be a human in a loop if that decision requires a kill.

You cannot have AI autonomously decide that an attack should occur, that an attack will occur.

You have to have a human being in there.

And this is a sort of ethos that is now part of the military as we go forward trying to figure out how AI fits into our lives.

So in the case of war games, that was not the case.

In the case of war games, it was not written that way.

It was like Joshua could do this all by itself.

The beginning of the movies, the premise is that the missile commanders fail the test.

They don’t want to turn the keys to kill 100 million people until they get someone on the phone to tell them.

And so they decide, well, we can’t do this.

Let’s get rid of the humans and just put the machines in control.

Right.

Right.

I’ve forgotten that.

That was a bit of tension at the beginning there.

Yes.

Yes.

Very good.

Very good.

Well, gentlemen, this has been a delight to have you on.

We’re continuing this program on the Future of Life Award because coming up, we’re going to have Nicholas Meyer, who directed the TV film The Day After, which was seen by essentially every single American when it aired.

And we’ll pick up that conversation.

Again, guys, thanks for being on StarTalk.

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Hi I’m Chris Cohen from Haworth, New Jersey and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

So Chuck, continuing with this Future of Life Award, what intrigues me is that this is a set of awards that this year went to the power of storytelling to affect change, rather than people who might have themselves had access to the button and didn’t push it, thereby sort of saving the world.

This is their other ways to save the world and we cannot undervalue the power of a good story told well, told with impact and emotion.

And that brings us right to the director of the movie The Day After.

I remember this movie.

I was like fully alive and cognizant when this movie came out in 1983.

We have with us the director of that movie, Nicholas Meyer.

Nicholas, welcome to StarTalk.

Oh, hi.

Thanks for inviting me.

So Nicholas Meyer, you’re not only a screenwriter, director, author, you’re deep into the Star Trek universe.

Is it a universe or a world?

What should I…

There’s like the Marvel universe.

Universe of work.

Okay, universe works.

By the way, that’s how I know them.

You’re the director of The Wrath of Khan, co-writer of The Voyage Home.

Was that Save the Whales?

That was the Save the Whales one, right?

Yes, it was.

That’s right.

But yeah, my best line in that is, what is exact change as they get kicked off the bus?

And so, in Star Trek Discovery, you’re all in the Star Trek universe.

So, you’ve got the right street cred here for our audience.

And in there, among there, before that, you were director of The Day After.

So, apparently, not only are you in the Star Trek fandom, creating content for that universe, you’re also writing Sherlock Holmes.

So, a year ago, The Return of the Pharaoh, and coming up, Sherlock Holmes and The Telegram from Hell.

So, you’re a busy guy.

A busy guy.

Congratulations on it all.

Thank you.

And the world is a better place and, dare I say, safer place for you being in it.

My mother thanks you.

I thank you.

Yeah.

So, The Day After is the day after total thermonuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.

It’s a movie about that.

It aired on ABC.

It was a TV movie.

It aired on ABC.

Everybody was talking about this the day after.

It’s like almost the entire country watched.

Yes.

One thing at one time.

One thing at one time, which doesn’t happen anymore.

That doesn’t happen anymore.

And a hundred million people, I’m one of those hundred million.

So Nicholas, can you just remind us of the geopolitical climate in 1983?

Reagan was president.

Gorbachev was head of the party in, I think…

The Soviet Union, yes.

Well, actually, he was not.

His predecessor was the very aged Yuri Andropov.

This was, at the time, characterized as the absolute low point in U.S.-Soviet relations.

There’s no more Soviet Union, but U.S.-Russia relations are now at as bad or probably worse point than they were in 1983.

But Yuri Andropov believed that Ronald Reagan was prepared to push the button at any moment.

And he wasn’t far wrong.

Ronald Reagan came to power believing in a winnable nuclear war.

As if you watch Dr.

Strangelove, George C.

Scott as General Buck Turgesson says to the president, played by Peter Sellers, Mr.

President, I’m not saying we’re not going to get our hair must, but I’m telling you, 10, 20 million dead tops.

And it was that sort of thinking that prevailed at the time that the movie came out.

Everyone was basically held hostage to this nuclear arms race.

And so you have many talents in this space as screenwriter, director, and author.

How did you land the director’s role for The Day After?

Well, I certainly was nobody’s first choice.

I believe…

You’re our first choice.

You are our first choice, of course.

But I believe I was the third director to be asked.

I think it’s important to establish the great paradox with which we are dealing and have been dealing since 1945 and the explosion of atom bombs over…

The ability to annihilate ourselves is arguably, possibly along with climate change, the most important question that has ever faced the human race and by extension of all of planet Earth.

And yet, and here’s the paradox, it is so disturbing that nobody can bear to think about it.

We don’t want to talk about it.

In the words of George Bush, we say, go shopping.

So what we do is we pretend that this Damoclean sword, which is dangling by an ever fraying cord over our heads, doesn’t exist.

But as Daniel Ellsberg said, hope is not a strategy.

Luck is not a strategy.

And I have to say that at the time I was the third director to be offered this, I didn’t want to think about nuclear war either.

I directed a couple of hit movies.

I’d been nominated for an Academy Award.

Who wanted to do this?

But in fact, I was being psychoanalyzed at the time.

I was lying on the couch and trying to talk my way out of doing this, when my analyst, who never spoke, said, well, I think this is where we find out who you really are.

Checkmate.

That’s how I wound up doing the movie.

Not because I’m a professional do-gooder or altruist.

And so here’s my memory of the plot, and I tuned it up if I get it wrong.

So it follows a family or some town in Kansas, where we have a higher concentration of nuclear silos.

And in any first exchange, what I do know is you want to first take out the other person’s nukes before you start going after their cities or any other targets.

And so Kansas became a hotbed for the first arrival of these nuclear weapons.

And they do hit, and they do go off, and you watch people attempting to survive this into the next day.

That was what I remember.

Well, basically, Kansas was, Lawrence, Kansas was picked simply because it’s the geographical center of the continental United States.

The fact that we have these missile silos all over the United States, they’re all over, is part of the great folly of our policy and politics.

Because it simply makes sitting targets for every place you have a missile is a target.

Whereas, as Daniel Ellsberg so precisely pointed out, we can defend ourselves with Polaris submarines, which are much harder to locate than pinning these targets all over the place.

And accidents happen in these targets.

You may remember some years ago in Arkansas, a monkey wrench fell down a missile silo, unloosed the fuel leak that almost precipitated the annihilation of all of Arkansas.

And there have been a lot of nuclear accidents, many.

It was a literal monkey wrench.

Is it a literal monkey wrench?

Yes, it was a monkey wrench.

What Ed Hume, who wrote the screenplay, did, was he simply wrote about a lot of regular people, not just one family, but different people doing different things, going to college, getting married, on and on and on.

Some people who worked in the military, who go down in those silos, among them.

In other words, people like us doing what we do, and they all get nuked.

That’s the movie.

That’s the movie.

That’s the movie.

But I remember it was an event.

It was a television event.

And I also distinctly remember that after the film, there was a panel of experts, which included Carl Sagan, Henry Kissinger, LA.

Visell, William Buckley, Robert Jastrow, Carl Sagan, some of the deep thinkers of the day to analyze what had just happened.

So let me ask you this.

The Future of Life Award goes to people who played some pivotal role in saving all of humanity, and most people don’t even know it.

So it’s a way to tease out of the history of human conduct those people who mattered greatly.

So if this movie was just a movie and people saw it and went about their way, you wouldn’t be recognized 40 years later.

It’s just a movie.

So how did this end up mattering geopolitically afterwards?

Ronald Reagan, as I said, came to power believing in a winnable nuclear war.

You know, when a child falls down a well, that’s a tragedy.

But when millions die, that’s statistics.

Mr.

President, I’m not saying we’re not going to get our hair must.

We’re just talking abstraction at this point.

But when you see those missiles take off, and we’ve all been raised on 100 years of Hollywood happy endings, and suddenly there was, and he flipped out.

And he’s a Hollywood guy.

He’s a Hollywood guy.

So this especially affects him.

I don’t even think that’s the main point.

There was a general on Castro’s staff who said that the Cuban missile crisis had not been real to him till he saw the movie.

I think it’s about imagining the unimaginable.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Hollywood actor or not.

Yes, he may have been more naive.

He told Helen Caldicott that the missiles could be recalled.

And she said, Mr.

President, they can’t be recalled.

He didn’t know that.

Anyway, what happened was this, I guess…

It was just on-the-job training.

That’s all.

He wound up changing his mind.

And when Gorbachev…

After he saw the film.

Yes.

I don’t…

I think Edmund Morris, who was in the White House, who was his official biographer, and I also got to know Morris because he wrote The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which I wrote as a screenplay for Martin Scorsese at one point.

And he told me, he lived in the White House for three years, and he said the only time he ever saw Reagan lose it was after he saw the movie.

And ultimately what happened was Yuri Andropov died and Gorbachev took over, and there was Glasnost and there was Perestroika, and Reagan went to Reykjavik to meet with Gorbachev and ultimately signed the Intermediate Missile Range Treaty with him.

He was on his way to signing off on a lot more, but he wouldn’t give up his strategic defense initiative, which we call Star.

Daniel Ellsberg explained to me, and Ellsberg had been nuclear war planner, that the treaty that resulted between Reagan and Gorbachev in Iceland, which the fearless grabber-in-chief has now walked out of, was the only treaty that ever resulted in the physical dismantling of nuclear weapons.

So, that’s my little contribution to world history.

I’m interested to know how it came to Reagan.

Did you guys, as a production, say, hey, you know, you should take a look at this?

Yeah, screen this at the White House.

Or did his advisors say, my God, or was it just the sheer magnitude of the event itself, the fact that more than half the country watches one television event altogether?

And then what kind of public reaction did that have something to do with maybe him?

Chuck, that’s a good point, because often a politician in a democracy, in a republic, has to be responsive to what the public thinks, right?

They can’t be opposite what their electorate says, otherwise you don’t get reelected.

So, Chuck, that’s a good point.

Unless you have gerrymandering.

That’s a whole other show.

Well, let me explain as best I can.

Basically, the secret of the film’s success, in my opinion, but I think I can sort of back it up, was the controversy that accompanied it.

The very idea, everybody at ABC, the network that was making the movie, hated the movie, hated the idea of it, couldn’t stand it.

They knew they were going to lose all their sponsors.

This is not what was shown on American network television.

In prime time.

They did the flying nun.

They did laugh-in.

But their main business is to sell product.

It’s to advertise.

And they knew this wasn’t going to happen.

They were going to lose a bucket on this.

One man wanted this movie made.

His name was Brandon Stoddard.

If you’re giving prizes, he’s not alive.

But he should get the prize because he insisted, despite death threats and all, he had to threaten to resign to get this movie on the air.

This is what he wanted.

He’s the guy who did Roots.

And he was looking to a follow-up for Roots.

And the controversy and the nuclear freeze movement got Reagan’s attention, got the White House’s attention.

And before he saw the movie, Ronald Reagan regarded the movie as a threat.

We were offered Defense Department cooperation.

You can have missiles, you can have tanks, you can have helicopters, whatever you want.

Just make sure that the Russians started the war.

We told them to fuck off.

So we had to sort of do it in our own way without that.

But this was on Reagan’s radar.

And the more Phyllis Schlafly and Bill Buckley went running up and down the country like Chicken Little, insisting that the sky was falling if this movie got on the air, the more the White House and the country got drawn into, what is it?

Why can’t I watch it?

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And that’s why 100 million people watched it in one night.

Incidentally, there’s a documentary about the making of this movie now.

Which is called Television Event.

And I believe Television Event is available on YouTube.

And I must also tell you, because I just got this in the mail, that this is coming out November 15th.

Tell us the title, for those who are only listening.

It’s called Apocalypse Television, How the Day After Helped End the Cold War by David Craig.

Craig, I just got it in the mail this morning.

It comes out on the 15th.

And I read it, of course, I went November 15th.

The 15th of November.

I immediately went to the index to see how I turned out.

Oh, yeah.

And yeah, I come off like a jerk half the time.

And the rest of the time I come out OK.

So I figure whatever.

On balance.

But there are other apocalyptic moments.

For example, Netflix had the film Don’t Look Up, although that was comedic.

But their apocalyptic films are an important genre.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, but I think the difference, there’s a certain…

Now that we have great special effects, it’s kind of fun to see New York City inundated by water and sort of the effects take over.

I’m sure there are loads of versions where the White House blows up and so on and so forth.

My point is that I, as a director, figuring out about this movie while I was making it, I realized that I didn’t want to make a really good piece of cinema because I realized that if the movie had great acting and great cinematography and a catchy theme song, blah, blah, nobody was going to talk about the subject.

We would do anything not to talk about the subject.

And Nicholas, what I remember most is that I didn’t recognize any of the actors.

Well, we didn’t want a lot of bold-faced names.

You succeeded at that, and there was nothing else I could pay attention to but the storyline.

That’s kudos to your whole concept.

I wanted to make a movie like a public service announcement.

If you have a nuclear war, this is what it’s going to look like on a good day.

We didn’t show Nuclear Winter because we didn’t know about it, but we did show the electromagnetic pulse because we did know about that.

I started out thinking, oh yes, right, I could unseat Ronald Reagan or some grandiose shit like that.

Then I realized, no, forget all that.

Just show them what it’s going to be like.

We couldn’t make it too terrible because people would reach for the clicker and change the channel to something else.

It was a tightrope act.

Again, I didn’t want music in the movie, so there’s very little music in the movie.

I didn’t want to be accused of goosing anybody’s emotions or editorializing.

Just the facts, ma’am.

So we’re running short on time.

A quick question here.

So remind me who launched missiles first if you ignored the DOD’s request to not show America as a first strike.

I don’t remember what started it.

Nobody knows.

We never showed it.

That was the whole point of the movie, was not to show who started it.

And by the way, when we get nuked…

Yeah, no one will care.

No one will know.

No one will know.

And nobody’s going to be afterwards going, who did this?

Because it’s just not going to happen, because it’ll be so incredibly devastating.

No, we’ll be sitting here talking, and then we’ll be gone.

And it’s not a question of who started it.

It won’t matter.

All right, so Nicholas, give me something positive to think about going forward.

We have to get past the paradox of not wanting to think about this.

It’s not enough to contribute to some charity online, send in $10 and hope for the best.

Luck is not a strategy.

Hope is not a strategy.

You have to get out in the streets and demand change, and you have to do it in astronomical numbers in order to make things happen.

This is a call to action.

You bet.

And there’s not a lot of time.

Yeah.

All right.

It’s interesting you say that because the thing that is most disturbing about this issue right now is that you have talk and saber rattling surrounding limited strike capabilities.

Oh, yeah.

Or this is a big thing that’s being bandied about right now.

And I don’t know how you feel about that.

You don’t?

I could guess.

I could venture the guess.

The thing that’s really dumb about nuclear weapons is that they can never be used.

And yet we keep on building more and more of them.

You’re not going to get the toothpaste back in the tube.

Once this starts, it won’t stop.

Mm-hmm.

Well, that’s a call to action, a call for peace, a call for sanity.

It’s a call for sanity, one hopes, yes.

Sanity.

There it is.

Well, Nicholas, first congratulations on this award.

Thank you.

We need more people to keep the world safe, whether they’re household names or not.

And I’m delighted that we could at least help in our little way to bring attention.

I’m extremely grateful and very honored.

Excellent.

All right.

All right, Nicholas.

Chuck, always good to have you, man.

Always a pleasure.

So this has been StarTalk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here.

You’re a personal astrophysicist.

And we had a celebration of the Future of Life Award.

Check it out, futureoflife.org online.

As always, keep looking up.