Meltdown

I just watched "Meltdown," which is an FX original movie.  (Stop reading now if you don’t want to know what happens.)

The story is that terrorists take over a nuclear power plant in southern California, and threaten to create a radiological disaster by setting off a giant bomb in the area where the spent radioactive fuel rods are stored.  This is not a "nuclear bomb" of course, but the explosion would spread radiation into the atmosphere, killing hundreds of thousands of people immediately and millions more over time.

The terrorists speak in Arabic and quote from the Koran that any person who dies doing Allah’s work will be greatly rewarded.  But it turns out that they are all American ex-military.  They are dying of cancer from exposure to some kind of dangerous material while serving overseas, and they don’t actually want to blow up the power plant, they just want to scare the government into locking such places down to protect America better.  Interestingly, it turns out that one of them really does want to blow the place up, unbeknownst to the head "terrorist" guy.  Towards the end, the head guy and the chief special agent on the scene have to work together to try to stop this from happening.

But one thing jumped out at me in the middle of it.  One of the aides to the US President says to the Attorney General, "If we get nuked, the Arab world has to see a proportional response -- nuclear.  The President wants to have that option."

Fictional movies are not "real" of course, but they often (as in this case) aspire to present plausible scenarios, to be realistic even though not real.  So that particular line is terribly out of place, as it represents the opposite of reality for that situation.  The most basic principle of our deterrence policy during the Cold War was that in the event of a nuclear attack on America, there would be no such "proportional response."  Our response would be to launch every one of our nukes at the country that attacked us, with the intention of inflicting massive casualties and as much damage as possible on the entire nation.  There would be no tit-for-tat, no city-trading process.  Furthermore, we would consider the threat of an attack against us to be tantamount to the attack itself, and we would respond with full force in the same way.  This was the public and formal policy of the United States, and because of it no nuclear attacks took place during the Cold War, and our enemies were prevented from using nuclear blackmail to wring concessions out of us.

Or for an example of the opposite -- of actually using a proportional response to achieve nothing whatsoever -- consider President Clinton’s response to the attack on our African embassies in 1998.  He fired a few Tomahawks into Afghanistan and Sudan, and then forgot about the whole thing.  He didn’t get bin Laden, and bin Laden then made fun of us, saying we were "too cowardly ... to meet the young people of Islam face-to-face."  Our half-hearted response to the terrorist attacks was just enough to kill the deal where the Taliban were turning Osama over to the Sauds for trial, just enough to unite al Qaeda and the Taliban against the US, all while actually achieving nothing whatsoever for us.

Not that I would expect anyone in Hollywood to know any of that, though.