Just in time for Halloween, a really scary movie premiered Friday at the Edina Cinema.
Only "Command and Control" isn't a horror flick, but a documentary about a near nuclear-weapon explosion in Damascus, Ark., in 1980.
The film uses footage, re-creations, and surprisingly moving interviews from former airmen to tell the story of how a dropped socket during routine maintenance almost led to a nuclear warhead detonation that would have decimated much of Arkansas and spread radioactive fallout all the way to the East Coast.
The socket plunged 70 feet, bounced off the silo, and then punctured the fuel container of a Titan II missile carrying America's most powerful nuclear warhead. What came next is "Command and Control's" harrowing, heroic tale of the frantic scramble to avert thermonuclear catastrophe.
Just as disturbing as that incident is, it's not isolated. In fact, the film reveals, there have been more than 1,000 "broken arrow" incidents.
"The core message of this film is that nuclear weapons are machines controlled by fallible human beings, and human beings make mistakes all the time," said Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation that supports nonproliferation efforts.
Politicians are all too human, too, and some (including Hillary Clinton, in a leaked recording) question whether it's a mistake to back President Obama's plan to spend about $1 trillion over 30 years to upgrade America's nuclear arsenal.
Some defense experts are also increasingly speaking out, including former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, who, in a recent New York Times commentary, urged the U.S. to "safely phaseout its land-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force." Further, James E. Cartwright, a former vice chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff who now chairs the Global Zero Commission on Nuclear Risk Reduction, and Bruce G. Blair, a former Minuteman launch officer who is a founder of Global Zero, argued in a separate Times commentary that the U.S. should adopt a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons.