We should probably be more careful. In Command and Control, the latest documentary from Food Inc. helmer Robert Kenner, we get an inside look at nuclear proliferation through the lens of a single, 1980 incident. This incident, one which was caused by simple human error, was almost a cataclysmic event that shook the entire world to its core.
Command and Control tells this story competently. There’s no real flare here, but perhaps there doesn’t need to be one. Instead, the story is presented as a series of facts told in two parallel timelines, one which explains the incident at the film’s center and another which takes viewers back to the beginning of the Cold War to explain the global context that could create a nuclear arms race like the one we had in the 1980’s.
Perhaps ironically, Command and Control presents little command or control in regards to the film’s central figures, a group of young men charged with keeping massive nuclear arms from detonating. If this sounds unsafe, that’s because it is. One of the film’s first and most important points is that these armaments were not properly looked after, and the young kids who were in charge of their maintenance were, like many young people, entirely too confident in their own abilities.
Supervision plays a key role here, as does the fact that we had far more of the bombs than it would take to wipe out the entirety of the world. We had them just to prove that we could have them, we had them to prove we were better.
Command and Control is fairly unequivocal in the judgement it renders about what nuclear arms are good for. It doesn’t pretend to be fair and balanced, and maybe that’s alright. It presents an argument that tells us we had way too many world ending machines, and all of them were poorly managed.
If the incident at the film’s center was isolated, a one-time thing, then Kenner’s argument would lose a great deal of its weight. Instead, Kenner wisely makes the choice to use a single incident as a vehicle to tell a larger story, one of systematic mismanagement and danger that still exists to this day.
As far as nuclear condemnations go, this film is neither as clever nor as entertaining as Dr. Strangelove but, to be fair, few things are. What it is is informative and a little horrifying. We have thousands of nuclear devices to this day, and while we may never use them on our enemies, we should be scared of what might happen if they blow up in our face. We should probably be more careful.