When I look back on it, it was quite quite odd that so many of us, back in the benighted 20th century, accepted the threat of nuclear war (thousands of nuclear weapons perpetually poised for launch) as normal. Just part of the background noise for daily life. Anyone who expressed concern about living on the knife edge of catastrophe was probably either some sort of political extremist or some sort of unhinged commie sex pervert.
But…even if all-out nuclear war were impossible, nuclear blackmail wasn’t. Some nation, NGO, or highly motivated individual could build bombs and threaten to use them if they didn’t get what they wanted. (Nice planet you have here; shame if anything happened to it…) At one time there was a fair bit of worry that this would happen; then (at least as far I can tell using Google Ngram) people sank into numb acceptance that there was nothing they could do to avoid doom. (Am I wrong here? You oldbies can tell me about it in comments.)
One work that sounded the alarm was John McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy (a 1973 New Yorker article and later a book) which painted the issue as an imminent threat. Nuclear materials were shoddily managed, the article claimed. Ted Taylor, the bomb expert on whose testimony the book relied, argued that knowledge like his was all too easy to acquire and misuse.
Fiction authors were not slow to realize the dramatic potential of nuclear blackmail. Consider these five examples.
The Mouse that Roared by Leonard Wibberley (1955)
The tiny principality of Grand Fenwick had no intention of blackmailing the world with atomic doom. Faced with economic calamity (Americans had successfully copied Grand Fenwick’s principal export, Pinot Grand Fenwick wine), they came up with a simple but brilliant plan: declare war on the United States of America, lose, capitulate, and then wait for US to expend billions of dollars rebuilding Grand Fenwick (shades of the Marshall Plan). Since Grand Fenwick had not upgraded its military toolkit since the Hundred Years War, there was no way this cunning scheme could go wrong. Or so it seemed.
The handful of men-at-arms dispatched to New York City find a city abandoned thanks to a Cold War-era Civil Defense exercise. Hunting for someone to whom they might surrender, they stumble across Dr. Kokintz and his Q-bomb demonstration model. Both Kokintz and his device are carried off to Grand Fenwick, whereupon the astounded Grand Fenwickians discover to their alarm that they are now in possession of a weapon that could, if detonated, depopulate a continent. Still, having the eyes of the world on them has possibilities…provided nobody jostles the delicate Q-bomb.
***
Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach (1975)
Twenty years after the West Coast exited the United States of America to form a utopian ecotopian state, ace reporter Will Weston travels to Ecotopia. Officially, his purpose is report on conditions in the breakaway nation. Unofficially, the US President wants the reporter to feel out the possibility of Ecotopia being reabsorbed into the Union. Not only are true Ecotopians utterly disinterested in rejoining capitalist, ecologically deranged America, they waste little time assimilating the reporter into the Ecotopian way of life.
Ecotopia’s independence is based in part on the simple fact that a few highly motivated militias can easily handle the much larger, better funded, but inefficient American military-industrial complex. Elan trumps mere logistics, after all. Another, perhaps more important element in the Ecotopian defense strategy is that they may or may not have mined American cities with nuclear devices. Thus far, the US has not cared to test this.
***
Alongside Night by J. Neil Schulman (1979)
Thirty years of fiat currency and rampant short-sighted nanny-statism have left the United States of 2001 in a parlous state: annual inflation is 2000 percent per year and coffee costs $500.00 a cup. The state’s reaction to unrest is to double down on economic mismanagement while brutally suppressing malcontents and dissidents. This march towards a permanent state of emergency, martial law, and unending oppression turns out to be the opportunity the libertarian Revolutionary Agorist Cadre needs to stage a bold takeover. America will be saved to follow the one true gold-standard-based way!
Political chaos might provide America’s rivals and enemies with the opportunity to interfere in American affairs. The RAC has a fix for this: they covertly mine a number of foreign cities with nuclear devices before providing proof that they did so. The fear that the US will detonate as yet hidden mines in the event of interference is enough to deter rascally foreign governments. While it’s not clear why secretly mining cities is better than simply aiming ICBMs at those cities, the stratagem proves effective.
***
Special Bulletin (TV movie), written by Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz (1983)
Disillusioned nuclear weapons experts Dr. Bruce Lyman, Dr. McKeeson, and their fellow peacenik terrorists are determined to put an end to nuclear escalation before it leads to nuclear war. To this end, they turn the military-industrial complex’s tools against it. McKeeson constructs a small nuclear device, which they sneak into Charleston on a boat. When the Coast Guard attempts to intervene, the terrorists take hostage a group of reporters who just happened to be standing on the docks to report on unrelated labour unrest.
The reporters provide Lyman with the perfect channel through which to deliver his ultimatum: the US must turn over all of the nuclear trigger devices from the Charleston’s naval base or the terrorists will detonate their device. This ensures the full attention of the viewing public and its government. The official response to Lyman’s flung gauntlet will be very public and extremely memorable.
***
The Takeover by C.G. Edmondson and C. M. Kotlan (1984)
First: The Soviets trigger an energy crisis by bribing Canada and Mexico to halt oil sales to the US.
Second: The Reds detonate a small nuclear device in a troubled Caribbean nation.
Third: Those darn commies dispatch a pair of terminally-ill diplomats to meet with US President Cannon. Several American cities, including the one in which Cannon stands, have been seeded with concealed atom bombs. Cannon has a choice: incineration or host Soviet advisors to “assist” with dismantling the supposed rampant nuclear terrorism threat. Cannon capitulates to a degree even Soviet optimists could never have predicted. America has fallen!
Except…Admiral Conyers has fled out to sea with a small fleet of Trident subs before the Soviets could completely lock down the USA. If the Reds destroy a dozen American cities, Conyers can depopulate the Northern Hemisphere. The Soviets seek some means to compel Conyers’ surrender. Thanks to a series of improbable coincidences, one illegal immigrant named Mariano stands between America and final defeat…and the bigoted Americans have never given Mariano reason to love the USA.
***
Although concern re: nuclear blackmail seems to have faded with the end of the Cold War, perhaps I am overlooking some modern examples. Perhaps asking for memories jogs will prove a mere bagatelle…but I have faith in the collective memories of the legions of Tor.com readers. Comments are below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF(where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
“The Fifth Horseman” by Collins and LaPierre is a thriller/police procedural where Libyans hide a nuke in New York City. Very good, though definitely of its time.
In non-fiction, “Mushroom: The Story of the A-bomb Kid” is the story of a Princeton undergrad who read “The Curve of Binding Energy” and designed an a-bomb for his senior thesis. It’s also a fun look at the ivy league and the outskirts of Hollywood in the Disco Era.
Richard Hoyt’s Cool Runnings (no relation to the movie of the same name) involved a Commie-backed plot to set off a terrorist nuke in New York. It was part of a zany Cold War series, which saw such developments as Soviet dissidents stealing Lenin’s body and Fidel Castro, tired of being Cuba’s President, shaving off his beard and walking out of the UN unrecognized (although throughout the novel, people comment that if he grew a beard, he’d look just like Castro).
What about the much overlooked 1977 movie The Twilights Last Gleaming with Burt Lancaster?
I think Spider Robinson had it as a thread in Lady Slings the Booze.
Then there’s the comic series the Losers by Andy Diggle. Bad guys steal plutonium and use it and some other things to accomplish something.
Joe Haldeman’s “To Howard Hughes: A Modest Proposal” shows how the threat of nuclear war is ended by a billionaire playing nuclear blackmail with the world’s powers. Looks like it was first published in 1974.
The television series “The Last Resort” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Resort_(TV_series) featuring a rogue ballistic submarine fits this category.
Then there’s Doctor Evil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-PIidaqCyU
There’s John Varley’s story “Bagatelle”. A fellow has arranged with a handy terrorist group to have himself cyborged into a mobile bomb on wheels. His goal wasn’t blackmail, though. He just wanted everybody in the domed lunar city to piss their pants in fear before he enacted murder/suicide.
In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash there was a character who also brought a mobile thermonuclear device into personal scale. He had lifted a warhead off a submarine and mounted it on the sidecar of a motorcycle. People pretty much let him do what he wanted. Also, he had other means of self-defense.
Thunderball by Ian Fleming and the two films Thunderball and Never Say Never Again
Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes series has the Grunmark travellers strike/blackmail the US government with the possibility of nuclear strikes with no possibility of early warning (by traveling from Grunmark to the US inside buildings) and demonstrate their capacity by blowing a decapitation strike bomb in DC.
I can’t remember if it was before or after that strike, but some US Intelligence agents also discovered a NORTHWOODS false flag bomb in a storage unit in Boston leftover from the Nixon era (the idea being, blow up some pinkos AND gain a causus belli simultaneously).
As I recall, Charles borrowed that (with permission) from an old soc.history.what-if post of mine. IIRC, the set up was the authorities stumble over a nuke in a storage unit. It’s been there for decades but the paper trail does not suggest who put it there and the nuke in question is documented to have been dismantled ages and ages ago. It’s just this weird Cold War relic.
8: Clearly, asking for more titles was not a “mere bagatelle” :D
Not exactly a modern example, but the Boulting Brothers’ 1950 film Seven Days to Noon fits the profile – a weapons physicist tells the government to renounce nuclear weapons, or he will demonstrate their horrors in central London.
The repeated use of nuclear mines as deterrent blackmail as opposed to ICBMS doesn’t make much sense to me, either…
But then again, much of the logic of nuclear armsmanship deeply puzzles me. I remember reading an explanation for one element of policy along the lines of “We need to put nuclear silos near population centers, because we’re worried the Soviets might think they can nuke us just a little, and we want to make sure that they understand if they nuke us they have to nuke us badly enough that we’ll have to nuke them just as badly as we can.”
The Last Days of America (1981) by Paul Erdman – someone has a plot to covertly sell a weapon system to those wicked West Germans, who will then become pals with the USSR & tell the USA to get out of Europe. Or else.
The story’s main character isn’t a super-duper navy SEAL – he’s just a corporate schlub working for the company that’s going to transfer the weapons to the FRG & realizes that this is (a) illegal and (b) wrong. Said corporate drone tries to stop this madness.
It has been MANY, MANY years since I read this, and am relying on its Amazon summary to jog my memory.
Nuclear blackmail is the primary job of the Space Patrol in Heinlein’s Space Cadet.
@16: And a significant plot point in Heinlein’s “The Long Watch”
Not sure what else you could call what Klaatu and Gort are threatening at the end of The Day the Earth Stood Still. (Not that it’s necessarily a bad idea.)
I haven’t got any examples to add since @16 & @17 beat me to it, but I find the N-Gram intriguing. It’s interesting that the concept seems to have peaked in 1966, tailed off for a decade and then plateaued until the end of the first Reagan administration, followed by a steady decline. I suppose American authors could have been distracted by the unrest of the late 60sand economic woes of the early 70s and focused on other things like hippies, inflation and Middle Eastern oil blackmail.
That plateau would make more sense to me if its 8 years were Reagan’s two terms, rather than including the end of the Ford administration and the entirety of the Carter years. Actually, a new peak during Reagan wouldn’t have surprised me; there were certainly enough post-nuclear apocalypse stories in those years. A peak after the fall of the Soviet Union (when everybody was worried about the security of Russian nukes) or after 9/11 wouldn’t be surprising either, but it’s just a long steady decline.
“The Masada Plan” (1977) by Leonard Harris. As Israel is attacked by Arab forces in 1979, the US will not intervene due to Arab oil blackmail. Anticipating this, Israeli agents have planted nukes in every major US, European and Asian city, and leaks through an investigative reporter that if Israel falls, the bombs go off.
“Not This August” (1954) by C.M. Kornbluth. Set in 1964, the US is occupied by the USSR and China. The Resistance locates and finishes assembly of a hidden US military satellite then launches it, threatening to deploy its cobalt bomb unless the Soviets and Chinese withdraw.
In Arslan by M.J. Engh, the U.S. is conquered by nuclear blackmail. The exact opposite of wacky hijinks ensue.
Heinlein’s “Gulf” has the equivalent of nuclear blackmail.
I recall seeing the end of Special Bulletin when it first aired. It was a gut punch.
Regarding footnote 3: Does anyone know how the Winged Victory of Samothrace became a canonical version of “Behold! I distract you that I may escape!” I know which friend I learned it from thirty-some years ago and I am keen to discover whence it came.
@22 See also Heinlein’s “Project Nightmare” (1953). Agents of the USSR have planted nuclear bombs in US cities and demand surrender. A team of telekinetics who have the ability to either detonate or suppress nuclear fission reactions manages to neutralize the US nukes and in retaliation threatens to set off the Soviet arsenal on their own soil.
@23 “Behold, the Wing Victory of Samothrace!” comes from “Bored of the Rings,” the notorious Harvard Lampoon Tolkein parody from the 1960’s.
(Am I wrong here? You oldbies can tell me about it in comments.)
No- it was just one more way we were all going to die.
@25 Thank you! There it was, not six feet behind me as I typed. P 154 of the old Signet paperback.
@6 – I really liked Last Resort. It might be the last broadcast channel drama I watched on a regular basis. Really well done show. I was disappointed it didn’t catch on for the long haul.
H. Beam Piper’s “Operation R.S.V.P” is an odd little epistolary story which culminates in nuclear blackmail (of a sort) by… the Kingdom of Afghanistan? (Like a number of Piper’s works, it is available for free these days via Project Gutenberg.)
@20 I vaguely remember a story that was sort-of the opposite to “The Masada Plan”.
It involved a nuke being build in secret in Jerusalem, and used to blackmail peace in the Middle East. I think the idea was that it was a ‘Judgement of Solomon’ type-deal, “if you can’t agree then nobody gets the city”.
Completely at a loss as to when I read it, what it might have been called, who wrote it, or anything else. Possibly I even dreamt it.
I don’t remember the title or the author, but there was a book where the crew of a US missile submarine mutinied and turned pirate, cruising the world extorting women and booze (or something on those general lines). The US government, in an attempt to close the barn door, modified personnel selection parameters for its nuclear deterrent. The unintended consequence was that an air base dominated by fundamentalist Christians mutinied and demanded the enactment of laws enforcing fundamentalist Christian morality. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Robert Anton Wilson’s Schrödinger’s Cat: The Universe Next Door goes like:
* Sixties: the Nihilist Anarchist Horde prints and widely distributes Hobbysheet #4: A Simple Atomic Bomb for the Home Craftsman, just for laughs
* Seventies: lots of plutonium goes missing from Unistat’s nuclear arsenals
* Eighties: Furbish Lousewort VI of the People’s Ecology Party is elected president of Unistat and institutes anti-science dictatorship. Terrorist grouping P.O.E. (no official meaning but meant to echo Jack D. Ripper’s obsession), who has gotten hold of a copy of the Hobbysheet and some of the plutonium, mines every major US city and demands Lousewort’s resignation, the confiscation of the assets of every millionaire, and the replacement of Washington on the dollar bill with Mickey Mouse. The FBI arrests every dissenter they can find, P.O.E. open their cans of sunlight, Unistat’s DEAD HAND system launches on Russia, Russia’s DEAD HAND system launches on China, all die, O the embarrassment. Interleave with porn cut and pasted from Wilson’s earlier The Sex Magicians and essays on Wilson’s foolish belief that quantum mechanics has any application whatsoever at human scales.
I loved The Mouse That Roared.
While it’s not clear why secretly mining cities is better than simply aiming ICBMs at those cities …
It makes marginally more sense if the people planting the mines don’t have the resources to build and maintain ICBMs, nuclear submarines, etc. So, Ecotopia, perhaps; the US or the USSR not so much.
I seem to recall speculation that, in the event of the Korean War reactivating, the strategy of the North (aware that they were now hopelessly outclassed militarily) might be an all-out drive on Seoul, so that they could get close enough to the city to truck one of their nukes in and then reveal it and threaten to set it off if the South didn’t surrender.
I love the Mouse series. They are great, great satires. I saw The Mouse That Roared 1st run in 1959 and immediately developed a severe crush on Jean Seberg. I went out looking for the book. My edition has the same art, but with a white border, rather than the purple border above. I tried to determine which was the original, but isfdb was no help. I think mine is. Then, I read The Mouse on the Moon and saw the film adaptation. That movie doesn’t get the love that the first one does, probably because it doesn’t have a Peter Sellers tour de force triple performance, but it is very good. It’s directed by the great Richard Lester, and Margaret Rutherford takes over from Sellers as Grand Duchess Gloriana XIII. It also stars, Ron Moody, Terry-Thomas & Bernard Cribbins. The Mouse on Wall Street was also quite fine, but it was never filmed. I get that, because it is less inherently cinematic. The Mouse That Saved the West came out many years later, and I never got a copy of it. It’s on the TBR list, along with about a gazillion other things.
Heinlein’s “Solution Unsatisfactory” is also about nuclear blackmail, of a sort.
@34: ISTM that’s underestimating the advantage of mines; a mine is right where the potential offense wants it, not subject to diversion, mis-direction(*), or pre-emptive strike and less dependent on a human crew that might decide against mutual suicide.
There’s another on-topic Heinlein short story: a mixed group of psi talents, originally dissed, gets called on to prevent a couple of dozen USSR mines from exploding in US cities when the US doesn’t accede to USSR demands for concessions. The story ends with the suggestion that the talents are about to locate and explode the USSR’s deliverable weapons in their silos/planes/…
For people wanting to rinse their minds out after all this destruction, there’s a Vonnegut short (IIRC “Report on the Barnstable Effect”) in which a psi talent “refuses to go off”, escapes, and spends the rest of his life disabling arms stockpiles whenever they’re revealed.
(*) When I was paying attention (decades ago), one of the issue with ballistic-missile submarines was that they had limited accuracy (IIRC due to not being able to know precisely where they were while they were underwater), making them suitable only for anti-city revenge rather than stop-thrust strikes on opponents’ missiles. This may have changed.
@37
SLBMs have had a hard target kill capability since the 80s. And they have MIRVs.
What about the movie The 27th Day?
I submit 1974’s “Almost Midnight”, by Martin Caidin of Marooned, Cyborg (6 Million Dollar Man), Maryjane at Angels Twelve, The God Machine and Fork-Tailed Devil fame. 5 US cities are mined w/nukes unless $100M is paid. The perps set the sixth one off in the mountains north of LA as a demonstration that they actually have the capability. A racist gets his comeuppance and that starts the unraveling of the plan. Very 70’s, but still would make a heck of an action flick today.
(Am I wrong here? You oldbies can tell me about it in comments.)
In the early ’80’s a friend told me that that one of his teenage sons had told him that he didn’t expect to live to be 21. The boys reasoning was that we’d all be dead in a nuclear war by that point. My friend asked if I could suggest any sort of response that would give the boy hope. I couldn’t think of anything to say that would be encouraging.
Wow, most of the examples in the article itself look like total crud.
I think someone should point out that we may not pay attention to it any more, but it’s not like the threat of nuclear war ever went away. The US still has a ton of nukes, Russia and China still have plenty enough to wipe the world out, Britain, France, Israel, and now we have India, Pakistan and North Korea (albeit NK only have a few). The United States is still, or once again, at odds with some of these countries and its official published military doctrines still call for first use of nuclear weapons under disquietingly lenient circumstances. The folks who keep the doomsday clock recently set it closer to midnight than it ever was at the height of the cold war. Maybe it’s time to brush off some of those old tales about the nuclear threat.
Not sure if there is a book version, but the movie Deterrence (1999) was edge-of-the-seat mesmerizing.
@41
I certainly didn’t expect to still be alive as an adult. (Born in 72).
And for those young-uns of you, check out the girl who wrote to Russian leader asking not to be killed by nukes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Smith
I remember when she did that.
I think we still may be very likely to see individual nukes used at different locations, but I don’t expect the world to just end in a holocaust and I DID as a child. Friends of mine also recall feeling relief at being told we lived near a site that would be bombed quickly, so we wouldn’t deal with surviving. (See The Day After)
@41: I was born in 1963, served in USMC during the early 1980s, went to college in the mid-1980s and graduated from law school in the early 1990s. During that time, I never thought I’d live to see my 30th birthday! That being said, I don’t think anything has changed since then with regard to the risk of worldwide nuclear annihilation.
Thought “Project Nightmare” is a close second, my favorite such story is Kit Reed’s “The Judas Bomb”, most easily found (I suppose!) in Judith Merril’s 7th Best SF Anthology. Not that there’s anything seventh-best about anything in that anthology.