Volume 6, Number 3
April 2009

Safeguards at the Movies: Hollywood’s Nonproliferation Vocabulary
by Mark Laughter
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

High school guidance counselors will tell you to choose a career based on what you love. I have to admit that in high school I didn't love nonproliferation and safeguards. I didn't even know what they were. But I did—and still do—love movies. Movies taught me something about nonproliferation. Movies taught me that safeguards don't work.

Movies taught me that it’s not difficult to find a hidden (“undeclared”) temple, as long as your ancient parchment map is authentic. A deadly wall of spring-loaded spikes (“physical protection”) could be an obstacle, but the wary adventurer knows to simply avoid breaking the beam of sunlight. The tarantulas and the bottomless pit (containment and surveillance) will only briefly slow you down. The weight-sensing floor tiles (“access control”) are easy to spot. The weight-sensing pedestal (“material accountancy/item monitoring”) will be triggered when you finally get your hands on the protected item, but by then it’s too late—you barely break a sweat jumping back across the pit, diving under the stone door, and outracing the boulder (“emergency response”) to make a clean escape. Only the treachery of a competitor, snatching away the spoils of your effort, keeps you from returning home with your prize.

Safeguards don’t work. At least that’s the message being delivered through popular literature in the United States, especially motion pictures. This opening scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark demonstrates how Hollywood views safeguards and physical security measures either as obstacles for the hero to overcome or as ineffective barriers to the villain, so that the hero will need to swoop in at the last moment to save the day. Effective film narrative often requires the failure of preventive measures in order to build drama and suspense. A plot in which potential threats are foreseen and effectively thwarted before they mature would not be very entertaining, and would not fill seats in the multiplex.

The movies have been filled with references to nuclear weapons—both literal and metaphorical—since the 1940s (Them!, Godzilla, Dr. Strangelove, and The Day After). Allusions to the dangers of science-gone-wrong have been around for centuries (from Frankenstein and The Fly to The Matrix and I Am Legend); apocalyptic imagery has been a staple of human culture for millennia. Hollywood has developed a vocabulary of themes and images to communicate these ideas to the audience.

This vocabulary has expanded to include themes of terrorism (Die Hard, True Lies); generalized weapons of mass destruction (The Rock, The Omega Man); and man-made apocalypse through climate change or other ecological disasters (The Day After Tomorrow, The Happening).

More recently, Hollywood has constructed a vocabulary surrounding nonproliferation issues. Here are several of the basic building blocks of this nonproliferation vocabulary, along with examples of recent movies that make use of each component:

• Security and safeguards depicted as barriers to be overcome by the hero: most famously as a central feature of the Mission Impossible movies (and in the Charlie’s Angels movies, as parody of the Mission Impossible scenes); the Indiana Jones series (as referenced above); and Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels, as prototypical “heist” films (e.g., the GRECO casino security system from Ocean’s Thirteen)
• Advanced science as an individual accomplishment: either creating a villain when the scientist becomes corrupt or when something goes wrong with an experiment, as in Spiderman  and Spiderman 2, respectively; or as sources of knowledge that can be kidnapped and forced to work towards nefarious ends (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow; The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen)
• The insider threat: a component of many heist films (Ocean’s Eleven, again; Inside Man)
• International agencies (but still often staffed by American experts): Dr. Christmas Jones of the “International Decommissioning Agency” in The World Is Not Enough
• Cultural barriers to effective cooperation: The Kingdom, Syriana, and, of course, Borat

Other building blocks of the nonproliferation language of Hollywood include governmental incompetence and corruption, states vs. sub-state actors, and absolutist consequences (either 100 percent success or 100 percent failure). These concepts simplify storytelling, adorning the standard action film plot of threat and resolution.

Preventive measures, the very heart of nonproliferation efforts, are part of this vocabulary. In film, prevention doesn’t work. It represents some bureaucrat’s misplaced confidence in faulty technology or procedures so riddled with holes that someone can—and will—prance right through. As stated above, the only effective measure in Hollywood is the hero who can swoop in and save the day at the very last moment (for example, see practically every single James Bond film).

Compared to such an effective and efficient hero, who would want to spend that money instead on surveillance cameras and fences for some remote facility in a place we can’t pronounce. Every moviegoer knows a dozen ways to beat a surveillance camera; if you can’t avoid it, disable it, reprogram it, or cover it up, then you can bet that the guy watching the monitor will be asleep, in the bathroom, or outside smoking a cigarette when you need to sneak by.

The public is influenced by what they see in the movies and on television, and these media in turn reflect trends in the culture at large. Literature has an effect on public opinion, which drives policy. So there is some relationship between Hollywood’s portrayal of preventive measures and the nonproliferation initiatives pursued by policymakers. Preventive programs would not inspire anyone to splurge on an overpriced tub of popcorn at the movies, and they do not inspire policymakers to lay out taxpayer money to fund them in real life.

The public’s imagination is currently not captured by efforts to track down and secure loose nuclear material, much less efforts to apply more effective and efficient safeguards to declared material at nuclear facilities. The public sees more benefit in training and equipping their local heroes, the first responders in every town and village, to deal with the aftermath of the “inevitable” dirty bomb attack. Experts should be mindful of this hurdle of the public imagination when promoting programs that make use of the limited resources available for nonproliferation.