‘Command and Control’ Review: Terrifying Nuke Doc Warns of Accidental Apocalypse

With the Cold War cooled and the nation’s fears focused on individual terrorists rather than rogue states, it’s easy to overlook the fact that the U.S. still has an arsenal of some 4,500 nuclear warheads.

Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, Kenner’s movie proceeds like a real-life thriller, one with striking parallels to its narrative contemporary “Deepwater Horizon.”

Like the oil rig’s roughnecks, the heroes of “Command and Control” are the people tasked with doing a dangerous job to protect the American way of life, and the villains are the by-the-book bureaucrats — corporate in one instance, military in the other — who get in their way.

The difference is that the Deepwater Horizon’s crew numbered 126 men and women, while the accident at a missile silo in rural Arkansas could have killed tens of thousands, if not millions.

Kenner (“Food, Inc.”) and Schlosser (author of “Fast Food Nation”) — the latter is credited as a co-writer on the film and is also one of its interview subjects — point out that the history of nuclear armaments has always been fraught with risk:

Warheads have to be simple to fire, so that their operators don’t hesitate in the critical instant, but effectively impossible to launch or detonate by accident, a formidable challenge met, Schlosser says, by the extraordinary efforts of scientists and technicians and military personnel — but also by luck.

[...] had that socket not skittered off the catwalk and plummeted 70 feet to the missile’s base, and had it not ricocheted off the launch mount with enough force and at the proper angle to knock a hole in its fuel tank, perhaps nothing would have happened.

In any case, the silo began to fill with fuel, and as the fuel leaked out, the structural integrity of the rocket holding the nuclear warhead at its tip aloft began to be threatened.

[...] none were quite so close, so the film keeps circling back to Arkansas, 1980, as the situation worsens and the distant higher-ups hem and haw about what to do next.