In the final days of clashing election campaigns, a U.S. senator rides a groundswell of support as the world falters during a global nuclear crisis.
In our novel, first drafted years ago, the character is Senator Elaine Adams, an African American woman from Chicago’s south side, the leading Democrat in a presidential campaign against a swaggering autocratic Republican who revels in name-calling and vulgar nicknames—“Insane Elaine” in our story. We called him President Richard Waller.
While the comparisons with former President Donald Trump and his “lunatic Harris” insults may ring a bell, this is not what worries us, as authors of this fictitious story.
At this very moment, over 3,000 “accountable” nuclear warheads are currently deployed by the U.S. and Russia on land-based and submarine-launched ballistic missiles and bomber bases, according to the Federation of American Scientists. This number comes from the New START agreement, signed in 2010 by U.S. and Russia Presidents, Obama and Medvedev. Key word: Accountable. Over 12,000 nuclear weapons are spread across the globe, per official estimates.
We thought we wrote fiction, but we are now terrified about the unfolding crisis of our nuclear weapons policy—and a growing but misguided call for a renewed arms race that will continue to push our civilization to the brink—of survival.
But this last nuclear agreement, like a bridge burning on both ends of diplomacy, expires in the spring of 2026, thanks to the Trump administration’s refusal to accept an extension. The next President of the United States will be in charge of both modernizing our nuclear arsenal and renegotiating it with Russia, China and six other nuclear countries.
Freeze that frame with this image at a global arms conference: The next President of the United States will ultimately decide our fate as the “Doomsday Clock” remains at 90 seconds before midnight. UN chief Antonio Guterres added his own metaphor this summer, that humanity is now on the “knife’s edge” of nuclear annihilation.
This election has forced us, a film director and a cultural historian, to come from behind the camera and between library stacks to put our storyline on the table with an unabashed message. In a world in the midst of indiscriminate warfare from the Ukraine to Sudan to the Middle East, in an age of super sophisticated high-tech weaponry, including laser weapons and nuclear-tipped hypersonic missiles, we need a President who doesn’t declare, as Trump did on the cusp of his presidency in 2016, “let it be an arms race.” Or worse: A repeat of a Trump administration that gutted or abandoned virtually every arms control treaty, while viciously attacking the one treaty that attempts to save humanity from itself: the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
We thought we wrote fiction, but we are now terrified about the unfolding crisis of our nuclear weapons policy—and a growing but misguided call for a renewed arms race that will continue to push our civilization to the brink—of survival. Let us not forget why the Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded this year to the organization of survivors of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nihon Hidankyo, for their efforts “to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.”
A crisis is never a crisis until it is validated by disaster. In our research, that theme permeated the storylines, as it has with movies by Andrew Davis for the past thirty years. When the New York Timesreviewed the film Under Siege for “blending art and action,” he reminded them that his intent was to raise “provocative questions” about nuclear arms.
Today we write about hypersonic missiles, which are being deployed by Russia in Ukraine, that travel 5-25 times the speed of sound. These missiles now have the capacity of being equipped with nuclear warheads. Likewise, laser weapons, seemingly out of “Star Wars,” are being deployed in the Middle East.
A crisis is never a crisis until it is validated by disaster.
This is not fiction: The illusory age of fail-safe systems has come to an end. Miscalculations have always been part of the nuclear past, and yet fate has remained on the side of humanity. The explosion of a B-52 bomber carrying two nuclear bombs came one switch away from detonating in North Carolina in 1961. Three decades later, Russian president Boris Yeltsin activated the nuclear briefcase, only to pull back when the perceived threat was discovered to be a Norwegian rocket studying the northern lights.
In our novel, we posit the rise of a new president, in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster. We bring the story back to Chicago, and we ask this provocative question: If the Atomic Age truly began in the afternoon of December 2, 1942, at the University of Chicago with Enrico Fermi’s team, who created the first controlled chain reaction in a secret location under the old Stagg Field stadium stands, could a new age of a world without nuclear weapons unleash its own chain reaction of peace here at McCormick Place in Chicago?
In 1955, author William Faulkner confronted his native South to "speak now against the day" of segregation; to not wait until the evitable questions over denial arose in another generation: “Why didn’t someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time!”
The nuclear bomb has come full circle. It’s time to elect a president who will bring disarmament to the global agenda—and put an end to this new nuclear arms race.
