"A Hundred Million Hydrogen Bombs": Total War in the Fossil Record

Doomsday Summer

When Disney Studios threatened to destroy the world in the summer of 1998, only NASA could save it. Blockbuster producer Jerry Bruckheimer took an old movie and made it new for Disney's Armageddon, strapping rocket engines on the Dirty Dozen and sending them on a suicide mission against the one foe left after the Cold War that could menace the entire continental United States—an asteroid "as big as Texas." Bruckheimer hired a space-shuttle astronaut and NASA's former director of advanced concepts to serve as the film's scientific advisors, and Disney premiered the film at an exclusive gala at the Kennedy Space Center. Stars dined under the sublime exhaust nozzles of a Saturn V before heading out to a specially designed theater to watch a crew of oil-platform roughnecks blow up an incoming "global killer" with nuclear weapons. NASA loved it. As the agency's publicist crooned: "we sort of save the planet. We at NASA team up with the oil drillers for the good of the planet. That's not fiction. That sort of thing NASA is known for: overcoming obstacles, teaming up together." ¹ NASA, far from being an institution without a mission after the Cold War, got to play at being the first line of planetary defense.

Armageddon's producers may have wrapped their product in Big Science, but as numerous critics quickly pointed out, there is very little science in the film. There is, however, a massive amount of conspicuous destruction. Throughout the film asteroids rain down like smart bombs, homing in on the world's major urban areas, toppling landmarks such as New York City's Chrysler Building, and incinerating the hub of Paris. People die just as they died in all of the twentieth century's strategic bombing campaigns: as targets, and often without knowing what hit them. Director Michael Bay offers us quick views of the cosmic assault from vantage points reminiscent of war reporting, intercutting unsteady ground footage with static long shots familiar to atomic tests. The finest and most crowd-pleasing moments of Armageddon are its documentary scenes of death from above. That cities are the primary targets of Outer Space's bombing campaign should come as no surprise, for (aside from being more exciting than blowing up fields of tundra) cities have been the presumed targets of strategic bombardment ever since German Zeppelins terrorized Londoners at the onset of the First World War—a presumption driven further home by the fire and atomic bombing campaigns of the Second World War. In a cruel coincidence, the first city utterly destroyed in Armageddon, Shanghai, also happens to be the one of the first cities ever subjected to a truly massive aerial bombardment, by the Japanese in the summer of 1937—the year when the aerial bombing of cities and civilians became a commonplace of modern warfare.

Armageddon is not a scientific film; it is a war film, and in particular a nuclear war film, with Outer Space cast as the ruthless enemy behind an apocalyptic bombing campaign. Disney Studios actually chose to raise Armageddon's death-toll in order to compete at the box office, when their film was scheduled to open a month after another impact disaster film, Mimi Leder's surprisingly popular Deep Impact. Director Bay flew crews to Paris and Shanghai less than a month before Armageddon's opening in order to shoot extra location footage for additional bombardment sequences. ² The story told by the retooled Armageddon reiterates Cold War fears of nuclear escalation: a limited meteor strike (against where else but New York) is followed by increasingly destructive strikes against disparate nations' cities; more and more countries are drawn into the fray until, finally, global destruction threatens.

While Armageddon's familiar tale of commando heroics may be simply one more instance of Hollywood's reliance on the proven formula, the likeness of its...