Earth Wars
Rogue One and the need for a New Hope
On Thursday, President-elect Donald Trump casually called for a return to the nuclear arms race of the twentieth century.
On Friday, I watched the latest Star Wars movie, Rogue One, in which a newly-built Death Star annihilates populations as a gesture of Imperial power and punishment against Rebel forces. Its inaugural blasts brought to mind the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist behind the development of Earth’s first atomic bomb: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
In Rogue One, which tells the story of the creation of the Death Star as a prequel to the original Star Wars trilogy, this new destroyer of worlds tests its power by targeting two cities from above. Each blast produces a spherical blaze of white light and a billowing mushroom cloud, the unmistakable hallmarks of nuclear detonations. I couldn’t help associating these two attacks in quick succession with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and then, almost inevitably, associating the impending build-up of the Death Star in the Star Wars universe to the ensuing build-up of nuclear stockpiles in the twentieth century Cold War of our own…
