Let England Shake

The United States was not attacked by the nuclear arsenal of North Korea on January 13, 2018, but it is a date that will live in infamy all the same. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL” read an unsigned emergency message claiming that ballistic missiles were “inbound to Hawaii”; many of the Aloha State’s residents had the warning beamed directly to their cell phones. It took less than 30 minutes for authorities to conclude that this apocalypse-now alert had been a mistake, a false alarm caused by an employee who had “pressed the wrong button” before clocking out. The wording of the explanation was worthy of a classic Simpsons episode; you may recall that power-plant safety technician Homer once prevented a meltdown by playing eenie-meenie-miney-moe with his keyboard. (D’oh!)

But in light of the current US president’s fiery rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction—specifically, his willingness to use them at the drop of a Tweet—the Hawaiian snafu was much scarier than it was silly. Pressing the wrong button is one thing; imagining a stubby little orange finger poised over the right one is the stuff of nightmares. Grotesque times call for a grotesque mindset: it’s all so horrible that you just have to laugh. In the hours after the (1964); Linda Hamilton’s irradiated daydream from (1991); Charlton Heston on the beach in (1968); Gregory Peck on the beach in (1961); even the black-and-white CGI mushroom cloud spewed forth in the eighth episode of (2017). There were also several shout-outs to Martin Sheen’s proto-Trumpian prez in (1983) greeting his concerned national security advisors with an offhandedly messianic “the missiles are flying, Hallelujah”—a line reading that will persist longer than any of Good President Sheen’s well-meaning pronouncements on