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

Abstract

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