Tactical nukes in Netflix’s ‘The Diplomat’ and pop culture’s impact on politics

In Netflix’s political thriller The Diplomat, British Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (actor Rory Kinnear) is looking for a way to retaliate against Russia for the killing of 41 British Sailors.

When he insists on a forceful response, his Foreign Secretary outlines the stakes: “Unable to match us in conventional warfare, they may break the seal of the last remaining taboo: nuclear weapons. Tactical warheads, to start, as if they’re somehow less significant, which they aren’t.”

When it comes to understanding nuclear terms and policies, pop culture can have an outsized effect on the general public and policy makers.

The show, which premiered on Netflix in April and was renewed for a second season in May, is no more accurate a depiction of foreign service than The West Wing was of White House press operations. That doesn’t keep The Diplomat from using the technocratic language of foreign policy elites.

While the show's events are fictional, it is still set in a world where Russia invaded Ukraine, and the UK left the European Union. The show presents a heightened reality that shows how the modern language of policymakers has spread to writers' rooms and popular audiences.

Tactical nuclear weapons are an enduring feature of foreign policy fiction and nuclear war planning, but lining up the interpretations between fiction and reality and between the U.S. and Russia has rarely been more urgent. This June, Putin announced the transfer of nuclear weapons to Belarus, weapons that can both rightly be seen as tactical and horrific on their own scale.

“We have missiles and bombs that we have received from Russia,” Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said in an interview with Russian state TV channel on June 14. This announcement was widely covered as Belarus took delivery of “tactical nuclear weapons,” the phrase used to highlight constraints on the weapon’s power, but Lukashenko opted for a different emphasis. “The bombs are three times more powerful than those (dropped on) Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” he continued.

“God forbid I have to make a decision to use those weapons today, but there would be no hesitation if we face an aggression,” Lukashenko said later. “I believe no one would be willing to fight a country that has those weapons. Those are weapons of deterrence.”

Lukaschenko’s statements, though full of characteristic bluster, capture the specific nature of lower-yield nuclear weapons well. The weapons are exceptionally powerful, held for deterrence, and also an inherent threat, all bound in how the leader of a state perceives their utility. It’s unlikely Lukaschenko is drawing lessons about statecraft from a Netflix show, but Western viewers of The Diplomat now have competing visions of tactical nuclear weapons which blur the lines between entertainment and real world political consequences.  

Fact From Fiction

In 2017, political scientists J. Furman Daniel III and Paul Musgrave wrote a study of synthetic experiences, examining how popular culture matters for the perception of international relations.

“Why does fiction matter for world politics, given that it is not real?” Furman Daniel and Musgrave asked. “We conclude that fiction matters for international relations theory in part because the nature of cognition makes it harder for people to tell fact from fiction than they may realize—or than theorists want to admit.”

While viewership numbers on a streaming service are harder to come by, multiple shows in the streaming era have gone on to have outsized cultural impact. The Diplomat’s handling of the topic matters, especially as “tactical nuclear weapons” have moved from a niche piece of Cold War and arms control jargon into a familiar term. In March 2022, a month after Russia invaded Ukraine, the New York Times reported that NATO was meeting to outline contingency plans for the war, including what might happen if a “ ‘small’ tactical nuclear bomb” is used by Russia.

In The Diplomat, the debate over the use of tactical nuclear weapons is written largely as it happens in Congress, with the term itself being discarded by professionals.

In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on February 6, 2018, Secretary of Defense James Mattis said, “I do not think there is any such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. Any nuclear weapon used any time is a strategic game changer.”

The nuance of this debate, these positions between tactical nuclear weapons as a meaningful and useful term or an imprecise label on an overbroad category, can be lost in the translation. If viewers watched this exchange on C-SPAN, they likely come away with the correct conclusion that all nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons. If they saw it, instead, dramatized on a popular television show, the viewer might be inclined to view nuclear weapons as more usable and less constrained.

In 2020, Ashley Lytle and Kristyn Karl published a study of American perception of nuclear risk. They found a curious contradiction regarding media habits: people who follow the news had a lower perception of nuclear threats. In comparison, people who watch a lot of non-news media had a higher perception of that same risk.

“Why would the effect of following the news pull in the opposite direction of media usage? In short, the effect of increased exposure to TV, radio, and the Internet is different than the effect of closely following current events,” Lytle and Karl report. 

Later, they conclude, “To reduce the cognitive dissonance of knowing little about nuclear issues, but being exposed to media about these and related issues, younger Americans may embrace apathy to justify their lack of knowledge or efficacy of how to respond.”

It is likely too early to see how pop cultural depictions of low-yield or tactical nukes play out among the actions of millennial and Generation Z politicians. There is more concrete historical evidence of how pop cultural depictions of nuclear weapons have changed the attitudes of politicians and policymakers.

“After watching the 1983 film War Games, featuring a hacker’s attack on U.S. nuclear command and control systems, President Ronald Reagan worried about the vulnerability of U.S. strategic forces and asked the principals of the National Security Council if the film's plot was plausible,” write Furman Daniel and Musgrave. “Although many officials dismissed Reagan's query as wild speculation based on a silly movie, a review pursuant to his queries found that U.S. systems were vulnerable, prompting the first U.S. document on cyber defense.”

In the early 2000s, the Bush administration pursued the development of a “Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator,” a nuclear bomb designed to be low-yield and specifically aimed at destroying underground bunkers. Funding for the program was dropped for fiscal year 2006. 

Still, authors Marco Fey, Annika E Poppe, and Carsten Rauch of the Peace Research Institute saw the program as a breaking of the nuclear taboo, primarily by suggesting such weapons had a use on the battlefield. Fey and his colleagues found a pop cultural counterpart to this in the critically acclaimed science fiction show Battlestar Galactica, which regularly featured nuclear weapons.

“In Battlestar Galactica…nuclear weapons seem simply to be ‘bigger bombs’ and thus of no different quality than conventional explosives,” the Peace Research Institute authors write. “The overall impression that the Battlestar Galactica audience is left with in relation to nuclear weapons is that they are fairly ‘clean,’ causing massive and immediate death and destruction but sparing the survivors the gruesome experience of radiation sickness.”

When pop culture covers nuclear weapons but leaves out the ill effects, it can lead audiences to believe these weapons are less scary and more usable than imagined. This is especially dicey when elected officials take that pop cultural understanding into debates over nuclear policy, sold on lower yield as a more desirable option for military commanders.

Tactical Impractical

Since the end of the Cold War, the concept of tactical nuclear weapons—which nonetheless have the city-destroying power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World World II—has appeared often in dramatic television. Two seasons of the action thriller 24 feature nuclear weapons smuggled into the United States. Season 2 focuses on a nuclear bomb placed in Los Angeles by a terrorist group. Season 6 features several suitcase nuclear weapons. While the existence of Soviet suitcase nuclear weapons was largely dismissed by the scientific and intelligence community in 2007, the weapons would still show up in Congressional hearings as recently as 2010.

Tactical nuclear weapons, or at least a pop cultural understanding, can appear in the Congressional record in the oddest places. In a 2017 hearing on the Coast Guard’s budget, Representative Peter DeFazio of Oregon invoked smuggling weapons around the proposed border wall with Mexico as a reason not to fund it. “It is not going to solve any national security problem, but it would open up the same route the Germans used to invade France to drug smugglers, human smugglers, and potentially terrorists trying to get a tactical nuclear weapon into the United States,” said DeFazio.

Smuggling small nuclear weapons into the United States is largely the work of speculative fiction. In 1970, the CIA was worried about smuggling nukes into the US, not by terrorist groups, but by either the USSR or China.

In a memo declassified in 1994, the CIA estimated that the Soviet Union could produce weapons as small as 150 pounds with a yield of between 250 tons to 15 kilotons of TNT explosive equivalent. The CIA, walking through scenarios where such a weapon might be placed and used as part of an early nuclear attack, ruled it out as too likely to be caught and thus disrupt the whole operation.

These fictional or long-shot uses likely animated DeFazio’s aside about nukes that a terror group could smuggle around a border wall. Small-yield nuclear weapons, especially ones that a single person can transport, have far more to offer fiction writers than they ever did militaries.

“Tactical is the adjective”

In thrillers, the role of a small nuke is to drive the plot and raise the stakes, with a specific catastrophe just one more heroic action away from being thwarted. In war planning, the targets of tactical nuclear weapons may initially have been soldiers or tanks, but once the weapons were produced at scale, their role moved to target other nearby nuclear weapons.

While Soviet suitcase nukes likely never existed, the legacy of planning for war around tactical nuclear weapons persists. With it now come generations of political and military leadership that understand nuclear risk through fiction as much as history. The term “tactical nuclear,” so imprecise that NATO has five definitions for it, now applies to weapons with yields dialable to multiple times the explosive force of the bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan in 1945.

As the fictional character in The Diplomat articulated, it is a straight line toward breaking a taboo. Any such use would open a new era in warfare and world history, one that is possibly very brief as the results of live nuclear weapons accelerate beyond any careful attempt to manage escalation.

“Tactical is the adjective, not the noun,” says Pfieffer. “The concept is incoherent, always has been incoherent, and always will continue to be incoherent for as long as nuclear weapons are regarded as a functionally or qualitatively different class of weapons, which they are.”

We can hope that viewers of The Diplomat, not inconceivably a self-selected audience that may include more than a few DC congressional aides, take away the show’s clear dismissal of “tactical nuclear” as a term. But it’s easy to imagine, in a real-life scene reminiscent of the fiction, hungover staffers answering an early call from their elected boss and remembering only that the weapons were presented as an option, not an option that was discarded.

When it comes to viscerally accessible memory, no volume of carefully written Congressional Research Service reports can overpower the compelling information transfer of two smoldering stars looking to escalate tensions on screen.