Kristen Stewart is sounding the alarm over the threat of a global nuclear war by getting behind Paul Jay’s feature doc about Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, How to Stop a Nuclear War, which is now in production.
“We’ve grown so accustomed to the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, that it barely registers in our daily lives,” Stewart says in a fundraising video obtained by The Hollywood Reporter for the documentary, which is based on the book Doomsday Machine by the Vietnam-era whistleblower. “But when some new crisis or close call startles out of our slumber for just a brief moment, we truly grasp the insanity of living on a hair trigger to what could be a real-life Armageddon.”
Stewart’s fiancée, Dylan Meyer, is the daughter of Nicholas Meyer, the director of ABC’s groundbreaking 1983 TV movie The Day After and an executive producer of the How to Stop a Nuclear War documentary. Emma Thompson is also on board to narrate the upcoming feature doc, where Ellsberg warns that the nuclear weapon arsenals of the U.S. and Russia are still very much a threat to global peace, and that an all-out nuclear war remains capable of being launched from missile silos or submarines on a few minutes’ notice.
Stewart, who will also appear in the eventual documentary, echoes Ellsberg in arguing the world is “dangerously close to nuclear conflict, perhaps closer than we have been since the Cold War.”
In the sizzle reel sent to potential investors of the doc as the producers fill out the budget, Stewart praises the history-making whistleblower, who died in June 2023 at age 92. “[Ellsberg’s] insider knowledge of nuclear war planning informs the film’s urgent call to action. This films sounds the alarm about this threat, but also shows the solutions and steps we can take to avert catastrophe,” she adds.
Ellsberg famously made copies of the Pentagon Papers and other classified nuclear documents during the Nixon administration and leaked the documents to The New York Times and other media outlets in 1971. As a high-level Pentagon analyst, Ellsberg was charged by the U.S. with breaking the Espionage Act, but the case was dismissed because of government misconduct in evidence-gathering.
“If we don’t address this [nuclear weapons] issue, nothing else we care about — no social justice or environmental causes or peaceful political resolutions, movies we make, people we love, the things we care about — don’t matter anymore. They don’t matter in a postapocalyptic wasteland,” Stewart warns.
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