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Ninety-six “atomics” are not enough to blow up a planet or strike every last spice field on Arrakis. As nuclear arsenals go, it is actually…puny? In fact, that is just one-third of the full warhead capacity of a single USS Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine. Nor are the “Atreides family atomics” stored for safety in silos, receiving regular maintenance and inspection, ready to fire at a moment’s notice. Rather, Duke Leto Atreides had them hidden away in a cave, packed side-by-side like sardines, with no visible means of deployment, erection, or launch. Three of these precious, heirloom nukes are used in one fleeting moment on screen. No one mentions radiation or the dangers of exposure to thermonuclear fallout. The resulting blast seems less powerful than Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear warhead ever detonated (50 megatons). What is going on here?
Perhaps future technology, deployed off-camera, takes care of such pesky material details as are involved in the actual use of nuclear missiles. Maybe the nuclear missiles of the future can hover out of their storage racks and follow Gurney Halleck around to wherever he wants them, erecting themselves and launching on command. Paul Atreides might have used three at once to make a point, perhaps “dialing them down” to reduce fratricide, or employing some special penetrative power to bury the detonations deep inside the targeted rock wall and reduce the resulting radiation. Weapon choices are definitive of a strategic culture, and nuclear weaponry is inherently strategic in purpose. It makes sense that the Atreides strategic culture chose to maintain a small, very flexible deterrent. Hewing to the family script, Paul Muad’Dib uses them to make a small display of strategic nuclear power, then uses the remainder as a deterrent.
Denis Villeneuve has delivered a relatively faithful adaptation of Frank Herbert’s book. There are no surprises that lurch very far from the text. Here, however, Villeneuve has made much more of the Atreides’ nuclear option than Herbert ever did. The scene depicting the recovery of the nuclear weapons from the cave was unnecessary to the script. Perhaps Villeneuve was just giving Josh Brolin more screen time, but I think he is movie-meditating on the disturbing image of a messiah with nukes. Of course, Paul Muad’Dib Atreides is a reluctant messiah in the making, learning how to win battles with desert power. His nuclear behavior is cold-blooded rather than imbued with holy zeal, wholly consistent with the Atreides in him. Holy war too is just another nuclear option that the Kwisatz Haderach unleashes in the manner of the strategic culture of the Atreides. Jihad is but a weapon, to Paul.
After the nuclear explosions destroy the rock wall protecting the galactic emperor and his army from a literal sandstorm, sandworm cavalry ride through the new breach, and then Paul leads the storm of jihadists in a frontal assault on the Sardaukar laager and the imperial throne-ship. We see the planning session for this three-pronged attack, which in outline is reminiscent of the fall of Mecca to the prophet, the penultimate confrontation of the film. Villeneuve weaves Paul’s nuclear negotiation with the other noble houses of the galaxy into the ensuing final boss confrontation with the emperor and his duel with Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. Anyone familiar with any version of Dune will already know the story. Again, there are no big surprises.
From a military standpoint, however, it is surprising to see an army — even an army of the faithful — embarking in spaceships to go attack another planet immediately after a titanic battle, even a victorious one. Where did the troop ships come from? What logistical and hosting arrangements were made, and when? There is no nuclear arsenal scene here. Something is happening off-screen, and in the Dune universe, that thing is called the Spacing Guild. Thus far, Villeneuve has not portrayed them onscreen in this series. He gives us only a cryptic hint at the beginning of this sequel: the words “the spice must flow” appear onscreen with an unintelligible, scrambled voiceover. This is likely meant to be the voice of a “Navigator” of the Spacing Guild. Human once upon a time, the Navigators have been transformed by the Arrakis spice into beings capable of folding time and space. Galactic civilization is only possible thanks to the Navigators. Access to melange spice is their greatest strategic imperative, therefore the monomania of their strategic culture.
Here is a clip from the David Lynch version of Dune portraying a Navigator. Note that humans of the Spacing Guild are also flanking and escorting the Navigator. Perhaps Villeneuve has reserved this sort of encounter scene for a potential third film. He is likely to get a greenlight for a franchise sequel, if he wants to make one. And if Villeneuve is true to form, Dune Part Three would be based on the plot of Herbert’s Dune: Messiah, in which the Navigators form a conspiracy against Paul with the Bene Gesserit. Since they cannot control him, they seek to destroy him. Spoiler alert: this plotline invites the return of Jason Momoa to the series as a ghola, or clone-like simulacrum, of Duncan Idaho. One wonders what that same material would have been like had David Lynch produced it.
It is evident from the swift arrival of troop ships to Arrakis that Paul has been able to contact the Spacing Guild for some time. Indeed, the more his Fremen raiders restricted the supply of melange from the Harkonnens, the more imperative that representatives of the Tleilaxu machine-world make contact with other providers. Furthermore, as Gurney Halleck can attest, spice smugglers operate at the discretion of the Fremen. A strategic culture based on spice access would deal with Fremen before it would ever give up access to spice altogether. For them, it is a sacred value.
Thus, we can assume the Guild and the Fremen have been engaged in a form of spice trade off-camera. Where else are we to suppose that cave-dwelling desert people got all those nifty advanced weapons? Chani Kynes, Paul’s Fremen girlfriend, uses a shoulder-fired missile system against a Harkonnen ornithopter. Nothing we see in the Fremen world is capable of producing it. If human history is any guide, these weapons came from a world like “Ix” as trade goods for spice, and Paul Muad’Dib is capable of calling as many Navigators flying as many space-taxis as he wants. It is as easy for him as it is easy for Timothée Chalamet to summon an Uber.
Interstellar travel being relatively swift in the Dune universe, the jihad thus follows immediately upon the heels of victory over the Sardaukar and the emperor. Paul wastes no time getting as much of that revolutionary energy as possible off the planet of Arrakis. Set twelve years after the events of Dune, Herbert’s Messiah sequel does not portray the jihad, merely its aftermath. Billions have died on thousands of worlds, including many thousands or tens of thousands of Fremen raiders. Jihad reduces the ranks of holy warriors even more than the Harkonnens’ attempted genocide of the Fremen. As Arrakis becomes the paradise they were promised, the Fremen and their way of life disappear.
Having imbibed the water of life (concentrated sandworm vomit, basically), Paul has seen this outcome in advance. Embarking his expeditionary forces so immediately suggests prior planning. Movies must compress events, but let us accept the story as told. We see Halleck in communication with the noble houses, so conveniently summoned by the scheming Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who then refuse to recognize Paul as emperor. They cannot attack Arrakis because of Paul’s threat to the spice fields — who would want to offend the Spacing Guild, after all? — but they still invite attack by declaring their opposition. Put simply, the Fremen can embark quickly because they have a ready list of targets, now. Paul is eager to get them off the planet.
Herbert did not describe Paul’s conquest of the galaxy in great detail, nor is Villeneuve likely to show us more than an impressionist montage. Yet we can guess, based on what we have seen, that his success is made possible by command of galactic logistics. A caravan-master before he was a prophet, the historical Muhammad also succeeded through mastery of logistics. Having a shared moral purpose, a holy cause, certainly motivates warriors to war, but even the most fanatical warrior is less warlike when he is hungry and thirsty or without needful supplies.
We can also guess, based on the dismal strategy of the Harkonnens and the Sardaukar, that the Dune universe is filled with very vulnerable strategic cultures. For in the first film, the Atreides military gets caught flat-footed with their most powerful weapons sitting in neat rows on the parade ground, somehow unable to put an early-warning satellite in orbit. Harkonnens seem almost the enemy of strategy: despite his plans-within-plans-within-plans, the Baron displays no imagination about the use of force. Neither Rabban nor Feyd-Rautha knows how to be clever or inventive. Because Harkonnen strategic culture emphasizes brutality over brains, it cannot overcome Fremen fanaticism. So too the Sardaukar, allegedly the best soldiers in the galaxy, are no match for the angry desert-dwellers fired up by faith.
How did the future go backwards? As we left the theater, my own father, a historian, observed that the far-future is often portrayed as though it takes place in a medieval or ancient past. After viewing the first film, I observed a return to the Stone Age primitive, set at least ten thousand years into the future. Frank Herbert suggests that incompetence is the ultimate condition of military organization in a galactic (or global) empire, that the very impossibility of bringing force to bear at such great distances inhibits the wisdom necessary for effective action.
In such a universe, a nuclear missile that removes itself from the rack, follows the user outside on smooth antigravity motors, erects itself, and launches on command, by remote control, to explode with exactly as much megaton-force as desired, penetrating as deeply as desired, makes perfect sense. The small size of the arsenal, relative to nuclear powers of the past, was also a rational choice by House Atreides. Jihad is a rational choice by Paul Atreides. In the grimmest of futures, when humans have technologies that are indistinguishable from magic, it seems that nuclear bombs are not even the most destructive weapons available, anymore.
Well, it IS the future...