The Peacemaker is a 1997 American action thriller film starring George Clooney, Nicole Kidman, Armin Mueller-Stahl and Aleksandr Baluev and directed by Mimi Leder. It is the first film by DreamWorks Pictures. While the story takes place all over the world, it was shot primarily in Slovakia with some sequences filmed in New York City and Philadelphia.
The basis for the film was the 1997 book One Point Safe, about the state of Russia's nuclear arsenal.
Plot[]
In an Eastern Orthodox church in Pale, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Bosnian Minister of Foreign Affairs is murdered after being paged to meet a colleague of a fellow member of the Bosnian Parliament outside.
At a missile base in Kartaly, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, SS-18 ICBMs are being decommissioned. Ten nuclear warheads are loaded onto a train and sent to a separate site for dismantling. However, Russian Army General Aleksandr Kodoroff, along with a rogue Spetznaz unit, kills the soldiers on board the transport train and transfers nine of the warheads to another train. Kodoroff then activates the timer on the remaining warhead and sends the transport on a collision course with a passenger train. Minutes later, the 500-kiloton warhead detonates, killing thousands of civilians and delaying an investigation.
The detonation immediately attracts the attention of the US government. White House nuclear expert Dr. Julia Kelly believes that Chechen terrorists are behind the incident. US Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Devoe interrupts her briefing to suggest that the crash and the detonation were staged to hide the hijacking of the other warheads. A call to Devoe's long-time friend and Russian counterpart, FSB Colonel, Dimitri Vertikoff, adds reliability to his theory and he is assigned as Kelly's military liaison.
Kelly and Devoe secures information about the terrorist's hijacking operation through an Austrian trucking company, which is a front for the Russian Mafia. When the Mafia realizes they are US federal personnel, they send thugs to kill them. Vertikoff is killed while he tries to pay them off. Devoe kills all of the attackers before he and Kelly escape. Information from the trucking company says that the nukes are going to Iran. Spy satellites place the truck in a heavy traffic jam in Dagestan after a ongoing territorial dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Devoe uses a ruse to identify it. The satellite, tracking in real time, is able to verify its license plate.
Stopped at a Russian checkpoint, Kodoroff and his men kill all the guards before escaping. Devoe then leads a US Special Operations unit from a US military base in Turkey to stop them. Denied entry into Russian airspace from the Russian military, one of the helicopters is shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile, but the remaining helicopters manage to locate the truck carrying the warheads. A gunfight ensues in which Kodoroff is killed and the warheads are seized. Interrogation of the surviving member of the group reveals that one warhead was taken by another man who was able to escape before the truck was intercepted.
Further work on the information from the trucking company leads IFOR to a Sarajevo address. Inside is a video cassette of a Yugoslav named Dušan Gavrić, who disclaims any allegiance in the Yugoslav Wars ("I am a Serb, a Croat, and a Muslim"), but blames other countries for supplying weapons to all sides in the war. Kelly realizes he intends to bomb a meeting at the UN headquarters in New York City after the documents are tracked as taken from the Austrian trucking company, and the city goes into lockdown. Gavrić arrives in Manhattan with the Bosnian diplomatic delegation.
A flashback shows that Gavrić wants to avenge the death of his wife and daughter, who were killed in Sarajevo during a sniper attack in the city. He and his brother were later found by DeVoe and Kelly. When his brother is killed by Devoe, a wounded and enraged Gavrić is later followed into a parochial school and then a church. Devoe and Kelly confront Gavrić, who commits suicide and knows that the bomb is set to go off in a matter of minutes and cannot be deactivated. With only seconds to spare, Dr. Kelly is able to remove part of the explosive lens shell of the bomb and to stop the primary explosion from establishing critical mass within the plutonium core. The primary wrecks the church, but the warhead itself does not detonate.
Both Devoe and Kelly survive with minor injuries. After the nuclear attack is over, Julia spends her free time swimming. Devoe stops by and ask her for a drink, which she accepts.