Special Bulletin

Special Bulletin
Ed Flanders as RBS anchor John Woodley.
Genre	Drama
Written by	Marshall Herskovitz (teleplay) Edward Zwick Marshall Herskovitz (story)
Directed by	Edward Zwick
Starring	Ed Flanders
Theme music composer	Ferdinand Jay Smith (promo and news music only)
Country of origin	United States
Original language(s)	English
Production
Executive producer(s)	Don Ohlmeyer
Producer(s)	Marshall Herskovitz Edward Zwick Lynn D. Baltimore (associate producer)
Editor(s)	Arden Rynew
Running time	105 minutes
Production company(s)	Ohlmeyer Communications Company
Distributor	NBC
Release
Original network	NBC
Original release	March 20, 1983

Special Bulletin is a 1983 American made-for-TV movie. It was an early collaboration between director Edward Zwick and writer Marshall Herskovitz, a team that would later produce such series as thirtysomething and My So-Called Life. The movie was first broadcast March 20, 1983 on NBC as an edition of NBC Sunday Night at the Movies.

In this movie, a terrorist group brings a homemade atomic bomb aboard a tugboat in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina in order to blackmail the U.S. Government into disabling its nuclear weapons, and the incident is caught live on television. The movie simulates a series of live news broadcasts on the fictional RBS Network.

A "Special Bulletin" slide interrupts commercials on the fictional RBS television network for its TV shows. A TV crew covering a dockworkers' strike are caught in the middle of a firefight between the U.S. Coast Guard and the crew of a tugboat sitting at a dock in Charleston, South Carolina. The coast guardsmen surrender and are taken hostage, as are the reporter and cameraman.

The reporter is asked to televise a statement by the terrorists calling for delivery to them of every nuclear trigger device at the U.S. Naval Base in Charleston. Without these triggers, nuclear weapons on the naval warships and nuclear-powered submarines based at Charleston cannot be used. The terrorists reveal their motive is to completely disarm America of Nuclear weapons as well as to convince the Soviet Union to the same, which they believe will completely prevent possible nuclear war. They also mention they have constructed their own nuclear device—one roughly equivalent to the bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. Their device is set to detonate within 24 hours if their demand is not met, and has anti-tampering devices that will set it off if any attempt is made to move or disarm it.