The script focused not on politics or military decision-makers, but on a small group of average citizens in the American heartland – teachers, farmers, doctors, students – who live among unseen ICBM missile silos in nearby cornfields.
Early in the story, there is background news-chatter of mounting tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, but it is intentionally left unclear who fires the first missile.
Among the participants were Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, Carl Sagan, William F. Buckley, Elie Wiesel, and Secretary of State George P. Shultz.
[2] In addition to the feature film screenplays for Summertree (1971), A Reflection of Fear (1972) and Two-Minute Warning (1976), Hume wrote the TV movies The Harness (1971), Sweet Hostage (1973) and 21 Hours in Munich (1976), dramatizing the events surrounding the Black September terrorist attack on Israeli athletes during the 1972 Summer Olympics.
Common Ground (1990), based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book by J. Anthony Lukas, revisited the turbulence of the Boston busing crisis of 1976 through the lives of three families.