How Hollywood Taught a Generation to Fear the Bomb

Again within the late 2000s, I used to be educating a category on nuclear weapons to undergraduates who had principally come of age after the autumn of the Soviet Union. As I attempted to elucidate what it was prefer to develop up worrying a couple of sudden apocalypse, a scholar raised his hand and mentioned: “What have been you so afraid of? I imply, positive, nuclear weapons are unhealthy, however …” And right here he gave up with a puzzled shake of his head, as if to say: What was the large deal?I paused to consider a greater solution to clarify that the annihilation of the world was an enormous deal. Individuals who grew up through the Chilly Battle, as I did, internalized this worry as youngsters. We nonetheless inform our campfire tales about hiding below college desks on the sound of air-raid sirens. Such issues appeared mysterious, and even irrelevant, to my college students within the twenty first century. After which it occurred to me: They haven’t seen the flicks.Discover the August 2025 IssueCheck out extra from this subject and discover your subsequent story to learn.View MoreDuring the Chilly Battle, standard tradition supplied Individuals with photographs of (and a vocabulary for) nuclear conflict. Mushroom clouds, DEFCON alerts, exploding buildings, fallout-shelter indicators—these visuals popped up in even the frothiest types of leisure, together with comedian books, James Bond motion pictures, and music movies. The potential for a nuclear holocaust was at all times lurking within the background, just like the determine of Dying hiding amongst revelers in a Bosch triptych, and we might think about it as a result of it had been proven to us many instances on screens massive and small.Ensuing generations have grown up with their very own fears: Terrorism, local weather change, and now AI are upending life throughout the globe, and nuclear conflict might sound extra like a historic curiosity than a concrete menace. However at this second, Russia and the US every have roughly 1,500 deployed strategic warheads, a lot of them on alert, with hundreds extra of their inventories. That is an enchancment over the insanity of the Chilly Battle, when the superpowers have been sitting on tens of hundreds of deployed weapons, however the present international stockpile is greater than sufficient to destroy a whole bunch of cities and kill billions of individuals. The menace stays, however the public’s fears, together with the flicks that explored them, have light away. Individuals want new movies to remind new generations, however Chilly Battle–period motion pictures will not be simply relics. The horrors they depict are nonetheless attainable.From the August 2025 subject: Tom Nichols on the president’s weaponLess than a decade after the Trinity check and the atomic bombings of Japan, filmmakers have been tapping into public anxieties a couple of nuclear-arms race. On the finish of the 1951 basic The Day the Earth Stood Nonetheless, a good-looking alien named Klaatu tells the individuals of Earth that different civilizations within the galaxy have determined that people can’t be trusted with the ability of the atom. He explains that these civilizations way back agreed to present management of their navy energy to unstoppable robots programmed to eradicate aggressors with out mercy. Earth, Klaatu says, should conform to this association or be destroyed. “We will be ready to your reply,” he says politely, after which takes off in his spaceship, leaving the gobsmacked earthlings staring into the heavens.This grim ultimatum was geared toward moviegoers who had simply lived by means of World Battle II. Their youngsters, the Child Boomers, would get their first publicity to nuclear fears by means of monster motion pictures and popcorn flicks that may later air recurrently on tv. Within the 1954 horror characteristic Them!, nuclear explosions in New Mexico (the location of the Trinity check) irradiate a nest of ants, turning them into man-eating giants. Them! advised that radioactive monsters had been unleashed by nature as a sort of revenge on mankind for taking part in with nuclear hearth. “We could also be witnesses to a biblical prophecy come true,” a authorities scientist warns.Different thrillers adopted this components, together with the 1954 debut of the unique king of the monsters, Godzilla, who was woke up by nuclear testing. By the mid-Nineteen Fifties, the superpowers had created thermonuclear arms, which dwarfed the ability of earlier atomic weapons. Each the unique Godzilla movie—produced in Japan lower than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and the 1956 model launched within the States (with a efficiency by the actor Raymond Burr spliced in for American audiences) are somber and even daring for the time. They depicted victims of radiation illness and featured a surprising ending: The scientist who invents a solution to destroy Godzilla commits suicide quite than let his data be used to create one other superweapon.Because the Boomers grew up, the variety of nuclear weapons skyrocketed, with estimates of about 5,000 warheads in 1956 after which a peak of greater than 70,000 within the Eighties. Nuclear battle turned an extinction-level proposition. Depictions of nuclear conflict turned extra severe and disturbing, breaking Hollywood conventions about blissful endings. For a lot of within the Boomer era, On the Seashore (the 1957 novel and 1959 film) turned a touchstone as a result of it wasn’t about monsters or aliens, however about individuals dealing with demise from the fallout of nuclear conflict.From the January/February 2013 subject: The actual Cuban missile crisisIn 1964, two years after the Cuban missile disaster had pushed the world to the sting of the nuclear abyss, Fail Protected and its black-comedy twin, Dr. Strangelove, introduced audiences with the nightmare of unintended nuclear conflict, a worry that appeared on-screen with extra frequency as nuclear weapons—and the means to ship them—turned extra diverse and sophisticated.In Fail Protected, Moscow is about to be destroyed by errant U.S. bombers when the Soviet premier tells the U.S. president (performed by Henry Fonda) that nobody is responsible for what is clearly an digital error. Fonda rejects this absolution: “We’re responsible, each of us. We let our machines get out of hand.” After Moscow is obliterated, Fonda orders the nuclear destruction of New York Metropolis as atonement, hoping to avert full Soviet retaliation.Like many Chilly Battle youngsters, I noticed these motion pictures on TV in later years. That they had a very highly effective grip on me, as soon as I spotted I used to be being raised on a bull’s-eye: My household dwelling was subsequent to an Air Power nuclear-bomber base, a goal that the Soviets would destroy within the first minutes of a conflict. Fail Protected disturbed me a lot as a boy that I purchased the e-book in school to see if the novel ends as bleakly because the film. (It does.) Years later, I assigned the e-book to my college students. Their response to the ending? “The president can’t try this!” To which I responded: “Are you positive?”Nuclear conflict made routine appearances on the small display screen, generally as allegories on Star Trek and The Outer Limits. Nobody did extra to convey nuclear points into dwelling rooms than Rod Serling, whose pioneering present, The Twilight Zone, generally explored the results of dwelling with the bomb. One episode, “The Shelter,” confirmed neighbors turning in opposition to each other when knowledgeable of an imminent nuclear assault. One other, “Time Sufficient at Final,” included a basic Serling twist: After a bookworm emerges from a lunch break in his financial institution’s vault to search out the world incinerated, he fortunately sits down with a stack of books—after which unintentionally breaks his solely pair of eyeglasses.Learn: How The Twilight Zone predicted our paranoid presentSerling was additionally liable for maybe the largest intestine punch of ’60s cinema: the ending of Planet of the Apes. Loosely based mostly on a satirical French novel, the script, by Serling and Michael Wilson, follows an American astronaut (Charlton Heston) after his ship crashes on a planet the place a civilization of speaking apes guidelines over mute people. On the film’s finish, which departed from the e-book’s, Heston escapes his captors, makes his solution to a barren seaside, and discovers the ruins of the Statue of Liberty. Realizing that he’s on an Earth turned the wrong way up by nuclear conflict, he turns into delirious with rage. “You maniacs!” he wails, pounding his fists into the surf. “You blew it up! Oh, rattling you! God rattling you all to hell!” The scene then fades to black and the credit roll, with solely the sound of waves lapping on the seaside.Once I confirmed these closing minutes to younger college students, a lot of them have been as surprised as audiences had been in 1968. Some college students admitted that they have been unsettled, and even moved, by the straightforward tableau of Heston weeping in entrance of the final image of an extinct civilization.Mike McQuade. Sources: United Archives GmbH / Alamy; Hulton Archive / Getty; LMPC / Getty.Within the Nineteen Seventies, audiences have been changing into more durable to shock, however the black comedy A Boy and His Canine (1975) did simply that, and have become a cult movie. Don Johnson roams a nuclear wasteland within the far-off yr of 2024, accompanied by a telepathic speaking canine, as he searches for meals and intercourse. Johnson finds each. He lets his canine eat the lady he thought he liked however who, in the long run, tried to betray him. A Boy and His Canine warned that civilization is a facade, and that we’re one conflict away from changing into wicked brutes.I left for faculty within the late ’70s, considering I might main in chemistry. However the Chilly Battle was heating up once more, and I made a decision to check the Russian language and Soviet affairs. In the course of the drive from Massachusetts to New York Metropolis for graduate college on a late-summer day in 1983, I heard the information that the Soviets had shot down a civilian South Korean airliner, killing a whole bunch. (“Powerful day to start out learning these items,” my father mentioned within the automobile.) Ronald Reagan was in his first time period; the Soviet Union was led by a former chief of the KGB, Yuri Andropov; and nuclear-arms negotiations with the Soviets have been floundering. To many younger individuals, nuclear conflict felt extra imminent than at every other time in our lives.It apparently felt that means in Hollywood too. The primary half of the ’80s produced a battery of movies about nuclear conflict, however none had the impression of a made-for-TV film that premiered on November 20, 1983. About 100 million individuals—greater than 60 % of the TV-viewing viewers that night time—tuned in to ABC to observe The Day After, concerning the horrifying impression of nuclear conflict on small-town Kansas.The movie “left me significantly depressed,” Reagan wrote in his diary. ABC adopted the printed with a dialogue among the many astronomer Carl Sagan, the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, the author William F. Buckley Jr., former Cupboard Secretaries Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara, and Brent Scowcroft, the as soon as and future nationwide safety adviser. The 80-minute session, in entrance of a stay studio viewers, was performed with a seriousness lengthy gone from TV within the twenty first century.Sagan argued that the arms race was like being in “a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One among them has 9,000 matches. The opposite has 7,000 matches. Every of them is anxious about who’s forward, who’s stronger.” Scowcroft firmly disagreed however added, with evident sincerity, that he had “nice respect” for Sagan’s judgment. Not solely did these panelists deal with each other cordially, however additionally they assumed that the general public was able to following their complicated dialogue.That very same month, Testomony had hit film theaters with scarcely any particular results and no dramatic pictures of missile launches or mass incinerations, as in The Day After. As an alternative, the quiet movie depicts a California suburb, spared a direct nuclear hit, slowly succumbing to radiation poisoning and hunger. Within the span of three weeks, in prime time and on the large display screen, Individuals witnessed two vivid interpretations of the horrors of nuclear conflict: one explosive and terrifying, the opposite corrosive and elegiac.In 1985, I used to be 24 and ending a graduate thesis on NATO choices after a hypothetical Soviet assault in Europe. One night time in Boston, the place I used to be learning at Harvard’s Russian Analysis Heart, I sat down to observe a BBC film titled Threads.The movie is so grotesque and relentlessly coldhearted that it makes The Day After appear virtually optimistic. The temporary scenes of city destruction in Threads are much less disturbing than the movie’s prediction of what life can be like after a contemporary world is destroyed. When the principle character, Ruth, offers start alone in an deserted farmhouse months after the nuclear assault, the digital camera doesn’t look away as she chews by means of her daughter’s umbilical wire. Later, the younger mom should commerce intercourse for useless rats to feed herself and her youngster.By day, I studied nuclear-war particulars corresponding to “equal megatonnage” and “overpressure.” Threads provided haunting, ghastly photographs of what these ideas would appear like in the actual world. I turned off my tv, and I didn’t sleep that night time.Testomony, The Day After, Threads, and WarGames—which bridged Boomer and Gen X tastes by making laptop hacking the set off for a nuclear disaster—all debuted inside 16 months of each other, signaling a wave of tension and a want to course of it collectively.After which it was over: Reagan and the Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev signed a landmark nuclear-arms treaty in 1987. Two years later, the Germans tore down the Berlin Wall. A month after the wall fell, Gorbachev and Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, declared the tip of the Chilly Battle.Over the following 36 years, filmmakers have discovered different public anxieties to gasoline their tales. Plagues and local weather change at the moment are frequent themes. Within the 2011 reboot of Planet of the Apes, the inversion of apes and people occurs not due to nuclear conflict however due to a defective pharmaceutical experiment. The 2008 reimagining of The Day the Earth Stood Nonetheless has Klaatu warning earthlings about ecocide quite than an atomic menace.The 2023 movie Oppenheimer, concerning the father of the atomic bomb, made almost $1 billion on the field workplace and gained the Oscar for Finest Image. However Oppenheimer is a talky interval piece, an exploration of a person and his thoughts, with solely a flash-forward warning about doomsday tacked on to the ending. No panel of luminaries debated nuclear points in prime time due to Oppenheimer. This yr’s Mission: Unattainable encompasses a Fail Protected callback, however it deploys nukes to lift the stakes for Tom Cruise’s heroism, to not query the worth of their existence or painting the carnage they create.Learn: Oppenheimer’s cry of despair in The AtlanticThe director Kathryn Bigelow will quickly launch a film, set within the current, a couple of shock missile assault on the US. Bigelow, who additionally directed the practical navy dramas Zero Darkish Thirty and The Harm Locker, instructed me final yr that she was alarmed by the shortage of public debate on nuclear peril. My hope is that her subsequent movie can function a modern-day Fail Protected or The Day After, and spur the sort of dialogue that was impressed by these earlier motion pictures.A few of these recollections would possibly look like nostalgia, however I don’t miss the Chilly Battle. I’m blissful that Individuals are rising up with out each day reminders that all the things we all know and love might vanish in a flash of sunshine. However is it attainable to have a significant dialogue about nuclear weapons with out being slightly frightened? As Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Nations, remarked after the Cuban missile disaster: “Maybe we want a coward within the room once we are speaking about nuclear conflict.” And maybe we nonetheless want motion pictures about nuclear conflict to scare us into speaking, and remembering.This text seems within the August 2025 print version with the headline “Rattling You All to Hell!” If you purchase a e-book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.