1970s: Fears Continue
The American public's concerns about nuclear weapons and related technology continued to be present in the 1970s. The most talked about events in the 1970s were the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, the Iran hostage crisis, the energy crisis, and stagflation.
The 1973 oil crisis heightened fears of an peak oil collapse of domestic life. The crisis rationing led to incidents of violence, after American truck drivers nationwide chose to strike for two days in December 1973 because they objected to the amount of supplies the government had rationed for their industry. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, non-striking truckers were shot at by striking truckers, and in Arkansas, trucks of non-strikers were attacked with bombs.
These peak oil fears lead to the iconic Mad Max movie series in 1979. The Road Warrior's desert imagery of a resource-drained world became an archetypical default of post-apocalypse worlds. Screenplay writer James McCausland drew heavily from his observations of the 1973 oil crisis' effects on Australian motorists:
| “ | Yet there were further signs of the desperate measures individuals would take to ensure mobility. A couple of oil strikes that hit many pumps revealed the ferocity with which Australians would defend their right to fill a tank. Long queues formed at the stations with petrol – and anyone who tried to sneak ahead in the queue met raw violence.
... George and I wrote the script based on the thesis that people would do almost anything to keep vehicles moving and the assumption that nations would not consider the huge costs of providing infrastructure for alternative energy until it was too late. |
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—James McCausland, writing on peak oil in The Courier-Mail, 2006 |
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On television, the British science fiction series Doctor Who based a 1972 storyline, Day of the Daleks on the premise of time travellers from the future attempting to trigger a present-day nuclear war between the superpowers.
In the 1977 Robert Aldrich film Twilight's Last Gleaming, a nuclear missile silo is seized by renegade US Air Force officers, who threaten to start World War III if the American government does not reveal secret documents that show that the military needlessly prolonged the Vietnam War.
Read more about this topic: World War III In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words fears and/or continue:
“When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The admission of Oriental immigrants who cannot be amalgamated with our people has been made the subject either of prohibitory clauses in our treaties and statutes or of strict administrative regulations secured by diplomatic negotiations. I sincerely hope that we may continue to minimize the evils likely to arise from such immigration without unnecessary friction and by mutual concessions between self-respecting governments.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)