World War III in Popular Culture - 1980s: Belief in An Imminent Threat

1980s: Belief in An Imminent Threat

In the early 1980s there was a feeling of alarm in Europe and North America that a nuclear World War III was imminent. In 1982, 250,000 people protested against nuclear weapons in Bonn, then the capital of West Germany. On June 12, 1982, more than 750,000 protesters marched from the U.N. headquarters building to Central Park in New York to call for a Nuclear Freeze. The public accepted the technological certainty of nuclear war, but did not have faith in nuclear defence. Tensions came to a head with the NATO exercise Able Archer 83, which, combined with other events such as President Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech and the deployment of the Pershing II missile in Western Europe, as well as the erroneous Soviet shoot-down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, had the Soviets frantically convinced that the West was about to launch an all-out war against the USSR.

These fears were manifested in the popular culture of the time, with images of nuclear war in books, film, music, and television. In the mid-1980s artists and musicians drew parallels with their time and the 1950s as two key moments in the Cold War.

There was a steady stream of popular music with apocalyptic themes. The 1983 hit "99 Luftballons" by Nena tells the story of a young woman who accidentally triggers a nuclear holocaust by releasing balloons. The music video for "Sleeping with the Enemy" had images of the Red Army parading in Red Square, American high school marching bands, and a mushroom cloud. The 1984 hit "Two Tribes" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood had actors resembling Konstantin Chernenko and Ronald Reagan fighting each other amidst a group of cheering people. At the end of their fight, the Earth explodes. Sting's 1986 song "Russians" highlighted links between Nikita Khrushchev's threats to bury the US and Reagan's promise to protect US citizens. Many punk, hardcore and crossover thrash bands of the era, such as The Varukers and Discharge, had lyrics concerning nuclear war, the end of mankind and the destruction of the Earth in much of their early material.

Films and television programs made in the 1980s had different visions of what World War III would be like. Red Dawn (1984) portrayed a World War III that begins unexpectedly, with a surprise Soviet and Cuban invasion of the United States. A small band of teenagers fight the Soviet and Cuban occupation using guerrilla tactics. In the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy, James Bond tries to stop World War III from being started by a renegade Soviet general. WarGames (1983) had a teenage gamer accidentally hacking the U.S. nuclear defense network(thinking he'd hacked a computer game company), which reveals a potentially catastrophic flaw in the newly automated system.

In the early 1980s there were a number of films made for television that had World War III as a theme. ABC's The Day After (1983), PBS's Testament (1983), and the BBC's Threads (1984) depicted nuclear World War III. The three movies show a nuclear war against the Soviet Union, which sends its troops marching across Western Europe. These films inspired many to join the anti-nuclear movement. Threads is notable for its graphically disturbing and realistic depictions of post-nuclear survival.

The Day After was shown on ABC on November 20, 1983, at a time when Soviet-US relations were at rock bottom, just weeks after the NATO-led Able Archer 83 exercises, and less than three months after Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down by Soviet jet interceptors. ABC warned its audience about the graphic nature of the film. The Day After became a political event in itself and was shown in over forty countries. The shocking and disturbing content discouraged advertisers, but had the largest audience for a made-for-TV movie up to that time (a record which still stands as of 2008) and influenced the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty negotiations in 1986.

The 1982 NBC miniseries World War III, directed by David Greene, received little critical attention. In the program, a Soviet Spetznaz (Special Forces) invasion of Alaska in order to destroy the Alaska oil pipeline escalates to a full scale war. The miniseries abruptly ends with the President releasing US nuclear forces against the Soviets. This narrative is almost unique because the film ends moments before the world is annihilated with nuclear weapons. Similar stories about the destruction of the world showed the possibility of the world's rebirth following global destruction.

During the 1980s, the techno-thriller became a literary phenomenon in the United States. These novels about high-tech non-nuclear warfare reasserted the value of conventional weapons by showing how they would be vital in the world's next large scale conflict. Tom Clancy's novels proposed the idea of a technical challenge to the Soviet Union, where World War III could be won using only conventional weapons, without resorting to nuclear weapons. Clancy’s detailed explanation of how and why World War III could begin involves oil shortages in the Soviet Union caused by Islamic terrorism within it. The Hunt for Red October (1984) hypothesized that the Soviet Union’s technology would soon be better than the Americans'. Red Storm Rising was a detailed account of the coming world war. Soon after the Cold War ended techno-thriller novels changed from stories about fighting the Soviet Union to narratives about fighting terrorists.

When the Wind Blows, a graphic novel by Raymond Briggs, was published in 1982. The novel is a bitter satire on the advice given by the British government about how to survive a nuclear war, where a working-class couple that do not believe that nuclear war is possible die of radiation sickness after a nuclear explosion. It reflects Briggs’ participation in the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Briggs is best known as a writer and illustrator of children’s literature, but this novel was written for an older audience and is his bleakest work. The novel’s message greatly affected young adult readers. Briggs rewrote the novel for radio, stage, and an animated film that was released in 1986.

American superhero comics addressed the issue of World War III with the implications of super-powered beings as metaphors for nuclear weapons or using it as character motivation. Marvel Comics gathered many of their Russian super-hero and villain characters into a new group, called "The Soviet Super-Soldiers" which answered directly to the Soviet Government. Uncanny X-Men #150 featured the villain Magneto justifying a takeover bid by stating that if he not take over the world then and there, that mutantkind would be destroyed along with mankind in the event of a nuclear war. DC Comics' "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns" ends with World War III erupting over the issue of a small Latin American country, with the Soviet Union effectively "winning" the war overnight by using a specially designed weapon to make a nuclear winter but without the mass murdering side-effects of radiation. In the same year, the acclaimed Watchmen (set in an alternate timeline) is driven by the threat of nuclear war: the nuclear-powered superhuman Dr. Manhattan has become America's main deterrent to the Soviet Union and his disappearance, which the Soviets exploit, brings the world to the brink of nuclear war. Antagonist characters Adrian Veidt and the Comedian are haunted by the thought of nuclear war, and Veidt's entire plot is to end the threat of nuclear war by faking the existence of an extraterrestrial threat.

Other comics would use a third World War as part of their plots: Britain's "V For Vendetta" and Strontium Dog's "Portrait of a Mutant" both use nuclear war as the backdrop for the establishment of totalitarian governments, with the former having Britain escape a direct hit and the latter showing the country in ruins. Judge Dredd, which already had a devastating World War III as part of its backstory (which left most of the world a desert), has an all-out Soviet/US war in "The Apocalypse War". This climaxes with Dredd obliterating the enemy with a nuclear strike - this slaughters "half a billion human beings", something presented as both necessary to win such a war and as morally appalling. Japan's Akira and Ghost in the Shell both start with World War III as part of their backstory, with Japan becoming a world power because in the latter due to having less nuclear fallout than other nations.