World War III in Popular Culture - 1990s: Fears Subside

1990s: Fears Subside

The Cold War ended without the destructive final global war that had often been envisioned in popular culture, and the public's fears of World War III were allayed. On the other hand, the previously classified Stanislav Petrov incident of 1983 seemed to imply that the risk of accidental nuclear war due to technical malfunction had been greater than previously anticipated. The theme of nuclear armageddon launched by military artificial intelligence computer systems without human decision was explored in the 1991 blockbuster movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day. During the early 1990s and the Gulf Crisis, tabloid papers and other press discussed whether World War III would be linked to prophecies of Nostradamus concerning a third great war.

Movies about nuclear weapons that saved humanity were popular, such as Armageddon and Deep Impact (1998). Blast from the Past (1999) is a comedy about a 1960s family caught in the grip of Cold War paranoia. Falsely convinced that World War III has started, they hide in their fallout shelter, only to emerge 35 years later in the post–Cold War world. Jonathan Schell complained to the New York Times that "the post–Cold War generation knows less about nuclear danger than any generation."

Yellow Peril (1991) by Wang Lixiong, is about a civil war in the People's Republic of China that becomes a nuclear exchange and soon engulfs the world. It was banned by the Chinese Communist Party but remained popular.

World War III is referenced in the 1996 film Star Trek: First Contact. William T. Riker states that 600 million people were killed and very few world governments are left after a world war occurring sometime around 2053.

While the Cold War was over, some stories now presented the conflict as alternate history. The Fallout series of video games, which began in 1997, took place in a world still gripped by Cold War hysteria late into the 21st century. This, among other factors, led to an eventual World War III between the global powers (notably the US and China), and the series involves exploring what is left of the United States following the conflict. Fallout is considered a spiritual successor to 1988's Wasteland, which involved a similar premise and also mentions World War III.

In the 1998 ZDF mockumentary Der Dritte Weltkrieg, consisting largely of real-life footage of military and political figures presented out of context, Mikhail Gorbachev is ousted by hardline coup in October 1989 during his visit to East Germany (with the Soviet Union still in effective control of Eastern Europe, as such the events of that autumn are either brutally repressed by "Chinese" methods or simply never occur), and the actions of the paranoid, ruthless new General Secretary lead first to a brief conventional war. Just when the conflict seems to have ended, a Soviet radar malfunction, while US forces are on full SIOP alert, results in a civilization-killing nuclear exchange ("There is no further historical record of what happens next"); after "ending" just as the annihilation begins, the film rewinds to Gorbachev in East Berlin, and actually concludes with joyous Berliners ("History... took a different path") celebrating the real end of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent German unification.