Nuclear Weapons in Popular Culture - in Fiction, Film, and Theater

In Fiction, Film, and Theater

• Nuclear weapons are a staple element in science fiction novels. The phrase "atomic bomb" predates their existence, back to H. G. Wells' The World Set Free (1914) when scientists had discovered that radioactive decay implied potentially limitless energy locked inside of atomic particles (Wells' atomic bombs were only as powerful as conventional explosives, but would continue exploding for days on end). Robert A. Heinlein's 1940 Solution Unsatisfactory posits radioactive dust as a weapon that the US develops in a crash program to end World War II; the dust's existence forces drastic changes in the postwar world. Cleve Cartmill predicted a chain-reaction-type nuclear bomb in his 1944 science fiction story "Deadline," which led to the FBI investigating him, due to concern over a potential breach of security on the Manhattan Project. (see Silverberg).
• Many of the characteristics of nuclear weapons themselves have played on ages-old human themes and tropes (penetrating rays, persistent contamination, virility, and, of course, apocalypse), giving their standing in popular culture and politics a particularly emotional valence (both positive and negative). For example, the book Down to a Sunless Sea (1979 novel) is set in a post-holocaust environment, as what may be one of the last planeloads of survivors tries to find a place to land.
• Nuclear weapons have even featured in children's works: The Butter Battle Book, by Dr. Seuss, deals with deterrence and the arms race.
• I Live in Fear, a 1955 Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa, is about a Japanese businessman who is terrified of nuclear war and was among the earliest films to deal with the psychological impact of nuclear weapons.
• Many films, some of which were based on novels, feature nuclear war or the threat of it. Godzilla (1954) is considered by some to be an analogy to the nuclear weapons dropped on Japan, another pre-dating film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms being the start of a more general genre of movies about creatures mutated or awakened by nuclear testing. Them! (1954) (giant ants in Los Angeles sewers) is based on a similar premise. The Incredible Shrinking Man (novel) (film, 1957) starts with a sailor irradiated by a bomb test, based on a real incident of irradiation of Japanese fisherman. In A Canticle for Leibowitz, (novel, no film, 1959) the previous war is known as the "Flame Deluge"; On the Beach (novel 1957, film 1959, television miniseries 2000) is most famous for making the end of humanity a theme in popular thinking on nuclear war; Final War (Japan, 1960) nuclear war erupts after the USA accidentally bombs South Korea. The 1962 film This is Not a Test addresses the reactions and emotions of a group of people in the minutes prior to a nuclear attack.
• Some non-fiction works of the time had an effect on cultural works. Herman Kahn's innovative non-fiction book On Thermonuclear War, (1961) describing various nuclear war scenarios, was never widely popular, but the seeming outlandishness of its projections and the possibility of a "Doomsday Machine" (an idea Kahn got from Leo Szilard before relatively small, deliverable thermonuclear weapons were developed in 1954) as a way to prevent war were direct inspirations for director Stanley Kubrick to handle Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb as a black comedy. (Menand, 2005) The 1964 film was loosely based on Red Alert, and a later novelization of the film was also written by the original author Peter George. Fail-Safe (novel 1962) (film 1964) (live-TV remake 2000) was a dramatic version of a similar accidental war that came out soon after. The War Game (BBC TV film, 1965) was a documentary-style film about the effects of nuclear war on England while Planet of the Apes (1963 novel, and five films 1968-1973) was about an Earth ruled by apes because of a nuclear war that destroyed mankind. Damnation Alley (1977) features a chilling launch and destruction sequence, followed by a trek across a ruined America; Taiyō o Nusunda Otoko / The Man Who Stole the Sun (1979), When the Wind Blows (British graphic novel 1982, animated film 1986). Special Bulletin was a 1983 made for TV movie about anti-nuclear activists detonating a home built nuclear device in Charleston, South Carolina,the film was shot in a live breaking news show format.

• The Day After (1983) was a "made for TV" movie that became fodder for talk shows and commentary by politicians at the time due to its depiction of the runup to a nuclear war between the US and the Soviets with graphic explosions on American soil,the aftermath of the attack and alleged political content. Testament (1983), another postwar vision of survival in a small California town after WWIII; WarGames (1983), features a young computer hacker who nearly starts World War Three when he inadvertently breaks into a fictional NORAD supercomputer named WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) to play the latest video games; The Terminator (4 films, 1984, 1991, 2003, 2009) features a post-apocalyptic future in which artificial intelligence has become self-aware,identifies all humans as a threat and uses the worlds nuclear arsenal to destroy mankind.(all James Cameron films from 1986 through 1994 deal with nuclear explosions); Red Dawn (film, directed by John Milius) a Soviet/Cuban invasion follows a surprise limited nuclear strike on the US (1984), Mad Max (3 films, 1979–1985),a loner Australian highway patrolman wanders a bleak violent post apocalyptic wasteland. Countdown to Looking Glass, (1984) a 'docudrama,' shows an international incident, the breakdown in diplomacy, the escalation in international tensions leading up to a nuclear crisis, the breakout of ground and naval combat overseas, and ends with the president taking off in the airborne E-4 command post ("Looking Glass") and the activation of the Emergency Broadcast System and air raid sirens. Manhattan Project (1986), is not about the actual Manhattan Project but how, using stolen plutonium, a high school student builds an atomic bomb for a science class project. Threads (BBC TV production made 1984, shown 1985), based on British government exercise Square Leg, shows the effects of an all-out nuclear war on the UK. Project X (1987) which deals with testing of lethal exposures to nuclear radiation on chimpanzees. In Miracle Mile (1988) a musician visiting the "Miracle Mile" area of Los Angeles receives a wrong number phone call and hears a conversation in the background saying that a nuclear attack on the United States is imminent. Denial, confusion, fear and panic ensue before the attack as the protagonist scrambles to save himself and a woman he met earlier in the day. By Dawn's Early Light (1990) portrays an accidental limited nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union after a "false-flag" attack on Soviet territory by Russian ultra nationalist terrorists seemingly launched from a US base in Turkey, and attempts to stop hostilities before they spiral into an all-out nuclear war. Broken Arrow (1996) depicts the theft of two thermonuclear weapons by a rogue US bomber pilot. ("Broken Arrow" is military jargon for an accidental nuclear event, the theft of nuclear devices depicted in the film would actually be classified as an "Empty Quiver" by the US Department of Defense.).
• The 1984 book The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth and its 1987 film describe a plan by lone and extreme Soviet government elements to encourage unilateral British disarmament. They smuggle the components of a small tactical nuclear bomb into Britain, to a deep-cover Russian spy who gathers them for assembly and eventual detonation near an American nuclear base, the week before a General Election.
• The James Bond films are also known to have plots surrounding nuclear weapons. Films like Thunderball (1965), You Only Live Twice (1967), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Octopussy (1983), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and The World Is Not Enough (1999) involve nuclear weapons. Some are based around their threatened use, others in a showdown between the superpowers. The threat is prevented by Bond in the nick of time, although weapons are detonated in The Spy Who Loved Me when two Polaris missiles each destroy a stolen nuclear submarine out at sea, British and Russian respectively. However, these do not harm the world's population or land, killing only the villain's crews in each stolen submarine. In Goldfinger (1964) the titular antagonist (with assistance from Chinese and North Korean agents who want economic collapse in the West) attempts to irradiate the US's national gold reserves stored at Fort Knox with an atomic bomb in order to increase the value of his own stockpile. The villain in Octopussy (1983) was a power-mad renegade Soviet general opposed to disarmament talks with NATO, who hatches a plot to invade Western Europe after by the clandestine placement and detonation of a nuclear weapon on a US Air Force base in West Germany. GoldenEye (1995) focuses on a nuclear satellite weapon that unleashes a powerful electromagnetic pulse attack upon whatever area it is detonated over, destroying anything with an electronic circuit.
• There have been a few fictionalized accounts of historical events relating to nuclear weapons as well. The Manhattan Project itself, for example, was depicted in both the 1989 theatrical film Fat Man and Little Boy and, somewhat more in-depth, also released in 1989 the CBS television film Day One. Thirteen Days (2000) dramatizes the tensions of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis from the standpoint of President Kennedy's Cabinet.
• The second season of the television series 24 involves Muslim terrorists smuggling a nuclear bomb across the Mexican border and planning to detonate it in Los Angeles. In the fourth season, after a series of terrorist attacks, a group of Islamic terrorists capture and launch a nuclear cruise missile at Los Angeles. The sixth season also involves nuclear weapons as a major theme, with a group of terrorists having access to five nuclear suitcase bombs.
• Nuclear weapons, both conventional and "enhanced" (through the use of fictional advanced technology), are used in the feature film Stargate and the related television series Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis.
• The Tom Clancy novel and movie The Sum of All Fears depicts a nuclear explosion caused by Islamic terrorists in Denver (novel) or by neo-Nazis in Baltimore (film).
• The movie On The Beach is based around the premise of a nuclear war. In the original novel, the war starts as a "catalytic war" caused by Egyptian airmen destroying Washington, DC in Russian-built bombers, causing mistaken retaliation against the Soviet Union and a general nuclear exchange. In the 2000 Australian remake of On The Beach, a nuclear war is fought between the United States of America and the People's Republic of China over a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
• In the comic The Invisibles, writer Grant Morrison references Oppenheimer using the "Destroyer of Worlds" quote as a mystic phrase and using the moment of detonation as part of a magical ritual. The roleplaying game GURPS Technomancer repeats this theme, depicting an alternate history where Oppenheimer unwittingly completes a necromantic ritual that releases magic back into the world at Trinity. The CBS Television Drama Jericho (2006) focuses on a small town that is left without communications and basic necessities after a nuclear attack on major US cities. The film The Hills Have Eyes (2006) features a group of miner's descendants in the New Mexico desert, who have become genetically mutated due to the radiation caused by the atomic tests, and terrorize travelers in the area, who are lured to their mines in the hills by a gas station owner who profits from the victim's jewelry.
• There have also been a number of plays set around the theme of nuclear weapons development. Michael Frayn's Tony Award-winning Copenhagen (1998), for example, contemplates the ethics and early history of nuclear weapons development through the eyes of the physicist Niels Bohr, his wife Margarethe, and his former pupil Werner Heisenberg. Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt addressed the question of the responsibility of scientists in a post-Hiroshima world explicitly in his 1961 satire, Die Physiker. The rise-and-fall of American physicist and "father of the atomic bomb" J. Robert Oppenheimer has been the subject and inspiration of a number of plays—Heinar Kipphardt's In the Matter J. Robert Oppenheimer (1964), PBS's American Playhouse's 7 part "Oppenheimer" (1982), and even an opera, Doctor Atomic (2005).
• In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), set in 1957, Indiana Jones finds himself in a nuclear test site in Nevada that has been set up to resemble a suburban area while being chased by Soviet soldiers. Realizing he has a matter of seconds before an atomic bomb detonates, he locks himself in a lead-lined refrigerator. The bomb flings the refrigerator a safe distance away, where Jones emerges without any serious injuries.
• The third episode of Lost's fifth season, "Jughead," reveals that the United States military brought a hydrogen bomb called Jughead to the island in 1954; the military troops were killed by the Others and the bomb was seized. A time-traveling Daniel Faraday convinces the Others that he is part of a military science team sent to defuse the bomb, which is leaking radioactive material, but eventually confides to one of their members that the bomb must be buried underground after being sealed with lead or concrete, explaining that he knows this will work because the island is still intact 50 years later, having never been destroyed in a nuclear blast. However, in 1977, the bomb was used in an attempt to stop the Incident, in the hope of changing the future.
• In the movie Back to the Future, Marty McFly, in 1955, is showing Doc Brown a video made in 1985 in which Marty and the future Doc Brown are wearing radiation suits. Doc Brown surmises that the radiation suits are worn to protect himself and Marty from the fallout "from all the atomic wars" (presumably referring to the fact that the 1955 Doc Brown is living during the Cold War).