Photo-illustrations by Mike McQuade
Back in the late 2000s, I was teaching a class on nuclear weapons to undergraduates who had mostly come of age after the fall of the Soviet Union. As I tried to explain what it was like to grow up worrying about a sudden apocalypse, a student raised his hand and said: “What were you so afraid of? I mean, sure, nuclear weapons are bad, but …” And here he gave up with a puzzled shake of his head, as if to say: What was the big deal?
I paused to think of a better way to explain that the annihilation of the world was a big deal. People who grew up during the Cold War, as I did, internalized this fear as children. We still tell our campfire tales about hiding under school desks at the sound of air-raid sirens. Such things seemed mysterious, and even irrelevant, to my students in the 21st century. And then it occurred to me: They haven’t seen the movies.
During the Cold War, popular culture provided Americans with images of (and a vocabulary for) nuclear war. Mushroom clouds, DEFCON alerts, exploding buildings, fallout-shelter signs—these visuals popped up in even the frothiest forms of entertainment, including comic books, James Bond movies, and music videos. The possibility of a nuclear holocaust was always lurking in the background, like the figure of Death hiding among revelers in a Bosch triptych, and we could imagine it because it had been shown to us many times on screens big and small.
Ensuing generations have grown up with their own fears: Terrorism, climate change, and now AI are upending life across the globe, and nuclear war might seem more like a historical curiosity than a concrete threat. But at this moment, Russia and the United States each have roughly 1,500 deployed strategic warheads, many of them on alert, with thousands more in their inventories. This is an improvement over the madness of the Cold War, when the superpowers were sitting on tens of thousands of deployed weapons, but the current global stockpile is more than enough to destroy hundreds of cities and kill billions of people. The threat remains, but the public’s fears, along with the movies that explored them, have faded away. Americans need new films to remind new generations, but Cold War–era movies are not just relics. The horrors they depict are still possible.
Less than a decade after the Trinity test and the atomic bombings of Japan, filmmakers were tapping into public anxieties about a nuclear-arms race. At the end of the 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, a handsome alien named Klaatu tells the people of Earth that other civilizations in the galaxy have decided that humans cannot be trusted with the power of the atom. He explains that these civilizations long ago agreed to give control of their military power to unstoppable robots programmed to eradicate aggressors without mercy. Earth, Klaatu says, must agree to this arrangement or be destroyed. “We shall be waiting for your answer,” he says politely, and then takes off in his spaceship, leaving the gobsmacked earthlings staring into the heavens.
This grim ultimatum was aimed at moviegoers who had just lived through World War II. Their children, the Baby Boomers, would get their first exposure to nuclear fears through monster movies and popcorn flicks that would later air regularly on television. In the 1954 horror feature Them!, nuclear explosions in New Mexico (the site of the Trinity test) irradiate a nest of ants, turning them into man-eating giants. Them! suggested that radioactive monsters had been unleashed by nature as a kind of revenge on mankind for playing with nuclear fire. “We may be witnesses to a biblical prophecy come true,” a government scientist warns.
Other thrillers followed this formula, including the 1954 debut of the original king of the monsters, Godzilla, who was awakened by nuclear testing. By the mid-1950s, the superpowers had created thermonuclear arms, which dwarfed the power of previous atomic weapons. Both the original Godzilla film—produced in Japan less than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and the 1956 version released in the States (with a performance by the actor Raymond Burr spliced in for American audiences) are somber and even daring for the time. They depicted victims of radiation sickness and featured a shocking ending: The scientist who invents a way to destroy Godzilla commits suicide rather than let his knowledge be used to create another superweapon.
As the Boomers grew up, the number of nuclear weapons skyrocketed, with estimates of about 5,000 warheads in 1956 and then a peak of more than 70,000 in the 1980s. Nuclear conflict became an extinction-level proposition. Depictions of nuclear war became more serious and disturbing, breaking Hollywood conventions about happy endings. For many in the Boomer generation, On the Beach (the 1957 novel and 1959 movie) became a touchstone because it wasn’t about monsters or aliens, but about people facing death from the fallout of nuclear war.
In 1964, two years after the Cuban missile crisis had pushed the world to the edge of the nuclear abyss, Fail Safe and its black-comedy twin, Dr. Strangelove, presented audiences with the nightmare of accidental nuclear war, a fear that appeared on-screen with more frequency as nuclear weapons—and the means to deliver them—became more varied and complicated.
In Fail Safe, Moscow is about to be destroyed by errant U.S. bombers when the Soviet premier tells the U.S. president (played by Henry Fonda) that no one is to blame for what is obviously an electronic error. Fonda rejects this absolution: “We’re to blame, both of us. We let our machines get out of hand.” After Moscow is obliterated, Fonda orders the nuclear destruction of New York City as atonement, hoping to avert full Soviet retaliation.
Like many Cold War kids, I saw these movies on TV in later years. They had a particularly powerful grip on me, once I realized I was being raised on a bull’s-eye: My family home was next to an Air Force nuclear-bomber base, a target that the Soviets would destroy in the first minutes of a war. Fail Safe disturbed me so much as a boy that I bought the book in college to see if the novel ends as bleakly as the movie. (It does.) Years later, I assigned the book to my students. Their reaction to the ending? “The president can’t do that!” To which I responded: “Are you sure?”
Nuclear war made routine appearances on the small screen, sometimes as allegories on Star Trek and The Outer Limits. No one did more to bring nuclear issues into living rooms than Rod Serling, whose pioneering show, The Twilight Zone, sometimes explored the consequences of living with the bomb. One episode, “The Shelter,” showed neighbors turning against one another when informed of an imminent nuclear attack. Another, “Time Enough at Last,” included a classic Serling twist: After a bookworm emerges from a lunch break in his bank’s vault to find the world incinerated, he happily sits down with a stack of books—and then accidentally breaks his only pair of eyeglasses.
Serling was also responsible for perhaps the biggest gut punch of ’60s cinema: the ending of Planet of the Apes. Loosely based 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 where a civilization of talking apes rules over mute humans. At the movie’s end, which departed from the book’s, Heston escapes his captors, makes his way to a barren beach, and discovers the ruins of the Statue of Liberty. Realizing that he’s on an Earth turned upside down by nuclear war, he becomes delirious with rage. “You maniacs!” he wails, pounding his fists into the surf. “You blew it up! Oh, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” The scene then fades to black and the credits roll, with only the sound of waves lapping at the beach.
When I showed these final minutes to young students, many of them were as stunned as audiences had been in 1968. Some students admitted that they were unsettled, and even moved, by the simple tableau of Heston weeping in front of the last symbol of an extinct civilization.
In the 1970s, audiences were becoming harder to shock, but the black comedy A Boy and His Dog (1975) did just that, and became a cult film. Don Johnson roams a nuclear wasteland in the far-off year of 2024, accompanied by a telepathic talking dog, as he searches for food and sex. Johnson finds both. He lets his dog eat the girl he thought he loved but who, in the end, tried to betray him. A Boy and His Dog warned that civilization is a facade, and that we’re one war away from becoming depraved brutes.
I left for college in the late ’70s, thinking I would major in chemistry. But the Cold War was heating up again, and I decided to study the Russian language and Soviet affairs. During the drive from Massachusetts to New York City for graduate school on a late-summer day in 1983, I heard the news that the Soviets had shot down a civilian South Korean airliner, killing hundreds. (“Tough day to start studying this stuff,” my father said in the car.) Ronald Reagan was in his first term; the Soviet Union was led by a former chief of the KGB, Yuri Andropov; and nuclear-arms negotiations with the Soviets were floundering. To many young people, nuclear war felt more imminent than at any other time in our lives.
It apparently felt that way in Hollywood too. The first half of the ’80s produced a battery of films about nuclear war, but none had the impact of a made-for-TV movie that premiered on November 20, 1983. About 100 million people—more than 60 percent of the TV-viewing audience that night—tuned in to ABC to watch The Day After, about the horrifying impact of nuclear war on small-town Kansas.
The film “left me greatly depressed,” Reagan wrote in his diary. ABC followed the broadcast with a discussion among the astronomer Carl Sagan, the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, the writer William F. Buckley Jr., former Cabinet Secretaries Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara, and Brent Scowcroft, the once and future national security adviser. The 80-minute session, in front of a live studio audience, was conducted with a seriousness long gone from TV in the 21st 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 of them has 9,000 matches. The other has 7,000 matches. Each of them is concerned about who’s ahead, who’s stronger.” Scowcroft firmly disagreed but added, with evident sincerity, that he had “great respect” for Sagan’s judgment. Not only did these panelists treat one another cordially, but they also assumed that the public was capable of following their complex discussion.
That same month, Testament had hit movie theaters with scarcely any special effects and no dramatic shots of missile launches or mass incinerations, as in The Day After. Instead, the quiet film depicts a California suburb, spared a direct nuclear hit, slowly succumbing to radiation poisoning and starvation. In the span of three weeks, in prime time and on the big screen, Americans witnessed two vivid interpretations of the horrors of nuclear war: one explosive and terrifying, the other corrosive and elegiac.
In 1985, I was 24 and finishing a graduate thesis on NATO options after a hypothetical Soviet attack in Europe. One night in Boston, where I was studying at Harvard’s Russian Research Center, I sat down to watch a BBC movie titled Threads.
The film is so gruesome and relentlessly coldhearted that it makes The Day After seem almost optimistic. The brief scenes of urban destruction in Threads are less disturbing than the film’s prediction of what life would be like after a modern world is destroyed. When the main character, Ruth, gives birth alone in an abandoned farmhouse months after the nuclear attack, the camera does not look away as she chews through her daughter’s umbilical cord. Later, the young mother must trade sex for dead rats to feed herself and her child.
By day, I studied nuclear-war details such as “equivalent megatonnage” and “overpressure.” Threads supplied haunting, ghastly images of what those concepts would look like in the real world. I turned off my television, and I did not sleep that night.
Testament, The Day After, Threads, and WarGames—which bridged Boomer and Gen X tastes by making computer hacking the trigger for a nuclear crisis—all debuted within 16 months of one another, signaling a wave of anxiety and a desire to process it collectively.
And then it was over: Reagan and the Soviet leader 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 end of the Cold War.
Over the ensuing 36 years, filmmakers have found other public anxieties to fuel their stories. Plagues and climate change are now common themes. In the 2011 reboot of Planet of the Apes, the inversion of apes and humans happens not because of nuclear war but because of a faulty pharmaceutical experiment. The 2008 reimagining of The Day the Earth Stood Still has Klaatu warning earthlings about ecocide rather than an atomic menace.
The 2023 film Oppenheimer, about the father of the atomic bomb, made nearly $1 billion at the box office and won the Oscar for Best Picture. But Oppenheimer is a talky period piece, an exploration of a man and his mind, with only a flash-forward warning about doomsday tacked on to the ending. No panel of luminaries debated nuclear issues in prime time because of Oppenheimer. This year’s Mission: Impossible features a Fail Safe callback, but it deploys nukes to raise the stakes for Tom Cruise’s heroism, not to question the value of their existence or portray the carnage they create.
The director Kathryn Bigelow will soon release a movie, set in the present, about a surprise missile attack on the United States. Bigelow, who also directed the realistic military dramas Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker, told me last year that she was alarmed by the lack of public debate on nuclear peril. My hope is that her next film can serve as a modern-day Fail Safe or The Day After, and spur the kind of discussion that was inspired by those earlier movies.
Some of these recollections might seem like nostalgia, but I do not miss the Cold War. I’m happy that Americans are growing up without daily reminders that everything we know and love could vanish in a flash of light. But is it possible to have a meaningful discussion about nuclear weapons without being a little frightened? As Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Nations, remarked after the Cuban missile crisis: “Perhaps we need a coward in the room when we are talking about nuclear war.” And perhaps we still need movies about nuclear war to scare us into talking, and remembering.
This article appears in the August 2025 print edition with the headline “Damn You All to Hell!” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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