It’s Time to Revive the Nuclear Disaster Film

With the U.S. and Russia each edging towards possible Atomkrieg, we’re overdue for a cinematic reminder of the horrors of nuclear war

by Patrick Maynard

BERLIN — When international leaders met in the German capital in early February, they all agreed on one thing: None of them wanted a war. But their governments’ actions since then have belied those words. Russia has sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine. The U.S. is deploying fighting personnel and weapons throughout Eastern Europe and has moved all embassy operations out of Kyiv—first into the far-flung city of Lviv and then from there into neighboring Poland. For its part, the government of Ukraine, after weeks of doggedly telling other countries not to stir panic, has been releasing military-trained prisoners to fight and forcing all military-age males to stay and battle the invading Russian soldiers, while urging other citizens to throw Molotov cocktails at incoming Russian troops. 

Other Ukrainians outside of the military demographic have been forced to leave the country in droves as refugees.

And it could get worse. Vladimir Putin has already put his nuclear forces on high alert at least once during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and there is a very real chance that if the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine continues or expands—with an errant missile accidentally hitting a civilian airline bound for a NATO country, for example—a few miscommunications or mistakes could cause the current war to spread and, eventually, to go nuclear. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has even said as much.

And even assuming that no nuclear catastrophe happens in the very near term, Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of the Russian Security Council chaired by Putin, has been paraphrased by the Associated Press as saying that western sanctions offer the Kremlin a pretext to completely review its ties with the West, suggesting that Russia could opt out of the New START nuclear arms control treaty that limits the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. 

“The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists argues we’re at ‘100 seconds to midnight,’ the same threat level during the end of the Trump era,” says Dr. Steven Holmes, an academic who has written about nuclear disasters on film and is the author of the forthcoming book Exploding Empire: Imagining the Future of Nationalism and Capitalism. 

He says that a nominally more diplomatic administration in Washington has not reversed the clock thanks “in large part” to factors like failure to renegotiate nuclear agreements, developments in steerable hypersonic weapons—which can evade defense systems and travel so fast that decision windows for leaders collapse—and the current Ukraine standoff. “Speaking personally,” says Holmes, “the ‘threat’ of nuclear danger had a sharp reminder in the state of Hawaii where I live, when in 2018 there was a false missile alert.”

“The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists argues we’re at ‘100 seconds to midnight.'”

That worry of nuclear weapons hitting Hawaii has some factual backing behind it. In addition to the Ukrainian war, the possibility of a similar conflict in Taiwan has peace groups fretting about nuclear conflict in the Pacific region. 

As with Ukraine, Taiwan offers a small, U.S.-backed target for a revanchist takeover by a neighboring great power. As with Ukraine, Taiwan is a recipient of western weapons, but not of western troops. And just as with Ukraine, an invasion that accidentally treads on American shoes could compound any existing local tragedy, turning it into a global nuclear risk.

For children of the Seventies, who were raised on a diet of Cold War nuclear disaster films like The Day After, Threads, and Testament, the situation is nothing less than the re-emergence of a nightmare long thought to have receded. 

Cultural artifacts of a fearful age

According to Holmes, of those three nuclear films, The Day After was especially impactful thanks to the relatively low number of options on television when it was screened in 1983. With cable now fragmenting attention, he argues, it would be difficult for a TV movie to start dialogue in the way The Day After did.

But even before its public debut, the movie had already made an impact. Shortly after seeing a pre-release version of the film, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech saying that nuclear weapons should be “banished from the face of the Earth.. A few years later, he had signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Mikhail Gorbachev, leading to an era of increased caution and even disarmament. 

Some of that caution has now been lost. As the U.S. and Russian governments trade propaganda barbs over Ukraine and non-proliferation agreements fall one after another, the world is again facing the risk of triggering a nuclear winter—a risk that had seemed until recently to be declining.

When viewing the three best-known Eighties nuclear disaster films—Testament, The Day After, and Threads—it is impossible not to draw parallels. All three are set in second- or even third-tier cities to emphasize the possibility of a nuclear incident happening anywhere. All three have family dramas at their center. All three are in western countries.

But it’s also informative to look at the differences. 

The first of the movies to be released (by 16 days), Testament tells the story of a family in an exurb of San Francisco following a nuclear attack on that city. Of the three films, Testament tells the least about who or what caused the destruction; our only clues are a few seconds of a television news announcer saying that nuclear devices have been detonated in several cities, then the light from a distant blast and a loss of signal. Most of the movie is spent covering the gradual withering of the town’s resources, with the remaining residents on the verge of starvation by the time the film ends. (My mother remembers coming home from the theater after seeing it in 1983 and just holding her young son for a long time.)

In The Day After, released as a television movie on ABC later that same month, there is much more explicit harrumphing by radio announcers (for ABC’s radio arm, naturally) in the days leading up to the violence. Eastern Bloc powers amass their forces near the West German border, and Berlin gets cut off by a blockade. Tanks stream through the Fulda Gap, only to be targeted by small nuclear weapons launched by NATO forces. 

Eventually, both sides launch their intercontinental ballistic missiles. The sense of impending doom projected by a young John Lithgow while viewing the American launch is one of the most unique moments of the film. Several larger Russian ICBMs hit the Kansas City area, along with other U.S. cities. Great care is taken to show how not just residents of big cities, but also places like the small town of Lawrence, Kansas, are affected by the strikes.

Finally, there’s Threads, which came out nearly a year later in September 1984, released by the BBC. The TV film portrays the run-up to and aftereffects of a strike on the midsized British city of Sheffield. The only one of the three pieces to portray a true nuclear winter—with a blocked sun, lost crops, and subsequent global mass starvation—this movie flashes forward in stages to a time more than a decade after the strike, showing how severe the devastation from such an attack would be.

The three films had a great impact on western populations and leaders alike, with work on nonproliferation treaties going into overdrive in the mid-1980s. On the Soviet end of things, there was also the film Dead Man’s Letters, which its creators hoped would have a similar effect in the USSR. 

(Of particular interest in Dead Man’s Letters is a bit of dark, post-apocalyptic humor, revealing that the worker who could have prevented the nuclear apocalypse failed to reach his controls in time because he was walking slowly and carefully, the better to avoid spilling his coffee. Which is not to take pot shots at the people who work with such systems; Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov famously saved the world by disobeying the Soviet chain of command, thinking correctly that a detection of incoming American missiles was a false alarm.)

Andrei Kozovoi wrote in an analysis of Dead Man’s Letters for the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, however, the film’s persuasive potential quickly lost its charge after being overshadowed by the Chernobyl disaster, which had occurred months before the film’s release.

More recently, interest in the topic onscreen has fallen off. Exceptions have tended to stress the non-state origin of nuclear threats, as in The Sum of All Fears—which, while at least acknowledging the folly of relying on mutually assured destruction, lionizes the military and intelligence services, mainly using a small nuclear blast as a plot device to drive a great deal of dramatic, Sorkin-esque talking.

Recent nuclear films have tended to stress the non-state origin of nuclear threats, as in The Sum of All Fears.

In Christopher Nolan’s overlong superhero drama The Dark Knight Rises, the big bomb planted by the film’s villains is harmlessly detonated over water after some scary poors take over New York. In this case, the lionization is not of the military but of the police. (And of paternalistic capitalism, of course. It wouldn’t be a Bruce Wayne movie without that.)

Both of these movies, however, at least acknowledge nuclear weapons as a threat, which is not the case for other post-Soviet-era uses of nukes—as in Independence Day, when the devices are used to save humanity. 

Games do a slightly better job of depicting long-lasting effects, with collections like the Fallout series certainly making nuclear conflict look unattractive. Joe Biden, however, being a septuagenarian, probably has spent more time on movies than on games, even in recent years.

A new wave?

While our present situation might suggest a moral case for making new nuclear disaster movies, experts aren’t holding their breath.

“Frankly, I think the Covid-19 pandemic has probably captured Hollywood’s imagination more than the current fears of nuclear weapons, and will shape narrative depictions of disaster in the coming years,” says Holmes. “In terms of the coming trend, I think Don’t Look Up reflects some of the anxieties and approaches we may see in the disaster film in coming years. That being said, the idea of nuclear weapons has never really gone away from mass media generally.”

Holmes argues that, while quantitatively the use of nuclear weapons as a plot device hasn’t changed much, the qualitative aspects of nuclear use in films has shifted, with filmmakers increasingly seeing nukes as a “solved issue” and missiles relegated to a role in which they can be used by the good guys to fight off aliens or otherwise save the day. If the audience is more focused on radioactive mutants, or superheroes using nukes to stave off aliens, they are being led away from a mindset in which they could think critically about the use or proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Rasmus Dahlberg, PhD, associate professor at the Royal Danish Defence College in Copenhagen, who has written extensively about disaster films, says he sees a possibility for a wave of disaster movies—but they’re most likely to be concerned with viruses. 

“People need movies and TV shows to help them digest and understand what is going on in the world, and disaster themes are very good for that,” Dahlberg says.

So is there much directorial interest in a new wave of nuclear disaster movies? The latest offerings at the Berlinale film festival here in Germany seem to indicate a “no,” with only one of the festival’s many screened titles—Sonne Unter Tage, a documentary about the cleanup of uranium mining sites—getting even tangentially near the topic. (Admittedly, even non-war-related nuclear disasters have gained some topicality following two incidents at nuclear sites in Ukraine.)

But there’s some hope for those rooting for a resurgence of antinuclear messages in the early 21st century. Counter-proliferation activist Timothy Westmyer has written about how the Game of Thrones series used dragons as metaphors for nuclear weapons, and the recent success of both Dark on Netflix and the Chernobyl miniseries on HBO and Sky speaks to a continued interest in the topic of radiation. 

As for the more traditional depictions of nuclear war that the Eighties gave us, fans can take at least some solace in the fact that remakes are incredibly popular with producers right now. And the Ukrainian standoff may certainly nudge filmmakers in that direction as well.

Whether there’s a quick exit from Ukraine or not, this is unlikely to be the last place the three global powers rub up against each other. China and Russia have agreed to oppose NATO expansion, while NATO’s longstanding avarice for new members seems unlikely to be abated, with an “open door policy” regularly quoted as some sort of immutable global law—consequences be damned.

In addition, the arrival of a technological singularity could soon lead to a complete closing of the decision window—at least for human leaders. With the militaries of the world demanding more and more rapid responses and increased adoption of automation, the time may one day come when algorithms could make launch decisions faster than a human could reasonably analyze and countermand them. Only leaders dedicated to avoiding tragedy are likely to find a way of preventing catastrophes.

But if the threat of nuclear war has been elevated by recent events, it doesn’t always show. In much of Europe, life is going on pretty much as usual. The grocery store shelves are stocked, save for a few covid-related supply chain problems. There is no panic buying. Buses, trains, and planes are following their regular schedules, ATMs still dispense cash, and shops are still open. 

Relative normalcy, residents of the continent hope, will continue, with the area dodging a role as a global nuclear flashpoint. The movies may or may not help keep the peace.

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