
Nuclear Storytelling: Hollywood and The Bomb

In the summer of 2023, the simultaneous release of the Barbie and Oppenheimer movies seized the world—and “Barbenheimer” took over social media. While Oppenheimer was the first summer blockbuster in decades to give nuclear weapons center stage, it certainly was not the first.
The story of nuclear weapons and Hollywood is almost as old as nuclear weapons themselves and examining how nuclear weapons show up as a plot device provides an interesting window into how audiences’ relationship with nuclear weapons has evolved over the past 80 years.
The history of atomic cinema began in the early 1950s with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), in which a nuclear test frees a dinosaur from artic ice that eventually destroys New York City. Shortly after that, Godzilla debuted in Japan showing a monster, awoken by nuclear tests, destroying Tokyo. While the resumption of nuclear testing is a concern today, no one is worried about it awakening a creature from the deep. These films provide a window into how people saw nuclear weapons in the heady days of the “atomic age,” more closely aligned to science fiction and monsters than real-life risk.
That perception appeared to change with On the Beach (1959). The monsters in On the Beach are not prehistoric creatures, but us. The film follows the crew of a submarine exploring a post-nuclear war world that is slowly suffocated by nuclear fallout. On the Beach highlights, possibly for the first time in a Hollywood movie, the limits of deterrence theory. “No, it wasn’t an accident” a nuclear scientist says as he tries to explain the start of the nuclear war, “it was carefully planned down to the tiniest mechanical and emotional detail, but it was a mistake… In the end…we shall find that our so-called civilization was gloriously destroyed by a handful of vacuum tubes.”
This ushered in a stream of atomic movies in the 1960s. From Stanley Kubrick’s biting satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb to Fail-Safe, a movie about a computer erroneously ordering a nuclear strike on Moscow, it was clear the nuclear narrative had shifted away from sci-fi monsters.
Some point to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis as prompting these films, but the reality is many of them were in production before the crisis. It’s possible that more than a decade of duck-and-cover drills in fallout shelters, civil defense drills and information campaigns, and ongoing nuclear tests shifted American public consciousness toward real-life risks. However, as the 1960s marched on, the public’s attention shifted to the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, and nuclear cinema went dormant for several years.
As the Cold War heated up in the 1980s and then eventually came to an end, Hollywood gave us many more nuclear movies:
- Wargames (1983) adds a new element to nuclear films—cybersecurity—when a teenager hacks into NORAD
- The Day After (1983) follows ordinary Americans in the aftermath of total nuclear war. More than 100 million Americans watched the film, including President Reagan, who even noted in his diary how the film depressed him
- Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) has Superman collecting and destroying the world’s nuclear arsenals
- Fat Man and Little Boy (1989) is a drama based on the Manhattan Project
- The Hunt for Red October (1990) where a defecting Soviet submarine, armed with nuclear missiles intended for a first strike, is pursued by both Soviet and U.S. forces
- By Dawn’s Early Light (1990) follows military and political leaders as they try to stop a nuclear war once its already begun
- James Bond films Goldeneye (1995) and The World Is Not Enough (1999) both deal with Russian terrorist groups seeking to obtain nuclear weapons
- Crimson Tide (1995), a submarine captain and his second in command clash over interpreting a garbled order, to launch or not to launch
- Thirteen Days (2000) covers the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis
- The Sum of All Fears (2002) sees a Neo-Nazi terrorist detonate a nuclear weapon in Baltimore with the aim of bringing the U.S. and Russia to the brink of war
Perceptions of nuclear weapons evolved, changing as the political climate shifted from Cold War narratives to terrorism. This wave ended in the early 2000s, likely the result of attention shifting towards more conventional terrorist threats and wars in the Middle East.
But with increased nuclear rhetoric, rising political tensions, and Russia’s war in Ukraine, nuclear risks are increasing. For the first time in decades, there is talk in Washington of restating explosive nuclear testing. And we are less than a year away from New START — the last active arms control treaty between Russia and the United States — expiring without a replacement.
Oppenheimer opened a window for Hollywood to once again turn the world’s attention to the civilization-ending risks posed by nuclear weapons. Thankfully, we are in a new phase of atomic storytelling, with multiple movies and TV shows either recently released or in the works – ranging from the Fallout series on Amazon Prime to the upcoming film adaptation of Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War, A Scenario.
A new generation of Hollywood film and TV can remind audiences of the real monster we live with today—a system that depends on technology and the human beings that control it performing perfectly every time to avoid unparalleled catastrophe. New cultural products can show audiences what’s really at stake if a nuclear weapon goes off. We need to see all the ways deterrence could fail on the silver screen, because there will be a day when the hero of our real-life story cannot avert a nuclear crisis. Finally, this new crop of nuclear cinema has a chance to show heroes that we can see ourselves in. Sure, the heroes that brought us from 70,000 nuclear weapons at the Cold War peak to about 12,000 today were presidents and diplomats, but they were also activists, journalists, scientists, and whistleblowers.
Today’s storytellers have incredible power to inform and inspire audiences—to show a safer path is possible and shift the story of nuclear weapons from a fact of life to a relic of the past.
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