Back in the late 2000s, I was instructing a nuclear weapons course for college students who had largely grown up since the collapse of the Soviet Union. One student raised his hand and asked, “What were you so afraid of?” as I attempted to describe what it was like to grow up worrying about an impending apocalypse.
Yes, nuclear weapons are terrible, but he gave up at this point, shaking his head in confusion as though to ask, “What’s the big deal?” I took a moment to consider a more effective way to convey why the world’s destruction was so significant. This fear was internalized as children by those like me who grew up during the Cold War.
Our campfire stories about hiding beneath school desks when air-raid sirens sounded are still told. For my 21st-century students, such things seemed enigmatic and even unimportant. Then it hit me: they haven’t watched the films.
Americans were exposed to images of (and a vocabulary for) nuclear war through popular culture during the Cold War. Even the most fanciful entertainment, such as comic books, James Bond films, and music videos, featured images of mushroom clouds, DEFCON alerts, exploding buildings, and fallout-shelter signs.
Because it had been repeatedly shown to us on screens of all sizes, we were able to visualize the possibility of a nuclear holocaust lurking in the background, like the figure of Death hiding among revelers in a Bosch triptych.
Future generations have grown up with their own fears: nuclear war may seem more like a historical curiosity than a real threat, and terrorism, climate change, and now artificial intelligence are upending life on a global scale.
However, both Russia and the United States currently have about 1,500 strategic warheads in use, many of which are on alert, and thousands more in stock. Although the current global arsenal is more than enough to destroy hundreds of cities and kill billions of people, it is still a step up from the chaos of the Cold War, when the superpowers were sitting on tens of thousands of deployed weapons.
Although the threat still exists, the public’s anxieties and the films that examined them have diminished. Cold War-era films are more than just artifacts; Americans need new films to remind the next generation. The atrocities they portray are still conceivable.
From the August 2025 issue: Regarding the president’s weapon, Tom Nichols
Filmmakers were capitalizing on public fears of a nuclear arms race less than ten years after the Trinity test and the atomic bombings of Japan. The Day the Earth Stood Still, a 1951 classic, ends with a dashing alien named Klaatu informing Earthlings that other civilizations in the galaxy have determined humans cannot be trusted with the power of the atom.
He explains that these civilizations long ago decided to hand over their military might to invincible robots that were designed to mercilessly destroy aggressors. Klaatu asserts that Earth must accept this arrangement or perish. After saying courteously, “We shall be waiting for your answer,” he departs in his spaceship, leaving the stunned Earthlings gazing up at the sky.
Moviegoers who had recently survived World War II were the target of this somber call to action. Monster movies and popcorn flicks, which would later be broadcast on television on a regular basis, would expose their children, the Baby Boomers, to nuclear fears for the first time.
In the 1954 horror film Them!, a nest of ants is irradiated by nuclear explosions in New Mexico, the location of the Trinity test, transforming them into giants that devour humans. Them! implied that nature had let loose radioactive monsters as a form of retaliation against humanity for experimenting with nuclear fire.
A government scientist cautions that we might be seeing a biblical prophecy come to pass. This formula was used in other thrillers, such as the 1954 release of Godzilla, the first king of the monsters, who was roused by nuclear testing.
The power of earlier atomic weapons was dwarfed by the thermonuclear weapons developed by the superpowers by the middle of the 1950s.
The original Godzilla movie, which was made in Japan less than ten years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the 1956 American release, which included a performance by Raymond Burr, are both sombre and, for the time, daring. They showed radiation sickness victims and had a shocking conclusion.
Instead of using his knowledge to create another superweapon, the scientist who devises a method to destroy Godzilla kills himself.
Fail Safe and its black-comedy twin, Dr. Strangelove, introduced audiences to the nightmare of unintentional nuclear war in 1964, two years after the Cuban missile crisis had driven the world to the brink of nuclear abyss. This fear became more prevalent on screen as nuclear weapons—and the means to deliver them—became more complex and varied.
In Fail Safe, the Soviet premier informs the American president (Henry Fonda) that no one is responsible for what is clearly an electronic error just as the U.S. bombers are about to destroy Moscow. Fonda disputes this absolution, saying, “We are both at fault. We allowed our machines to become unmanageable.”
In an attempt to prevent complete Soviet retaliation, Fonda orders the nuclear destruction of New York City as retribution after Moscow is destroyed.
In later years, like many children of the Cold War, I watched these films on television. Once I realized that I was being raised on a target—my family’s home was adjacent to an Air Force nuclear-bomber base, which the Soviets would destroy in the first few minutes of a conflict—they had a particularly strong hold on me.
As a boy, I was so troubled by Fail Safe that I purchased the book while I was in college to see if the book ended as depressingly as the film did. (It does.) I gave the book to my students years later. How did they respond to the conclusion?
“That is not possible for the president!”
I answered, “Are you sure?”
On Star Trek and The Outer Limits, nuclear war frequently appeared on television, sometimes as allegories. Rod Serling, whose groundbreaking program The Twilight Zone occasionally examined the ramifications of living with the bomb, was the one who did more to bring nuclear issues into living rooms.
When neighbors learned that a nuclear attack was imminent, they turned against one another in one episode, “The Shelter.” Another, “Time Enough at Last,” featured a traditional Serling twist: a bookworm joyfully sits down with a stack of books after discovering the world has been destroyed by fire while on a lunch break in his bank’s vault. However, he then unintentionally breaks his only pair of glasses.
Serling was also in charge of the conclusion of Planet of the Apes, which is arguably the biggest gut punch in 1960s cinema.
Following an American astronaut (Charlton Heston) after his ship crashes on a planet where a talking ape civilization rules over mute humans, the script, written by Serling and Michael Wilson, is loosely based on a satirical French novel. Heston breaks free from his captors, travels to a desolate beach, and finds the remains of the Statue of Liberty at the film’s conclusion, which differs from the book’s.
He becomes delirious with rage upon realizing that he is on a nuclear-war-torn Earth. He beats his fists into the surf and yells, “You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Goddamn you all to hell!” After that, the credits roll and the scene fades to black, leaving only the sound of the waves crashing onto the shore.
Many of the young students were as shocked as the audiences had been in 1968 when I showed them these last minutes. Some students acknowledged that the straightforward scene of Heston crying in front of the final remnant of a vanished civilization disturbed and even moved them.
Although it was getting harder to shock audiences in the 1970s, the black comedy A Boy and His Dog (1975) succeeded in doing so and went on to become a cult favorite. In the distant year of 2024, Don Johnson wanders a nuclear wasteland in search of food and sex with a talking telepath. Johnson discovers both.
The girl he believed he loved but who ultimately attempted to betray him is allowed to be eaten by his dog.
A Boy and His Dog forewarned us that civilization is a front and that we could turn into amoral barbarians in just one more conflict.
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In the late 1970s, I decided to major in chemistry when I went to college. However, as the Cold War was resuming, I made the decision to study Soviet affairs and the Russian language.
On a late-summer day in 1983, while traveling from Massachusetts to New York City for graduate school, I learned that hundreds had been killed when the Soviets shot down a civilian South Korean airliner. In the car, my father remarked, “It’s a tough day to start studying this stuff.”
Nuclear-arms talks with the Soviets were in a shambles, Ronald Reagan was in his first term, and Yuri Andropov, a former KGB chief, was in charge of the Soviet Union. The threat of nuclear war seemed more real to many young people than it had ever been.
Apparently, Hollywood felt the same way. There were many films about nuclear war in the first half of the 1980s, but none had the same impact as the made-for-TV film that debuted on November 20, 1983.
Approximately 100 million viewers, or over 60% of the audience that evening, tuned into ABC to watch The Day After, which depicted the devastating effects of nuclear war on small-town Kansas. Reagan wrote in his diary that the movie “left me greatly depressed.”
The astronomer Carl Sagan, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, author William F. Buckley Jr., former Cabinet Secretaries Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara, and former and future national security adviser Brent Scowcroft participated in a discussion on ABC after the show.
In front of a live studio audience, the 80-minute session was conducted with a seriousness that is long gone from 21st-century television. The arms race, according to Sagan, is like being in “a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room.” There are 9,000 matches in one of them. There are 7,000 matches in the other. They are all worried about who is stronger and who is in front.
Despite his strong disagreement, Scowcroft stated with obvious sincerity that he respected Sagan’s judgment. These panelists were not only friendly with each other, but they also believed that the general public could follow their intricate conversation.
With hardly any special effects and no dramatic shots of missile launches or mass incinerations like in The Day After, Testament had debuted in theaters that same month.
Rather, the silent movie shows a Californian suburb that was spared a direct nuclear strike, gradually dying of radiation poisoning and malnutrition. Over the course of three weeks, Americans saw two striking depictions of the horrors of nuclear war—one corrosive and elegiac, the other explosive and terrifying—in prime time and on the big screen.
After a fictitious Soviet attack on Europe in 1985, I was 24 years old and completing a graduate thesis on NATO options. I sat down to watch the BBC film Threads one evening while I was studying at Harvard’s Russian Research Center in Boston.
The film is so graphic and unrelentingly heartless that it almost gives The Day After a hopeful vibe.
The movie Threads predicts what life would be like after a modern world is destroyed, which is more unsettling than the brief urban destruction scenes. The camera follows Ruth as she chews through her daughter’s umbilical cord during her lonesome delivery in an abandoned farmhouse months after the nuclear attack.
Later, in order to provide for herself and her child, the young mother is forced to exchange sex for dead rats. During the day, I researched nuclear-war specifics like “overpressure” and “equivalent megatonnage.” Threads provided eerie, horrifying visuals of how those ideas would appear in the actual world.
I didn’t sleep that night, and I shut off my TV.
A wave of anxiety and a desire to process it collectively was indicated by the 16-month release of Testament, The Day After, Threads, and WarGames, which bridged Boomer and Gen X tastes by making computer hacking the trigger for a nuclear crisis.
Then it was over: in 1987, Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed a historic nuclear arms treaty. The Berlin Wall was destroyed by the Germans two years later. Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s successor, announced the end of the Cold War one month after the fall of the wall.
In the 36 years that have followed, filmmakers have discovered additional public fears to bolster their narratives. These days, plagues and climate change are frequent topics.
The inversion of apes and humans in the 2011 reboot of Planet of the Apes occurs due to a botched pharmaceutical experiment rather than a nuclear conflict. Klaatu warns people about ecocide instead of an atomic threat in the 2008 reimagining of The Day the Earth Stood Still.
The 2023 film Oppenheimer, which tells the story of the father of the atomic bomb, won the Oscar for Best Picture and made almost $1 billion at the box office.
With the exception of a flash-forward doomsday warning at the end, Oppenheimer is a talkative period piece that explores a man and his mind. Because of Oppenheimer, no panel of distinguished individuals discussed nuclear matters during prime time.
Although there is a Fail Safe callback in this year’s Mission: Impossible, the use of nuclear weapons is meant to heighten the stakes for Tom Cruise’s bravery rather than to cast doubt on their necessity or depict the destruction they cause.
A film about a surprise missile attack on the United States, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, will soon be released. Bigelow told me last year that she was concerned about the lack of public discussion on nuclear peril. Bigelow also directed the realistic military dramas Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker.
I’m hoping her next film can act as a contemporary Fail Safe or The Day After and spark the same kind of conversation that those earlier films sparked.
I don’t miss the Cold War, even though some of these memories may come across as sentimental. I’m glad Americans aren’t constantly reminded that everything we cherish and know could disappear in an instant.
But can we have a meaningful conversation about nuclear weapons without feeling a little scared?
“Perhaps we need a coward in the room when we are talking about nuclear war,” said John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, following the Cuban missile crisis.
And maybe nuclear war movies are still necessary to frighten us into remembering and talking.
