Nuclear Nightmares in Film and Preventing Eventual Armageddon

In 1984, Threads was released and viewed by audiences across the United States and Britain. The film follows the events of a nuclear war folding out over Britain. It starts with a young couple finding their way through a sudden pregnancy and turns to expose to the audience, as realistically as possible, what would happen in a nuclear war to members of the everyday public. A lot of research was done to make the film as accurate as possible.

The film is horrific. Audiences who watched it apparently shared a gloomy sense of horror at what they had seen having watched the film. The events of the film stuck in the minds of whoever watched the film, creating a shared post-traumatic feel of fright in how it depicts things going from bad to worse in what would likely really result in a nuclear war. After a similar movie The Day After aired in the United States, public debate was stirred meaning that Secretary of State George Shultz had to reassure the public that nuclear was not acceptable.

Normally, audiences who watch horror play out on screen have an escape to calm their senses when the action finishes. What they are watching is not real and could not happen in real life. But movies about the impacts of nuclear and atomic war bring something real to their audience, particularly when they portray what happens using true historical events. It is easily forgotten that collectively there are enough nuclear weapons across the globe to destroy it more than once over. What have films about nuclear weapons taught us about what would happen in a nuclear war?

Moments Before a Nuclear Attack

On the 13th of January 2018, the residents of Hawaii all received an alert that a ballistic missile was making its way to their location. “Seek Immediate Shelter. This is not a drill” the message read, creating a panic that led the residents to scrabble and seek out shelter in the limited time they had before the nuclear attack took place. People were recorded screaming and running in the streets as they came to terms with the fact that they were all about to die. Parents inserted their children into manholes.

Scenes like these have been portrayed in cinema before. In 1983, the movie The Day After portrays the occupants of Kansas City in a similar state of panic. In the movie ballistic missiles are suddenly fired leaving characters aware of the impending armageddon. While some characters are left wondering whether the United States or Russia fired first, the reality begins to bear down on the characters that an attack is about to take place. One of the families, who happens to live right next to a nuclear launch facility, are first to realize what is about to happen to them.

A husband is depicted in the movie dragging his wife down the basement with her screaming out in agony knowing that things will never be the same again. A number of characters are depicted driving their cars only to have them grind to a halt the moment the nuclear attack takes place. In Threads, distant nuclear explosions catch characters off guard. The romeo of the movie is seen running in the street only to not be seen again in the movie after the bombs go off. Characters are seen one scene to be gone the next after the nuclear attack. Just as in The Day After, people are seen running in the streets. One women is shown in Threads to be wetting herself at the sight of the nuclear explosion off in the distance.

Scenes of utter panic like this, don’t seem realistic when shown to audiences in The Day After and Threads, until they are compared with what happened in 2018 in Hawaii. It becomes very easy for strong words to lead to a sense of willingness to see the war continue in order to win out compared to an enemy country. Conflicts like the Vietnam War have been extended by words that did not really make apparent what was playing out. Scenes of nuclear attack like those in The Day After and Threads force politicians to be honest about what the public is being asked to sacrifice. Trump had to reflect on the relationship between himself and Kim Jung Un after the incident in 2018 in Hawaii – that turned out to be a false alarm. Leaders in the 1980s had to also deal with a public with a better understanding of what would actually happen in a nuclear war.

The Use of the First Atomic Bombs

The events of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been the focus point of a number of recent movies. The Japanese film This Corner of the World follows a young woman living in Japan who has to marry and move out of Hiroshima to the neighbouring city of Kure. The main character is living in Japan’s war period, and as the movie progresses the war becomes less distant. Scenes show American war planes attacking the Japanese navy ships in the harbour of Kure. Eventually, Hiroshima is attacked and the main character is left wondering what has happened to her family in Hiroshima. While the film is not intended to be patriotic, it does show Japanese life at the time in a number of different ways.

When the neighbouring city of Hiroshima gets bombed, we see characters react in confusion not understanding fully what has just occurred. The flash and arrival of doors caught in the blast and blown all the way to Kure make it apparent that something terrible has happened. Radio announcements follow including the formal message from the emperor that Japan cannot go on against such attacks and “endure the unendurable”. The main character reacts in frustration, having lost her arm in a bombing and having her youth stripped away as the war takes hold, she finds it difficult to come to terms with what is going on around her in the same way we see in The Day After.

The films Oppenheimer and This Corner of the World are important pieces of the same historical story. Oppenheimer does not portray what happens in Japan or spend a lot of time trying to understand it. Instead, parts of the film shows a crowd celebrating only for Oppenheimer to see the audience with torn skin and suffering from the effects of radiation revealing how naive the American public really is about atomic weapons and what they do when used. On the one stance, the use of the atomic bombs on Japan helped prevent the need for an invasion of mainland Japan. On the other stance, the impact of these weapons was not fully understood. The bombs were indiscriminate in who they killed as This Corner of the World shows.

Oppenheimer spent a lot of time in the film trying to make apparent to decision-makers like President Truman that the proliferation of atomic weapons posed a grave threat. What we are left with in the film is a strong contrast between Oppenheimer and President Truman. Oppenheimer feels guilty because he understands what he has done. President Truman, who ends up labelling Oppenheimer a “crybaby”, makes clear to Oppenheimer that he was the one who dropped the bomb not him. Truman comes off, reflecting on the real effects of a nuclear war, as very naive as at the end of a nuclear war it will not matter who dropped the bomb. However, we don’t really get this feeling from the movie as the effects of atomic weapons are not shown to the audience in the attack on Japan.

When The Clock Is Ticking

The movie Thirteen Days is focused not on a nuclear strike but on the possibility of one as the United States navigates the missile crisis created by Russia placing nuclear missiles into Cuba. The movie starts with a lot of discussion of strikes on sites in Cuba and invasion, only for the conversation to shift towards finding a solution that does not mean escalation into a conflict that would eventually mean both sides use their nuclear weapons. While a nuclear strike does not take place during the film, and did not take place historically during the crisis, it does present a reflection point on how the world finds its way towards using nuclear weapons.

It is interesting comparing the events of this film with what we hear in the background in the lead up to nuclear strikes in Threads and The Day After. Before warheads are launched, we hear of nuclear weapons being used against Russian soldiers in Europe in The Day After, and we hear news reports of nuclear weapons being used against Iran in Threads by NATO. The contrast, between these depictions and Thirteen Days is that the characters in the story are family men who don’t want to see their country go to war unnecessarily. Thirteen Days spends a lot of time painting the military industrial complex as the enemies of the story as they lean into the prospect of war without understanding what they are doing. Kennedy wants to avoid a conflict that will escalate to nuclear war.

As the conflict in Ukraine continues to unfold, Russia faces a number of challenges against Ukrainian forces that make their situation dire. This has led some Russian officials to talk about the use of nuclear weapons and hope doing so will be a detariant to those assisting Ukraine. In late July 2023 Medvedev, the former Russian Prime Minister, suggested that Russia would be justified in using nuclear weapons to defend itself against Ukraine taking back territory which Russia had taken from Ukraine. While comments like this were put to one side, they do sound similar to events that were part of an all out nuclear war escalation in Threads and The Day After.

Thirteen Days holds a number of lessons that are useful for leaders who want to prevent a nuclear war but are having to deal with a crisis. One of the big lessons is keeping your military leaders honest and checking in with what is really going on. Flyovers and warning shots seem like passive steps but the movie asks whether the other side will know the difference between a flyover and warning shots and an all out attack. The other lesson from the movie is thinking about your military actions as a conversation with the enemy. As both countries lacked the ability to communicate with each other they had to apply this kind of thinking. Ultimately doing so prevented escalation to a conflict. While Thirteen Days does not feature a war it does feature a good example of what to do rather than what not to do which is portrayed in The Day After and Threads.

The Nightmare Begins After Midnight

One of the most interesting depictions of the effects of nuclear weapons in film starts focused on a small town. Three children ride their bikes up to the local nuclear power station to witness the plant blow up in front of them. The boys quickly get back on their bikes, with one left looking in horror not aware of the radiation that he is being exposed to and how things are about to change for this character. Chernobyl: Abyss released on Netflix in 2021 isn’t about a nuclear war but a nuclear disaster that occured in Ukraine in 1986. One of the reasons it is so unique is how it focuses on a child and how radiation poisoning would impact children in a nuclear attack.

The main character of the movie, a firefighter, ends up getting involved in cleaning up the mess at Chernobyl having been told that it will give the young boy, the son of his love interest, a chance at survival. We see the boy vomiting early on in the movie, and his health deteriorate through the movie making the main characters efforts more and more dramatic. But films like this don’t go far enough in giving a modern audience an understanding of what happens to people in a nuclear war.

While what would happen after a nuclear war occured is difficult to know, researchers do have some idea. The book Nuclear Choices for the Twenty-First Century: A Citizen’s Guide written by Richard Wolfson and Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress talks about how important it is early on to seek shelter. According to the book, staying inside for the first 48 hours after a nuclear blast is recommended as fallout levels decay by a factor of a 100 in this period. Severe burns are likely to occur and could very quickly overwhelm hospitals as was depicted in The Day After. Wolfson is a physicist and expert on this topic. Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress is a scientist at the Centre for Nonproliferation Studies at Middlebury College.

In film, pieces of what would happen seem best depicted between different films rather than in one place. The Day After shows hair loss amongst a number of characters who went outside for extended periods or got caught in the initial blasts. Scaring also appears on a number of characters, people are depicted with bleeding, and eye damage as a result of watching the blast. However, The Day After ends depicting one lady giving birth to suggest that there is hope for the future. Threads is a lot more blunt with the future, ending with a lady giving birth to a dead baby deformed because of the effects of nuclear radiation. Audiences have to realize that once a nuclear attack is done it is done, there is no going back to normal. It is the end of life as we know it for those involved.

World on the Brink of Armageddon

In 2013, Princeton University researchers looked into what would happen in the first few hours of a nuclear war given the current number of warheads and likely targets. The research, called ‘Plan A’, showed that within the first few hours of their scenario playing out 90 million people would likely be dead. An article published in Food Nature in August 2022 talks about how a nuclear winter would entail 5 billion people starve to death in the first few years. Growing concern about nuclear war has forced world leaders to ratify the SALT treaty that reduced the number of nuclear weapons in both Russia and the United States. But at present both countries are upgrading their nuclear capabilities. Andrew Facini, a Senior Fellow at the Council of Strategic Risks, noted that chances of a nuclear conflict are increasing as the United States improves sea capabilities to launch nuclear missiles this year.

Movies like The Day After and Threads created conversations about nuclear conflict that led to a rethink about their use in the United States. Marsha Gordon, a professor at Carolina State University, pointed out in a recent article that “Perhaps some modernized version of The Day After could function as a wake-up call for those who have no real context for nuclear fear”. It clearly worked in doing so in the 1980s. But in the present period, nuclear war has been made less tangible by how filmmakers have not portrayed nuclear war in the same way that left audiences horrified when they watched The Day After or Threads. Maybe what the world needs at the moment is a movie that makes clear what would happen in a nuclear war and leads us to all reflect on nuclear nightmares once more.

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