On the 26th of September in 1983, Soviet Air Defense Officer Stanislav Petrov decided that the Soviet Early Warning Systems had malfunctioned and that the US had not just launched a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Consequently, the Soviets did not launch a retaliatory attack on the West. As a result of that, billions of people did not die in late 1983.
Those of you with kids may find it hard to convey to them the delicious thrill of waking each morning during the Cold War without having been reduced to a shadow on the wall OR (much more likely) being slow broiled under burning debris OR waiting in an inadequate improvised shelter for the fallout to arrive, secure in the knowledge the architects of apocalypse made certain of their own safety. It’s up to you to teach the lessons of history to the young and impressionable. Here are five atomic war movies suitable for kiddos of all ages.
Stanley Kramer’s adaptation of the 1957 Nevil Shute’s novel of the same title, 1959’s On the Beach features an all star cast (Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins). Nuclear proliferation put an end to all conflict in the northern hemisphere: those spared immediate death by nuclear blast were treated to death by enhanced fallout, courtesy of cobalt bombs. Australia and the other nations of the Southern Hemisphere were too insignificant to die in the exchange. Unfortunately, fallout is spreading slowly, inexorably south. The question is not how can the characters survive but rather how they will face their inevitable demise in a world without hope.
This movie has curiously few Australians in it for a movie set in Australia. Fallout does not work the way the plot needs it to work. It’s also curious that absolutely everyone has given up (unless the suicide pill program is a ruse and the Australian government is quietly moving Top People into grand bunkers to wait out the fallout). And nobody needs to hear Waltzing Matilda that many times. Nevertheless, there are some fine performances in what would be the classic atomic war film if the British weren’t even better at creating their own1.
1962’s Panic in the Year Zero was directed by Ray Milland, who also acted in the film. Co-stars: Jean Hagen, Frankie Avalon, Mary Mitchel, and Joan Freeman. The Baldwin family is on their way to a camping holiday when their home and the rest of Los Angeles is annihilated by atomic bombs. Milland’s Harry Baldwin utterly rejects On the Beach’s defeatism. The nation may be at war but that’s not Baldwin’s problem. Determined to keep his family alive regardless of the cost to others, Baldwin goes on a rampage of armed robbery and wilful sabotage in his quest to survive.
If you’ve ever wondered how narrative worlds end up like those of The Postman or Mad Max, it’s thanks to the efforts of hardworking people like Baldwin. Baldwin is convinced he is surrounded by mobs barely kept in line by civilization. Once disaster strikes, all rules are off. It’s not clear to me if Milland noticed the subtext of his film but what reached the silver screen was the story of a man whose decisions create the violent anarchy he’s trying to survive.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb featured Peter Sellers, George C. Scott and Slim Pickens (and James Earl Jones, in his first film role). When United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper launches an unauthorized attack on the Soviet Union, America’s top officials do their pitiful best to prevent an unnecessary apocalypse. Unfortunately for the world, not only is the US Air Force, as represented by Major Kong and the rest of his aircrew, competent enough to evade efforts by the Soviets and the US to stop them from delivering their nuclear payload, the Russians have their own unstoppable response ready. Everything works exactly as it should, unless for some reason you don’t want the Earth sterilized.
Kubrick rejects the solemnity of his source material (Peter George’s Red Alert) in favour of political satire that embraces the essential absurdity of preparing for nuclear war while pretending the goal is to avoid it. The result may be bleakly nihilistic, but it’s also very, very funny.
James B. Harris’ 1966 The Bedford Incident, is based on Mark Rascovich’s novel of the same title. Starring Richard Widmark, Sidney Poitier, James MacArthur, Donald Sutherland, and Martin Balsam, the film focuses on Eric Finlander, captain of the USS Bedford, and his relentless pursuit of a Soviet submarine. Embittered over lack of promotion, Finlander does not allow himself to be deterred from his hunt either by the fact it is peacetime or by the potential consequences if he pushes his nuclear-armed quarry too far.
Although there were indeed real-world confrontations somewhat like the Bedford Incident, the novel and film draw on another, more classic, inspiration. Similarities between Widmark’s Finlander and Moby Dick’s Ahab are not entirely coincidental. Viewers aware of the source material can make an educated guess as the form Finlander’s final triumph will take but how he manages it may come as a surprise2. Even to Finlander.
Jack Sholder’s 1990 By Dawn’s Early Light (based on Prochnau’s Trinity’s Child) starred Powers Boothe, Rebecca De Mornay, James Earl Jones, Martin Landau, Rip Torn, Jeffrey DeMunn, Darren McGavin, and Ken Jenkins. The end of the Cold War is in sight, alarming high ranking Soviet extremists and spurring them to launch a false flag attack on the Soviet Union. By the time the US has enough information to realize what’s going on, millions of Americans have died in the misguided Soviet retaliation and the American response. Worse, the senior surviving administration official known to be alive is the Secretary of the Interior and he is determined to escalate the conflict. Ending the war before a full exchange depends on the decisions of the aircrew of the B52 bomber Polar Bear 1.
This is about as late an example of this genre as there could be, since the Soviet Union disappeared in a puff of logic nineteen months after By Dawn’s Early Light was released. Although this was a made-for-TV film, this HBO effort is a surprisingly slick thriller, driven far more by the interactions between the characters than the (largely off-screen) deaths of a hundred million people.
The decline of a genre is a melancholic affair. The circumstances that inspired the works above and others like them are decades past. What a relief, therefore, to see the end of creatively stultifying nuclear weapons treaties! People now living may get to see a second golden age of nuclear war films. If they are very lucky, they may even get to experience the Live Action Roleplaying Game.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He was a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]The three British atomic war classics, The War Game, Threads, and When the Wind Blows are discussed here: https://reactormag.com/2018/11/01/13-stories-about-surviving-a-nuclear-war-at-least-briefly/
[2]As might the similarity between Finlander’s crucial moment and the ending of The Iron Giant.
Trinity’s Child had a much more absurd beginning to WWIII: believing that the Soviet Union would be broken by an escalating arms race, the Soviet decide the smart plan is to launch a counter-force attack on the US, in the hope the US would limit itself to a similar attack on the SU. This demonstrates a faith in US self control and ability to fine tune responses that may not have been entirely justified.
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/why-arent-we-all-atomic-ash
Pat Frank’s 1959 novel Alas Babylon would have made a great movie but apparently they made a 1960 Playhouse 90 adaptation that was so far removed from the book that Frank vowed to never release the rights again, a vow his estate keeps to this day.
I know it will come up: I just wasn’t that crazy about The Day After or Testament. Or The Bed Sitting Room. Or whatever that Canadian play was where the annihilation of Ottawa leads to an emergency government led by former PM Pierre Trudeau, much to the anger of a survivor in a fall-out shelter.
Speaking of Canadian fallout shelters, 30 years ago I contacted Emergency Preparedness Canada to ask about our Continuity of Government programs. It turned out they could only supply documents to people with need to know. At the same time, they had no budget to determine who needed to know. As a consequence, they assumed anyone who asked had a need to know, which is how I ended up with one of everything they published at the time.
2 is that what happened! I guess I can stop looking for a copy of the adaptation.
If you want a heartwarming end of the world story, I say go with Miracle Mile.
Girls’ Last Tour gets my vote for most heartwarming end of the world story, but it lacks cans of instant sunshine, or at least ones that get opened (if only because Yuuri didn’t realize she was standing right next to some… unless the kets already ate them).
Beneath the Planet of the Apes probably doesn’t match the tone this article is going for.
I own the graphic novel of “As the Wind Blows.” Bought it while visiting family in England when I was a boy. Absolutely loved it.
One movie not mentioned above that my father took my brother & I to was War Games. We loved all loved it – as did Captain America (or at least he saw it).
Probably my favorite, however, has to be Fail-Safe (released in 1964 according to IMBD). Tense, terrifying, far too realistic (to those of us living through those times, anyway), and with a horrifying ending.
Kato
“Panic in The Year Zero” is based on “Lot” by Ward Moore, right?
The Day After struck a little closer to home for me, quite literally; there’s something about seeing your hometown landmarks reduced to post-apocalyptic rubble that adds that little extra bit of frisson to the process.
An obvious movie not in this list is Fail Safe — which is from the same source material as Dr. Strangelove and released 8 months later. There was an interesting lawsuit as well.
Not a film, but I recently read A Canticle for Leibowitz. War and recovery, war and recovery, war and recovery.
I’ll put in another vote for Fail-Safe. Aside from the disturbing content, it has some really terrific performances, in particular a decidedly non-comedic Walter Matthau. Also a young Dom DeLuise makes an appearance! Yes, that Dom DeLuise.
@@.-@ That somehow seems very Canadian; I would expect a bureaucracy to default to “we have no evidence of your need to know, so you can’t have it–never mind that we have no evidence of anyone else’s need, or any way to determine it.”
Thumbs up for The Bedford Incident, I think it was an amazing film.
I would promote Fail-Safe, staring Henry Fonda and Larry Hagman and Walter Matthau. Terrifying to watch, even today, imho.
12: KHA did an incredible radio adaptation of Canticle worth tracking down.
9: It is.
But do apocaloi come much cheerier than The Road?
The poignant and elegiac The Bed Sitting Room is, sadly, not referenced here.
In the sitting I saw, there was hardly a dry eye in the house when the Prime Minister mutated into a parrot.
@17: I’ll bet the movie changes the ending a bit, then.
Panic in Year Zero! is a disquieting film. I’m not sure if it was a movie or a survivalist tract. Milland’s character had all these cold, ruthless, every-family-for-itself survival strategies already at his beck and call as if he’d been planning for the apocalypse for years. At times it seemed like his whole family was being held hostage by this paranoid strongman, however much he paid lip service to believing in law and order and civilization (just, y’know, not at the moment).
It’s also the nuclear apocalypse as written by Charles Dickens, since — due to the low budget — the family keeps coincidentally running into the same people they’d tangled with before.
Dr. Strangelove is the only other one of these films I’ve seen, and I don’t think I’ve even heard of the last two. (By Dawn’s Early Light was an HBO film, not a theatrical release, which I guess is why I wasn’t aware of it.)
As it happens, I just found out that Stanislav Petrov died earlier this year, though it wasn’t reported until last week:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/18/551792129/stanislav-petrov-the-man-who-saved-the-world-dies-at-77
@22: that URL has ‘2017’ in it.
I remember staying home sick one day, and watching Doctor Strangelove and Fail Safe back to back. I was depressed for weeks. That was back in the 1980s, when fearing nuclear armageddon was a bigger part of our lives.
I also remember talking in the 1990s to a nuclear arms expert, and saying it was amazing that when the Soviet Union fell, it didn’t trigger a nuclear exchange. He looked sad, and replied to me with one word, “Yet.” That word haunts me still…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LNHYz89sNc
This old cartoon based on Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” is the most terrifying nuclear war movie I know. Even if it’s not a movie.
“Consequently, the Soviets did not launch a retaliatory attack on the West. As a result of that, billions of people did not die in late 1983.”
Really wish people would stop repeating this BS. Even if every nuke the US and USSR had hit every target it was meant for, billions would not have died. Given that the targets were mostly in the USSR, US, and a few in Europe, 300 million max.
Given that the targets were mostly in the USSR, US, and a few in Europe, 300 million max.
Oh, well, that would have been alright, then.
You’re also forgetting bykill, I think – the worldwide effects of a large-scale nuclear exchange on the biosphere. You wouldn’t have to have a TTAPS-level nuclear winter to kill off billions.
The “Mortal Engines” series was written for a YA audience, and the film adaptation is suitable for same. Not about the immediate aftermath of nuclear war, but the distant future after near total destruction, along with the threat of history repeating itself.
@23/Patrick: Oh, sorry. That article came up in my Facebook feed just minutes after I first read this post, and was dated September, so I assumed it had to be recent news. So it’s still a hell of a coincidence, but only for me, not for the world.
@24/AlanBrown: When The Day After was about to air, my father didn’t want to let 15-year-old me watch it because he thought it’d be too scary and depressing for me (as I wrestled with some pretty major depression and anxiety issues back then). I had to use all my debating skills to talk him into it. But as it turned out, it didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know from nonfiction books like Sagan’s Cosmos and Schell’s The Fate of the Earth.
@26/ragnar: Aside from the fact that 300 million dead is nothing to be trivialized, there would’ve been no guarantee the war would’ve ended with those initial strikes. It was generally assumed back then that the cycle of mutual retaliation would spin out of control and destroy everything. Even if it did stop with 300 million in the first strike, what about the long-term deaths from fallout, nuclear winter, the general economic and civilizational collapse, the contamination of the world’s food sources, the kaiju rampages (reawakened or freshly mutated), etc.?
Given that the targets were mostly in the USSR, US, and a few in Europe, 300 million max.
Someone needs to read Dark Beyond Darkness, which explains why any reasonably-scaled nuclear exchange would likely mean the extinction of civilisation, worldwide, despite the deliberate obtuseness of a certain fraction of the population.
Fail-Safe is brilliant. The book is great as well. Henry Fonda should always be President.
Dr Strangelove is nonpareil.
I’ve seen By Twilight’s Last Gleaming, and it was brill. James Earl Jones was fabulous, as was Darren McGavin.
The NPR radio play of A Canticle for Liebowitz is available for download here. It is every bit as good as one might expect.
Nothing the Americans produced has anything on Threads. Way too damned optimistic, they.
There was also the miniseries World War III, which was pretty good. David Soul, Cathy Lee Crosby, Rock Hudson. Far better than you’d think.
-26
Have you seen On the Beach? Or for a real-world example, how about HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries. Fallout cares not for borders.
I grew up in McLean Virginia, home of the CIA. The air raid sirens were tested the first Wednesday of the month at 1030. All of us elementary school kids would make very dark jokes about it, as there were numerous primary targets within 5 miles or so, and one just over the hill from my high school. We had no delusions about our chances.
@32/wiredog: In my town it’s the first Wednesday at noon (we still use them as tornado/severe thunderstorm warnings, being in the Midwest). I always thought, what if the enemy started its attack right when the siren test began? Nobody would know it was real! Hey, maybe that’s why it was a different time of day in different cities.
21) As noted above, Panic in the Year Zero is based (perhaps too loosely) on Ward Moore’s “Lot” and “Lot’s Daughter”. If you think Panic is a disquieting film, imagine one based closely on those two stories!
You folks are such pessimists! I’m pretty sure that in a full-scale, no-holds-barred, everyone-in nuclear war, more people would survive, in some sense of the word, than die. So cheer up!
The thing about Where The Wind Blows, is that every other book by Raymond Briggs is a children’s book. Consequently it was shelved with his other books (like The Snowman, and Fergus the Bogyman) in my local library. I must have been about 7-8 when I brought it home and read it, and I still remember how much it upset me. I really wasn’t expecting such a bleak tale from someone who usually just made silly jokes.
Of course, this was just before the end of the Cold War, and we lived just over the hill from what was almost certainly a Soviet first strike target (and probably still a Russian one too). Just far enough that we’d escape the blast, but definitely close enough to be caught in the fallout. Growing up we ‘knew’ that we’d be lucky to reach adulthood.
Growing up in Omaha, NE in the 50’s….we had pretty good knowledge of our target status. I virtually never saw, however, the angst, paranoia, and depression claimed by many of this era.
Later, after entering the USAF, and a career that involved tactical and strategic missiles and, later, medicine, I was cognizant of the actual facts, enabling me to ignore the hysteria.
Dr. Strangelove, while mildly political, was wildy, effectively, and wonderfully satirical, with all involved dedicated to that end.
The rest…….Day After, etc……were all whiny, propagandistic, silliness intended to scare and, thus, persuade the public into cheek-spreading pacifism………as opposed to genuine humanistic peacefulness.
Joseph Losey’s These Are The Damned isn’t strictly an atomic war movie, but it definitely deserves a mention. Mysterious happenings in a seaside town turn out to be down to the experiments of scientists in a secret lab. The “experiments” are children who’ve been altered to be able to survive in an irradiated post-nuclear war world and have been sneaking out to explore without their creators knowing.
When I left the US Army, I went to Colorado Springs and going to the local branch of the University of Colorado. My parents were living there at the time and I remember my mom asking me what would we do if the USSR were to attack.
So I pointed to the south and said, “That’ Cheyenne Mountain, home of NORAD, the Russias probably have something big targeted for that. That way is Peterson Air Force Base, probably got a 100kt targeted for it. That way is Ft. Carson, with another nuke. Out east is Space Command, they are probably targeted. North of us is the Air Force Academy, that’s a target if for nothing else, for spite. And then there are all the various offices and military contractors around the city. So it’s a target as well. The only escape route will be up SR 24, through Old Colorado City and Manitou Springs. That road will be jammed and wall to wall cars. So, you know what I’m going to do if the balloon goes up and the missiles are on their way? Get a lawn chair out and beer and watch the light show…”
Personally, I kinda like “Blast from the Past” – the Brendan-Fraser-grows-up-in-a-fallout-shelter movie because his parents think there was an atomic war.
@11 The two films are not based on the same source material. Kubrick’s *Dr Strangelove* was based on Peter George’s novel *Two Hours to Doom* (1958) (vt. *Red Alert*). *Fail-Safe* was based on the 1962 novel of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. You were right about the lawsuit. “The similarities between [*Two Hours to Doom*] and Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s Fail-Safe (1962) were so great that George sued for plagiarism, gaining an out-of-court settlement”. Both novels featured the concept of both sides each other one city in mutual retaliation to prevent further escalation to all-out nuclear war. In *Two Hours to Doom* it is Atlantic City for the targeted Kotlass, and in *Fail-Safe* New York for Moscow. The obvious similarities led to the lawsuit. Kubrick’s *Dr Strangelove* mostly follows George’s story faithfully. Although many of the characters were turned into dark comic versions of the novel’s cast. Dr Strangelove and the Doomsday Machine didn’t appear in the novel. Of course, they featured in the inevitable movie novelization.
I always thought of Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove as dramatic and comedic variants of the same theme, and thus distinct works that didn’t occupy the same niche, in the same way that Get Smart was distinct from James Bond. But if the original book that Strangelove was based on was not a comedy, then I can understand why there was a lawsuit.
Two noteworthy British contributions to the microgenre:
1)Threads was a made-for-TV mini-series in 1984 that managed to scare the ever-living crap out of everyone who saw it with its matter-of-fact depiction of the consequences of a minor east-west nuclear exchange for a couple of families living in Sheffield, England (the aphorism “the living will envy the dead” could have been invented for this production). Basically the TV nuclear war equivalent of a 1970s British SF novel, a bracing dose of bleak existential despair.
2) On a less-depressing note: Whoops Apocalypse was a 1982 British sitcom about the events leading up to, well, the nuclear apocalypse, featuring John Cleese as a nuclear-armed terrorist, Barry Morse as a hopelessly naive US president, and a plot revolving around the search for the Shah of Iran (trapped in the toilet of a cross-channel ferry) and a succession of clones of the Soviet premier (back then they kept dying on a seemingly-monthly basis, mostly of old age). It all ends pretty much the same way as Doctor Strangelove, but with more slapstick along the way (and a loosely-related movie version that came out a couple of years later).
… I didn’t know about Panic in the Year Zero and am now wondering if it was to some extent an influence on Robert Heinlein’s oh-no-RAH novel Farnham’s Freehold. (With added ploddingly incompetent attempt to do an if-this-goes-on about the civil rights movement.)
Tom Paine #37:
Omaha is in Nebraska, land area 200,000 km^2, population 1.9 million. (Omaha: land area 370 km^2, pop. 450,000.)
Random example city in the UK: Edinburgh, population 520,000 (metropolitan area: 800,000), land area 264 km^2. Roughly double the population density there.
But there’s worse: the entire UK land area is only 242,000 km^2, with a population of 67 million.
So roughly 25 times the population density … but tons more nuclear targets: the UK was a major NATO member and resupply hub and expected to receive 2000-5000 nuclear weapons during the opening 1-3 hours of a war.
This is why Brits didn’t generally share your optimism about the effects of nuclear war. Even in the early 1960s, we were basically toast.
Post-apocalyptic SF was a cottage industry in the 50s and 60s. That wasn’t an accident.
A few examples are:
Poul Anderson’s After Doomsday
Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog
Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold
Stirling Lanier’s Hiero’s Journey
Fritz Leiber’s The Night of the Long Knives
Theodore Sturgeon’s Thunder and Roses
Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley
We were shown the War Game in school in sixth form so we were sixteen to eighteen year olds. I already knew we were screwed, but the details gave me nightmares. I spent the following weekend on a sleepover with some friends and we all had nightmares the first night so we just stayed up all night the second night, but spent it going over the film and our nightmares. I don’t fault our teachers, this was way before the film was finally shown on UK TV and they felt it was important we understand, but yeah we took the threat seriously. Then we had a lovely long time when that madness seemed to be over …
@46) “Post-Apocalyptic SF was a cottage industry in the ’50s and ’60s” …
Indeed, especially in the ’50s. When I was first reading a lot of back issues of SF magazines from the 1950s, I swear at one time I realized that EVERY SINGLE ISSUE (that I read) had at least one story concerning either nuclear war in progress, or the aftermath of such war.
I haven’t gone back to rigorously check whether the rate of issues with Nuclear War stories was truly 100%, or merely 95% or something, but it was certainly quite high.
@48/ecbatan: In Carl Sagan’s Cosmos in 1980, when estimating the Drake Equation and the probability that a technological civilization would survive its nuclear age, Sagan’s most optimistic estimate was a probability of one percent. For decades, people took it for granted that we were probably doomed. That’s why Star Trek was so optimistic merely for depicting a future where human civilization survived and thrived hundreds of years in the future (although even ST posited a Third World War that dwarfed the Second).
Then again, the belief that the end of the world would inevitably come in our lifetimes has been a peculiar characteristic of Western thought going back to Biblical times. Some people just can’t conceive of the world going on without them. The main difference is that since 1945, it’s become a genuine possibility.
@48: not precisely related, but I suddenly noticed that one collection of James White’s SF short stories contained exactly none that didn’t have a spaceship in it somewhere, although we might not be on it. I don’t think the theme was intended, and he didn’t -only- write space travel stories, but he wrote plenty of them. I could check him on apocalypses, but he wasn’t fond of those unless an impossibly idealistic Doctor could swoop in and sort things out – hmm… eventually he did write a tie-in for television’s “Earth: Final Conflict”. ;-)
Fail Safe was remade in 2000 as a TV movie. The TV version was broadcast live, and filmed in black-and-white. I remember thinking, at the time, that it was a good remake of the original. The cast was amazing: George Clooney, Harvey Keitel, James Cromwell, Richard Dreyfuss, Brian Dennehy, Sam Elliott, Noah Wyle, Hank Azaria, and hosted by Walter Cronkite.
It’s ironic to me that On The Beach is on this list, as my mother wouldn’t let me watch it when it came to TV (early 70s) because she thought it would be too upsetting for me. When I finally found out what happens in it, I was somewhat disappointed.
“I Live in Fear” – Kurosawa, 1955. No actual war, but that’s the theme.
Another interesting case: an order to launch a nuclear attack from a Soviet sub in 1962 was blocked by the 2nd in command.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov_(vice_admiral)
And in 1961 we accidentally dropped some of our own hydrogen bombs over North Carolina, but the safety devices held (in one case, only one of the 6 held, but it was enough).
Mr. Petrov is often and rightly aclaimed for his wise decision. But imagine if the situation were reversed. If a US early warning system had malfunctioned so badly we would probably hear a lot more about the criminal incompetence of its designers and operators than about the wisdom of one man who rightly disobeyed orders.
There were US incidents in which erroneous warnings of sometimes massive Soviet attacks were issued without triggering WWIII. At least two during the Carter years. On the one hand, how reassuring that the systems are not as hair trigger as they are supposed to be but on the other, what if as a consequence the Other Side succeeds in a Bolt Out of the Blue attack? What if one side should tragically survive simply because the other hesitated over fear of error? Never forget the lessons of Pearl Harbor/ Port Arthur!
@54/James: So what you’re saying is, it’s better to wipe out all of humanity just to be on the safe side? Okay, then. Good talk.
If we had any collective issue with atomic doomsday, we would not collectively have deployed so many nuclear weapons.
I don’t believe a bolt out of the blue nuclear attack was ever a realistic possibility, because there was always the nagging what-if about the extent of fallout around the globe. Even if the other side didn’t manage to launch a counterattack, there’s still the jet stream bringing it back on you and your allies.
An accidental war or a war carried out by extremists with nothing to lose was, and still is, the bigger worry. The elected and appointed people in Washington and Moscow presumably enjoy living above ground for the long term like everyone else (fingers crossed). There’s also a safe bureaucratic space for them to occupy when taking a defensive stance. Offensives, real offensives beyond defensive saber-rattling, demand results, and that’s typically an un-bureaucratic thing to do.
It’s worth mentioning “Pilot Light of the Apocalypse” as a very early example of an atomic war story (written in play form, but never filmed as far as I know). In 1945 (!) the author, Ridenour, talked about the dangers of responding quickly to an apparent attack and other related issues https://histsci122v.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/primary-source-pilot-lights-of-the-apocalypse/
Panic in the Year Zero was fairly consistent with its source material: the great science fiction story LOT. There was an even more depressing sequel: Lot’s Daughter, with incest, intellectual disability, and further decline.
I live in Connecticut. When I was a lad, it was home to the largest maker of large aircraft engines, two large makers of military helicopters, a shipyard that builds nuclear submarines, a major naval base, and downwind of New York City. Oh, and one of these was in my hometown.
Maybe that’s why I don’t remember any “duck an cover” exercises in school. They would be pointless as we would be too close and would all die anyhow
I saw a British movie years ago, possibly in school, but I don’t think so. It’s about the prospects of nuclear war and what would happen if London were bombed. The premise also is about having a bomb shelter and how much protection each model might give you. You live within a mile or 2 of central London and you try different shelters based on the idea of a megaton blast overhead. They go through about 5-6 different shelters, showing how much protection they provide (not much). Finally, they tell you, oh yea, it wont be a one megaton blast. Most likely for a city like London, try a 20 in the center, with a ring of ones all around. Won’t matter what you do, there won’t be anything, anyway. Anyone ever seen that movie? If so, remember the name?
QED’s A Guide to Armageddon?
@54
Good. Better that some survive, even if they are undeserving, than everyone dies. Better still that everybody does though. That is why nukes are such bad weapons, if you have to use them then you already lost. So better just not to use them in the first place.
@63
What’s the fun in an apocalypse that leaves survivors around to pick up the pieces?
It was the fathers of the atomic bomb way back in WW2 who said, when confronted with the [erroneous as it turned out] possibility that the A-bomb might set the atmosphere on fire, “Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run the chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!” if the chances of it happening were more than one in three million. The thought of making human extinction a deliberate consequence, after they went to such effort to ensure that it wouldn’t be an accidental one, is horrific. And all because the other team might win? People who flip the tables over when they lose are just the worst, especially when they use bombs to do it. If the choice was the end of all humanity, or the communists winning; sign me up for the communists any day of the week.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/bethe-teller-trinity-and-the-end-of-earth/