The Nuclear War Films We Refuse to See, but Must See

Film is the most persuasive of modern media, but also somehow the easiest to dismiss. Nothing can match its ability to create verisimilitude. Yet still, and perhaps when film is most effective at disturbing us, we dismiss all that as “just movies.”

For reasons that provide therapists with endless paychecks, the destruction of the human body, either through murder or torture, is a film staple. The destruction of the human body on a mass scale, meanwhile, is a topic we seem a lot less willing to entertain. There is no doubting the formulaic success of the zombie apocalypse film. What we fail to consider is that maybe—I would say definitely—the reason we gravitate toward flesh-eating zombies is because they divert our thoughts and attention away from the empirical fact that we could all perish en masse in a nuclear war. If it is true, blood-chilling fear you want from a film, nothing shoves verisimilitude against our deepest, real-life fear like a film about all-out nuclear war.

We are reminded every August since 1945, on or near the sixth day of the month, that at least 118,000 Japanese civilians died instantly, with many thousands more to follow for an estimated total of 200,000, when the U.S. military detonated two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The only problem with this annual reminder is that it seemingly reinforces the idea that nuclear obliteration is something that happens to other countries and other places, not ours. With cold, calculating, rapid-response AI systems replacing slower, more considered human responses to nuclear deployment, plus the smashing of international alliances designed to keep nuclear proliferation at bay, the idea that nuclear war is a catastrophe for other countries, not the United States, is obsolete. We can laugh at “preppers” amassing canned food and building generators in bunkers. We are less inclined to laugh when billionaires do the same, building elite bunkers in New Zealand and other locales far removed from nuclear targets.

It was August only last month, and NPR hosted a recent broadcast asking its film critics to name-check their favorite films of the nuclear age. It was a parade of all the usual suspects—Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) et al—along with a few curveballs. Sure, maybe Godzilla can act as a metaphorical stand-in for our deepest fears of nuclear destruction. But a giant reptilian monster is not a nuclear ballistic missile. Through all eleven minutes of this broadcast, I waited for the panelists to name the two most chilling film portrayals of nuclear holocaust committed to film—Peter Watkins’s 1965 film The War Game and Mick Jackson’s 1984 film Threads—or even the most elegiac portrayal of a world ended by nuclear war, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1986 film The Sacrifice. Not one of these three films warranted a mention. That not one of them was mentioned reveals that we are still prone to lacing the unthinkable with laughter and fantasy.

Dr. Strangelove can hold nuclear annihilation at its center because it also makes us laugh, while Peter Sellers charms and impresses us by juggling four acting roles. Stanley Kramer’s On The Beach (1959) gives us characters who must deal with the fallout of nuclear war without ever showing us its horrors. The War Game and Threads have no time for dramatic trifles of characters dealing with nuclear war from afar, or even the relative safety of a military bunker. Instead, both films plunge us deep into their dreaded, adrenaline-soaked horrors.

Set in stolid black-and-white, as if to mock the war reports of old, The War Game stages its grim scenario after the Soviets invade West Berlin. The panic before the bombs is a scramble of useless desperation, the explosions and destruction impressively real for the time the film was made, but it is the aftermath of attempts to feed survivors, care for the dying, and maintain order that congeal into terrifying realism. A large part of Watkins’s mission is to make us ask whether the human species is worthy, much less capable, of living in relative peace. The DVD copy of Watkins’s film sells it on sensation before you start viewing, which seems almost gratuitous after you watch it. Soon after its debut, British broadcasters refused to air it for twenty years. Soon after John Lennon and Yoko Ono received a copy of the 49-minute film, sent to them by Watkins himself, they inaugurated their curious “bed-ins” for peace, and Lennon wrote “Give Peace a Chance.” Film critic Roger Ebert gushed, “They should string up bedsheets between the trees and show The War Game in every public park.”

Threads travels miles further in its depiction of nuclear horrors, and plunges chasms deeper into scientific and sociological hypotheticals that skirt with almost documentary-like realism. Part of this is because the film is shot in color and is more than twice the length (112) of The War Game. Another reason is that Jackson made Threads at the peak of the 1980s “nuclear freeze” movement of mass protest against nuclear armament along the Cold War’s iron curtain dividing East and West Europe. The script, written by Barry Hines, sees a Soviet invasion of Iran, via Afghanistan, as its catalyst. Its sole purpose is to lend its grim sequences words and action. Almost every word by the film’s helpless cast is born of fear and pain. The action that prevails, after English cities everywhere are set ablaze, but with a visual focus on Sheffield, is death. Like an executioner unafraid of tightening the noose, Jackson crafts every scene on the imperative of human survival against impossible odds. When not dying, people loot, search for family, care for the dying, kill, rape, or do their best to manage starvation and squalor in the countryside. The end asks that we imagine a future race of people devolved into stupidity and speaking a primitive, guttural language imposed by radioactive mutations passed on to successive generations of survivors.

In contrast to The War Game and Threads, Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice comes as sweet relief. If we stop to consider it fully, however, this Russian film is no less devastating for being so achingly beautiful. The plot is slow and methodical, showing us the struggles of one family to find solace and meaning in their loves and in the world, even as fighter jets rumble above them and news reports about the start of World War III commence. Tarkovsky depicts a sort of inverse horror without horrific sights. It is the horror of trying to make sense of your final days. It is the horror of trying to find beauty before beauty ends forever.

As is true for most stalwart members of Generation X, my own memories of nuclear holocaust film portrayals began with the 1983 television broadcast of The Day After. A mostly tepid portrayal of nuclear winter—at least compared to The War Game and Threads—it budged its way into high school history and civics classes nationwide. That was no small feat at the height of the Reagan years. Yet there is a solid case to be made that President Reagan’s private screening of The Day After was instrumental, at least in part, in motivating him toward the negotiating table with the Soviet Union in attempts to reduce the chance of nuclear war ever taking place.

Few of us have the psychic wherewithal to dwell fully, even occasionally, on the prospect of what can only be called the End of the World. But when we are facing an outcome made horrific by statistical probability, and by the stark fact that nuclear weapons exist, we cannot dismiss any one of these films as “just a movie.”

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1986 tome on the science and creation behind the most destructive weapons known to humanity, saves its last pages for the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The pages in between, as Rhodes charts the path of the nuclear age we still inhabit, are no less gripping. Profiling English physicist James Chadwick, who earned the 1935 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering the neutron and led the British team of Allied scientists for the Manhattan Project, Rhodes recounts the spring day in 1941 when Chadwick felt the full, cumulative force of understanding just how destructive nuclear weapons would be, once produced.

“And there was nobody to talk to about it. I had many sleepless nights,” Chadwick said in a 1969 interview. “But I did realize how very very serious it could be. And I had then to start taking sleeping pills. It was the only remedy. I’ve never stopped since then. It’s 28 years, and I don’t think I’ve missed a single night in all those 28 years.” (Rhodes, 356)

If the mind of someone such as Chadwick could quake at the implicative knowledge of how destructive nuclear weapons would come to be, four full years before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, perhaps we should be ashamed to rely on “just a movie” to shake us out of complacency. But that is exactly what these films should do, and why we should find the courage to watch them.