Nuclear War

This is the outline I used to put together my radio review of the genre of Nuclear War Movies. The reveiw was a collaboration between Justin and Myself before we started this web log. The films' links are big, and the historical links are smaller:

The Back Ground to most of these films
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki(1945)


First USSR test (1949)







Korean War (1950-53)

Invasion USA (1952)
This was the year the U.S. tested the first hydrogen bomb, on Nov. 1. The explosion was 750 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima.

Sputnik launched (1957)

On the Beach (1959)

Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)

Dr Strangelove (1964) Failsafe (1964)

Détente (late 60's-up to Reagan)

The Day After (1983) (TV) Threads (1984) (TV)
WarGames (1983)

Fall of Berlin Wall (1989)
September 11th 2001

The Sum of All Fears (2002)

Terminator 3 (2003)


This blog orriginally appeared at Making Contact's Web Log - where it was extremely usefull for me while I was immersed in writing the script... In the end , the radio piece was over 16 mins - instead of the 8 I was originally alloted. So Justin kindly restructured the 29min program, and I cut the piece down by 5 mins. Below is some parts of the script that I miss the most (though they had to go)...Mostly my thoughts on the later films of the 90's and 00's.

The latter part of the script below, before the final edits:


WarGames was released in 1983 - for my memory, it heralds the coming of the 1990's. No threat from the Soviet Union - just a teenager from Seattle (and his personal computer) that cause a bunch of fuss and then save the day.

"Stand down the missiles! Recall the bombers! Hooray!"

The 90's saw the end of the Soviet Union, and with no Evil Empire, there can be no fantasy of destruction. It would seem as though nuclear war movies would become a thing of the past.

But there are a significant handfull of big hollywood films that come along in the 90's to rekindle old fears. Notably The Hunt For Red October and Crimson Tide, both flicks about the posibility of nuclear war being started by a rogue submarine commander...

90's action flicks also addressed growing fears about terrorism, depicted in blockbuster movies like "True Lies," where Arnold Schwarzenegger fights Jihadists who nuke an island in the Florida keys- and "The Peacemaker" George Clooney and Nicloe Kidman verses balkan terrorists who get their hands on decomissioned-soviet nuke.
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FADE UP MUSIC from SUM OF ALL FEARS

Just like the Cold War, the 90's had an ending too...

So if movies about nuclear war are in any way a barometer for the nation's anxiety, then what comes after September 11th 2001, is worth a closer look.

MORGAN FREEMAN, SUM OF ALL FEARS..."The Russian scientists have been working on a bomb! Nuclear! It arrived in Baltimore this morning!"

Cold war novelist Tom Clancy in 2002 brings us "The Sum of All Fears." AKA the evil empire strikes back.

In the Clancy book, Islamist Extremists unearth a 70's era Israeli nuclear bomb in the Golan Desert. In the movie version, it's an international cabal of neo-Nazi extremists. Either way, the bomb is planted in a packed football stadium to kill the president and set off a full scale conflict with the Russians. get it. The sum of all fears.

A fun movie. Ben Afleck saves the Day. But even a mushroom cloud over Baltimore didn't scare me one bit. Threads. Now that's a scary movie.

So with the USSR out of the picture what should we be scared of?

ARNOLD as TERMINATOR: "Judgment Day is inevitable..."

The first Terminator movie introduced us to Arnold Schwartzenegger as a cyborg from a post-apocalyptic future. The Terminator Arnold travels back in time to kill the mother of John Connor, the would-be leader of the human resistance movement against the killer robots.

Pretty cool. And in 1984 when it came out, film makers didn't have to give audiences any explanation as to "what caused nuclear Armageddon."

So the Question that must have faced the bearers of the Terminator franchise was how to keep the doomsday scenario alive for an audience largly in diapers at the end of the cold war.

Answer: Blame the computers...Here's post adolecent John Connor at the opening of 2003's Terminator 3, rise of the machines.

"I should feel safe but I don't... so I live off the grid, no phone no address. No one and nothing can find me..."

Terminator 3 ends with the misiles criss-crossing the globe and mushroom clouds sprouting up everywhere because the computer in charge decided to kill us all. T3- rise of the machines gets right to the heart of things regarding nuclear war- we still have plenty to be scared of, even without a plausible scenario for the fighting of world war three....

Unless there's some sort of accident that snow balls out of control or you believe in the Book of Revelations...

And while some may be scared of evil robots or permanent war, the second comming or Governor Ubermensh - (Shwartzenegger was voted into office while T-3 was still in theaters) There could be something else that's causing this unease at the core of Rise of the Machines:

There are still more than 10,000 nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal and about 20,000 world wide. There are at least nine countries who posess nuclear weapons. There have been new cold wars - between India and Pakastan (they are in the midst of their own detante with a new bus route linking the two sides in the disputed region of Kashmir...
The Bush administration has plans for new nuclear weapons and new ways of using them, like bunker busters and mini-nukes. Lower yeild nuclear weapons for tactical use on todays battlefield. The recent conference on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty at the UN was a failure.

Of course there are a new generation of movies on the way to bring a new world of nuclear conflict to the screens. I'll go out on a limb and predict that we'll keep on making nuclear war movies until disarmament or doomsday. For Making Contact and the National Radio Project - I'm Eric Klein.
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Interesting that the Iran/Israel "cold war" wasn't on the radar just 6 months ago. If I wrote this script now, it would have been mentioned.