The Nukes Of Hazard

(This is one of two blog posts discussing nuclear war depicted in cinema and television. The other one is about fallout shelter stories in the 2020s and was posted simultaneously.)

With the Cold War in full swing, and fears of nuclear catastrophe looming large, there was a moment in popular culture in which mainstream cinema and television grappled with what impacts an atomic war might really have on humankind.

From the perspective of cinema, the 1980s were the golden age of nuclear war. 

There was a time in the 1980s when nuclear war
felt very present on television screens and theatres.
(Image via New Yorker)

There had of course been movies about atomic warfare prior to the 1980s — Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe to name two — though these had mostly to do with the political decision-makers and military types responsible for launching the weapons. There had been movies set in the decades after such a conflict (A Boy And His Dog or Mad Max as examples), but they mostly didn’t engage with or depict the actual bombs dropping.

Over the course of only a few years, mainstream audiences around the world were inundated with horrifying on-screen attempts to realistically portray a fully nuclear global conflict. Lynne Lyttman directed Testament for PBS in 1983. Within the same month, ABC’s The Day After hit screens. Less than a year later, the BBC offered the bleakest take on the subject with Mick Jackson’s Threads. In 1984, Canada’s CTV made Countdown to Looking Glass, a mock news broadcast showing how a nuclear war would appear to TV viewers. In 1986, Jimmy Murakami offered a small-scale view of nuclear war in his animated film When The Wind Blows. In the Soviet Union in 1986, Konstantin Lopushansky depicted survivors of a nuclear war in the basement of a museum in his film Dead Man’s Letters.

What made this flourishing of nuclear cinema unique was that these are depictions not of how the atomic war might have happened, but about what impact such a catastrophe would have on everyday people — people like those watching the movies.

Prior to the 1980s, the likely and potential consequences of nuclear war had been suppressed by governments. The British Government blocked the distribution of Peter Watkins’ 1966 movie The War Game, in which he tried to accurately depict what atomic warfare would mean for everyday citizens (the movie would not in fact be aired by the BBC until the 1980s). Information, when it was shared at all, focused on the blast and its effects on the immediate vicinity, not on the consequences to the globe and to populations removed from the impact sites. 

With When The Wind Blows, Jimmy Murakami
attempted to show the toll that nuclear war
would have on a pair of senior citizens.
(Image via BBC) 

There were numerous scientific and journalistic reports over the course of the late 1970s and early 1980s that completely reshaped how the public imagined nuclear war. The SCOPE report (Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment), specifically SCOPE 28, detailed the catastrophic and potentially extinction-level ecological and agricultural environmental consequences of nuclear war. Hugo-winning author Carl Sagan in 1983, brought the concept of nuclear winter (in which global climate is fundamentally altered by dust in the atmosphere) to the public's attention. 

By the end of the decade a combination of factors — the cooling of the Cold War, and increased public awareness of the global effects of such a conflict — nuclear war seemed both less likely, and less survivable. (If nobody survives a conflict, there would be no more stories to tell in its wake.)

In a tangible way, these films are amongst the most important science fiction movies ever made. Then-president Ronald Reagan later said he had watched The Day After, and been inspired to reach out to his Soviet counterpart to begin talks about nuclear disarmament. Threads is credited with turbo-charging the British anti-nuclear campaign. Russian State Broadcaster Первая программа broadcast The Day After in 1987, making the unusual concession to the American director that they would not change a word in their translation. In the subsequent decade, the policy results could be seen: the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 1991 limited the number of nuclear weapons hoarded by the two superpowers. It was followed by additional limitations in 1994, and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1996.

The explosion of nuclear war cinema in 1980s film might seem like and odd obsession for younger audiences, but examining them provides a window into the concerns and preoccupations of that time, as well as a warning about the inability of governments to stick to peaceable agreements.

We would suggest that a related explosion of screen storytelling will help audiences decades from now understand who we are in the 2020s.

Bunker Mentality

(This is the second of two blog posts discussing nuclear war depicted in cinema and television. The other one is about a flourishing of Atomic War fiction in the 1980s and was posted simultaneously.)

From Philip K. Dick’s The Penultimate Truth (1964) to Jeanne DuPrau’s City of Ember (2003), post-apocalyptic narratives set in bunkers often reflect how humans create, respond to, and survive authoritarian control and the destabilization of shared truths.

Say what you will about the shadowy builders of
Silo 18, they had a flair for brutalist architecture.
(Image via Apple+)

So what does it say about our present moment that there are three major television series all playing with the same trope?

• On the Apple+ TV series Silo, Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) slowly begins to realize that citizens of “Silo 18,” the underground bunker in which she lives, are being deceived and that a shadowy cabal is manipulating the populace. 
• Over on Amazon Prime’s Fallout, Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) sets out on a quest to uncover a conspiracy surrounding “Vault 33,” the underground bunker in which she was raised. 
• On Hulu’s Paradise, Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) investigates the mystery surrounding the construction of a post-apocalyptic bunker in which the last vestiges of the American government are now sheltering.

These fictional nuclear bunkers provide a relatively controlled environment for narratives about authoritarian systems of control being replaced by a more egalitarian system. These are stories in which protagonists live in a home that they did not choose, can not control, and from which they (at least in principle) cannot escape. Systems of coercion and control are baked into the very walls by which the citizens are surrounded, because those walls were designed and built at the behest of an unseen elite. Architectural features such as the levels of Silo 18 can be designed to keep one class of citizen separated from another class. Surveillance — either overt or covert — can both enable authoritarian policing and be used as a panopticon that motivates individuals to police themselves. 

Fallout depicts a society that relies on propaganda
and the manipulation of shared notions of history.
(Image via Amazon)

Fundamentally, these are all narratives about a distrust in institutions and in authority — and the hope that they can be overtaken and replaced with something that provides more integrity and more space for hope. The villain in Fallout isn’t the atomic weapons, it’s the shadowy elites who make decisions without regard to the consequences for the masses. This resonates with audiences living in an era of global declines in trust towards institutions, and each other. They can also be about the idea that mere survival isn’t enough, that we need to do better by one another even in the face of catastrophe.

In the modern context, these stories can serve as allegories for climate change. It’s been long observed that climate change affects those on the lower end of the economic spectrum more than it affects the more privileged classes and countries. Consequently, those making decisions at the top do not have as much skin in the game when it comes to dealing with carbon emissions, for example. Essentially, whether the world burns in nuclear fire or is cooked in a runaway greenhouse effect, those at the top of the economic pyramid will be able to hide away in their bunkers and preserve their privileged position. This is the narrative conclusion of Frederick Jamieson’s famous maxim that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism; the post-apocalyptic bunker story portrays the persistence of capitalism-derived hierarchies when all else is dust.

What makes these stories affecting is not just their dystopian premises, but how plausibly they mirror the realities experienced by today’s viewers. As climate anxiety grows and wealth inequality deepens, the idea that a select few might retreat into secured, climate-controlled sanctuaries while the rest of humanity suffers outside doesn’t feel like science fiction. Rather, it feels like a logical extension of gated communities and private police forces.

In Paradise, the connection between bunker and
gated community is made fairly explicit.
(Image via Hulu. 

You don’t have to look hard to find real-world parallels: from billionaire bunkers in New Zealand to Silicon Valley doomsday preppers investing in underground shelters, the fantasy of survival for the elite is already in motion. The bunker trope is a narrative reflection of this quiet but chilling shift in priorities for the privileged classes. Elon Musk’s pipe dream fantasies of building underground slave colonies on an uninhabitable planet seem strangely benign and kind when compared to the prepper billionaires preparing for the depopulation of our current planet.

Fundamentally however, the current crop of bunker-mentality television shows reflect a world where escape is privatized and survival is monetized. Perhaps audiences turn to these shows for a glimmer of hope, since they all seem to argue that those in power can not perpetually escape the consequences of their decisions.