World War III, sometimes abbreviated to WWIII, is a common theme in popular culture. Since the 1940s, countless books, films, and television programmes have used the theme of nuclear weapons and a third global war.Biggs, Lindy and Hansen, James (editors), 2004, Readings in Technology and Civilisation, . The presence of the Soviet Union as an international rival armed with nuclear weapons created persistent fears in the United States and vice versa of a nuclear World War III, and popular culture at the time reflected those fears.Worland, Rick, 2006, The Horror Film: An Introduction, Blackwell Publishing, . The theme was also a way of exploring a range of issues beyond nuclear war in the arts.Franklin, Jerome, 2002, Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film, Routledge, . U.S. historian Spencer R. Weart called nuclear weapons a "symbol for the worst of modernity."
During the Cold War, concepts such as mutually assured destruction (MAD) led lawmakers and government officials in both the United States and the Soviet Union to avoid entering a nuclear war.Lipschutz, Ronnie D., 2001, Cold War Fantasies: Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy, Rowman & Littlefield, . Various scientists and authors, such as Carl Sagan, predicted massive, possibly life-ending destruction of the Earth as the result of such a conflict. Strategic analysts assert that nuclear weapons prevented the United States and the Soviet Union from fighting World War III with conventional weapons.Angelo, Joseph A., 2004, Nuclear Technology, Greenwood Press, . Nevertheless, the possibility of such a war became the basis for speculative fiction, and its simulation in books, films and video games became a way to explore the issues of a war that has thus far not occurred in reality. The only places that a global nuclear war has ever been fought are in expert scenarios, theoretical models, war games, and the art, film, and literature of the nuclear age.Martin, Andrew, and Petro, Patrice, 2006, Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the "War on Terror" Rutgers University Press, . The concept of MAD was also the focus of numerous film and television works.
Prescient stories about nuclear war were written before the invention of the atomic bomb. The most notable of them was The World Set Free, written by H. G. Wells in 1914. During World War II, several nuclear war stories were published in science fiction magazines such as Astounding. In Robert A. Heinlein's story "Solution Unsatisfactory," the US develops radioactive dust as the ultimate weapon of war and uses it to destroy Berlin in 1945 and end the war against Germany. The Soviet Union then develops the same weapon independently, and war between it and the US follows.William H. Patterson, Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, volume 1, Tor Books, 2011 ch. 20-21; see also the description of Heinlein correspondence here
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 made stories of a future global nuclear war hypothetical rather than fictional. When William Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, he spoke about Cold War themes in art, expressing concern that younger writers were too preoccupied with the question of "When will I be blown up?"Halliwell, Martin, 2007, American Culture in the 1950s, Edinburgh University Press, .
Pre-World War II As early as 1907, H. G. Wells in The War in the Air described a catastrophic global conflict leading to the collapse of civilization, survivors reduced to a semi-medieval life among the ruins.
Wells later released a novel in 1914 entitled The World Set Free in which he details a fictional war fought by nuclear forces where major parts of the European continent are ultimately destroyed as a result of highly powerful weapons of mass destruction.
Both books were inspired by work done by Frederick Soddy in 1903, who was researching radiation and the possibility of radioactive weapons, foretelling ideas that would later become prominent concepts utilized in the Cold War.
1930s American cartoonist James Thurber published the short story The Last Flower in November 1939, two months after World War II began. The story predicts a series of world wars, and begins with the line "World War XII, as everybody knows, brought about the collapse of civilization." The book depicts a post-apocalyptic Stone Age human society.
1940s The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the "atomic age", and the bleak pictures of the bombed-out Japanese cities that were released shortly after the end of World War II became symbols of the new weapons' power.
Around the mid-1940s, American society ushered in the age of atomic music, where different genres of music prompted differing ideas about the age of nuclear weapons. Some music, such as Hawkshaw Hawkins song "When they Found the Atomic Power," promoted development of nuclear weapons as defensive measures against other countries, appealing to people's sense of patriotism during a time of international conflict. Other types of music, however, were not as keen on the idea of promoting the idolization of the Atomic Age. Folk music, rock music, and even some jazz songs, such as "Atomic Cocktail" by Slim Gaillard, cautioned the use of such powerful weapons and warned the American people about what harms can come from such a destructive nuclear power.
On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, codenamed "Joe 1". Its design imitated the American plutonium bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.
1950s American fears of an impending apocalyptic World War III with the communist bloc were strengthened by the quick succession of the Soviet Union's nuclear bomb test, the Chinese Communist takeover in 1949, and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. Pundits named the era "the age of anxiety," after W. H. Auden. In 1951, an entire issue of Collier's magazine was devoted to a fictional account of World War III; the issue was entitled "Preview of the War We Do Not Want", in which war begins when the Red Army invades Yugoslavia, and the United States responds by conducting a three-month bombing campaign of Soviet military and industrial targets. The Soviet Union retaliates by bombing New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Detroit.
Against that background of dread, there was an outpouring of cinema with frightening themes, particularly in the science fiction genre. Science fiction had previously not been popular with either critics or movie audiences, but it became a viable Hollywood genre during the Cold War. In the 1950s, science fiction had two main themes: the invasion of the Earth by superior, aggressive, and frequently technologically advanced aliens and the dread of atomic weapons, which was typically portrayed as a revolt of nature with irradiated monsters attacking and ravaging entire cities.
In The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), a flying saucer lands on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and is surrounded by troops and tanks. The alien Klaatu delivers an ultimatum that the Earth must learn to live in peace, or it will be destroyed. The War of the Worlds (1953) has a montage sequence of the countries of Earth joining to fight the Martian invaders, a metaphor for the dangers of nuclear war. The most elaborate science fiction films in the 1950s were This Island Earth (1955) and Forbidden Planet (1956). In the climax of both films, the characters witness the explosion of alien planets, which implies Earth's possible fate. The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) is also in the science fiction genre. In it, a man, a woman, and a bigot (the devil) roam New York City after a nuclear war. Only those three characters appear in the film. Also released in 1959 was On the Beach, directed by Stanley Kramer and starring Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck and Fred Astaire. Based on the eponymous novel by Nevil Shute, the film deals with the citizens of Australia as they await radioactive fallout from a catastrophic nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere. The French author Stefan Wul's 1957 novel Niourk provided a portrait of New York after World War III.Horn, Pierre L., 1991, Handbook of French Popular Culture, Greenwood, , page 236. The 1959 novel Alas, Babylon depicted the effects of nuclear war on a small town in Florida; a television adaptation was broadcast in 1960.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell's dystopian 1949 novel about life after a third World War, rose to cultural prominence in the 1950s. In it, the world has endured a massive atomic war and is politically divided into three totalitarian superstates, which are intentionally locked into a perpetual military stalemate and use the never-ending warfare to subjugate their respective populations.
Anxiety created by Japanese-produced media also facilitated the fear of nuclear threat that Americans were experiencing. Movies such as Godzilla (1954) and I Live in Fear (1955), which later became popular Japanese films within the United States, were heavily inspired by the fear and destruction created by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings, giving Americans critical insight over the consequences of using such weapons, as well as ideas about what might happen in the event of a nuclear exchange with the increasing production of Hydrogen Bombs by both the United States and the Soviet Union.
1960s In the 1960s, media about the threat of nuclear world war gained wide popularity. According to Susan Sontag, films struck people's "imagination of disaster... in the fantasy of living through one's own death and more the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself."Quart, Leonard, and Auster, Albert, 2001, American Film and Society, Praeger/Greenwood, , p. 76-77. A leading member of the 1960s antiwar movement, the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan evoked the topic of World War III thrice in his LP The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, in "Masters of War", "Talkin' World War III Blues", and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall". Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), adapted to film in 1982 as Blade Runner, features as its setting an Earth having been damaged greatly by the radioactive fallout of a nuclear war called "World War Terminus."
The 1961 Toho film The Last War showcases the effects of a global nuclear war from the perspective of Japan.
In 1964, three films about the threat of accidental nuclear war were released: Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe, and Seven Days in May. Their negative portrayal of nuclear defence prompted the US Air Force to sponsor films such as A Gathering of Eagles to address the potential dangers of nuclear defense publicly.
Dr. Strangelove is a black comedy by Stanley Kubrick about the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviets and the doctrine of mutually assured-destruction. After a bizarre mental breakdown, the C.O. of a SAC base orders the B-52 wing operating from his base to attack the Soviets. The title character, Dr. Strangelove, is a parody of a composite of Cold War figures, including Wernher von Braun, Henry Kissinger, and Herman Kahn. The secret codename of Operation DROPKICK, mentioned by George C. Scott's character, may be an oblique reference to Operation Dropshot.
The 1964 film Fail-Safe was adapted from a best-selling novel of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. Nuclear disaster is caused by a technological breakdown, which mistakenly launches American bombers to attack the Soviet Union. To prove that it was a mistake and to placate the Soviets, thereby saving the world from nuclear war, the US president orders the destruction of New York City after an American bomber succeeds in destroying Moscow. The film was made in a semi-documentary style and ends just as the explosion over New York City begins.