10 great films about nuclear apocalypse

On July 16, 1945, at the Trinity Site in New Mexico, the Manhattan Project personnel responsible for the creation of that day’s prototypical ‘Gadget’ observed the fruits of their years of labour: the first ever detonation of a nuclear device. Soon this superweapon, formerly the stuff of speculative fiction, would hasten the end of the Second World War and power up a new Cold War between east and west. It would also quickly become a source of fascination for the movies.

Initially, atomic anxiety was chiefly fodder for pulp cinema, a concern of science fiction (The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951; The War of the Worlds, 1953), monster movies (Godzilla, 1954; Them!, 1954) and occasionally noir (Split Second, 1953; Kiss Me Deadly, 1955). Some films from early in the Atomic Age, like the Mickey Rooney comedy The Atomic Kid (1954), took the Bomb less seriously, while others, including Destination Moon (1950) and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961), even displayed a cautious nuclear optimism.

But as America and its enemies developed increasingly powerful nuclear arsenals and the world reached a more mature understanding of the weapon’s potential, cinema got serious. Major studio pictures such as On the Beach (1959) and Planet of the Apes (1968) would, along with the odd arthouse production including La Jetée (1962), soberly imagine Earth in various stages of decay after nuclear war has already occurred. Still other films would speculate just how humanity could reach the brink of – and in some cases tip over into – nuclear annihilation in the first place.

Director: Stanley Kubrick

In the process of adapting Peter George’s novel Red Alert for the screen, Stanley Kubrick found the inherent absurdities of mutual assured destruction (MAD) – a military doctrine engendering peace between east and west through mutual threat of nuclear obliteration – leading him away from the straight thriller material of the source to what ultimately became a “nightmare comedy”.

Fully exploring the potential of his chosen genre, Kubrick peppers Strangelove with sight gags, slapstick and some very un-Kubrickian improv (particularly from Peter Sellers, in a triple role). Chiefly, though, from the opening scene of a military refuelling plane appearing to copulate with a bomber, Dr. Strangelove is a black satire with a deep vein of blue humour. In MAD, Kubrick finds a potent metaphor for male sexual anxiety, with macho generals like George C. Scott’s Buck Turgidson and Sterling Hayden’s Jack D. Ripper – frustrated by inaction and ‘loss of essence’ – aching to blow their nuclear payloads.

Director: John Frankenheimer

In the 1960s, few filmmakers married contemporary concerns with action and thriller elements as well as John Frankenheimer. For Seven Days in May, the tale of a future US president (Fredric March) facing a coup from a USAF general (Burt Lancaster) over a planned nuclear disarmament treaty between the US and the Soviet Union, Frankenheimer and screenwriter Rod Serling took America’s temperature and found Cold War paranoia, a growing appetite for civil protest and a yawning Kennedy-era White House-Pentagon divide.

Inspired by Edwin Walker and Curtis LeMay, two reactionary military chiefs who were openly critical of the Kennedy-Johnson regime for not being more aggressively anti-communist, Lancaster’s General James Mattoon Scott is a slyly opportunistic villain; an egotist riding a cause on his way to becoming a ‘great man’ of history. Frankenheimer, his control of the rhythm and tension of a scene honed over hundreds of hours directing live TV, makes even dialogue scenes into nail-biters.

Director: Sidney Lumet

Released just months after Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe has an almost identical premise – only where Kubrick’s film is a farce which laughs at humanity’s appetite for self-destruction, Sidney Lumet’s drama despairs. In Fail Safe, it’s a technical error that puts US nuclear bombers on a course to strike Russia, forcing Henry Fonda’s honest president and his men in the Pentagon to make a series of rapidly more grim decisions.

A matter-of-fact vision of a nuclear exchange, Fail Safe unfolds in unremarkable control rooms and grey conference spaces, where the likes of Walter Matthau’s nihilistic political advisor and Dan O’Herlihy’s doomy military commander vainly debate a situation that’s largely out of their control. Escalating from an average day to what could be all-out war over a matter of hours, in what feels like real-time, Lumet’s film shares with Strangelove the sense of grave inevitability: that the Cold War-era American nuclear war machine is so well-oiled, there’s little stopping a bomber from reaching its target once it’s loosed.

Director: Peter Watkins

While there was little comforting in Hollywood’s depiction of nuclear sabre-rattling in the period immediately following the Cuban missile crisis, Peter Watkins’ BBC film The War Game proved so unpalatably honest it would be banned from airing on British television for 20 years. Made in Watkins’ signature pseudo-documentary style, The War Game places the viewer on the ground in suburban Kent, where atomic blasts, firestorms and radioactive fallout take their incredible, alien toll on land and the human body.

The War Game wasn’t pulled from its original air date just because of its scouring depiction of the physical effects of atomic warfare; the film so thoroughly dismantled Britain’s nuclear civil defence plan circa 1965 that the BBC came under pressure from Harold Wilson’s government to pull it. Despite Oscar and BAFTA awards, Watkins’ film, deemed “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting”, wouldn’t air on British television until 1985.

Director: Joseph Sargent

Nuclear fear and a post-Space Odyssey distrust of artificial intelligence combine in Colossus: The Forbin Project, a Frankenstein story for the despairing 70s. A mountain-sized supercomputer given control of all NATO nuclear weapon systems, Colossus quickly advances beyond the unthinking doomsday machine intended by creator Dr. Forbin (Eric Braeden) when it links up with its Soviet counterpart, Guardian, and the machines together devise a foolproof plan for mankind’s advancement.

Programmed to perpetually maintain a nuclear stand-off between the US and USSR and usher in the “human millennium”, in their infinite wisdom Colossus and Guardian decide that an ever-present threat of armageddon will be the best driver of human progress. Pointing American and Russian nukes back at their former masters, Colossus and Guardian offer their superior knowledge guaranteeing humanity’s betterment in exchange for total submission; or, as they put it, “the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death”.

Director: John Badham

Riding a wave of renewed nuclear panic in the Reagan era, WarGames combined the Cold War uncertainty of the 1980s with the decade’s teen hacker paranoia, introducing Matthew Broderick as the high-schooler who gains access to America’s atomic arsenal from his PC and inadvertently almost starts WWIII. It’s a film that’s both tech savvy and techno-sceptic, both thrilled by the adventure undertaken by Broderick’s David and concerned that a kid looking to play an online video game could potentially doom mankind.

Perhaps summing up the then-US government’s cavalier attitude towards the concept of MAD, when David asks the malfunctioning online defence system whether its digital ‘simulation’ of ICBM and nuclear sub movements is actually real or just a game, it responds: “What’s the difference?” Directed by Saturday Night Fever’s John Badham, WarGames wears the light frivolity of popcorn entertainment, but, in the same year as the film’s release, a 19-year-old UCLA student successfully used his home computer to hack the US Defence Department.

Director: Mick Jackson

Eschewing the government and military perspective favoured by other movies, Threads considers what approaching nuclear apocalypse would look like to ordinary men and women. Where the second half of director Mick Jackson and writer Barry Hines’ documentary-style drama shows us the unimaginable, initially it depicts the build-up to Armageddon as relatably mundane: the inhabitants of working-class Sheffield continue about their daily lives despite news reports of an escalating US-Soviet clash over in the Middle East – until the air raid sirens indicate they can ignore the story no longer.

Threads wasn’t the only TV film of the 1980s to imagine a nuclear apocalypse of the everyday. Ten months before Jackson’s film first aired on British television, the end came to rural Kansas in The Day After, an ABC movie of the week that – according to Ronald Reagan’s own memoirs – changed his stance on nuclear war and in part led to the signing of 1987’s Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Director: Steve De Jarnatt

Beginning as romantic comedy, with LA museum curator Harry (Anthony Edwards) falling head over heels for quirky barista Julie (Mare Winningham), Miracle Mile’s jolting transition to doomsday thriller in its first act played to underlying fears during the period that the world could at any second simply end without warning.

Writer-director Steve De Jarnatt only hints at what brings humanity to a state of nuclear war: late for his first date with Julie, Harry answers a ringing payphone outside their agreed meeting place and is informed by a panicked voice that American warheads have fired, with a retaliatory Russian strike set to hit the US in just 70 minutes. The film then becomes a race against time – not for Harry and Julie to save the day, but to make the most of what’s left of their lives before it’s all over.

Director: Tony Scott

Released four years after the collapse of the USSR, Crimson Tide is a typically bombastic Simpson-Bruckheimer production, both about the world coming to terms with the precarious new post-Soviet reality and Hollywood coming to terms with the fact that its go-to bogeyman of several decades was suddenly no longer supposed to be a threat. Tony Scott’s riveting submarine thriller, like the same year’s GoldenEye and Die Hard with a Vengeance, can’t let go of the idea that remnants of the eastern bloc might still be intent on making the west sweat.

Screenwriter Michael Schiffer (with assists from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Towne) posits a scenario where Russian ultra-nationalists take advantage of the region’s instability to seize territory and arms and threaten nuclear war. Under the ocean, where a US nuclear sub is divided over whether to fire missiles at Russian targets after its communications are cut, the survival of the species hinges on which approach to thermonuclear warfare prevails: the reactionary bluster of Gene Hackman’s captain or the caution of Denzel Washington’s discerning second-in-command.

Director: Roger Donaldson

Telling the American side of a story of real-life nuclear impasse, Roger Donaldson’s account of the Cuban missile crisis details the impossible situation John F Kennedy and his chiefs of staff faced over 13 days in the autumn of 1962. A US spy plane discovers nukes stashed in Soviet-allied Cuba, and, as the world enters panic mode, government and military officials gather to try figure out the best way to avoid total war.

It’s a ticking-clock set-up, played out in stifling boardrooms full of suits endlessly talking their way through a scenario no one could realistically prepare for. What David Self’s screenplay and tightly-wound performances from the likes of Bruce Greenwood and Dylan Baker (playing JFK and Robert McNamara, respectively) convey is just how unnervingly delicate the situation was: east and west were only a botched reconnaissance flight or a misunderstood naval order away from disaster.