Damn You All to Hell!

How Hollywood taught a generation to fear nuclear + catastrophe

- Tom Nichols

Back in the late 2000s, I was teaching a class on nuclear weapons to undergraduates who had mostly come of age after the fall of the Soviet Union. As I tried to explain what it was like to grow up worrying about a sudden apocalypse, a student raised his hand and said: “What were you so afraid of? I mean, sure, nuclear weapons are bad, but ...” And here he gave up with a puzzled shake of his head, as if to say: What was the big deal?

I paused to think of a better way to explain that the annihilation of the world was a big deal. People who grew up during the Cold War, as I did, internalized this fear as children. We still tell our campfire tales about hiding under school desks at the sound of air-raid sirens. Such things seemed mysterious, and even irrelevant, to my students in the 21st century. And then it occurred to me: They haven't seen the movies.

During the Cold War, popular culture provided Americans with images of (and a vocabulary for) nuclear war. Mushroom clouds, DEFCON alerts, exploding buildings, fallout-shelter signs—these visuals popped up in even the frothiest forms of entertainment, including comic books, James Bond movies, and music videos. The possibility of a nuclear holocaust was always lurking in the background, like the figure of Death hiding among revelers in a Bosch triptych, and we could imagine it because it had been shown to us many times on screens big and small.

Ensuing generations have grown up with their own fears: Terrorism, climate change, and now AI are upending life across the globe, and nuclear war might seem more like a historical curiosity than a concrete threat. But at this moment,