Narrator / Historian (2:35)
As I write this, in the hot summer of 2025, there has not yet been a nuclear war. We've had nuclear attacks and Nuclear scares, nuclear tests and nuclear threats, and nuclear accidents, although never the big one. But I believe it will happen one day. Because since the summer of 1945, when the thing was born out in the sands of the desert, we have got by on luck. Propped up by nuclear deterrence, certainly, but we've mainly coasted on flimsy, wobbling, spectacularly audacious luck. But it will happen one day. Until that moment, we think about how it will be. We agonize over it, we dread it. And musicians, directors, authors and actors have obsessed over the thing too, and used it to produce nuclear stained popular culture, some of which has been magnificent and some of which has changed history. Throughout the Cold War, nuclear pop culture has managed to get to number one in the charts, made Ronald Reagan depressed, got itself banned by the BBC, won an Oscar, was debated in Parliament, left a country sleepless, provoked talk of mass suicide has been set back in the swinging 60s or 2000 years hence, up in the frozen north of Canada or down on the beaches of Australia. Made in grim black and white film, or as a softly hued cartoon. Some of it has been deadly serious and some just plain silly. But it all tells a strange story of how it is to live under the ludicrous threats of nuclear war. And it is indeed ludicrous. We hate the nuclear bomb. We fear makes us scared and sick, but we can't get by without it. In 1987, Martinimus said, after reading the best selling book about nuclear weapons, the Fate of the Earth. At last I knew what was making me feel so sad. Sick. But nuclear weapons are a sickness for which there is no cure. Because if you eradicate the disease by banning the bomb, then you're left defenseless against its inevitable resurgence. And if one country finds a vaccine, but only distributes it to its own population, then that would terrify and enrage the others who may feel that possession of that same disease is their only protection. It may seem that the only defense against the sickness is to acquire more vials of that hideous potion. The only remedy is the sickness itself. Yes, it's ludicrous, but we are stuck with them, even though they threaten everything and everyone. So how can we respond to such a ludicrous situation? If politics and logic and reason won't touch the sides and activists just chant the same phrases and march the same routes, then all we can do is turn to fiction and song and cinema and express our massive fear and tiny hopes in the land of the imagination, where there is nothing that cannot be said. When the bomb was born, in July 1945, popular culture responded with pride and glee. This was the ultimate in American exceptionalism, even though the thing had been created by a rainbow of international scientists, including Brits, Hungarians, Germans, Austrians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Italians and Russians. And the word atomic was pinned to anything that was new, gleaming and sexy in the post war era. Why not ogle misatomic blasts? Who was crowned at the beauty pageant at El Rancho Las Vegas in 1952, then enjoy an atomic cocktail on the roof terrace of the Fremont whilst watching the mushroom clouds bloom on the horizon? The proximity of America's nuclear tests at the Nevada Test site, just 65 miles north of Vegas, was a source of pride for the city and it was folded into the dodgy allure of the upstart desert town. But practicality was also involved. Many Vegas casinos displayed signs saying that if any rumble from a nearby nuclear test caused the dice to jump free from the table, then the house's decision would be final. If you're tired of the tables and wanted to watch the tests, a fine view could be had from the tall windows of the Desert Inn's famous Sky Room. Nuclear tests often occurred at dawn, so crowds would pack the Sky Room and drink and carouse all night long, calling for more wine and song before greasing the mushroom cloud. As morning broke, one reveller recalls the unnatural atmosphere as they waited for the flash. They sang as if they were on the Queen Mary and it was going down. LOUD DESPERATE VOICES Nuclear Vegas was glamour for some, but for others it was a disease, a nightmare, a paradise for the misbegotten. Pop songs in the early Cold War also celebrated the supposed dazzle and sexiness of the atomic the secret of all that fabulous, constrained power which America and others had cracked and which had won the war and would now secure the peace and would bring cheap energy and cures for disease, whilst reminding everyone who was top dog in the new post war world. But then the Russians ruined the party by exploding their own atomic bomb. In 1948, America no longer had a nuclear monopoly and so felt obliged to take the next step up the nuclear ladder by developing the so called super the hydrogen bomb. A bomb denounced by many nuclear scientists, including the great Oppenheimer, as a weapon of genocide. This dimmed the sparkly atomic enthusiasm and popular culture was suddenly no longer keen to associate the bomb with sex, cocktails and bikinis. Instead, a slew of films was released which expressed our rising fears about the bomb and our ascent up this shaky nuclear ladder, especially when we didn't know what lay at the top. Had science gone too far? Did our puny boffins know what they were dealing with? Had something awful hatched in the desert in July 1945 and we, too giddy with excitement and victory, had failed to control it? Had we created a monster? Japanese cinema took that literally with the creation of Godzilla. A creature rose from the depths of the ocean by nuclear explosions. Cinematic monsters also stalked the land in New Mexico. In them, 1954, where the radiation from nuclear tests transforms ordinary ants into monsters, tentative and frightened questions were being asked about the bomb, and popular culture offered possible answers that politicians, ensnared in the politics of the Cold War, were unable to give. Then came Castle Bravo. This was a 1954American nuclear test of that dreadful new hydrogen bomb out in the Pacific. The boffins got their calculations wrong, and the bomb was three times more powerful than predicted, throwing lethal fallout well beyond the exclusion zone. Radioactive ash soon began to patter down onto the deck of the Japanese lucky dragon fishing boat, falling like crunchy snow. The fishermen began to sicken, so they pulled in their nets and headed for shore. Several men fell ill and one died. The fact that the crew were Japanese added a particular pain, and it became an international incident, alerting the public to the horror of nuclear fallout. This new bomb, the hydrogen bomb, was not simply a bigger version of the original atomic bomb. This one came with the threat of fallout, an invisible killer which could float and drift on the wind and find you even as you sail your tiny boat in the midst of a vast ocean, and it can follow you home like a spirit which has possessed you and kill you. The fear of this new and invisible killer appeared in the 1957 novel on the Beach, later made into a 1959 film with Gregory Peck and Eva Gardner, where the population of Australia wait helplessly for the slow, drifting arrival of fallout from an apocalyptic nuclear war in the Northern hemisphere. One by one, the innocent countries of the south are snuffed out as a lethal fallout smothers the globe. Coming for Australia at last, fallout made all those Vegas atomic cocktails and beauty pageants seem a bit silly now, especially as scientists in Missouri began collecting American children's baby teeth so they could track how much fallout was making its way into our bodies. Nothing felt safe anymore. Even children's bones and teeth were being affected even as they grew up seemingly safe and sturdy in America, with two oceans to protect them from an enemy. And if you couldn't keep your kids safe, did safety exist? As the Soviet Union advanced in the nuclear arms race, so Americans were consumed by the Red Scare, and it provoked films and fiction about the fear of communist invasion and infiltration. The launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite in 1957 shook American confidence, proving that the enemy was surging ahead in the space race. But it also proved that they had the ability to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles. Suddenly, those vast oceans were no protection against attack or invasion. The enemy could get you. He could already be here. Can you be sure that your neighbour is who he claims to be? Brilliant episodes of the Twilight Zone, like the Monsters are due on Maple street capture this paranoia which sees residents of a leafy American street descend into violence and hysteria when they suspect one of their number might be an alien. The nuclear arms race spurred both sides on, and advancing weapons technology now meant the nuclear attack could reach you anywhere on the planet, whether via blast, fire or fallout. And with that knowledge came fears that the technology might run out of control. Puny man had created the means to extinguish life on Earth. Now could puny man control it? As nuclear proliferation spread, so did the rate of accidents and near misses. A fire in a nuclear missile silo in Arkansas in 1965 killed 53 men. In 1980, an explosion deep in a nuclear missile silo again in Arkansas killed one man, ejected the warhead and destroyed the silo. In other incidents, the Americans accidentally dropped nuclear bombs on Spain, Greenland and North Carolina. And through simple luck, there were no resulting nuclear explosions, although there was widespread radioactive contamination. And in the Spanish incident, one hydrogen bomb remained stubbornly missing and was only recovered three months later, deep in the Mediterranean. There have been so many accidents and errors with nuclear weaponry that the Pentagon developed its own terminology for these incidents bent spear, broken arrow and worst of all, empty quiver. Behind the Iron Curtain, an officer with the Soviet Air Defence Forces called Stanislav Petrov, later to be nicknamed the man who Saved the World, avoided plunging the world into nuclear war. In 1983, when the early warning system kept telling him most insistently that the Americans had launched ICBMs at the Soviet Union. Had he followed protocol and alerted his superiors to this incoming attack, the Soviets may well have launched theirs in imagined retaliation and all hell broken loose. Things can fall apart. The centre might not hold again. Luck saved us, the luck of having the Cam Petrov on duty that night. So the sheen had worn off and the bomb was no longer a fabulous invention representing victory, science and progress. It was now a device threatening sickness, death and maybe even the end of all things. And so, rather than toasting and boasting and Glorying in it. We sought to hide from it. Taking shelter is one of the most elemental and basic things man can do. We did it back in the early days, scratching around in caves. And now here we were doing the same in the 20th century. Nothing changes. Hiding from the saber toothed tiger, sheltering from the cold, ducking out of the storm. A zillion years have passed and yet we still have the need to curl up and shelter and inside the earth. But that's no way to live. When the shelter craze took hold in America in the early 60s, with JFK himself urging people to build a fallout shelter in their basement or under the garden, many people declared this was cowardly and un American. It was regressive, taking us back to the Stone Age. Even before the bomb's creation, the prophetic H.G. wells, who foresaw versions of aerial bombardment and atomic warfare in his novels the War in the air, 1908 and the shape of Things to Come, had shown in the time machine, 1895, what might happen to a civilization who retreat below the earth. His novel shows the future human race has split into two versions. The Eloi, graceful children of the upper world who toss flowers and clap the little hands. And then the Morlocks quote the bleached, obscene nocturnal things who live underground, one strand of humanity useless, the other brutish. Were these the alternatives facing humanity should nuclear war come? Both were dreadful. Popular culture had plenty to say on what might become of us and what the incessant need for shelter from the nuclear storm might do to us. The Twilight Zone episode the Shelter showed a citizen who was orderly and responsible. He followed government advice and built a fallout shelter for his family according to official instruction. But when the siren wails, his terrified and unprepared neighbors hammer on the door, begging for entry. When he refuses, they turn into a mob, arming themselves so they might batter their way in. We see similar in Ladybug, Ladybug 1963, a film based on a true story about an elementary school in California who received false alarm of an incoming nuclear attack. They activated the evacuation protocol, which was to send the frightened children running for home in the hope that they'd make it back to mother before the bomb dropped. The film is a kind of Cold War Lord of the Flies, showing the kids turning brutal in their fight for the perceived safety of home and shelter space, and excluding those they dislike. And in the 80s, the two mammoth nuclear films of the decade Threads and the Day After. Both show responsible homeowners who have carefully followed civil defence advice and prepared shelters being either shot or beaten to death by those who have none. Well, the novel Brother in the Land shows shelter owners, nicknamed badgers by the resentful survivors above ground being smoked out of their shelters and murdered for their small supply of tins and batteries. Following the rules gets you nowhere in a nuclear war, popular culture warned. But for the obedient and the dutiful who had studied the plans, consulted the booklets, and built their own little fallout shelter beneath the house, a nasty shock was coming.
