World War III in popular culture
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nuclear weapons and a third global war.[1] 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.[2] The theme was also a way of exploring a range of issues beyond nuclear war in the arts.[3] U.S. historian Spencer R. Weart called nuclear weapons a "symbol for the worst of modernity."[1]
During the conventional weapons.[6] 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.[4] 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.[7] The concept of MAD was also the focus of numerous film and television works.[4]
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.[7] 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.[8] The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 made stories of a future global nuclear war hypothetical rather than fictional.[7] 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?"[9] 1900sAs 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.
1930sAmerican cartoonist James Thurber published the short story The Last Flower in November 1939, two months after World War II officially 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. 1940sThe 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. 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.
1950sAmerican fears of an impending apocalyptic World War III with the Pundits named the era "the age of anxiety," after W. H. Auden.[2] 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.[10]
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.[2] In 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. 1960sIn 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."[12] 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 is a 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 The War Game (1965), produced by Peter Watkins, deals with a fictional nuclear attack on Britain. This film won the Oscar for Best Documentary but was withheld from broadcast by the BBC for two decades.[13] In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Bread and Circuses," First Officer Spock estimates the death toll of Earth's Third World War at 36 million. 1970sThe American public's concerns about nuclear weapons and related technology continued to be present in the 1970s. The most talked-about events in the 1970s were the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, the Iran hostage crisis, the energy crisis, and stagflation. In the 1970 film The 1973 oil crisis heightened fears of a peak oil collapse of domestic life. The crisis rationing led to incidents of violence after American truck drivers nationwide chose to strike for two days in December 1973 because they objected to the amount of supplies that the government had rationed for their industry. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, nonstriking truckers were shot at by striking truckers, and in Arkansas, trucks of nonstrikers were attacked with bombs.[14] The peak oil fears led to the iconic Mad Max movie series in 1979. The desert imagery of Road Warrior showing a resource-drained world became an archetypical default of post-apocalypse worlds. The screenplay writer James McCausland drew heavily from his observations of effects of the 1973 oil crisis on Australian motorists:
On television, the British science fiction series Doctor Who, based a 1972 storyline, Day of the Daleks, on the premise of time travelers from the future attempting to trigger a present-day nuclear war between the superpowers.[3] That is incorrect as the actual story is that the Time Travellers were resistance fighters against the Daleks, who occupied Post War Earth. Their history stated that the person organising the Peace Talks had caused the war by exploding a bomb, which killed the participants in the Peace Talks and caused all sides to declare war on each other. However, the Doctor discovered that the Bomb Attack had actually been caused by one of the Resistance fighters attempting to blow up the house in an attempt to kill the person who set up the Conference and the Daleks who suddenly attacked the house. The Doctor got the participants away from the house just as one of the Resistance fighters blew up the house and the Daleks who invaded the house with it, causing the "Earth Invaded by Daleks" timeline to close. In the 1977 US Air Force officers, who threaten to start World War III if the American government does not reveal secret documents that show that the military needlessly prolonged the Vietnam War.[16]
Also in 1977, Damnation Alley (very loosely based on a novella of the same name by Roger Zelazny), depicts a United States Air Force Missile Wing stationed at a base in the Mojave Desert of Southern California. After a nuclear exchange in the beginning of the film renders the United States a radioactive wasteland plagued by massive dust storms and mutated insects, the survivors from the base set out towards a radio signal they receive from Albany, New York in search of other survivors. The narrow, dangerous passage across country they must take, is named "Damnation Alley." 1980sIn the early 1980s, there was a feeling of alarm in Europe and North America that a nuclear World War III was imminent. In 1982, 250,000 people protested against nuclear weapons in nuclear freeze.[18] The public accepted the technological certainty of nuclear war but did not have faith in nuclear defence.[7] Tensions came to a head with the NATO exercise Able Archer 83, which, combined with other events like President Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech and the deployment of the Pershing II missile in Western Europe, as well as the erroneous Soviet shoot-down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 , had the Soviets frantically convinced that the West was about to launch an all-out war against them.
These fears were manifested in the popular culture of the time, with images of nuclear war in books, film, music, and television. In the mid-1980s, artists and musicians drew parallels with their time and the 1950s as two key moments in the Cold War.[9] There was a steady stream of popular music with apocalyptic themes. The 1983 hit "99 Luftballons" by Nena tells the story of a young woman who accidentally triggers a nuclear holocaust by releasing balloons. The music video for "Sleeping with the Enemy" had images of the Red Army parading in Red Square, American high school marching bands, and a mushroom cloud. The 1984 hit "Two Tribes" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood had actors resembling Konstantin Chernenko and Ronald Reagan fighting each other amidst a group of cheering people. At the end of their fight, the Earth explodes.[17] Sting's 1986 song "Russians" highlighted links between Nikita Khrushchev's threats to bury the US and Reagan's promise to protect US citizens.[9] Many punk, hardcore and crossover thrash bands of the era, such as The Varukers and Discharge, had lyrics concerning nuclear war, the end of mankind and the destruction of the Earth in much of their early material. Films and television programs made in the 1980s had different visions of what World War III would be like.[9] Red Dawn (1984) portrayed a near future in which a communist revolution occurs in Mexico, the United States and Britain become strategically isolated from continental Europe, and the Soviet Union is threatened with famine after the failure of the wheat harvest in Ukraine. World War III subsequently begins unexpectedly, with a surprise Soviet and Cuban invasion of the United States, with large portions of the country falling under Soviet occupation. The central United States and China are obliterated with nuclear weapons and Europe remains neutral. A small band of teenagers fight the occupation forces in Colorado using guerrilla tactics, and are ultimately killed by the Spetsnatz. According to the film's epilogue, the United States repulses Soviet forces and wins the war.[4] In the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy, James Bond tries to prevent World War III from being started by a renegade Soviet general.[17] WarGames (1983) had a teenage gamer accidentally hacking the US nuclear defense network and thinking that he had hacked a computer game company, which reveals a potentially-catastrophic flaw in the newly automated system. Spies Like Us depicts US agents in the Soviet Union accidentally launching a missile at the US, which leads one of them to say, "I think we just started World War III." In the early 1980s, there were a number of films made for television that had World War III as a theme. PBS' Testament (1983), and the BBC's Threads (1984) show a nuclear World War III, against the Soviet Union, which sends its troops marching across Western Europe. Those films inspired many to join the anti-nuclear movement.[7] Threads is notable for its graphically disturbing and realistic depictions of post-nuclear survival and depicts a nuclear strike on Sheffield, the effects of a nuclear winter in the United Kingdom and the complete collapse of human civilization caused by the war.[citation needed ]
The Day After was shown on ABC on November 20, 1983, while Soviet-US relations were at their worst, just weeks after the NATO-led Able Archer 83 exercises and less than three months after Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down by Soviet jet interceptors. The film depicts Lawrence, Kansas, after a nuclear war with the Soviets. ABC warned its audience about the graphic nature of the film. The Day After became a political event in itself and was shown in over 40 countries.[17] The shocking and disturbing content discouraged advertisers, but the film had the largest audience for a made-for-TV movie,[19] a record that still stands as of 2008,[citation needed] and influenced the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty negotiations in 1986.[19] The which?] about the destruction of the world [when?] showed the possibility of the world's rebirth following global destruction.[3]
In the 1980s, the nuclear weapons. Soon after the Cold War ended, techno-thriller novels changed from stories about fighting the Soviet Union to narratives about fighting terrorists.[7]
radiation sickness after a nuclear explosion and reflects Briggs's participation in the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.[21] Briggs is best known as a writer and illustrator of children's literature, but the novel was written for an older audience[20] and is his bleakest work though the story includes humour. The novel's message greatly affected young adult readers. Briggs rewrote the novel for radio, stage,[21] and an animated film that was released in 1986.[22]
American superhero comics addressed the issue of World War III with the implications of super-powered beings as metaphors for nuclear weapons or using it as character motivation. Marvel Comics gathered many of their Russian super-hero and villain characters into a new group, called "The Soviet Super-Soldiers" which answered directly to the Soviet Government. World War III is mentioned several times in the animated sitcom The Simpsons, particularly in future-set episodes. Other comics used a Third World War as part of their plots: both Britain's Nelvana's first film Rock & Rule follows Earth after a World War III in which a new race of humans is born from domestic animals like dogs, cats, and rodents. 1990sThe Cold War ended without the destructive final global war that had often been envisioned in popular culture,[17] and the public's fears of a World War III were allayed. On the other hand, the previously classified Stanislav Petrov incident of 1983 seemed to imply that the risk of accidental nuclear war because of a possible technical malfunction was greater than had previously been anticipated. The theme of nuclear Armageddon launched by military artificial intelligence computer systems without human decision was explored in the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day. In the early 1990s and particularly during the Gulf War, tabloid papers and other press discussed whether World War III would be linked to prophecies of Nostradamus concerning a third great war.[26] A World War III crisis was also featured in the 1992 Canadian movie Buried on Sunday in which a separatist island in Nova Scotia threatens to use nuclear missiles from a Russian submarine to strike the US and Canada. Movies about nuclear weapons that saved humanity were popular, such as New York Times that "the post–Cold War generation knows less about nuclear danger than any generation."[7]
Wang Lixiong's 1991 novel Yellow Peril depicts a civil war in China that becomes a nuclear exchange and soon engulfs the world. The novel was banned by the Chinese Communist Party but remained popular.[citation needed] World War III is referenced in the 1996 film Since the Cold War ended, some stories have presented the conflict as alternate history. The Fallout series of video games, which began in 1997, took place in a world still gripped by Cold War hysteria late into the 21st century. That and other factors led to a World War III between the global powers (notably the US and China), and the series involves exploring what is left of the US after the conflict. Fallout is considered a spiritual successor to 1988's Wasteland, which involved a similar premise and also mentions World War III. In the 1998 "Chinese" methods or simply never occur. The actions of the paranoid ruthless new General Secretary lead first to a brief conventional war (the filmmakers accessed previously classified war plans and consulted numerous high-ranking military officials on both sides[27]). Just when the conflict seems to have ended, a Soviet radar malfunction, while US forces are on full SIOP alert, which results in a civilization-killing nuclear exchange ("There is no further historical record of what happens next"). After the "ending," just as the annihilation begins, the film rewinds to Gorbachev in East Berlin, and actually concludes with a montage of celebrations in Berlin as the Berlin Wall is freely crossed, danced upon, and dismantled and the country is reunited ("History... took a different path").
2000sAfter the September 11, 2001 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, a scenario of World War III beginning as a result of a nuclear or other catastrophic terrorist attack became prominent. Terrorism in the form of nuclear, chemical, or biological attacks now occupy the place in popular culture once held by the vision of a nuclear World War III between world powers.[7]
Later in the decade, World War III had also become the topic of several popular video games, reflecting the trend towards increased public consciousness of the possibility of a future global war. In 2008, games such as In 2000, a made-for-TV remake of Fail Safe was produced that remained set in the 1960s time period depicted in the novel. In 2002, the novel Metro 2033, written by Dmitry Glukhovsky, was released, which revolved around the survivors of a post-nuclear apocalyptic world within the Moscow subway system. It is never specified how the nuclear war begins, but through a combination of overwhelming biological and nuclear strikes occurred around the world, creating supernatural anomalies and new, heavily mutated animal species. Humanity, at least in urban areas, was forced underground into the Moscow subway system and eventually developed rudimentary civilization there in settlements based around the stations. The primary story centers around the character of Artyom, a Stalker from one of the fringe stations within the Moscow, traveling to find help for his home, which is under attack by very advanced, very intelligent mutants. This novel was eventually expanded into a media franchise encompassing multiple books and three video games, the first of which is an adaptation of the novel's events, the second, Metro: Last Light, which sees Artyom struggling to prevent the Moscow network from annihilating itself in a factional war, and the third, Metro Exodus, which revolves around Artyom and a group of fellow stalkers leaving Moscow and traveling through Russia by train in search of a new place to live. 2010s
World War III and its predicted aftermath continued to be portrayed in popular media around the world such as in recent video games APOX (2011), Homefront (2011), and the Metro franchise – Metro 2033 (2010), Metro: Last Light (2013), Metro Exodus (2019).
World War III scenarios have also been seen in certain TV shows. US Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, the fictional USS Nathan James, must try to find a cure, stop the virus, and save humanity while it fights many nations in the "Immune Wars", including Russia and China. Occupied is a Norwegian TV series that depicts a fictional future in which Russia, with support from the European Union, occupies Norway to restore its oil and gas production. SEAL Team has an episode in which the Navy SEALs must avert war with Russia and China after trying to extract a Russian defector inside Chinese borders.
Alien invasions have become a popular topic as a conflict like World War III, with the alien invaders portrayed similarly to human military invaders, as seen in the films Skyline (2010), Battle: Los Angeles (2011), Pacific Rim (2013) and the TV series Falling Skies (2010). The science fiction novel Sing Goddess The Wrath of the Fonz; Smokepit Fairytales Part II by Tripp Ainsworth centers around the Iliad in eastern Europe during a fictional third world war. 2020sShortly after the airstrike in which US forces 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.[29] The prevention of World War III
is the premise of the film better source needed ]
The 2020 novel Rogue Flag deals with the premise of a micronation starting a war between NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
[30]
In the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Captain Pike addresses a species which is like ours and nearing its own destruction in war. He shows them a video of a World War III on Earth as an example of what to avoid. See alsoReferences
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