World War III in popular culture
[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?
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.
[10] Both books were inspired by work done by Frederick Soddy in 1903, who was researching radiation and the possibility of a radioactive weapons,[10] foretelling ideas that would later become prominent concepts utilized in the Cold War.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[16] 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.
Marvels Tales of Suspense #8, written in 1960, introduced a story in which an enemy known as "The Reds" inadvertently created a large, mutated creature resembling an octopus due to an incident involving testing nuclear weapons.
[11] Characters such as these were highly influenced by shifting attitudes surrounding radiation and radioactive exposure prompted by fears created by the Cold War[11] during a time where much of the general public did not understand its effects.
The screenplay writer James McCausland drew heavily from his observations of effects of the 1973 oil crisis on Australian motorists: Yet there were further signs of the desperate measures individuals would take to ensure mobility.
Long queues formed at the stations with petrol – and anyone who tried to sneak ahead in the queue met raw violence ... George and I wrote the [Mad Max] script based on the thesis that people would do almost anything to keep vehicles moving and the assumption that nations would not consider the huge costs of providing infrastructure for alternative energy until it was too late.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.
[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.
[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.
ABC's The Day After (1983), 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.
[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.
[21] The shocking and disturbing content discouraged advertisers, but the film had the largest audience for a made-for-TV movie,[23] a record that still stands as of 2008,[citation needed] and influenced the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty negotiations in 1986.
[26] 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.
Uncanny X-Men #150 featured the villain Magneto justifying a takeover bid by stating that if he did not take over the world then and there, that mutantkind would be destroyed along with mankind in the event of a nuclear war.
DC Comics' Batman: The Dark Knight Returns ends with World War III erupting over the issue of a military arms race over a small Latin American country, with the Soviet Union launching a specially designed intercontinental ballistic missile at the island.
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.
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.
[30] 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.
In the 1998 ZDF/TLC mockumentary Der Dritte Weltkrieg, consisting largely of real-life footage of military and political figures presented out of context, Mikhail Gorbachev is ousted by an anti-reformist coup in October 1989 during his visit to East Germany, with the Soviet Union still in effective control of Eastern Europe, and hardline rulers still firmly entrenched in nearly all of the satellite states since the events of that autumn are either brutally repressed by "Chinese" methods or simply never occur.
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").
Battlefield 3 (2011), on the other hand, follows The Sum of All Fears's example, portraying Iranian terrorists stealing portable atomic weapons from Russia for the purpose of provoking a war between them and the United States.
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.
The Last Ship depicts a global pandemic wiping out over 80% of the world's population and the crew (consisting of 218 people) of a lone unaffected 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.
