Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, known simply and more commonly as Dr. Strangelove, is a 1964 black comedy film that satirizes the Cold War fears of a nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. The film was directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick and stars Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, and Slim Pickens. The film was made in the United Kingdom. The film is loosely based on Peter George's thriller novel Red Alert (1958).
The War Game is a 1966 British pseudo-documentary film that depicts a nuclear war and its aftermath. Written, directed and produced by Peter Watkins for the BBC, it caused dismay within the BBC and also within government, and was subsequently withdrawn before the provisional screening date of 6 October 1965. The corporation said that "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting. It will, however, be shown to invited audiences..."
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction is a subgenre of science fiction, science fantasy, dystopia or horror in which the Earth's civilization is collapsing or has collapsed. The apocalypse event may be climatic, such as runaway climate change; astronomical, such as an impact event; destructive, such as nuclear holocaust or resource depletion; medical, such as a pandemic, whether natural or human-caused; end time, such as the Last Judgment, Second Coming or Ragnarök; or more imaginative, such as a zombie apocalypse, cybernetic revolt, technological singularity, dysgenics or alien invasion.
On the Beach is an apocalyptic novel published in 1957, written by British author Nevil Shute after he emigrated to Australia. The novel details the experiences of a mixed group of people in Melbourne as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the Northern Hemisphere, following a nuclear war the previous year. As the radiation approaches, each person deals with impending death differently.
A doomsday device is a hypothetical construction — usually a weapon or weapons system — which could destroy all life on a planet, particularly Earth, or destroy the planet itself, bringing "doomsday", a term used for the end of planet Earth. Most hypothetical constructions rely on hydrogen bombs being made arbitrarily large, assuming there are no concerns about delivering them to a target or that they can be "salted" with materials designed to create long-lasting and hazardous fallout.
The Atomic Age, also known as the Atomic Era, is the period of history following the detonation of the first nuclear weapon, The Gadget at the Trinity test in New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, during World War II. Although nuclear chain reactions had been hypothesized in 1933 and the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction had taken place in December 1942, the Trinity test and the ensuing bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II represented the first large-scale use of nuclear technology and ushered in profound changes in sociopolitical thinking and the course of technological development.
The Amazing Colossal Man is a 1957 American black-and-white science fiction film from American International Pictures, produced and directed by Bert I. Gordon, that stars Glenn Langan, Cathy Downs, William Hudson, and Larry Thor. It is an uncredited adaptation of Homer Eon Flint's 1928 short science fiction novel The Nth Man. It was theatrically released by AIP as a double feature with Cat Girl.
The Sum of All Fears is a political thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and released on August 14, 1991. Serving as the sequel to Clear and Present Danger (1989), main character Jack Ryan, who is now the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, tries to stop a crisis concerning the Middle East peace process where Palestinian and former East German terrorists conspire to bring the United States and Soviet Union into nuclear war. It debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. A film adaptation, which is a reboot of the Jack Ryan film series and starring Ben Affleck as the younger iteration of the CIA analyst, was released on May 31, 2002.
Duck and Cover is a 1952 civil defense animated live-action social guidance film that is often popularly mischaracterized as propaganda.
Since their public debut in August 1945, nuclear weapons and their potential effects have been a recurring motif in popular culture, to the extent that the decades of the Cold War are often referred to as the "atomic age".
The Beast of Yucca Flats is a 1961 B-movie horror film written and directed by Coleman Francis. It was produced by Anthony Cardoza, Roland Morin and Jim Oliphant.
The Day the Earth Caught Fire is a British science fiction disaster film starring Edward Judd, Leo McKern and Janet Munro. It was directed by Val Guest and released in 1961, and is one of the classic apocalyptic films of its era. The film opened at the Odeon Marble Arch in London on 23 November 1961.
Fail-Safe is a bestselling American novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. The story was initially serialized in three installments in the Saturday Evening Post, on October 13, 20, and 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
"There Will Come Soft Rains" is a science fiction short story by author Ray Bradbury written as a chronicle about a lone house that stands intact in a California city that has otherwise been obliterated by a nuclear bomb, and then is destroyed in a fire caused by a windstorm. The title is from a 1918 poem of the same name by Sara Teasdale that was published during World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic. First published in 1950 about future catastrophes in two different versions in two separate publications, a one-page short story in Collier's magazine and a chapter of the fix-up novel The Martian Chronicles, the author regarded it as "the one story that represents the essence of Ray Bradbury". Bradbury's foresight in recognizing the potential for the complete self-destruction of humans by nuclear war in the work was recognized by the Pulitzer Prize Board in conjunction with awarding a Special Citation in 2007 that noted, "While time has (mostly) quelled the likelihood of total annihilation, Bradbury was a lone voice among his contemporaries in contemplating the potentialities of such horrors." The author considered the short story as the only one in The Martian Chronicles to be a work of science fiction.
World War III, sometimes abbreviated to WWIII, is a common theme in popular culture. Since the 1940s, countless books, films, and television programmes have used the theme of nuclear weapons and a third global war. The presence of the Soviet Union as an international rival armed with nuclear weapons created a persistent fear in the United States and vice versa. There was a pervasive dread of a nuclear World War III, and popular culture reveals the fears of the public at the time.
This Is Not a Test is a 2008 comedy-drama written and directed by Chris Angel and starring Hill Harper, Robinne Lee, and Tom Arnold. It was filmed in Los Angeles, California. The film was released on DVD in the United States on January 20, 2009.
Dollman vs. Demonic Toys is a 1993 American direct-to-video horror film. It is a continuation of three films released by Full Moon Features: Dollman, Demonic Toys and Bad Channels.
Portrayals of survivalism, and survivalist themes and elements such as survival retreats have been fictionalised in print, film, and electronic media. This genre was especially influenced by the advent of nuclear weapons, and the potential for societal collapse in light of a Cold War nuclear conflagration.
