“You can read about it, and you can hear about it, but actually seeing it is a different story,” she wrote. “Thousands of people vaporized in less than a second, buildings toppling on people faster than they can react . . . If you want to get a millennial’s attention, make a movie about it. There are plenty of dystopian movies today, but far too few about nuclear war.”
I’ve got a stockpile of vintage VHS tapes and DVDs that Cassandra and her classmates could borrow while they wait for Hollywood studios to show them a thoroughly contemporary omnicide. Much of my collection dates from before my own time—to cheap, bleak sci-fi B-movies and Red Scare freakouts such as Invasion USA(1952) and The Day The World Ended(1955). Just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Fail Safe (1964) made sober melodrama out of borderline hysteria, while rival production Dr. Strangelove (1964) went the other way, isolating the demon core of hollow laughter in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction.
Adapting Peter George’s novel Red Alert (1958), Dr. Strangelove director Stanley Kubrick turned his fabled pedantry on nuclear command-and-control protocols, to study them as closely as he was able without top secret clearance. His genius was to find them essentially comedic in premise and construction and to follow their absurd internal logic to an all-destroying punchline—our ultimate weapon blows up in our stupid faces like a joke cigar.
Professionals in the field weren’t laughing. In his memoir The Doomsday Machine: Confessions Of A Nuclear War Planner (2017), Daniel Ellsberg recalls leaving the Pentagon one afternoon in the winter of 1964 to see Dr. Strangelove. A consultant for the RAND Corporation with inside knowledge of strategic thinking, Ellsberg was “dumbstruck by the realism” of certain plot-points. It was, to him, “a documentary.” He titled his memoir after the world-ending device invented by Strangelove himself and which had its real-life counterpart in the USSR’s Perimeter defense system, also known as Dead Hand. The system was designed to set off the whole Soviet missile array, instantly and automatically, if an incoming strike was detected. (Ellsberg and others believe it is still the operative reflex-action of the present day Russian Federation.)
By the jittery late peak of the Cold War—marked by scary military maneuvers at the edge of Europe and crazy talk of Star Wars particle beams that would zap enemy warheads in Earth orbit—frosty spells in superpower relations gave rise to rashes of movies that would often seem uncannily sensitive to prevailing anxiety levels. My own youth was a fertile period for this stuff, and the fall of 1983 saw a peculiar cluster of films, released like a salvo.
