Who’s afraid of the big, bad nuke?

Nuclear survivors from the 1984 BBC drama Threads

THE 14th century Castilian aristocrat credited with coining the term “cold war” in fact minted a subtly different concept: guera tivia, or “tepid war”. It is a distinction we should value, for if its contrast is Saracens and Crusaders clashing on the field of battle, the opposite of cold war is 10,000 explosions each 10 times hotter than the sun. Just one third of a nuclear bomb’s total energy is heat, but it is still enough to yield a temperature of 100 million ºC.  Next to that all other human conflict is cold.

J Robert Oppenheimer recognised this at the Trinity Test, the world’s first atomic detonation. The Hindu Bhagavad Gita passage with which he has since become associated (“I am become death, the shatterer of worlds”) came later. From his observation bunker in New Mexico he chose another: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one.”

A mere 25 days separate the point at which mankind knew itself to be master and possessor of this God-like power and when it stopped using it in anger, yet that has not stopped the nuke etching itself deep in our popular consciousness. This forbearance is held to be the product of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. Yet, as the Emperor Hirohito noted when surrendering to the Allies after the second – and thus far final – act of nuclear warfare, the continued use of this technology risked not only the destruction of the Japanese nation, but the extinction of all human civilization.

That realisation may have stopped further nuclear war, but it was not enough to prevent a nuclear arms race. Soon came the hydrogen, or thermonuclear “super bomb”, a device so powerful even its creators could conceive of no military utility for it. The first test spread radioactive particles as far afield as Australia and the US mainland. The Soviets’ response, the “Tsar Bomba” was capable of yielding enough energy to power a Welsh home for a million years. Even limited to half that it remains the most powerful explosion ever caused by man. And there is almost no conflict situation in which it could have been used without irradiating those deploying it.

The 1961 movie The Day The Earth Caught Fire imagined a testing disaster

While people were thrilled by the size and sexiness of The Bomb (the skimpy new bathing suit in search of a name found one when nuclear tests began at Bikini Atoll) novelists and film-makers kindled apocalyptic visions. The 1961 film The Day The Earth Caught Fire reflected the anxiety people felt about mere testing of nukes. It told of simultaneous US and Soviet nuclear tests knocking Earth out of its orbit. But even as meteorological catastrophe begins to envelope Britain, the solution is revealed as further (joint US-Soviet) explosions to push the planet back into kilter. This apparent faith in nuclear technology to solve the problems of nuclear technology is tempered by an ending in which two alternate newspaper headlines are readied, reporting both doom and salvation.

The prospect of Armageddon – one proper noun that could now be plausibly used by the secular as well as the religious – tapped an even darker vein. This included the 1951 movie Five - a reference to the total remaining human population following a nuclear war. Another trope was the eradication of knowledge itself. The 1960 novel A Canticle for Liebowitz depicted a monastic order hundreds of years after a nuclear war struggling to preserve the few mundane and baffling fragments from before the “flame deluge”. In this world self-proclaimed “simpleton” survivors repudiate and destroy all learning. This kind of death is echoed in Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road in which the protagonist reflects on a world “shrinking down around a core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true.”

To inferno and self-barbarity was added the terrifying pestilential twist of radiation poisoning. The prospect of surviving the blast only to succumb to invisible airborne poisoning days, weeks, months and (though nobody knew it at first) years later seemed too much to bear. But the implications of radioactivity were not immediately clear, especially to a world where this branch of science promised many potential benefits. While movies such as 1954′s Them! imagined the unleashing of a wave of mutant monsters others depicted spectacular human transformations (The Amazing Colossal Man and The Incredible Shrinking Man, both 1957). On The Beach (1957 novel, 1959 movie) meanwhile enunciated the full dread of an unstoppable killer, slowly spreading across the globe, affording no hiding place.

The limited Soviet-US detente from the Cuban missile crisis onward gave rise to a different type of terror – that of accidental or capricious holocaust. Fail-Safe (1963 novel, 1964 movie) imagined a technical failure leading to the obliteration of Moscow and New York. Dr Strangelove (1964) viciously parodied the leading figures in the US nuclear weapons programme, mocking their eagerness to embrace war and their incompetence in averting it.

2000AD's Apocalypse War series depicted a future east-west nuclear conflict

By the early 1980s and the election of Ronald Reagan a new “second cold war” was under way, and with it a different type of fiction. In it was played out the anxiety that the West’s commitment to liberal democracy could make it soft and therefore vulnerable. In Octopussy (movie, 1983) James Bond foils a Soviet plan to fake an accidental nuclear explosion in West Germany. The aim is to cause a public wave of anger strong enough to trigger the West’s unilateral disarmament, in turn clearing the way for a conventional Warsaw Pact invasion. Other writers went further, asserting that only another dictatorship would be strong enough to defeat the Soviets. 2000AD’s fascistic anti-hero Judge Dredd responds to his city’s partial nuclear devastation at the hands of the future Soviets by calmly turning his enemy’s outstanding arsenal upon it, killing 500 million civilians in the process. The equanimity with which Dredd deals out this annihilation remains a rare glorification of nuclear war in popular fiction.

With increased tension went heightened anxiety. The BBC’s 1984 production Threads still stands as 110 of the bleakest minutes ever broadcast on British television. Centering on the lives of one Sheffield family ripped apart by full-scale nuclear war, it depicts some family members dying without dignity or hope in their pathetic shelters, while others members simply vanish from the screen without account. Threads takes the viewer to a full 15 years after the holocaust, at which point humanity has sunk to medieval levels of welfare and cohesion, scarcely able to communicate with one another. Like When The Wind Blows (graphic novel 1982, movie 1986) which packs the sucker punch of Raymond Briggs’ cuddly cartoon characters being subjected in detail to radiation poisoning, Threads carries the clear message that being vapourised is far preferable to surviving. War Games (movie, 1983) meanwhile revisited fears of accidental annihilation but, fittingly, imagined only a full-scale nuclear exchange as the consequence.

As the cold war ended, nuclear fiction again mutated. The 1991 novel The Sum Of All Fears surfaced what would become a recurring motif of nuclear technology falling into (mainly Jihadist) hands unbound by the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, but capable of only a limited terror attack. In depicting a mis-fire (or “fizzle”) that nonetheless irradiates thousands, the book also introduces the concept of the “dirty” bomb, child of the deeply controversial neutron device.

24 portrayed a nuclear explosion in 2007

This scenario and others like it (Spooks: Code 9, TV, 2008) while scary, were a great deal less nightmarish than oblivion. Moreover, the longer the world goes without a terrorist nuclear incursion, the less threatening the technology seems to be. The TV programme 24 provides a useful guide to the gradual detoxification of this most toxic thing. In the second series (2003) the imperative is to prevent detonation of a hidden bomb. By the fourth season the concluding action surrounds attempts to disarm an incoming ICBM. In both cases, the effects of an explosion are clearly unthinkable, yet by series six (2007) a suitcase bomb goes off in a suburb of Los Angeles, killing many thousands. Instead of a denouement, or even a centrepiece of the action, the blast features early and is soon forgotten.

Nuclear explosions have gradually become  less consequential, as if they are little more than conventional blasts. In True Lies (movie, 1994) and Broken Arrow (movie, 1996) disaster is averted not by deactivation, but by moving the detonations a few miles offshore or underground. Nukes have become ineffective: in the 1996 movie Independence Day, they literally bounce off the shields of alien invaders. They have become survivable; in 2008 Indiana Jones managed to walk away from a direct hit from a test bomb by hiding in a fridge while all else was rendered into plasma.  Nukes can even now be good. In the 1998 movie Armageddon one is used to save rather than doom the world, while in Lost (TV, 2009) one is set off to realign a temporal crisis. Perhaps more than anything, however, nukes have simply become less scary than other dystopias. In 1954 the Japanese movie Godzilla depicted an metaphorical America incinerating Tokyo with radioactive fire. 50 years later (Godzilla: Final Wars, movie, 2004) it takes the monster’s resurrection to avert the capital city’s destruction by asteroid. Environmental catastrophe now trumps nuclear devastation in our nightmares.

Yet if the threat has receded, it has not passed. Nuclear terrorism remains a possibility. The world’s estimated 8,000 nuclear missiles remain armed and ready. North Korea has only become a member of nuclear club in the last three years. And other, even less suitable, entrants await. The threat of the Taliban laying hands on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is routinely mooted as a reason for our continued involvement in the region. Negotiations to assume control of Iran’s uranium stocks are said to have made progress. We should hope so. The nightmare of a 300 megaton obliteration of Britain may have passed, but the concept of a nuclear theocracy only a short distance from Europe’s borders should be more than enough to wake us in a cold sweat.