Question

Pick one of the summaries and tell us what that piece of media revealed about how Americans felt about the Cold War. Do you think the insight into the American mentality you’ve revealed was grounded in reality, or was it influenced by emotions more than fact?
Here are the summaries:
Americans have always utilized pop culture and mass media to explore the events and norms of our times. Sometimes that media reflects our fears; sometimes it makes fun of the events and people portrayed; sometimes it re-evaluates or rediscovers the why behind historic actions. By the time the Cold War ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, pop-culture and American media had produced tons of material tied to Cold War themes. Here are summaries of just a few:

On the Beach

A 1959 American post-apocalyptic science fiction drama film based on Nevil Shute's 1957 novel of the same name depicting the aftermath of a nuclear war. The film is set five years in the future. In early 1964, in the months following World War III, the conflict has devastated the Northern Hemisphere, polluting the atmosphere with nuclear fallout, killing all life there. Air currents are slowly carrying the fallout south; the only areas still habitable are in the far reaches of the Southern Hemisphere. The film follows the crew of an American submarine who arrive in Australia and mingle with the citizens there in the final months before the radiation inexorably and inevitably reaches them. The film hints that the threat of annihilation may have arisen from an accident or misjudgment.

Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

This is a 1964 film that satirizes the Cold War fears of a nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, using dark comedy and humor to make a point about the Cold War. The story concerns an unhinged United States Air Force general who orders a first strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. It follows the President of the United States and his advisors as they try to recall the bombers to prevent a nuclear apocalypse. The film ends with a montage of nuclear explosions set to a popular World War II song, “We’ll Meet Again”

Fail-Safe

Fail-Safe is a bestselling American novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, also made into a film. 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. After putting protocols for nuclear missile launches into the hands of a computerized system, a bug in that system orders American bombers to drop a payload on Moscow. The various protocols in place do not allow for the correction of any mistake, so the mission continues. The President informs the Soviets of the mistake, but mistrust runs so deep that the two sides fail to work well enough together to prevent the bomber from successfully nuking Moscow; in order to prevent the Soviets from launching missiles at the US in retaliation, the President orders a nuclear bomb dropped on New York to “even the scales” so that the two countries can trust each other and not escalate into a full nuclear war.

From Russia With Love

This was the second film in the long-running film series about British secret agent James Bond, based on the novel. Incredibly popular with American audiences (President Kennedy once said it was among his favorite books), it follows a suave secret agent as he goes to Turkey to assist in the defection of a beautiful Soviet consulate clerk, who promises to bring with her a working Soviet code machine. The defection turns out to be a trap the Soviets has concocted to kill Bond and embarrass the West. Regardless, the Soviet clerk falls in love with Bond and betrays the plot to him, and all ends well, with the lady and Bond enjoying a romantic boat ride in Venice as the credits roll.

War Games

This was a 1983 film about a young hacker who unwittingly accesses WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), a United States military supercomputer originally programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war. The hacker gets WOPR to run a nuclear war simulation, believing it to be a computer game. The computer, now tied into the nuclear weapons control system and unable to tell the difference between simulation and reality, attempts to start World War III. The hacker eventually forces the computer to play tic-tac-toe against itself. This results in a long string of draws, forcing the computer to learn the concept of futility and no-win scenarios. WOPR cycles through all the nuclear war scenarios it has devised, finding they, too, all result in stalemates. Having discovered the concept of mutual assured destruction, the computer tells the hacker that it has concluded that nuclear war is "a strange game" in which "the only winning move is not to play."


Thank you so much!

Answer 1

War Games was just playing on AMC this past weekend. I believe that the sentiment expressed by this film, that there are no winners in a full scale nuclear war, is grounded in fact and not emotions. We already have the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to tell us about the devastation possible and the bombs developed later were many times more powerful. Mutual assured destruction was what kept the US and Soviet Union from attacking each other. People had a right to be afraid. We learned that in 1983 the world had a near-miss with nuclear war, when a Russian soldier ignored a false alarm (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov) and did not give orders or launch a counter-strike on the USA. We may never know how many times we were on the brink of global destruction.