World War III in popular culture

See also: Nuclear holocaust in popular culture and List of nuclear holocaust fiction
A 1952 comic book cover, with stories speculating on events that could happen in 1960.

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.[1] The presence of the Soviet Union as an international rival armed with nuclear weapons created persistent fears in the United States and vice versa of a nuclear World War III, and popular culture at the time reflected those fears.[2] The theme was also a way of exploring a range of issues beyond nuclear war in the arts.[3] U.S. historian Spencer R. Weart called nuclear weapons a "symbol for the worst of modernity."[1]

During the Cold War, concepts such as mutually assured destruction (MAD) led lawmakers and government officials in both the United States and the Soviet Union to avoid entering a nuclear war.[4] Various scientists and authors, such as Carl Sagan, predicted massive, possibly life-ending destruction of the Earth as the result of such a conflict.[5] Strategic analysts assert that nuclear weapons prevented the United States and the Soviet Union from fighting World War III with conventional weapons.[6] Nevertheless, the possibility of such a war became the basis for speculative fiction, and its simulation in books, films and video games became a way to explore the issues of a war that has thus far not occurred in reality.[4] The only places that a global nuclear war has ever been fought are in expert scenarios, theoretical models, war games, and the art, film, and literature of the nuclear age.[7] The concept of MAD was also the focus of numerous film and television works.[4]

Prescient stories about nuclear war were written before the invention of the atomic bomb. The most notable of them was The World Set Free, written by H. G. Wells in 1914. During World War II, several nuclear war stories were published in science fiction magazines such as Astounding.[7] In Robert A. Heinlein's story "Solution Unsatisfactory," the US develops radioactive dust as the ultimate weapon of war and uses it to destroy Berlin in 1945 and end the war against Germany. The Soviet Union then develops the same weapon independently, and war between it and the US follows.[8]

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 made stories of a future global nuclear war hypothetical rather than fictional.[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?"[9]

  1. ^ a b Biggs, Lindy and Hansen, James (editors), 2004, Readings in Technology and Civilisation, ISBN 0-7593-3869-8.
  2. ^ Worland, Rick, 2006, The Horror Film: An Introduction, Blackwell Publishing, ISBN 1-4051-3902-1.
  3. ^ Franklin, Jerome, 2002, Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film, Routledge, ISBN 0-415-93660-8.
  4. ^ a b c Lipschutz, Ronnie D., 2001, Cold War Fantasies: Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy, Rowman & Littlefield, ISBN 0-7425-1052-2.
  5. ^ Sagan, Carl (1985). Cosmos (1st Ballantine books ed.). New York, NY: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-33135-4. OCLC 12814276.
  6. ^ Angelo, Joseph A., 2004, Nuclear Technology, Greenwood Press, ISBN 1-57356-336-6.
  7. ^ a b c Martin, Andrew, and Petro, Patrice, 2006, Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the "War on Terror" Rutgers University Press, ISBN 0-8135-3830-0.
  8. ^ William H. Patterson, Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, volume 1, Tor Books, 2011 ch. 20-21; see also the description of Heinlein correspondence here
  9. ^ Halliwell, Martin, 2007, American Culture in the 1950s, Edinburgh University Press, ISBN 0-7486-1885-6.