How movies help elucidate US nuclear history
... I soon realized that nuclear-age movies were not mere visual window-dressing. They influenced how Americans thought about nuclear issues, and they help one map the larger cultural and political trajectory of the nation’s nuclear history. MGM’s The Beginning or the End (1947), made with the Truman administration’s blessing, introduced egregious factual distortions to justify the atomic bombing of Japan.4 The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), released as the early postwar movement for the international control of atomic energy gave way to cold-war imperatives, can be read as both an idealistic call for international control and a coercive insistence on America’s global hegemony.
Subsequent films both reflected and intensified successive waves of nuclear awareness and activism. The years from the mid-1950s through 1963 (when the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed) saw a surge of activism triggered not only by nuclear-war fears but also by the deadly radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests. As my generation well remembers, anxieties spiked during the 1961 Berlin crisis, when President Kennedy warned us that nuclear war could be imminent and urged everyone to build fallout shelters. Then came the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear catastrophe.5 Meanwhile, in On Thermonuclear War (1960) and Thinking about the Unthinkable (1962), strategist Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation coolly discussed America’s capacity to survive an all-out thermonuclear war and explored the deterrent value of an automated nuclear-retaliation system, the so-called doomsday machine, operating beyond human control.
Unsurprisingly, filmmakers of this era addressed the nuclear danger. Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras involving an affair between a Hiroshima architect and a French actress who had come to the city to make an antiwar film, juxtaposed documentary film clips of the devastated city of 1945 with the actress’s recollections of a wartime romance with a German soldier. As the images of destruction give way to scenes of bustling postwar Hiroshima, so the actress’s wartime memories fade. Though the theme is forgetfulness, the atomic-bomb scenes conveyed their own message to edgy audiences of 1959.