World War III In Popular Culture

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.Biggs, Lindy and Hansen, James (editors), 2004, ''Readings in Technology and Civilisation'', . The presence of the Soviet Union as an international rival armed with nuclear weapons created a persistent fear in the United States and vice versa. There was a pervasive dread of a nuclear World War III, and popular culture reveals the fears of the public at the time.Worland, Rick, 2006, ''The Horror Film: An Introduction'', Blackwell Publishing, .

The theme in the arts was also a way of exploring a range of issues beyond nuclear war.Franklin, Jerome, 2002, ''Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film'', Routledge, . The historian Spencer R. Weart called nuclear weapons a "symbol for the worst of modernity."

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.Lipschutz, Ronnie D., 2001, ''Cold War Fantasies: Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy'', Rowman & Littlefield, . Various scientists and authors, such as Carl Sagan, predicted massive, possibly life-ending destruction of the Earth as the result of such a conflict. Strategic analysts assert that nuclear weapons prevented the United States and the Soviet Union from fighting World War III with conventional weapons.Angelo, Joseph A., 2004, ''Nuclear Technology'', Greenwood Press, .

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. 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.Martin, Andrew, and Petro, Patrice, 2006, ''Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the "War on Terror"'' Rutgers University Press, . The concept of mutually assured destruction was also the focus of numerous movies and films.

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 for two decades.

In the ''Star Trek: The Original Series'' episode "Bread and Circuses," First Officer Spock estimates the death toll of Earth's Third World War at 36 million.

1970s

The American public's concerns about nuclear weapons and related technology continued to be present in the 1970s. The most talked-about events in the 1970s were the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, the Iran hostage crisis, the energy crisis, and stagflation.

In the 1970 film '' Colossus'', a massive artificial intelligence American defense computer becomes sentient, unites with its previously unknown Soviet counterpart, and assumes control of the world's nuclear ICBM arsenal for the "good of mankind" during the Cold War to prevent World War III.

The 1973 oil crisis heightened fears of a peak oil collapse of domestic life. The crisis rationing led to incidents of violence after American truck drivers nationwide chose to strike for two days in December 1973 because they objected to the amount of supplies that the government had rationed for their industry. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, nonstriking truckers were shot at by striking truckers, and in Arkansas, trucks of nonstrikers were attacked with bombs.

The peak oil fears led to the iconic ''Mad Max'' movie series in 1979. The desert imagery of '' Road Warrior'' showing a resource-drained world became an archetypical default of post-apocalypse worlds.
The screenplay writer James McCausland drew heavily from his observations of effects of the 1973 oil crisis on Australian motorists:

On television, the British science fiction series '' Doctor Who'', based a 1972 storyline, ''Day of the Daleks'', on the premise of time travelers from the future attempting to trigger a present-day nuclear war between the superpowers. That is incorrect as the actual story is that the Time Travellers were resistance fighters against the Daleks, who occupied Post War Earth. Their history stated that the person organising the Peace Talks had caused the war by exploding a bomb, which killed the participants in the Peace Talks and caused all sides to declare war on each other. However, the Doctor discovered that the Bomb Attack had actually been caused by one of the Resistance fighters attempting to blow up the house in an attempt to kill the person who set up the Conference and the Daleks who suddenly attacked the house. The Doctor got the participants away from the house just as one of the Resistance fighters blew up the house and the Daleks who invaded the house with it, causing the "Earth Invaded by Daleks" timeline to close.

In the 1977 Robert Aldrich film ''Twilight's Last Gleaming'', a nuclear missile silo is seized by renegade US Air Force officers, who threaten to start World War III if the American government does not reveal secret documents that show that the military needlessly prolonged the Vietnam War.

Also in 1977, ''Damnation Alley'' (very loosely based on a novella of the same name by Roger Zelazny), depicts a United States Air Force Missile Wing stationed at a base in the Mojave Desert of Southern California. After a nuclear exchange in the beginning of the film renders the United States a radioactive wasteland plagued by massive dust storms and mutated insects, the survivors from the base set out towards a radio signal they receive from Albany, New York in search of other survivors. The narrow, dangerous passage across country they must take, is named "Damnation Alley."

1980s

In the early 1980s, there was a feeling of alarm in Europe and North America that a nuclear World War III was imminent. In 1982, 250,000 people protested against nuclear weapons in Bonn, the capital of West Germany.Nichols, Thomas M., 2002, ''Winning the World: Lessons for America's Future from the Cold War'', Praeger/Greenwood, . On June 12, 1982, more than 750,000 protesters marched from the UN headquarters building to Central Park in New York City to call for a nuclear freeze. The public accepted the technological certainty of nuclear war but did not have faith in nuclear defence. Tensions came to a head with the NATO exercise Able Archer 83, which, combined with other events like President Reagan's " Evil Empire" speech and the deployment of the Pershing II missile in Western Europe, as well as the erroneous Soviet shoot-down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, had the Soviets frantically convinced that the West was about to launch an all-out war against them.

These fears were manifested in the popular culture of the time, with images of nuclear war in books, film, music, and television. In the mid-1980s, artists and musicians drew parallels with their time and the 1950s as two key moments in the Cold War.

There was a steady stream of popular music with apocalyptic themes. The 1983 hit "99 Luftballons" by Nena tells the story of a young woman who accidentally triggers a nuclear holocaust by releasing balloons. The music video for "Sleeping with the Enemy" had images of the Red Army parading in Red Square, American high school marching bands, and a mushroom cloud. The 1984 hit "Two Tribes" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood had actors resembling Konstantin Chernenko and Ronald Reagan fighting each other amidst a group of cheering people. At the end of their fight, the Earth explodes. Sting's 1986 song "Russians" highlighted links between Nikita Khrushchev's threats to bury the US and Reagan's promise to protect US citizens. Many punk, hardcore and crossover thrash bands of the era, such as The Varukers and Discharge, had lyrics concerning nuclear war, the end of mankind and the destruction of the Earth in much of their early material.

Films and television programs made in the 1980s had different visions of what World War III would be like. ''Red Dawn'' (1984) portrayed a near future in which a communist revolution occurs in Mexico, the United States and Britain become strategically isolated from continental Europe, and the Soviet Union is threatened with famine after the failure of the wheat harvest in Ukraine. World War III subsequently begins unexpectedly, with a surprise Soviet and Cuban invasion of the United States, with large portions of the country falling under Soviet occupation. The central United States and China are obliterated with nuclear weapons and Europe remains neutral. A small band of teenagers fight the occupation forces in Colorado using guerrilla tactics, and are ultimately killed by the Spetsnatz. According to the film's epilogue, the United States repulses Soviet forces and wins the war. In the 1983 James Bond film ''Octopussy'', James Bond tries to prevent World War III from being started by a renegade Soviet general. ''WarGames'' (1983) had a teenage gamer accidentally hacking the US nuclear defense network and thinking that he had hacked a computer game company, which reveals a potentially-catastrophic flaw in the newly automated system. ''Spies Like Us'' depicts US agents in the Soviet Union accidentally launching a missile at the US, which leads one of them to say, "I think we just started World War III."

In the early 1980s, there were a number of films made for television that had World War III as a theme. ABC's ''The Day After'' (1983), PBS' ''Testament'' (1983), and the BBC
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