Thirteen films that are essential to understanding the nuclear age

"The bomb, Dimitri, the hydrogen bomb."

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a special issue this month (July 2026) dedicated to Doomsday and the Movies. There are great articles about many specific movies. They asked me to come up with a list of 13 essential films for understanding the nuclear age, which I am reprinting below (with their blessing). I also (quite laboriously) chose the film clips to accompany all of them, which I thought captured the aspects that I thought made them “essential,” without necessarily spoiling the films (and sometimes their most iconic scenes) for those who have not seen them.

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Nuclear films are both reflections of the zeitgeist in which they are made and shapers of it. They feed off of both popular and expert anxieties, while also helping to solidify the terms on which these anxieties are engaged. While some themes are apparently universal (how many ways there are to blunder into nuclear war), some feel very much of their particular time and place.

In creating this list, I was cognizant that there are dozens of films that incorporate some sort of “nuclear” elements into their plots. Narrowing it down to 13 required implementing arbitrary criteria. Ultimately, I decided that any film on my best-of list needed to be explicitly engaged with nuclear themes in a serious and sustained way. (And so no films in which nukes are merely “MacGuffins” that could be swapped out with other “dangerous objects” would be included. Nor would there by any films which could only be allegorically understood to be about nuclear issues—no “the-dragons-are-nukes,” unless actual nukes also play a role in the plot). I focused on films about nuclear weapons, not nuclear power, with one important exception. I arbitrarily limited the scope to fiction, not documentaries (but if I were including documentaries, Errol Morris’ 2003 The Fog of War would be first in line). I also excluded all television and streaming series (sorry, HBO’s 2019 Chernobyl).

And, finally, any film on the list would have to be a “good film,” one that I felt I could recommend people watch without reservation or qualification. The was the trickiest and most subjective criterion, particularly for a historian, because there are many films that I think are profoundly interesting as artifacts, or have historical importance, but are not, in fact, great films. For example, while MGM’s The Beginning or the End (1947) is historically fascinating—it was made in collaboration with Manhattan Project officials—it is actually quite a tedious watch, in my opinion.

This list has a strong Anglophone bias, and with a few notable exceptions approaches the topic from largely American points of view. This is a reflection of its author’s limitations and relative accessibility for an American. Undoubtedly lists could (and should) be created from different cultural and national perspectives. The list is presented chronologically and can be thought of as an unfolding of the nuclear perspective from the early nuclear age to the present.

Godzilla

1954, Toho. Directed by Ishirō Honda. Released in the USA as Godzilla, King of the Monsters, in 1956.

Inspired in part by the 1954 Castle Bravo fallout disaster, which killed a Japanese fisherman and led to a boycott on tuna in Japan, Godzilla (Gojira in the Japanese original) is a more complicated film than just “radioactive monster attacks Tokyo.” Godzilla, the monster, is less of a metaphor for the atomic bomb itself than a representation of Japan’s submerged psychological reckoning with the horrors experienced by its civilians in World War II. Such discussions were officially suppressed during the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), but, like the monster, emerged as a consequence of US nuclear testing in the Pacific. The sequences with the rubber monster costume have probably aged the worst, but the films of how the people reconcile themselves with their destruction and their duty still hold up extremely well.

On the Beach

United Artists, 1959. Directed by Stanley Kramer.

The premise of On the Beach, adapted from the 1957 novel by the British author Nevil Shute, is that a future global nuclear war using cobalt bombs has both eradicated most of human civilization and created a massive, deadly cloud of fallout that is gradually circulating the globe, killing all in its path. Those in the southern hemisphere are momentarily safe, but the cloud is coming. An American submarine crew pursues one last-ditch hope to discover a path to survival, but it turns out to be spurious. All must make peace, in their own way, with the fact that the Earth will soon be dead. Although the underlying premise is technically dubious, the psychological resonances made it one of the most potent nuclear-themed films of the 1950s, and highly representative of a strain of fatalism that surrounds nuclear war.

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

1964, Columbia Pictures. Directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Stanley Kubrick’s dark comedy about the risk of unauthorized and accidental nuclear war fundamentally altered the lexicon with which we talk about nuclear weapons, and the performances of Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, and Slim Pickens created durable cultural archetypes. While loosely adapted from Peter George’s 1958 novel Red Alert, Kubrick’s own sensibilities both about nuclear war and how to talk about it run through it. The themes of unauthorized nuclear use, mutual assured destruction, and the dangers of automation are all deadly serious, but wrapping it all in a farce makes it a work of genius and helps it stand the test of time. When Daniel Ellsberg, then still at RAND and having just completed a classified study into the command and control problems central to the plot, saw the film in theatres, he was amazed — it was, he wrote later, “essentially, a documentary.”

Fail Safe

1964, Columbia. Directed by Sidney Lumet.

Fail Safe might be remembered as the film of mid-1960s nuclear anxiety had it not come out the same year as Dr. Strangelove and overlapped so significantly with its themes — so significantly that Kubrick sued it for copyright infringement and caused it to be released after his own film. Lumet’s film, a fairly faithful adaptation of Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s 1962 novel of the same name, plays the subject of accidental nuclear war and lack of control straight. Although rendered a box office flop by its circumstances, and while certainly the lesser of the two films, its management of tension has led to its retrospective status as a critical success.

The China Syndrome

1979, Columbia Pictures. Directed by James Bridges.

The sole film specifically about nuclear power on this list, The China Syndrome is a taut thriller that was elevated into something even more by its historical moment. The film, starring Michael Douglas, Jane Fonda, and Jack Lemmon, is about the threat of a meltdown at a nuclear power plant in Southern California. The threat wasn’t the reactor, per se, it was the corner-cutting and coverup perpetuated by a power utility more concerned with profits than safety. The film would work on its own merits, but the fact that the film premiered less than two weeks before the Three Mile Island accident catapulted it to the position of prophecy—for better and for worse.

Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen)

1983, Kyodo Eiga. Directed by Mori Masaki.

Barefoot Gen, first a manga (Japanese comic book) published in 1976, is a fictionalized version of writer and illustrator Keiji Nakazawa’s experiences of being a six-year-old boy growing up in Hiroshima before, during, and after the atomic bombing. It is powerful, rich, and moving. Much of the story is a preamble obscure to most Westerners: what life was like in the city before the attack, with its food shortages and political repression. The “cute” manga style fits the worldview of the child protagonists, increases the dread for what the viewer knows is coming, and contrasts starkly with the nothing-held-back depictions of the aftermath. The anime (cartoon movie) version was released in 1983, and is an exceptional adaptation of the form, content, and message of the original.

The Day After

1983, ABC. Directed by Nicholas Meyer.

This classic made-for-television movie about the run-up to nuclear war and its immediate aftermath aired on ABC in November 1983 and was seen by nearly 100 million people—over 40 percent of the entire US population. Coming at one of the highest points of Cold War nuclear anxiety in the United States and Western Europe, the film attempted to show what nuclear war would look like from the point of view of average Americans. Even though it was substantially toned down from what it could have been (see Threads), it was still disturbing enough that ABC advertised hotlines with psychological counselors. President Reagan watched The Day After at Camp David, and wrote in his diary as ringing an endorsement as one could imagine: “powerfully done,” “very effective,” and “left me greatly depressed.” The film is sometimes cited as a factor in Reagan’s willingness to initiate talks with the Soviet Union and initiate “the golden era of arms control.”

Testament

Paramount, 1983. Directed by Lynne Littman.

Among the crowded field of “the day after nuclear war” films of the early 1980s, Testament stands out for its relative quiet, reasonableness, and lack of sensationalism. The fictional suburb of San Francisco where it is set is well outside the blast radii, but the tight-knit community is devastated nonetheless: Family members who worked in the city never came home, people turned hostile and anxious in the face of rationing and looting, and nuclear fallout begins to take a slow but steady toll on the young, the elderly, and eventually all those in between. There is no chaotic descent into anarchy, no hordes of motorcycle gangs, no “lone survivor” fantasies. It plays out in living rooms, bedrooms, churches, queues for food and gasoline, and the memories of the deceased. The focus on the domestic aftermath of cities that “survived” the immediate spasm of war, but still suffer its consequences in the weeks and months to come, distinguishes Testament from nearly every other American nuclear war film.

WarGames

1983, MGM. Directed by John Badham.

WarGames is simultaneously a very ridiculous film and a very intelligent one. A teenage computer hacker infiltrates a government mainframe that, unbeknownst to him, is actually an advanced supercomputer at NORAD run by a highly capable-but-flawed artificial intelligence. And when he engages the computer’s AI in a game of “Global Thermonuclear War” on a lark, he is similarly unaware that the AI lacks the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction (and the generals aren’t so good at it, either). Ultimately he, his plucky love interest, and an exiled scientist have to travel to Cheyenne Mountain to help the machine understand that with nuclear war, “the only winning move is not to play.”

Threads

BBC, 1984. Directed by Mick Jackson.

Widely regarded as the darkest and most dismal of the “day after” genre, Threads was a made-for-television BBC creation that attempted to give a raw, unflinching view of what global nuclear war in the 1980s would look like from the perspective of the city of Sheffield. The world that Threads presents is not great: Aside from the horrific level of death and destruction caused by a megaton-range detonation itself, there follows a complete breakdown in social order. Jumping a decade into the future shows the nation deeply depopulated by the effects of fallout, disruption, and nuclear winter, with the just-hanging-on survivors barely capable of speaking English. Deliberately bleak, it’s a movie that people like to say they’ve seen, but nobody enjoys watching.

When the Wind Blows

Recorded Releasing, 1986. Directed by Jimmy T. Murakami.

This distinctly British animated film, adapted from a 1982 graphic novel of the same name by Raymond Briggs, follows an aging couple living in rural Sussex before, during, and after a nuclear war. Stereotypically British stiff upper lips, enhanced by blundering ignorance, keeps them in largely non-complaining good humor even as the world collapses around them. The unusual mixture of hand-animated and stop-motion animation, with a title song by David Bowie and a score by Roger Waters, adds to the study of contrasts in this dark parody, which ends with the couple inadvertently and cheerfully getting into their own body bags.

Oppenheimer

2023, Universal. Directed by Christopher Nolan.

There have been several attempts to represent the complicated life of J. Robert Oppenheimer on film. Nolan’s is the most stylized and artistic, and it’s based on the best source material (Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus). Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a drawn, anxious, stricken, and deeply flawed figure. His life is depicted less as a hagiography than a cautionary tale, a parable about the extreme possibilities and limitations of human ambition, agency, and control. It deftly uses concerns about accidental atmospheric ignition as a way to depict Oppenheimer’s gnawing dread that his invention had possibly doomed human civilization.

A House of Dynamite

2025, Netflix. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

This recent nuclear thriller depicts the 20 minutes between the detection of an unattributed missile launch heading towards the United States, and its arrival at its target. Director Kathryn Bigelow shows this same interval of time three times, from multiple perspectives. While there is much that one could argue with regarding the particulars of the film’s scenario, the film very astutely highlights the constraints put on deliberation, fact-finding, and decision-making by the short flight time of a ballistic missile and the inadequacy of defensive systems, political and military organizations, and any individual president to cope with those realities.

Honorable mentions

There are many other films one might want to include in such a list. Those that did not make the cut, but came close to it for me, included the suppressed British nuclear aftermath pseudo-documentary The War Game (1966); the ruminative Soviet post-apocalyptic Dead Man’s Letters [Pisma myortvogo cheloveka] (1986); the impending nuclear attack cult-classic Miracle Mile (1988); the Japanese Hiroshima family retrospective Black Rain [Kuroi ame] (1989); the late-Cold War Tom Clancy submarine defection thriller The Hunt for Red October (1990); the Cuban Missile Crisis dramatization Thirteen Days (2000); and the post-Cold War Tom Clancy nuclear terrorism thriller The Sum of All Fears (2002).

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Did I miss one that you think is vital? (I’m sure I did!) Or at least an honorable mention? Let me know in the comments!