So in 2021: Nuclear Annhilation Isn't a Worry Anymore?
It was a somewhat famous bit of Hollywood history that in 1964, two movies were released that had pretty much the same storyline and ending:
Fail-Safe
Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Fail-Safe was dead serious; Strangelove was a satiric comedy and STILL serious.
Both films were about the threat of nuclear bombs being aimed at each other by America and Russia --"Mutually Assured Destruction"(MAD) though these films were about the bombs being delivered by planes.
This was in the sixties, when kids were still being given drills at school to "duck and cover" under their desks(in a failed belief that this would be the way to survive the blast) and when, two years before the release of Strangelove and Fail-Safe, America and Russia seemed to have pushed nuclear brinksmanship to the very edge during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
So the threat of nuclear annihilation hung like a monstrous cloud over much of the 60's, nursed along by these two 1964 nightmare scenarios that ended with the bombs being dropped and going off.
The threat of the Bomb continued on, and I'm sure there were some more nuclear-based movies in the 60's and the 70's (The Bedford Incident comes to mind) ...but it seemed like it was in 1983 that "Nuclear Bomb Hysteria" came back with three movies: War Games at movie theaters; "The Day After" on television(with its vision of America crawling out from under the Bomb BEING dropped) and, as I recall "Special Edition"(which posited the biggest new threat of our time: that Middle East terrorists get the Bomb...with no interest in diplomatic negotiation to stop it from being used.)
Still, it is now almost 60 years since Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove came out, and we've recently had a whole other dose of worldwide fear via the COVID-19 pandemic.
And I'm just sort of wondering: how come they don't make movies like Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove anymore? Did disarmament succeed? Are all the bombs gone?
Its like once the issue of nuclear annhilation stopped being "hot" for movies...it just went away.