“AI apocalypse” is a sub-genre of apocalypse, and is well-represented in late-20th century fiction. One version of it, probably the most common, which we could just call “Skynet” as a mnemonic reference to The Terminator (1984), involves a hostile AI that actively wages war against humanity. Another, which I suspect is actively feared less but is nonetheless known and resonant, could just be call “The Matrix,” after the film of the same name (1999), involves a hostile AI that enslaves humanity. These are only two of many, and they of course have sub-variations, like “WOPR,” from 1983’s WarGames (1983), where the AI unintentionally (almost) starts nuclear war.

These are all examples from the late-20th century, when digital computers had become ubiquitous in human society, when the idea of “digital minds” had become commonplace. But how far back to these ideas ago?

E.M. Forster’s short novella, “The Machine Stops,” is perhaps one of the earliest of this style of story, dating all the way back to 1909. It is an amazing thing to read at the present moment. Forster (1879-1970) is better known for other works on quite different subjects — like A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924) — and “The Machine Stops” is one of his only works, I believe, that is concerned with the far future, or science fiction. But what a vision it is.

The novella is quite short, composed of just three chapters. They are all told more or less from the perspective of Vashanti, who is a “lecturer” living, like everyone she knows, in a “cell” inside a vast underground city which is managed by the Machine. Although Vashanti never leaves her room, she is connected through the Machine to thousands of friends and colleagues, part of innumerable conversations and discussions, and both attends and gives lectures on historical and artistic subjects regularly.

Her physical body is atrophied (“think of her as without teeth or hair… a swaddled lump of flesh… with a face as white as a fungus”), but her ever need is met by simply pushing a few buttons. If she needs anything, it comes to her, not the other way around. She cannot imagine any other way of life, at least without recoiling.

And of course she had studied the civilization that had immediately preceded her own — the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people. Those funny old days, when men went for change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms!

Everyone in the city lives the same fashion. Their rooms (the “cells”) are all assigned by the Machine, and all identical, and their physical location in the world is of no consequence, for what does physical location mean in an age where everyone is instantly connected to anyone and anything instantly? For in their age, they have conquered distance: “space is annihilated.”

She has but one physical book, The Book of the Machine, and it instructs what buttons to push to get any need met.

Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world. […]

By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter – one book. This was the Book of the Machine. […] Sitting up in the bed, she took it reverently in her hands. She glanced round the glowing room as if some one might be watching her. Then, half ashamed, half joyful, she murmured “O Machine! O Machine!” and raised the volume to her lips. Thrice she kissed it, thrice inclined her head, thrice she felt the delirium of acquiescence.

Such is Vashanti’s life, until her son, Kuno, calls her on the videophone with an odd request: that she visit him in person. She cannot really understand the request. Surely a videophone connection is the same thing? She has not seen him in person since his infancy. He lives in an entirely different continent, hours away by airship. Surely she does not have time for this. But Kuno is insistent, even blasphemous:

“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine. […] You talk as if a god had made the Machine. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”

Vashanti reluctantly agrees, and makes the arrangements (through the Machine) to take an airship to visit her son. This distresses her greatly, as she has not left her cell in years, and even though the transportation is as smooth as one would imagine it to be (because the Machine manages it), it involves disturbing things like being in the physical proximity of other people, exerting physical activity, and looking out the window, revealing horrors like dirt, mud, mountains, the sea, and stars. “I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars when it is dark,” Vashanti tells Kuno. “I get no ideas in an air-ship.”

The surface, we learn, is toxic. No one lives upon it. It is a relic of a past age, before the Machine. Vashanti suffers the trip as best she can, closing herself off to the outside world as much as possible.

She finally arrives to see Kuno, who tells her he is threatened with Homelessness — exile from the Machine — which of course means death. He explains to her that he had a radical idea, which was to explore the outside, outside of the confines of the Machine. She cannot believe it: “Don’t. Don’t talk of these terrible things. You make me miserable. You are throwing civilization away.”

Nevertheless, Kuno explains how he found a way outside of the city, through old ventilation tunnels used in its construction. He prepared his body for the physical activity of it, and made it to the surface. The process changed his view of the human conditional in a profound way:

“But I had got back the sense of space and a man cannot rest then. I determined to get in at the hole and climb the shaft. And so I exercised my arms. Day after day I went through ridiculous movements, until my flesh ached, and I could hang by my hands and hold the pillow of my bed outstretched for many minutes. Then I summoned a respirator, and started. […]

“I felt that humanity existed, and that it existed without clothes. How can I possibly explain this? It was naked, humanity seemed naked, and all these tubes and buttons and machineries neither came into the world with us, nor will they follow us out, nor do they matter supremely while we are here. Had I been strong, I would have torn off every garment I had, and gone out into the outer air unswaddled.”

Kuno has been thoroughly radicalized by the experience. The surface is not as barren as understood. Nor necessarily as deadly. And he understands that their dependence on the Machine is dehumanizing at the core:

“Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops — but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds — but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die. Oh, I have no remedy — or, at least, only one — to tell men again and again that I have seen the hills of Wessex as Ælfrid saw them when he overthrew the Danes.”

Kuno further tells her that he saw evidence of humans living on the surface, before he was pulled back into the city by massive “worms” that had emerged from it and wrapped themselves around him.

Vashanti leaves, understanding that her son has gone mad.

Above: Accidental cyberpunk at a Whole Foods parking lot electric car recharging station in New Jersey, which I filmed in December 2024.

In the final chapter, we hear of changes with life in the Machine. First, the Machine bans the use of respirators, which means that none would be able to ever leave its perfect control. Airships travel was still permitted, but nothing on the surface. The inhabitants of the Machine are by and large friendly towards this change. Then, religion is reestablished: the worship of the Machine, which “is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.“ Again, who would object to such an obvious thing?

Years pass. To Then atmospheric control and lighting. Finally all stops — silence surprise, she gets a call from Kuno, which is as mystifying and insane as anything:

He refused to visualize his face upon the blue plate, and speaking out of the darkness with solemnity said: “The Machine stops.”

“What do you say?”

“The Machine is stopping, I know it, I know the signs.” She burst into a peal of laughter. He heard her and was angry, and they spoke no more. “Can you imagine anything more absurd?” she cried to a friend. “A man who was my son believes that the Machine is stopping. It would be impious if it was not mad.”

But soon there are signs of problems. The Machine starts to glitch. Vashanti notices them while listening to music. She reports them to the Central Committee, but they persist nonetheless. Soon other glitches emerge — strange noises. The sleep system malfunctions. Then atmospheric control and lighting.

It becomes clear that the Machine’s own Mending Apparatus is failing, and that the people who manage the Machine no longer possess an understanding of how the Machine works that is sufficient to repair it.

Eventually, as Kuno predicted, the Machine stops. There is nothing but silence and darkness. Vashanti is forced to do the unthinkable: she opens her door and wanders into the corridor. It is full of other people, equally panicked, trying to summon help and trains and fighting over buttons.

People at any time repelled her, and these were nightmares from her worst dreams. People were crawling about, people were screaming, whimpering, gasping for breath, touching each other, vanishing in the dark, and ever and anon being pushed off the platform on to the live rail. Some were fighting round the electric bells, trying to summon trains which could not be summoned.

Others were yelling for Euthanasia or for respirators, or blaspheming the Machine. Others stood at the doors of their cells fearing, like herself, either to stop in them or to leave them. And behind all the uproar was silence – the silence which is the voice of the earth and of the generations who have gone.

She retreats back to her cell. Eventually she ventures out one last time. The fighting has stopped, the dead and injured lie around. She somehow finds Kuno, who lays dying in the dark. He tells her that men outside the Machine exist. She suggests they will restart the Machine, then. He tells her, “Never. Humanity has learnt its lesson.” And at that moment, an airship crashes into the city — destroying it. The end.

I think the easy, superficial way to appreciate Forster’s “The Machine Stops” is to marvel at how much he managed to get “right” in predicting what a world might look like in the far future. The ubiquitous communication and connectivity, which produces highly physically isolated people who are nonetheless constantly engaged with hundreds or thousands of others (a state of Sherry Turkle calls “Alone Together”), and shrinks the world by making it possible to rapidly move anything you want to you (rather than you to it) — this is all a fairly impressive extrapolation of late Industrial Revolution advances in communications, transportation, and automation technology. Similarly, the lament that humanity might become passively addicted to technological convenience feels ahead of its time. If this book was written in the 1960s or 1970s, it would be commonplace in this respect; by the fact that it was written in 1909, it is remarkable.

What I think is the deeper point of appreciation, though, is Forster’s humanistic concerns. It is not just the dependence that is the problem, although by the end of the book, when the Machine stops, it is clear how dangerous that can be. It is that people have gradually allowed the Machine to dominate their dreams of what it means to live and thrive. As Forster puts it at one point:

Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

Again, one can find other 20th century voices saying similar things, with different degrees of emphasis. The idea that modern “decadence,” particularly technological decadence, had produced a separation between modern humanity and the eons of generations before it, becomes very common starting in the 1920s and 1930s, and the technological horrors of the two World Wars spurred much of that sentiment. But 1909 still feels rather early for this.

If H.G. Wells gets credit for the trope of the atomic bomb (1914), should E.M. Forster get credit for… whatever this is? The idea of an artificial intelligence — for what other way can we understand the Machine in our present time? — that has been built for the convenience of humanity, whose workings become too impossible for humanity to understand and maintain, and on whose survival humanity becomes utterly dependent?

This is not “The Matrix,” I do not think. The people in Forster’s story are aware they live in the Machine, and while it is hinted that the Machine is involved in some degree of enslavement (the “worms” pulling Kuno back into the city and the banning of respirators that follows are all implied to be efforts the Machine to avoid humanity possibly leaving its embraces), it does not have the same degree of externally-imposed coercion that is implied by “The Matrix.” The situation with the Machine is even more of a reference to Plato’s allegory of the cave than “The Matrix,” as very few people who learn about the nature of “The Matrix” actually want to go back into it afterwards.

Is “The Machine Stops” an end of the world story? I think so, somewhat. Certainly it is the end for most of those people who live in the Machine. The implication that there are people living amongst the ruins of the world, and that they will be new inheritors of the mantle of humanity, is meant to be a little hopeful. But it is still quite grim, as it is hardly implied that those people living outside are doing very well up until that point, and even if there were significant numbers of Machine survivors, it is hard to see how much help they would be: not only are they useless at anything practical, including physical activity, but despite Kuno’s pronouncement that humanity must have learned its lesson, it is hard to believe.

As a humanist at a moment when the most profound disrespect to humanistic endeavor, art, thought, and ideals are being broadcast constantly from the engines of capital, the halls of governance, the administrators of higher education, and the centers of science and technology, I will admit that “The Machine Stops” sings to me and my concerns. Not so much in the sense that I think its specific future of people living underground is one that I am particularly worried about. But Plato’s cave was never a warning about literal caves, either — it is about the cave of men’s minds. We live at a moment in which great excavators are at work, boring metaphorical holes in to the metaphorical earth, and their monied and powerful operators are telling us pleasant lies about how happy we’ll all be, once we embrace living in our little cells.

These shelters were imagined to be used for at most a couple of weeks. By that point, it was hoped that the worst of the external fallout would have decayed to relatively safe levels that would allow for evacuation. These were not meant for long-term habitation. Which is a good thing, because even these idealized images look claustrophobic. Two adults and two children in an area the size of a prison cell, with nothing to do but survive for one week, much less two, sounds like a form of torture.

Some months ago I wrote about Dean Ing’s Pulling Through (1983), which is quite a wonder of a Survivalist novel. As I discussed then, Ing put himself into a strange bind when writing it, in that he both wanted the main character to be a relatable everyman, demonstrating that anyone could survive nuclear war if they just prepared for it, but on the other hand, he also wanted him to be really cool and special, and so he gave him a flying car, a pet cheetah, and made it really, really clear that no, not everyone is going to be able to do all of this stuff, because surviving nuclear war is hard. Because if it was easy, it wouldn’t be much of a plot, would it?

I did (and still do) mock many of Ing’s choices (he makes having a flying car a major element of Harv’s survival! what is relatable about that!?), but I did appreciate aspects of his book. For example, I thought he did a good job of (accidentally) illustrating why literally nobody was ever going to make and use a Kearny Survival Meter correctly — they seem quite hard to build right and seem like they need constant maintenance and are difficult to read and easy to misread and those are not the properties you want to have in a DYI “save you in a nuclear war” radiation meter. I say this is “accidental” because it is clear (in no small part because he includes the plans to build them in an appendix to his novel) that Ing actually thinks that people could and should use these things, but he struggles to have his own plot-armored/flying car protagonists pull that off.

But to my real point here, I also appreciated that Ing made the time in the shelter seem, well, awful. It’s dirty. People are sick and even dying. There’s fallout creeping in from all over the place, because the ventilation is bad. They’re in the dark a bunch of the time. It just sounds hellish. And, importantly, it’s dirty. He’s in there with a family of four, a couple other folks who come by (one of whom is dying of radiation sickness), his criminal-gal-turned-love-interest, and a live cheetah, and, yeah, that’s going to get pretty nasty pretty quickly.

And, importantly, they all have to regularly go to the bathroom.

I don’t know (or care) if Ing’s detailed description of the quirks of cheetah defecation is accurate (yes, I’ll spare you), but he gets human needs about right. People need to use the bathroom. It’s one of those things that most media we produce tactfully ignores, but if you’re serious about surviving in a fallout shelter, you’ve got to think about it.

So… what’s the plan?

One plan would be to have a dedicated, government-issued “Sanitation Kit.” All the ones I have seen look like the one in the photograph above, which I snapped at the National Museum of Nuclear History in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in their exhibit on Civil Defense some years back. Some years before that, I was interviewed for a television special about fallout shelters, and as part of the segment they actually had bought one of these things and had me open it up with them. The contents were:

• 10 x toilet tissue (rolls)

• 1 x can opener

• 1 x commode liner, polyethylene

• 60 x “sanitary napkins” (proof that somewhere in the organizational structure at the Office of Civil Defense there was, somewhere, a woman or two)

• 1 x hand cleaner

• 1 x gloves, polyethylene

• 1 x syphon spout

• 1 x tie wire

• 1 x commode seat

• 80 x cups and lids

• 1 x instruction sheet

• 1 x commode chemical

You were supposed to take everything out of the barrel, and then put the plastic liner inside of it, and then the “commode seat” — a plastic toilet seat the same size as the barrel — and put it on top of the barrel. And that is your commode, your true “nuclear throne.” The “commode chemical” could be added to reduce the smell. When the bag is full and ready to be disposed of, you use the wire to tie it shut. Lovely.

So that is a pretty grim thing to contemplate in and of itself, to imagine spending a week or two sitting on top of a squat cardboard “commode” that comes with one lousy liner. But look closer at the barrel in the photo, right about the “CONTENTS,” for the true horror to manifest: SUPPLIES 50 PERSONS.

Perhaps the survivors will envy the dead.

The “Sanitation Kits” were developed for public shelters, the kinds you’d see those yellow-and-black “fallout shelter” signs for, not suburban, home shelters. The most common model was the SK IV, which, asnoted, was meant to supply 50 people. A less common model, the the SK III, had the same contents, in slightly different numbers, and could supply 25 people.

A report discussing them from 1967 notes that if 50 people actually used one of these containers, it would be filled “in two days or less.” It doesn’t really suggest what to do about this, other than to imply that in that situation, you’d better have more than one. It suggests that once you get the chance, you should remove the waste from your shelter. It also talks a bit about the odor problem:

Odors in the shelter may become noticeable, especially by persons entering an occupied shelter from the outside. This is not, however, considered a serious problem. Persons exposed to a gradual buildup of odors become progressively unaware of them. The developing gases require a considerable concentration before toxicity becomes a problem.

And you must admit, it is just lovely to know that you’ll get used to the smell and it would take some time before the toilet gases were actually toxic.

The last time I was there, in the lobby of the New York City Emergency Management headquarters, they have a little exhibit on Civil Defense history, and it included a photo of the NYC branch receiving a huge pallet of “Sanitation Kits,” if I recall correctly.

Those planning for a home fallout shelter were required to figure out their own preparation. As always, the US government did provide something: a pamphlet. Of these, the one with the most amusing title is, Before Disaster Strikes… What to do About Emergency Sanitation in the Home (1955), from the Federal Civil Defense Administration. (“Before Disaster Strikes” is now going to be the phrase running in my head when I am off to the store to buy toilet paper.)

“Emergency sewage disposal” is only part of the overall “emergency sanitation” question (in case you were wondering why paper cups were included in the kit), but it’s a big part of it. The handbook explains that even if you did have access to regular flush toilets, it might be wise not to use or flush them, to conserve water, and the sewer system may not be working anyway. If the nuclear war continues for “some time,” or sewer systems are disabled for “several days,” then “you may find that disposal is a big problem,” the pamphlet informs us.1 Ultimately the pamphlet recommends you assemble basically in the emergency kits (including a bucket, and a trash can to empty it into), plus a shovel, to bury the waste, if need be.

Dean Ing, for his part, includes a section on “potties for the people” as one of his appendices in Pulling Through, and while he tries to put a good face on it, it’s as abject as everything else discussed here. There’s no dressing up that having to use “an emergency john made from a wastepaper basket, several layers of cardboard taped together with a hole cut through them, and a plastic bag taped into the hole.”

Even Ing is aware of this on some level, as he feels compelled to add: “Okay, so it ain’t the Waldorf; it only took ten minutes to build and it’s fast, fast, fast relief.” Great.

Cresson Kearny, of the aforementioned Kearny fallout meter, features a photograph in his 1986 Nuclear War Survival Skills of an “expedient toilet” that was used by a Utah family for an experiment of sheltering for three days.

The family, it appears, took the whole in thing a good spirit (as they were presumably aware that they would only be spending a few days in the shelter, as part of a study, and that nuclear war had not occurred), and decorated their little fallout shelter bathroom whimsically with a (disconnected) telephone and a sign that reads “bountiful sanitation department” and, er, “Hole Sweet Hole.” No, you can’t make this stuff up.

That’s at least better than Ing’s 10-minute toilet, I’ll say. Preparation matters after all, I suppose.

Why should we care about this? What I find fascinating and compelling about the problem of human waste during nuclear war is that it is so abject, so mundane, so easy to overlook, and yet the minute you start thinking about it, your nose rankles. It makes the reality of shelter survival much more tangible. And that’s assuming the best case scenario about what has happened in that nuclear war.

It’s such a minor thing, as opposed to hundreds of millions of dead corpses, but somehow it’s such a human thing, such an awful thing. Toilets and bathrooms are such hot-wires for human psychology — as Freud was quite aware — and they fascinate me for the ways in which they become representations of our various cultural quirks and hangups and fears (but that’s another story altogether). These squat little bucket toilets in these claustrophobic shelters are just so abject, just repulsive.

I’m not saying that the toilet problem is an insurmountable thing. But the real value of this kind of Civil Defense thinking, for me, is not so much fantasizing how one would feel superior “surviving” by pooping into a bucket or a waste basket for two weeks, but making us really and truly seriously think through what the lived experience of being even a very fortunate survivor in a nuclear war would be. To stop thinking about shelters as romantic stories of individual cleverness being validated, and instead think of them as squalid little prison cells that punish those trying to survive nuclear war just a tiny bit more than they are already being punished.

I’m thoroughly on team “it’s probably better to survive than not,” but jeez, wouldn’t it be just infinitely better to just, you know, not get into this situation in the first place. For a lot of reasons, to be sure. But also to avoid the final indignity of a fallout shelter toilet.

On May 7, 1955, 25 young Japanese women arrived by airplane at Travis Airfield in California. They had flown there from Iwakuni Airbase in Tokyo a few days prior, with a layover in Honolulu. In California, a crowd greeted their arrival by showering them with flowers—and four women who, to the discomfort of many involved, used the opportunity to give a speech about the dangers of the hydrogen bomb.1

All of the women had been schoolchildren in Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945, when the United States detonated an atomic bomb over the city. Many of them had been at work building firebreaks at the time of the bombing, and had all been severely burned by the attack. They were known in the press as the “Hiroshima Maidens,” and they were part of a trip, organized by a Japanese reverend and an American journalist, and with the hesitant blessing of the US State Department, to bring the women to the United States, so their scars might be healed through the power of American plastic surgery. The primary intent was to ease their individual suffering, but the trip was understood by all involved to be more than that: the wounds being healed were not just physical, but political.

Keloid scars are raised, thick, and irregular slabs of collagen. They can form after any injury, and can appear long after the injury itself. They generally do not hurt, but they can itch. They can also constrain muscle movement, decreasing mobility dramatically, depending on where they have formed. And they are disfiguring. For reasons that are apparently still not well-understood, such scars are more prone to develop in people of Asian, African, and Hispanic descent than in other peoples, and their heighted incidence among survivors of the atomic bombs has suggested that radiation exposure may increase the chances of their forming.

Photographs of the scarred bodies of atomic bomb victims are a common, if still controversial, accompaniment to discussions of the atomic attacks today. But in the immediate years after the end of World War II, they were much rarer. While an October 1945 story in LIFE magazine did feature two photographs of atomic victims, nearly all other popular photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 1940s featured only photographs of the ruined buildings, not ruined bodies.

Less popularly, the bodies of victims were visible in official, technical publications on the “medical effects” of the bombs, with photographs of the victims months or even years after the bombings. These photographs were meant to display, cleanly and clinically, the effects of atomic bombs. They were not intended to provoke a sense of guilt, or even empathy, except as relates to how their audience might be interested in “effects data” for planning for the possible use of atomic bombs against themselves in the future.

Information about the survivors was tightly controlled within Japan by the occupation authorities, who feared that widespread discussion of the atomic bomb could lead to anti-American and pro-Communist sentiment.2

John Hersey’s Hiroshima, published as a full-issue of The New Yorker in August 1946, was the first publication to really give international audiences a view of what the atomic bombings were like from the perspective of the bombed. One of the six survivors that Hersey profiled was an American-educated Methodist reverend, Kiyoshi Tanimoto. Tanimoto’s account is gripping, and prominently features his inability to render the help to others that he wished that he could:

After crossing Koi Bridge and Kannon Bridge, having run the whole way, Mr. Tanimoto saw, as he approached the center, that all the houses had been crushed and many were afire. Here the trees were bare and their trunks were charred. He tried at several points to penetrate the ruins, but the flames always stopped him. Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery. The wounded limped past the screams, and Mr. Tanimoto ran past them.

Hersey’s account showed Tanimoto trying to help whom he could, but the magnitude of the disaster was overwhelming. Tanimoto himself suffered from a bout of radiation sickness, but recovered.

At the time of Hersey’s book, there was no agreed-upon term to use for those people who were at Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time of the bombings but who had not died. The term “survivor” was common in English usage, but the Japanese have tended to shy away from their equivalent (seizonshai), apparently finding it to contain a bit of guilt or blame in its focus on those who did not die. Conversely, the term “victim” appears to have been used more commonly in Japanese (higaisha) than in English, perhaps again because of its apparent connotation that the violence done to the Japanese was unjust. It is not clear exactly when the term hibakusha—“explosion-affected person”—became the preferred term; it seems like it was used in Japan by the mid-to-late 1950s, and became well-known in English only in the early 1960s.3

In the months after the bombing, his church destroyed, Tanimoto worked as a street preacher in Hiroshima. His message was both theological and political: Looking for someone to blame for the atomic bombing—whether the Americans who had dropped the bomb, or the Japanese military leaders who had started the war—was futile. Seek salvation through God alone. With parishioners, he began the work of rebuilding the church building, but the work was slow, for there was no money and few resources available. In 1948, he traveled to the United States to meet with an old classmate of his, in an effort to raise funds for a new church. While on the ship to San Francisco, he had an idea: He could dedicate his life to peace, and the rebuilding of his ruined Hiroshima would be the focal point for that. Without consulting anyone back home, he began to give sermons around the United States, taking up a collection for Hiroshima’s rebirth. By the end of 1949, he had visited over 250 American cities, and raised about $10,000 for the church.4

Tanimoto ultimately made a connection with the editor of the Saturday Review, Norman Cousins, who enthusiastically supported his plea, and ran an editorial proposing the creation of a World Peace Center in Hiroshima. Although the article claimed to be in the name of the inhabitants of Hiroshima, no one but Tanimoto was ever consulted. A Hiroshima Peace Center Foundation was set up in New York by Cousins, in order to receive American donations.5

A few years later, as part of his peace center efforts, Tanimoto began a Bible study class for a group of women that he apparently called his “Keloid girls.” He had offered other classes to victims of the bombing; the Keloid girls were special because their deformity and their sex was seen to demand a level of social exclusion that went beyond that of other Hiroshima victims. He would eventually petition the Hiroshima government for funds to give them plastic surgery, but was rejected. He then went to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, the American-run effort to study the medical effects of the atomic bombings, but he was told that this was outside the commission’s scope. The commission was not in the business of “treatment,” and keloids were not unique radiation effects.6

Eventually, Tanimoto received some funding for surgery on the Keloid Girls within Japan, bringing a group of them to Tokyo in the spring of 1952, just after the end of the American occupation. There was also one male victim in the group, Kiyoshi Kikkawa. The Japanese press, to the surprise of Kikkawa, became completely focused on the women, dubbing them the Genbaku Otome: “Atomic Bomb Maidens.” The women were attractive because of their symbolism of peaceful Japanese resilience. Kikkawa quickly felt it was going too far: At one point in their trip, the “maidens” were taken to tour a prison that held Japanese war criminals, and two of the “maidens” chosen as delegates proclaimed that while they had once held grudges against the Japanese militarists, they now saw them as being in the same situation as the survivors.7

The surgeries were at least somewhat successful. Tanimoto had been in touch with Cousins about the “maidens” ideas, and with this pilot project completed—and its publicity value proven in at least the Japanese context—Cousins was ready to push for an American side of it. This would be larger and grander: more “maidens” (no men, this time), and the surgeries would be done in the United States, where plastic surgery was state-of-the-art. Cousins is credited for transforming their name: Having changed from “Keloid Girls” to “Atomic Bomb Maidens,” they were now the “Hiroshima Maidens.”8

For six months, Cousins sought funding for the project from foundations. It would be expensive: the transportation and lodging alone would cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the operations would drive the cost into the hundreds of thousands. He saw little success, apparently because the foundations blanched at the possible negative publicity that might attach to the project.9

Changing tactics, Cousins then attempted to see if the operations might be performed pro bono. Through his personal physician, he made a connection to Dr. Arthur Barsky, who ran and had founded the plastic surgery departments at Mount Sinai Hospital and Beth Israel Hospital in New York. Barsky had literally written one of the primary reference books for the field, Principles and Practice of Plastic Surgery, in 1950. Barsky had dedicated the book to “the soldier patients of World War II,” on whom Barsky had practiced as a lieutenant colonel. The art of plastic surgery had long been associated with war injuries, and the “Maidens” project would be no exception.10

Barsky agreed to the work, so long as he could be involved in the selection of proper candidates, as keloids were tricky, as his textbook explained. “The possibility of post-operative keloid formation is an ever present one,” and certain parts of the body, and certain races of people, were more prone to them than others. “The cause and treatment of keloids are vexatious problems which have not been solved,” he lamented. But experience had given promise that many could be treated, particularly with high doses of radiation, either directly to existing keloids or after the tissue had been excised.11

Barsky, along with his colleague William Hitzig — Cousin’s physician — would fly to Japan to select the candidate “maidens,” alongside Japanese physicians. The initial plan was to look only at women who were part of Tanimoto’s Bible classes, but it was decided it would be more appropriate to widen the pool to any young woman who had been disfigured by the Hiroshima bombing. Although that would be a very large potential number, fewer than 50 actually showed up for the screening, perhaps because of rumors that the women would be subject to experimentation. Ultimately, 25 were deemed suitable candidates. The Mount Sinai surgeons had agreed to donate their labor, and the hospital agreed to provide bedding for little to no charge.12

After hearing about the project, Gen. John E. Hull, head of the US Far East Command, gave orders that a plane would be provided to bring the “maidens,” Tanimoto, and the surgeons to the United States. The flight landed first in California, where it was met by journalists and a small protest, and then proceeded onward to New York. Before the operations would begin, there was publicity to attend to. Three days after landing New York, Tanimoto, and two of the “maidens” flew back to California to appear on the popular television show This is Your Life, with the goal of making a public appeal and raising perhaps a million dollars.

For Tanimoto, it appears to have been an agonizing experience. He was apparently unaware of the format of the show, in which various “surprise” guests from his past would be shown, and the studio’s approach was disrespectfully sensational. One of the guests was Capt. Robert Lewis, the copilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber which had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Lewis was, by a later account of someone backstage, extremely drunk: Lewis had thought he would be paid for appearance, and when he discovered he would not be, he went on a bar crawl.13

While the host, Ralph Edwards, appeared to find the entire episode jovial, Tanimoto was rigid and uncomfortable-looking for almost all of the show. Lewis slurred and struggled through a stiff speech, but appears to have been genuinely affected. Supposedly, before his segment, he looked into the room where two “Hiroshima maidens” were waiting. “And there are a hundred thousand more who look like that?” he is reported to have asked. During his segment, he recounted what the bombing of Hiroshima had looked like from the air, and recounted that he had written in a log book at the time: “My God, what have we done?”14

The two “maidens” were shown in silhouette only. A public solicitation was made for their cause, with Lewis giving the first check on behalf of the crew of the Enola Gay. The New York Herald Tribune denounced the episode as a “new low in poor taste” and “commercialized sadism,” while the Associated Press judged it “morbid and maudlin.” Former American servicemen jammed the telephone lines afterwards to complain about Lewis’ appearance, believing him to have disgraced the United States for expressing anything that sounded like guilt. Ultimately the episode only attracted $55,000 in donations — a meager sum compared to what had been hoped for.15

Back on the East Coast, Tanimoto and the women spent several weeks resting in a Quaker retreat in Pennsylvania. They were objects of intense scrutiny and paparazzi attention; no activity that the “bomb-scarred” (as the newspapers called them) women did was too mundane to avoid attention from journalists.16

Soon, however, the actual surgeries began. Over the next year, a team of surgeons at Mount Sinai, led by Barsky, performed over 140 operations on the women. When not in surgery, the women lived with host families. The operations were difficult. In some cases, there were dramatic improvements in mobility and appearance. One of the women, Tomako Nakabayashi, age 26, died of a heart attack during her third operation—a point that American newspapers made little of, but led Japanese newspapers to accuse the Americans of treating the women as guinea pigs.17

By the June 1956, 10 of the women were deemed ready to return home. The rest returned in late October 1956. The surgeries involving the women who survived were considered successful, although the reactions of people seeing them for the first time would often be to focus on the scarring that was still visible. But the women appear to have found the physical transformations a great boon, even if, as one later said, “there are lingering wounds in our hearts that have not healed.”18

The story of the “Hiroshima Maidens,” which has been told many times over the years, comes in two distinct modes. The “original” mode is optimistic and, perhaps, a bit naïve. It is the version of the story pushed by Tanimoto and Cousins and most of the press who eagerly covered the women once they arrived in the United States in May 1955. This version is one of rebirth: just as Hiroshima, the city, was in the process of rebuilding after the atomic bomb, so could Hiroshima’s inhabitants rebuild their lives, even their very flesh.

City organizers in Hiroshima embraced their own version of the narrative of the city’s rebirth. Starting in the 1940s, and accelerating in the 1950s and 1960s, they emphasized that the destruction at Hiroshima would be not its end, but its new beginning. There was a tactical element to this: They needed to attract resources for development and rebuilding, and leveraging their status and fame was a potent part of this appeal. It was not an approach that denied that the past destruction had occurred, obviously, for this could not be denied. The “rebirth” narrative would be a way to lean into that story and change its trajectory. Among the hibakusha, there were understandably mixed feelings about the approach. The famous “Atomic Bomb Dome”—the ruin of the former industrial exhibition hall near ground zero—ended up being the only preserved “monument” to the destruction, serving a focal point for Hiroshima’s peaceful rebirth activities, but its preservation was contentious.19

There is a more cynical read on the “Hiroshima Maidens” and the rebirth mode of talking about the bombings. For one, this version of the story almost exclusively focuses on Hiroshima, at the expense Nagasaki, even though the case for the use of the second atomic bomb, only three days after the first, has always seemed much weaker than the case for the use of the first.

The focus on “maidens” also creates additional places for critique. There were married and divorced hibakusha who were rejected from Tanimoto’s project, and after the pilot project’s single male hibakusha, the rest were all women. The exact reasons for this have not been articulated by the players involved, but it seems that Cousins and Tanimoto felt the maidens made for more sympathetic figures and gave the project more of an apolitical appearance.20 As Robert Jacobs has put it, the “Hiroshima Maidens” were:

…generally depicted as childlike, innocent and grateful. They were uniformly spoken of as being “almost pathologically shy,” and then “blossoming in the warmth they shared in the homes of American ‘parents.’” […] The use of the term “maiden” reveals the focus on the lack of romantic prospects for the women while reinforcing the image of their innocence and childlike nature. […] The Japanese women were all students when they suffered the atomic attack, thus sparing them of any complicity in the Japanese war effort, and casting them as victims themselves of Japanese military aggression.21

While the “Hiroshima Maidens” project was being planned, the discourse about the atomic bombings in Japan radically shifted. In early March 1954, the United States tested its first deliverable thermonuclear weapon at the Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. The detonation resulted in a massive plume of radioactive fallout that contaminated thousands of square miles of ocean and islands downwind of the test site and exposed a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon No. 5, which had inadvertently strayed close to the test site. After they returned to Tokyo, the crew began showing the symptoms of radiation sickness, but not before their tuna catch was offloaded in Tokyo fish markets. Thus followed a tuna boycott and massive global attention to the issue of nuclear fallout. One of the crew would eventually die. Within Japan, this Bravo test became a major focal point for an emerging anti-nuclear political activism and generally led to an opening up of long-suppressed public discourse about Japan’s status as a “nuclear victim.”22

The “Hiroshima Maidens” project, however, was not part of this political movement. Tanimoto’s politics were far more conservative, more pro-American, and definitely not anti-nuclear. His was a politics of restoration and “moving on,” and, if anything more specific than that, about suppressing the anti-H-bomb sentiment of the Japanese that was being used to fuel protests against American military presence in Japan.23

Cousins had a more left-leaning approach, but his goals were focused on a bland humanitarianism and universalism, with a dash of world governance thrown in. While earnest, this was not particularly threatening to the status quo. As Ron Zwigenberg notes, Cousins “unwittingly promoted the American expansionist agenda with his outreach projects in Japan and elsewhere.”24

Still, this cynical read of the Hiroshima maidens effort feels, well, cynical. There is nary a humanitarian project in the Cold War that does not vacillate between these two readings, the earnest and the cynical. There is always some truth to each of them. All humanitarian aid was, arguably, part of some side of the Cold War project, and anything that came out of the United States could be justifiably considered a promotion of an American expansionist agenda, part of its bid for “soft power,” and part of the explicit attempt to foster public attitudes in the United States and abroad that would serve as to damper more radical calls for change. It is of interest to note that in the case of the “maidens,” the United States was not the only superpower with the idea: Physicians from the Soviet Union had offered to provide reconstructive surgery to the “maidens” in 1952, on the condition that they speak out against American imperialism and nuclear testing.25

Similarly, while it is certainly the case that the “Hiroshima Maidens” were part of an American attempt to assuage feelings of culpability and guilt, they were also actual people, with actual suffering. That it required maudlin public relations efforts to make the project happen, and that the aid was so selectively applied, constitute the most apt critique of the project. And there are certainly worse narratives for a devastated city than Hiroshima’s self-conscious “rebirth” and self-fashioning into a symbol of international peace.

There is also a critique to be made about the politics of memory. The mono-focus on Hiroshima has been at the expense of Nagasaki. This has had practical effects, including differences in care received by survivors. It also changes how we regard and remember the attacks. Modern surveys show that among Europeans, around 85 percent can correctly identify Hiroshima as the first city attacked by atomic weapons. That number drops by 20 percent when asked about the second.26 The exclusive focus on Hiroshima for the “maidens” project is both a product of its circumstances — Tanimoto was in Hiroshima — and a sign as any that for all of its appeals to humanitarianism, it was intended, primarily, as a symbolic gesture.

Above: Excerpts from a film made by the US Air Force on the medical effects of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, 1946. I have only included the least invasive of the images. Source: NARA.

After their surgeries, few of the “maidens” sought additional attention. In the 1980s, Shigeko Sasamori lent her voice and authority as a hibakusha to a growing anti-nuclear movement. But most appear to have sought privacy after their period having their bodies and identities subjected to extreme focus, both positive and negative.27

The hibakusha, as the psychologist Robert Lifton observed in his in-depth study of them, have a complicated relationship with their status as victims. It is a no-win situation: If their victimhood is remarked upon or treated as special, they fear that any assistance rendered is inauthentic and confirms that they carry a stigma. If, on the other hand, they are ignored, they feel abandoned.28

Barsky, the plastic surgeon, continued his own kind of ministry. In 1969, he organized a clinic in Vietnam to operate on Vietnamese and Cambodian children who had been horribly burned by American munitions. The clinic operated on over a thousand children, including Kim Phuc, the famous “napalm girl.” After American surgeons fled during the fall of Saigon, the hospital was kept running, and still operates to this day.29

Scars are a sort of archive of a body’s experiences. They fade, and they can sometimes be healed. Scars in the mind are harder to see. But the scars of history, as played out in politics and attitudes and cultural creations, can outlive the people who experienced them firsthand. What does it mean to remove scars, or to preserve them? What story do the scars of history tell?

Most of the “Hiroshima Maidens” seem to have truly desired to be apolitical, which in this case seems primarily to mean non-controversial. This desire was, of course, impossible to fulfill. Their bodies were, by virtue of where they had been on the morning of August 6, 1945, inherently political. Plastic surgery could hide some of the scars. But being hibakusha appears to have thrust survivors of the bombings into a political position: One’s existence is some kind of statement about power, and so an object for others to use in making their own kinds of political statements. To gaze upon the body of a hibakusha is a political act—but so, also, is looking away.

The “shadow” on the steps of the Sumitomo Bank, not far from ground zero, above is the most famous one. The above photograph was taken by US military forces in the city in November 1945. The initial identification of the shadow as being caused by a human being was made by an earlier survey of the bombed city.

The “shadow” in the above, as with other “flash shadows” in the city, were caused by the intense-but-brief thermal pulse from the atomic bomb. Depending on the exact surface on which it acted, the physical behavior of the “shadow” varied. In the above, crystals in the surface of the polished stone steps expanded, changing their appearance. And any dirt would have been burned off. Except, of course, where that thermal pulse was blocked — in this case, by the body of a sitting man.

(The man, contrary to popular misconception, was not “vaporized” by the heat. In this case, his death probably was quite quick — he would have been intensely burned, and then the blast wave may have scattered him into oblivion. But vaporization — being heated to the point of changing into a gas — requires more heat than was delivered by the bomb onto the ground. The actual identity of the person on the steps is unknown and probably will never be known.)

The image of the atomic bomb searing the memories of its victims onto the surfaces is a potent one. In a short story he wrote for Collier’s in 1950, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” the science fiction author Ray Bradbury uses it for horrific effect. In the story, we see the remains of a house after a nuclear war set in the far future, and see how the automatic house persists despite its owners being quite gone:

The garden sprinklers pelted the windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hand raised to catch a ball which never came down.

The five spots of paint — the man, the woman, the children, the ball — remained. The rest was a think charcoaled layer.

Well, that is disturbing enough. But I am glad (although not surprised) that he correctly identifies that the shadow is the inverse of the thermal effect: that is, the shadow is what was preserved (the paint images of the people) and not what was burned (the rest of the house). The shadow is not the burned part; the shadow is the unburned part, which is only visible because the area around it has been burned.

The story has some additionally disturbing elements, such as what happened to the family’s dog after the nuclear war, and the ways in which our automated robots might just outlast us all.

The kicker for the present-day reader is when Bradbury’s far future was set: “Today is August 4, 2026, the city of Allendale, California.” Bradbury’s future is our present, and will quickly be our past. We’re doing somewhat better than Bradbury guessed, although one wonders how frustrated someone like him would be at the fact that so many very basic problems from his time, problems that do not require any high technology or scientific research to address, still remain on the table.

The Doomsday Clock, of course, is the famous design emblem that has been affixed to the masthead of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947. Since 1949, the first time its time was changed, it has served as a way to indicate how close to “midnight” — annihilation — the clock changers believe we might be. It has never made pretensions of being a scientific instrument, it has always acknowledged itself as primarily a way for Bulletin experts (or its editor-in-chief, pre-1973) to signal to a broader world what they thought the global risk trend was. One can think about it how one wants, but it has undeniably been a potent cultural artifact since the 1940s.1

So what would the opposite of the Doomsday Clock be? I don’t know why my brain popped that into my consciousness, but it has been interesting to roll around in my thoughts.

One possibility: if the Doomsday Clock is a measure of how close one is to annihilation, would the opposite be something that measured how close one was to salvation? To utopia? To disarmament? A generally good time? This would be some kind of Anti-Doomsday Clock. Which might be just the same as flipping the meaning of the clock upside-down, and not that interesting.

Another approach would be to focus on the “Clock” side of things. A Doomsday Barometer? Thermometer? Telescope? Seismograph? Microscope? Some of these seem like they would be effectively the same as the Doomsday Clock, just a different visual metaphor. Some of them make little sense metaphorically, or require an imaginative stretch. A Doomsday Microscope, to allow you to see the eschatological implications of the very small things? A Doomsday Telescope, to see annihilation coming from far, far away?

Of course, a Doomsday Graph is all too clear: the hockey-stick curve of global temperature — which looks more like a scythe than a hockey stick every year — is one version of what that could look like. A line that could, in theory, go down. But probably won’t, not in your lifetime.

Another place my mind goes is to think about avoiding a sense of measurement and countdown altogether. Perhaps an anti-Clock is really just an anti-Instrument, and the opposite of a Doomsday Clock is simply something that doesn’t try to measure anything, and is just a sign that read: doom. We have such things, of course: The End is Near, the signboard says, in the numerous classic New Yorker cartoons poking fun at sidewalk Jeremiahs. The real sidewalk Jeremiahs usually have a real goal, unlike the cartoon ones: the end is near, you can do nothing about it, so (insert whatever their religion tells you to do here).

A slicker version of the doom sign is the Extinction Symbol, which was was created in 2011 by a London artist who goes by the nom de guerre of ESP. It is simple enough: a stylized hourglass within a circle, along the same simple graphical lines of the peace symbol (which, you may be aware, is composed of the semaphore for N and D overlapped — for nuclear disarmament).

There is a website dedicated to it, that is currently down, but one can view its various iterations on the Wayback Machine. Here is how the oldest version on there, from 2012, describes its meaning:

The symbol above represents extinction. The circle signifies the planet, while the hourglass inside serves as a warning that time is rapidly running out for many species. The world is currently undergoing a mass extinction event, and this symbol is intended to help raise awareness of the urgent need for change in order to address this crisis. Estimates are that somewhere between 30,000 and 140,000 species are becoming extinct every year in what scientists have named the Holocene, or Sixth Mass Extinction. This ongoing process of destruction is being caused by the impact of human activity. Within the next few decades approximately 50% of all species that now exist will have become extinct. Such a catastrophic loss of biodiversity is highly likely to cause widespread ecosystem collapse and consequently render the planet uninhabitable for humans.

The use of an hourglass is what brought the Doomsday Clock to mind: an hourglass is a timekeeping device, of a somewhat different sort than the mechanical clock used in Doomsday Clock imagery. To “reset the clock” for the Doomsday Clock implies some intervention, because time always marches forward, but we are all familiar with setting mechanical clocks to specific times. But hourglasses don’t get reset to earlier times; they are simply restarted once they run out.

Thus I think the hourglass carries with it a much more obvious sense of finality to it. That, and the weight of tradition, is probably why hourglasses are far more heavily represented as symbols of memento mori — “remember death” — in artwork, on gravestones, and anywhere else that people might want to reminded that life is a finite thing.

The Extinction Symbol isn’t a clock, even if it invokes time. It isn’t saying how close we are. The people who made and use it treat it like a warning: they believe there is yet time to change the outcomes. Because it is not just about human extinction, but the extinction that humans cause. All things turn to dust, eventually, but we don’t have to be so directly responsible for it.

I find extinction fascinating. Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a lovely essay on the anatomist Georges Cuvier and his work cementing the concept of “extinction” into the scientific vocabulary for the New Yorker way back in 2013. When I teach about the history of biology, I love to ruminate on the fact that the very concept of extinction is so relatively recent, and was radical. To be able to say, with definition, that there was both a long, lost world of the long-dead (like dinosaurs), and that it was possible, in our modern time, to see such things occurring (as the case of the dodo clearly indicated).

To then extend it to the possibility of human extinction is quite radical yet, and indeed, there are many people who find one way or another to avoid accepting that such a thing is quite literally inevitable, one way or another, at one time or another. It is, essentially, a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Don’t get mad at me, I don’t make the rules.

A photograph of an activist’s use of the Extinction Symbol, shown above, includes the text: HOPE DIES, ACTION BEGINS. It is a rather bold idea. Both the Doomsday Clock and the Extinction Symbol are seeking action — but only the latter wants you to first abandon all hope. That may feel contradictory, but I can see the argument, I think: when talking about the climate, in particular, one needs to move beyond denial and bargaining, and into some kind of acceptance, before one can tackle it realistically. (“What if we just stopped pretending?,” Jonathan Franzen asked in 2019, to the revulsion of most people trying to do climate change messaging.)

I’m not sure any of the above are really the opposite of a Doomsday Clock, which might make as little sense as asking what the opposite of a clock is in general. If you have your own ideas, feel free to let me know.

The spring of 1950 is an interesting moment for thinking about US capabilities just at the end of the American nuclear monopoly. The Soviets had tested their first atomic bomb the previous fall. The Korean War had not yet started — that would happen in late June. As I write about in my most recent book (obligatory plug), the Korean War was an important turning point for American nuclear policy, and the start of the serious arms build-up that we tend to associate with the Cold War. While the Joint Chiefs of Staff had begun to take the possibility of war with the Soviets more seriously after the Berlin Crisis of 1948, President Truman himself was still opposed to re-militarizing and hesitant regarding anything like that looked like either conventional or atomic expansion. So this is before the US was actually on a true “Cold War” footing, even though the US Air Force was already beating that drum very loudly, at least internally.

We can get an unusually good glimpse of how the Strategic Air Command (SAC) viewed OFFTACKLE, because many of the presentations for a Commanders’ Conference at Ramey Air Force Base in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, from late April 1950 have been declassified. They make for interesting reading in and of themselves, particularly for their ideological content — the head of SAC intelligence, Maj. Geneal Charles Cabell, for example, was adamant that the Soviet Union was planning world conquest via direct military hostilities against the United States, a position he realized was deeply at-odds with how the CIA’s view that the Soviets would use subtle and sneakier tactics (subversion, playing allies against each other, etc.). Cabell urged the other SAC commanders to accept that they were not truly in peacetime: “we are at war right now and … an all-out national effort designed to maintain permanent military and political superiority over the Soviet Union is required.”1

The war plan at this time was known as “OFFTACKLE” (sometimes rendered with a space in the middle). It was a “Joint Outline Emergency War Plan” commissioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in November 1949, and meant to replace their existing war plan, known formally as JCS 1844/32. There were a succession of “plans” from 1946 through the 1950s with “colorful” codenames of this sort: PINCHER, BROILER, BUSHWACKER, GRABBER, SIZZLE, and so on.2 Unlike some of these, OFFTACKLE was a realistic “war plan,” as opposed to, say, early studies of what nuclear war might look like that were used for planning arsenal sizes, and were thus unrealistic when it came to actual US capabilities. (OFFTACKLE would itself, a few months later, be renamed SHAKEDOWN.)

As Maj. General S.E. Anderson emphasized in his presentation of it at the conference, OFFTACKLE was the first war plan developed with the fact that the Soviets also had atomic bombs in mind. It planned for a two year war, based on the imagined capabilities of the US and the USSR starting in December 1949. It would proceed in several phases. The first would start with “D-day,” the beginning of the war, and continue for the first three months. This would be based around securing major US launching points for Soviet attacks: above-all, the preservation of the United Kingdom, but also Japan (particularly Okinawa), and the oil-producing states of the Middle East.

To do this would require a fast and massive movement of US forces, because the deployed forces in places like the UK were considered inadequate to the task. By the third day of the war, the SAC forces, a bit over 500 bombers largely based in the continental United States, would be shuffled around to the UK and Eielson base in Alaska. Only 256 of these were “A-carriers” — nuclear capable.3

The first atomic strikes would not take place until the sixth day of the war, when medium bombers (B-29s and B-50s) would attack targets in the Soviet Union from bases in the United Kingdom, and heavy bombers (B-36) would attack from either Alaska, Canada (Goose Bay), or the Middle East (via South Dakota).4

Over the course of four hours, 26 “target areas” would be bombed by the UK bombers, who would then withdraw to bases in the UK and the Middle East. Six targets would also be hit by B-36s from the North American bases. A second strike was tentatively imagined to take place no more than three days later. If the UK bases “remain tenable,” then over the next 30 days, a total of 123 “industrial centers” would be bombed. By comparison, a previous plan, TROJAN targeted 70. Note that the US stockpile at this point was about 300 atomic bombs, with an average yield of about 30 kilotons.5 One report from February 1950 that I have says that the full plan at that moment was to drop 17,610 tons of high explosives on Soviet targets as well as 292 atomic bombs, 72 of which were set aside for “re-attack” of targets presumably not destroyed by the first wave.6

A later presentation at the same conference by Brig. General John B. Montgomery, SAC director of operations, displayed the above map of the 123 targets. It noted that adequate intelligence only existed for 60 of the targets, and that the other 63 would require pre-strike reconnaissance before they could be successfully attacked. The targets ranged across the whole of the Soviet Union, although most were concentrated in its western parts, and some where in Warsaw Pact nations.7

The second phase of OFFTACKLE would take place between the 3rd and 18th months of the war. During the period, the US and Europe would be recovering from whatever the initial Soviet atomic attack against them was, to continue efforts at defending against further Soviet attacks, to continue a “very greatly reduced” strategic air campaign against the USSR, and to maintain control of key assets like the UK and the Middle East. Very interestingly, securing Spain against invasion was also listed — it is clear that they believed that the Soviets would effectively occupy all of the rest of Western Europe up until the point. If the UK fell, SAC would move their forces to North Africa.

The third phase, from the 18th through the 36 months of the war, would involve the Allied forces pushing the Soviet forces out of Western Europe. After 24 months, they would have also created a “build up” of strategic air units for another major attack phase. The SAC presenters have very little to say about this and the previous phase, because this wasn’t their part of the war — they were the bombers. But this was clearly envisioned as a major effort that would require a significant conventional effort as well.

During a “fourth and final phase,” from 36 months until the end of the war, would involve “re-entry in force into Europe, defeat of the USSR, and the establishing of control over the defeated enemy.” There is an understandable vagueness to this stage of planning, given the unknowns and how much is dependent on how things worked out in the previous phases. And, as noted, this part plainly this would not be SAC’s job. There were, as another presentation emphasized, also many “soft spots,” places where there were need for improvements if an optimistic outcome was to be assured.

What we have here is a war still measured in months and years, not hours and days. It is World War II on nuclear steroids: an initial period of heavy bombing, but one assumed to be taking place while a massive Soviet army is invading Western Europe. Like World War II, logistics was key: you can’t fight if you’re not close-enough to do so. Holding territory, rebuilding infrastructure in real-time, continuing to put pressure on the enemy — these kinds of issues, ones which seem relatively quaint compared to the imagination of nuclear war that would dominate in a decade, still hold sway in an era where most of the weapons are being delivered by relatively short-ranged bombers, where the number of atomic bombs available is still relatively limited (to the thousands and thousands it would soon become), and where a Soviet attack on the USA is assumed to be something the US could recover from in a few months.

There was no discussion of casualties from what I can see. This is hardly surprising, but seems worth noting. This is a vision for how SAC saw its job in the event of a nuclear war at the time. It was not something that would be easily to implement. At this time, the US military had access to exactly zero fully-assembled nuclear weapons — their nuclear cores were still being kept by the US Atomic Energy Commission. Assembling the weapons had gotten a bit easier since the early days of the atomic arsenal, but there were still a limited number of trained teams who were capable of doing it, and a limited number of both weapons and atomic-capable aircraft. SAC was planning to use only six “assembly teams” available to put the weapons together for OFFTACKLE.

The atomic bomb was definitely a central part of this war plan, as can be seen, but it’s an ugly, gritty-looking war. There is no sense that the atomic bomb would be decisive in and of itself. There is no delusion that the Soviets would be totally destroyed by the initial atomic assault, nor that they would immediately sue for peace. In this period both Soviet and American planners agreed that atomic bomb alone “would not win the war,” as David Holloway puts it.8

One can readily see why even the SAC commanders had little enthusiasm for this kind of war, little belief that this was something one would want to voluntarily get into. I mention this because a frequent question online is: why did the USA not use its atomic bombs to preemptively destroy the Soviet Union? Aside from the political and moral aspects to the question (nothing could be further from Truman’s intentions at that time), a strategic answer is that doing so would hardly be a walk in the park, and an ultimate victory, defined as a total elimination of the Soviet Union, was hardly assured. OFFTACKLE was one of the more optimistic plans they had considered at the time, and it’s not all that optimistic, as the commanders themselves recognized.

How did the Air Force commanders receive this information? We have limited sources to answer this, but one is interesting. Immediately after the conference on OFFTACKLE, General George C. Kenney, who had until 1948 been the head of SAC, wrote a letter to General Hoyt Vandenberg about it. He was blunt in his assessment:

It was quite evident to all the conferees that Plan “Offtackle” was decidedly unrealistic. The one conclusion that almost everyone seemed to reach was that if we waited until Russia hit us, Europe, very probably includ[ing] the United Kingdom, would be lost to us. To repeat the Normandy Beach operation is something that is almost inconceivable. The problem of gaining air superiority over the beachhead two or three years after the shooting war started and after Russia had organized her defenses against such an invasion, the overcoming of the submarine menace in order to embark the huge number of troops and supplies for such a landing, and all the other complications in the face of atomic weapons or even conventional air operations, would seem to rule this type of warfare into the realm of impracticability.

He then went on to criticize nearly every aspect of the plan. He did not think that the US would be able to hold an inch of Western Europe, and that it would take “years” to gain adequate bases in the Middle East. He continued:

I believe that any plan looking toward July 1, 1952 as the probable D-day of a third World War should visualize that we will have no holdings on the other side of the Atlantic. Our primary move will be made by the Strategic Air Command against targets in Russia itself. If our air defense is good enough to prevent the Russian A-bomb attacks from knocking us out of the war and the attacks of our Strategic Air Command are powerful enough to bring Russia to terms, we will win. If not, we will either lose the war or get into a long-drawn-out contest that we certainly will not win and which will probably result in a stalemate with both sides exhausted and civilization as we now know it a thing of the past.

Which is both depressingly realistic as much as it is dire: World War III, Kenney is saying, needs to be predicated on the “wargasm,” on the total and utter destruction of the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, and no nonsense about holding territory and playing at a World War II redux. More than that, he felt that the assumption that the US would not initiate a nuclear war would have to be banished: “We have got to do something about the conception that we must wait until Russia hits us before we can start shooting. … By all previous definitions, we are now in a state of war with Russia. Whether we call it a cold war or apply any other term, we are not winning. … It would not be a preventative war, because we are already at war.”9

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).

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!

The setup: Harry Baldwin (Milland), his wife Ann (Jean Hagen), son Rick (Frankie Avalon), and daughter Karen (Mary Mitchel) have left their Los Angeles home early one morning, camper in tow, to go on fishing trip into the wilderness. While on the road and some ways out of the city, they see a fantastic flash of light in the distance. They tune in to an emergency broadcasting station, and learn that it may have been a nuclear detonation.1 They then see a mushroom cloud rising over Los Angeles. Later, a radio report makes it clear that it wasn’t the only victim: New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, London, Paris, and Rome are all destroyed as well, and retaliation against an unnamed enemy was also occurring.

For the rest of the film, the (nuclear) family, dominated by the patriarchal Harry, go about the business of “survival.” Harry is essentially convinced, from the first moment, that the world is about to fall apart, and that this will pit all against all. He approaches this in a hard and often condescending fashion, lecturing all who will listen about what the new facts of life are going to be. And he of course sees confirmation in this everywhere he looks, as panic, disorder, and violence start to bubble up almost immediately. Harry’s ethos for most of the film is quite simple: if it’s all against all, then he wants his family to survive, and he’s willing to do anything make that happen. Trust is a luxury he can’t afford.

Ann, by comparison, is the voice of compassion and hope. She’s the one who frets about how her mother, in Los Angeles, is doing. She’s the one who desperately wants to avoid causing more harm in the world. She’s the one who worries that her teenage son, Rick, is all-to-eagerly embracing Harry’s dog-eat-dog mindset, and is likely to become a murderer before all of this is over. Harry has no time for this, and gives her numerous lectures about the new ethos, in a frustrated, smug, and condescending tone of voice:

Ann: Are you trying to scare me? You’re wasting your time, I’m already scared.

Harry: Look, sweetheart: two-and-two doesn’t make four anymore. At the moment it adds up to exactly nothing. For the next few weeks, survival is going to have to be on an individual basis.

A: What do you want to do, write off the rest of the world?

H: When civilization gets civilized again, I’ll re-join.

A: It’s still here.

Harry is portrayed as wanting the best for his family, but he also frequently crosses lines towards that end. Early on, he turns what was intended as an honest transaction (buying supplies from a hardware store) into a robbery when the store owner wants to do the state-mandated background check before selling Harry guns. Harry sees this as madness and, of course, inconvenient, and he even fools himself into thinking that he’s not robbing the man:

Proprietor: This isn’t enough.

Harry: Is this? [gestures with a handgun that he has just swiped and loaded]

P: Well, just about.

H: Give me a receipt for the cash.

P: This isn’t a hold up?

H: No.

P: Then what about the balance?

H: I’ll owe it to you. Write the receipt.

The proprietor and Harry get into a fist fight, which sends the gun flying. Harry cries out for help, and Rick rushes in, grabs the handgun, and jabs it into the ribs of the proprietor. Harry grabs even more guns as he leaves.

H: I owe you $200. I’ll pay you when I can.

P: In my book, you’re just a thug.

H: [to Rick] If he makes one stupid move, shoot him. Come on. [to Ann, outside, harshly] Get in the car!

This is a world on the precipice: people are still paying for things with cash and checks, both of which require a functioning society to have any value. Politeness and social norms are being followed… until they suddenly aren’t. And although Harry seems to be in denial about the fact that he is robbing the man (“I’ll pay you when I can” is a hollow promise if you believe you are about to go into hiding from a coming civilizational collapse), Ann is not.

Back in the car, Ann looks at her husband in horror while they drive.

A: I can’t get over it. All these years, I thought I knew you, but you turn out to be a stranger. Robbing and mauling people like some kind of a cheap hoodlum.

H: We’re fighting for our lives, Ann. Every footpath will be crawling with men saying, ‘no matter what, I’m going to live,’ and that’s what I’m saying, too.

A: Intelligent people don’t just turn their backs on the rest of the world.

H: Under these conditions, intelligent people will be the first to try.

Ann points out that he just enlisted his teenage son in armed robbery, eliciting nothing but any angry snap from Harry, and then Rick chimes in: “We’re on our own, Ma, no rules, no regulations, and no laws.” Harry bristles at this, too: “Don’t write off the law; the law will come back. I just want us to be around when it does.”

The depiction of Harry is quite interesting and complex. He’s clearly coded as a villain in most of these scenes. He’s nasty to everyone, including the family who are meant to be the object of all of his sacrifices and actions. He looks increasingly wild as the film continues. But, the film implies as well, he’s not completely wrong: the society is rapidly falling apart, there are plenty of evil-doers and opportunists around, and his concerns about food, weapons, fallout, and insecurity are borne out again and again. That the actor playing Harry (Milland) is also the director is quite interesting, and one wonders what he thought about it (unfortunately, Milland does not mention the film at all in his autobiography).

The Baldwin family continue on their way, committing other various crimes (in the name of survival) as they go. They run into three men who menace them with threats of violence and hep-cat lingo (“We’re the new highway patrol… someone dropped a bomb, dad, crazy kick…”), but Rick gets the jump on them with a shotgun and they are run off.

Later, the family get into a classic post-apocalyptic traffic jam of others joining the exodus (in amazing period cars). When they find it difficult to rejoin the traffic after having left it for a while, Harry creates a sociopathic “stop sign” by spraying gasoline across the road and lighting up a wall of flame. It stops the traffic, all right, but not before setting at least one car completely ablaze — which doesn’t seem to bother Harry much.

Ultimately they end up deep in the woods, living in a literal cave (to avoid fallout). If this film were made today, one would imagine that this would be seen as pretty bleak living, an outward manifestation of Harry’s internal psychological state. Instead, it is portrayed as superficially idyllic living (and, in general, none of the family’s actors ever look like they are “roughing it” — they’re all pretty clean and kept, and one must imagine that Rick brought a generous supply of pomade to keep his hair looking as well-coifed as it is).

They have access to a radio, so they have some information about the outside world. General war has broken out between the United States and the unnamed enemy, and the United Nations has declared that it is now “Year Zero.” Harry wants to eschew all contact with other people until order has reasserted itself, to Ann’s frustration. “I love you, Harry,” she tells him at one point, “but not more than a future without hope.”

Eventually, the three hoodlums from before resurface. Two of them come across Karen, the daughter, and rape her before Ann can chase them off with a rifle. Harry and Rick track two of them back to a farmhouse and execute them in cold blood. They also discover that the trio had been keeping a teenage girl, Marilyn, as a sex slave in the house, having murdered her parents. Marilyn agrees to come back with the Baldwins after some hesitation.

That night, Harry talks with Ann, sharing self-doubts that he has hitherto kept to himself:

A: Harry, you can’t go on torturing yourself.

H: I killed two men.

A: I tried to kill them, too, but I missed, I just wasn’t a good-enough shot.

H: I looked for the worst in others and I found it in myself.

A: But you brought Marilyn here. That was kind, and good!

H: Even that was Rick’s idea.

Eventually, the radio announcer tells them that “relocation centers” have been established around the state for survivors, with the nearest one being 135 miles away. Ann and Rick are thrilled, but Karen’s experience has made her a newly hardened recruit to the Harry school of distrust:

Rick: People!

Ann: Civilization!

Karen: Some civilization.

A: What’s the matter, dear?

K: All our friends are probably dead. Our house… my school… everything’s… gone. Everything’s changed. Including me!

And she’s right — but of course, that kind of cynicism doesn’t get you anywhere. It doesn’t tell you what you ought to do next.

Harry decides against leaving; he feels they’re better off where they are, for now, and he fears the trip. He worries about “the wrong people.” Ann asks him how safe they are in their cave-forest setup, and Harry explains: “I have some measure of control here. Out there, none. Now leave me alone, please.” That night, after everyone else turns in, Harry sits outside in the dark, with his rifle. He looks stricken, and wordlessly puts his face in his hands.

The final act involves the third hoodlum coming across Marilyn and Rick chopping firewood. In the ensuing confrontation, Marilyn shoots the hoodlum, but not before he shoots Rick in the thigh. The family pile into the car and head to the closest town seeking a doctor for the unconscious Rick. While on the road, the radio tells them that the war is close to over: “Year Zero is drawing to a close.” Ann asks: “Does this mean that the war is over?” Harry replies: “For some people, yes. For us, not yet.”

They make their way through the ruins of a ransacked town (the only specifically post-apocalyptic set in the entire film), and use a phonebook to find a doctor’s house. We get some world-building lore from the doctor, who tells them to be on the lookout for “dope addicts” and notes that he has been without electricity for two weeks. He lacks the necessary supplies to save Rick’s life, and so sends them to the relocation facility, telling them that the Army has set up aide stations there.

The family pile back into the car, driving into the night. They are run off the road by a vehicle, whose occupants demand Harry exits and disarms or they will fire upon them. Harry does so, fearful for his life, but it turns out to be an Army patrol, who tell them they are close to their salvation. “Thank god!,” Ann cries. As the family drives off to save risk, the two Army men look on and chat: “That’s five more.” “Five more what?” “Five more that are OK. They come from the hills. No radiation sickness.” “Yep. Five good ones.” The end.

Panic in Year Zero! is not a terrible film. It is definitely low-budget. The whole thing would have been easy to film on generic sets (some of them have a definitely “Western” look to them), with the sole exception of the single street in the looted town, and the cast is kept improbably small (I didn’t mention it, but along with the hoodlums being repeated characters, the hardware store owner turns out, completely coincidentally, to be the Baldwins’ neighbor while they are living in the forest). But the performances are decent-enough (with perhaps the exception of the hoodlums, who are ridiculous). It is actually a better film than its marketing posters from the time — which billed it as “AN ORGY OF LOOTING AND LUST” and really tried to capitalize on the rape aspect — make it out to be.

The actual post-nuclear world-building is pretty spare. There is only the slimmest discussion of things like fallout, and no context for the war is ever hinted at. This is less a film about nuclear war than it is about the appropriate lengths one can take for survival, a common theme in early 1960s fallout shelter-inspired morality tales. I appreciate, though, that their take on nuclear war is spread out over the first few weeks — that is an interval of time that is often skipped in nuclear war films, who usually focus on “the run up to war” (or near-war), “the day after” (the attack and its immediate aftermath), or “the far post-apocalyptic future.”

It is not a Survivalist/Prepper film, however. Even Harry’s individualism has its limits. He is only trying to get through a few weeks of uncertainty, and is iron-clad in his belief that eventually “the law” will return to power. He also hasn’t prepared for this outcome; he’s playing it by ear as it comes, but he doesn’t know any more about surviving nuclear war than anyone else. He is not truly a hyper-individualist; this is not a libertarian fantasy. None of this is surprising — that genre of “survival” would not become really a thing until the mid-1970s — but it is again a very different film than would have been probably made even a decade later, much less today.

It makes for an interesting comparison with John Christopher’s novel The Death of Grass (1956), which features a very similar sort of post-apocalyptic family road trip. In The Death of Grass, the protagonist becomes a harder man as a result of the world going to hell, but the novel externalizes the most extreme individualism onto another character, an antagonist (Pirrie) who is ultimately punished for his sins.

In Panic in Year Zero!, Harry has some self-doubts, but he’s largely let off the hook. His kids are the only ones who are really abused by the conditions of war. Even with them, it is implied that Rick’s injury will be healed, and while Karen’s rape is treated as an appropriately horrible event when it happens, it is also said quite explicitly that “she’ll get over it.” Even Marilyn, whose situation was much worse than Karen’s, transitions from traumatized, orphaned sex slave into a cleaned-up love interest for Rick in what appears to be a matter of a few days’ time and a shower.

Which is just to say that the film doesn’t appear to want us to think that the Baldwins have been too traumatized by their nuclear war experience. They’ve “changed,” as Karen put its, in more ways than one, but they ultimately find salvation and a happy ending. Which makes the film’s message about Harry a little tricky to parse. Was he right in his cynical, self-interested, and often even predatory approach to survival? Harry himself only expresses a sense of guilt after he shoots the hoodlums in cold blood; he expresses no regrets about his violent thievery or his “stop sign” of fire.

The message of the film, then, is an interesting one. It’s not the everyone-dies fatalism of On the Beach (1959), and it’s not the “welcome to hell” post-nuclear vision of later films like The Day After (1983) or Threads (1984). But it’s also not a Survivalist/Prepper film. It seems to exist in a liminal space that is still largely based in a Civil Defense-approach to nuclear war, but with nascent Survivalist influences. The view it gives of nuclear war is something along the lines of: it’ll be bad, but recovery is completely possible if everyone keeps their cool and allows the authorities to reestablish themselves, but the odds are that until that happens you’re on your own, so get ready to temporarily “bug out.”

I find it an interesting question to ask how Hollywood would likely do this film differently if it was made today. It is hard to imagine that “hurray, we are saved by the Army” would be the happy ending. I suspect the “costs” to Harry would be higher — one of the kids would be killed, for example, and Marilyn would find assimilating into the family more difficult. At the same time, I also suspect that modern audiences would want a somewhat more sympathetic protagonist than Harry. If Harry had expressed more reluctance to do the things he did, and more regret over some of the things he did (I still can’t get over the “stop sign” incident), he’d be a lot more relatable. Instead, he comes off as sociopathic.

I enjoyed the film more than I thought I would. It has a sort of “what if nuclear war happened to the Cleaver family?” quality to it, Millard’s Harry is both terrible and complex in just the right ways, and even its “happy” ending is tinged with some foreboding. It somehow manages to be neither anti-nuclear nor pro-nuclear. Even if its nuclear aftermath is relatively tame compared to the vision put out in Civil Defense literature from the time, it is still no walk in the park, and as Karen points out, “everything’s changed,” and nothing for the better.

No photographs from the ground were available until after the surrender documents were signed, in September 1945, and American soldiers, scientists, and journalists, were permitted to enter Japan. By October 1945, some photographs of Hiroshima from the ground were beginning to show up in American publications, like LIFE magazine, although they are interesting in retrospect because they are all relatively close-in, giving very little sense of the scale of the destruction. But the LIFE photos did feature people, including women and children, some of whom were quite visibly injured.

There appear to have been surprisingly few views of the damage at Hiroshima available to the American public until 1947, two years after the attack. At that point, one starts to see many versions of now-familiar photographs of the shell of the Hiroshima Industrial Promotion Building — now usually just called the “Atomic Bomb Dome” — in mainstream publications.

One also gets, in 1947, much more technical discussions of the damage at Hiroshima, and the declassification and release of official reports about the medical effects of the bomb. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey’s The Effects of the Atomic Bombs on Health and Medical Services in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, released in March 1947, contains both broad photographs of the damage, as well as photographs of victims that were taken as part of the general study that was made by the Occupation forces into the effects of the bombings.

As makes sense for a medical survey, the photographs of the victims are clinical and focused on identifying specific categories of injuries. The description of the injuries is clinical and usually concerned with the circumstances under which the injuries were attained, e.g.:

S.N., 37 years old, male. Was working in open at 5,500 feet from center of blast, wearing trousers but bare above waist. Blast came from right. Note area of protection over spine due to shielding by right side of back.

The photographs show wounds that had already healed and scarred. The text says that the Medical Division of the USSBS did not arrive to the cities until several months after the bombings, so the survivors are in much better shape than they would have been immediately after the attacks.

Most photographs of the damage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were taken weeks, if not months, after the actual bombings. It gives them a particularly sterile look: the streets have already been cleared, the corpses have already been buried or cremated. It helps feed the misconception that the atomic bombings, while perhaps horrible in terms of the raw number of human beings killed by them, were fast and “clean” killers, vaporizing victims and ending their torment quickly. While there certainly were many who undoubtedly died very quickly, there were also many who died painfully, who were trapped under rubble that then caught fire, and survivors who suffered grievous injuries.

There are written accounts that give a potent sense of this. John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which debuted as an entire issue of The New Yorker in August 1946 before it was published as a stand-alone book, was potent then and is still potent now. It has no illustrations or photographs: the writing allows one’s imagination to do the violence for it.

After crossing Koi Bridge and Kannon Bridge, having run the whole way, Mr. Tanimoto saw, as he approached the center, that all the houses had been crushed and many were afire. Here the trees were bare and their trunks were charred. He tried at several points to penetrate the ruins, but the flames always stopped him. Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery. The wounded limped past the screams, and Mr. Tanimoto ran past them.

There were, however, photographs of Hiroshima on the ground taken on the day of the bombing. A Japanese photojournalist, Yoshito Matsushige, was employed by the Chugoku Shimbun newspaper, and worked as an official reporter for the Japanese Army. He lived 1.6 mi (2.7 km) from the hypocenter, and was at home, reading the newspaper, on the morning the attack happened.1

He later recalled the attack:2

At first I saw something shining and sparkling — it was a kind of twinkling light, like you see from a sparkling electric live wire. The next instant there was this huge white flash, like a giant magnesium flashbulb. I couldn’t see anything anymore after that. Then I heard a blast and when the blast hit, my body jumped in the air about one meter and I was thrown against the wall. My wife cried, ”Bombing!” and ran to me. I grabbed her hand and we both got out of the house. We crossed the streetcar racks and went out into the field across the street. I thought the bomb had landed right on my house. […] Everywhere there was dust; it made a grayish darkness over everything. But I could feel the warmth of my wife’s hand, and it was this that made me realize she was alive and also that I was still alive.

Matsushige recalled that in that moment of chaos and darkness, he thought, “I am a newspaper photographer and a reporter for the army, so I have an obligation to make sure where the bomb dropped.” He returned to his house and found his camera in the rubble. “It was time to go to work.”

Matsushige walked through Hiroshima. He took exactly five black-and-white photographs of the city that day with his small Mamiya viewfinder camera. They look dramatically different from the more sanitized photographs, and three of them feature people in them, giving a far more accurate depiction of what the victims looked like, at least in the areas that he was at.

The first, reproduced above, was taken on the Miyuki bridge, and was have been taken about 2 hours after the bomb detonated. The building in the background is a police station, in front of which an ad hoc medical treatment center had been constructed. Officers were putting cooking oil on the burns of survivors. Most of the people were students from the Hiroshima Girl’s Commercial High School and a middle school, who had been mobilized to build firebreaks.

The students are more clearly visible in the second photograph, which moves us closer. It is hard, in black-and-white, to get a sense of their possible injuries. That they are dirty and distressed is, however, obvious. The scene is chaotic.

Matsushige later recalled that he hesitated before taking the photos:

Injured people were everywhere. Both sidewalks of the bridge were crowded with dead and suffering victims. When I saw them I realized I had to take a picture, and I tried to push the shutter, but I couldn’t. It was so terrible. These people were pathetic. I had to wait. Most of the people were students, children. […] I found it difficult to push the shutter. I was standing on the Miyuki-bashi Bridge for about twenty minutes before I could do it. Finally I thought, I am a professional cameraman so I have to take pictures. Then I managed to push the shutter.

Matsushige also recalled elsewhere that: “I felt that everyone was looking at me and thinking angrily, ‘He’s taking our picture and will bring us no help at all.’”

After the second photograph at the bridge, found he could take no more:

My viewfinder was fogged because of my tears. I understand why you ask me why I did not take more pictures, but in reality it was very difficult. When I set my camera at somebody who was asking for help I could not really push the shutter.

After this, Matsushige attempted to visit his office at the newspaper, with little success. Bodies were everywhere. Passing Hiroshima University, he saw the swimming pool was filled with the boiled corpses of people who had attempted to take refuge there while the city burned. Outside of his office, he saw a streetcar full of people posed almost as if they were on their morning commutes, but all burned, reddish-black corpses.

I put one foot up on the street car and looked into it. I put my finger on the shutter for one or two minutes, but I could not push it. I refrained from taking the picture. It was too terrible to take a picture of. This was the only scene I was going to take a picture of but did not.

Matsushige returned to his house. He photographed the barber shop attached to it, which was in shambles, and then snapped a photograph from inside of a destroyed fire station across the street. They feature no injured people, only his wife (in the background of the barbershop) and a passing man through the window.

Hours later, Matsushige returned to the Miyuki bridge, and took one more photograph, this time of a bandaged soldier-policeman writing on a table. The man was writing certificates for people injured by the bombing, which would entitle them to some bread.

Matsushige says that he took a few more pictures that evening, but they did not come out, and so he threw the negatives away, not aware that his would be the only close-in documentation that day.

Matsushige’s photographs were confiscated by the US Occupation forces, who attempted to keep tight control on any Japanese discussions about the atomic bombings (part of a bid to avoid anti-American, pro-Communist sentiment). They were not published until after the Occupation ended in 1952. His photographs were first published by a magazine, Asahi Gurafu, in August 1952, in a sold-out and reprinted issue dedicated to damage photographs that ultimately had a circulation of 700,000.

Two of Matsushige’s bridge photographs (the second and the third) were reproduced along with other post-attack photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the September 29, 1952 issue of LIFE magazine, and referenced out on the cover as “FIRST PICTURES — ATOM BLASTS THROUGH EYES OF VICTIMS.” This was juxtaposed incongruously on the cover with “TV’S BIGGEST, PRETTIEST NEW SHOW,” and photographs of chorus girls auditioning for a Jackie Gleason production.

The article in LIFE was titled, “WHEN THE ATOM BOMB STRUCK — UNCENSORED,” blamed “jittery US military censors” for the fact that it had been over seven years before photographs of the bombings of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) from “below” had been made available either inside or outside of Japan. It misleadingly claimed (based on a selective quotation) that the atomic bombs had given its victims a “quick death, with no suffering.” But it concluded by acknowledging that all of the Japanese speaking for the victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki acknowledged that “the long suppressed photographs, terrible as they are, still fall far short of the depicting the horror which only those who lived under the blast can know.”

How can something on the scale of Hiroshima, as experienced by the victims, be captured? The photographic record is too meager to do the job, and even it represents a version of the event filtered through the experience of the photographer, who was himself a victim, “an ordinary person” (as he put it), and who found himself faced with his own decisions to make about what images he could, and could not, attempt to capture. But Matsushige’s photographs do give our imaginations a bit of additional material with which to understand the bombing, however incomplete.

The game has two basic “modes” which can be played concurrently or individually. “Scavenge” is a top-down, 3D game in which you must collect supplies and family members before the bombs go off. One can choose either Ted (the father) or Dolores (the mother) as one’s main character. One may have a few seconds to look around the house before the warning timer starts, which is helpful as the location of objects and people in the house is random on each playthrough. Once the attack warning starts, the player has 60 seconds to grab as much stuff as one can and throw it down the hatch to an underground bunker. If you aren’t near the hatch when the 60 seconds are up, you die, game over.

This is a maddening sequence, as your character is slow and runs into things. Clearly this is deliberate; it is why it is hard. In the house are your three other family members (your spouse, your son Timmy, and your daughter Mary Jane), cans of soup, bottles of water, a radio, a suitcase, a fire axe, a gas mask, a first-aid kit, a rifle, a map, various games and books, and so on. You only have four “slots” to hold things at any one time, and objects (and people) can take up multiple slots (poor Mary Jane requires three slots). So you have to strategically decide which rooms to run to, what items to grab, and be as quickly as possible. The temptation to grab just one more item (and possibly not make it inside the shelter yourself) is high.

If one is playing the two modes concurrently, after “Scavenge” the game then transitions to “Survival” mode. This takes place inside the fallout shelter, and is a 2D, point-and-click, visual-novel sort of experience. Whatever and whomever one grabbed during “Scavenge” mode is now inside the shelter as well. (If one is playing only “Survival” mode, then it is stocked with some random distribution of items. On the easiest level of difficulty, some additional items might be in the shelter as well, even if you didn’t grab them.)

“Survival” mode has a fairly simple game loop. Every day, one must dole out food and/or water to the survivors. People can go for a few days without food or water (the game tells you if they are very hungry or thirsty). Every day there is usually some “decision” that needs to be taken. The most regular of these is that one can send a survivor out into the world to look for more supplies. One can choose the survivor (or decline to send someone out) and an item for them to take with them (e.g., a gas mask, which helps keep them from getting sick from fallout, or a map, which helps them locate better places to scavenge). Once someone leaves the shelter, you won’t know for a few days how it worked out — they might come back with supplies, or information, or a disease. Or they might just never come back.

Other “decisions” include reacting to specific random events. A person might show up and offer to exchange the contents of their bag (which you cannot inspect) for a can of food. Do you agree to the trade? You hear a phone ringing across the street. Do you send someone out to go answer it? You hear a series of knocks on the door. Do you open it? Timmy seems depressed. Do you talk to him?

You seem to be able to do about one “decision” per day, and then it transitions to the next day. The characters in the shelter have essentially static cartoon appearances, but when they get sick, or go insane, their portrait reflects this. The inside of the shelter also changes to reflect different items you have, the amount of food and water, and whether you’ve picked up an additional friends (like a cat or a dog).

Such is the game. This loop continues until some end state is reached, and there are many end states. The most common is a “bad” ending, where you and everyone in the shelter ends up dead from disease, starvation, or dehydration. Womp womp. There are a multitude of other “bad” endings as well, such as having your shelter being taken over by armed ruffians.

One can also get rescued by the army, which is one of the few unambiguously “good” endings. Less unambiguously “good” are some of the stranger endings, like being sent in a rocket into outer space by a mad scientist who contacted you because of your cat. Or being “saved” by the Soviet Union.

The game makes no pretense at realism. It is possible for Mary Jane to get bitten by a radioactive spider and turn into a purple-skinned mutant. There are doomsday cults, Mad Max-style raiders, cats with cloning devices, and much more. The only “realistic” aspect of the shelter experience is that a) leaving the shelter early has the highest threat of radioactivity, b) it lasts on the order of weeks (and not, say, decades or centuries), and c) it is pretty boring, both for the characters and (in my opinion) for the player.

To be even more realistic, it would be even more boring, and take much longer to play through than the 5 minutes or so each “run” requires. I once contemplated making a VR game/art piece, years ago, that would “truly” simulate a fallout shelter experience, in mind-numbing detail, with time passing at exactly one in-game minute per real-world minute. This would, of course, not be fun to play. It would be a sort of nuclear version of the (in)famous anti-game Desert Bus, which simulates the driving a bus for 8 hours along a desert highway in real-time. The fact that it would not be fun would be, of course, the point: even just one week in a small fallout shelter, with little to pass the time, sounds more like prison than salvation.

Of course, if the alternative were really death — something a game could never truly make one believe — then one could imagine doing it. But the only person who would find such an experience fun would be someone who got truly high on the idea of their own individual survival, and how superior that made them to everyone else. Such people, of course, probably exist.

The silliness of 60 Seconds! is, of course, meant to make staying in a shelter actually seem like something one might want to do. Even so, it is a game of endurance, and, presumably, optimization of choices. I can see how a certain kind of player (not myself, alas) would enjoy figuring out all of the ways to improve their odds and length of survival, or figuring out how to obtain all of the different endings.

As far as “shelter games” go — of which there are a few — 60 Seconds! is much more realistic than anything that is more in the Fallout genre (e.g., Fallout Shelter, which has some similarities but lots more silliness). That they incorporate mental health (however unrealistically), tedium, and illness into the game already makes it a good antidote to most “lone survivor” fantasy games. I don’t think many people who played 60 Seconds! would come away believing that a post-nuclear war scenario would be very fun, and that’s better than the alternative.