Preparing for the Nuclear Holocaust: Town of the Times

http://thefilmarchived.blogspot.com/

Nuclear holocaust refers to the possibility of nearly complete annihilation of human civilization by nuclear warfare. Under such a scenario, all or most of the Earth is made uninhabitable by nuclear weapons in future world wars.

A common definition of the word "holocaust": "great destruction resulting in the extensive loss of life, especially by fire." The word is derived from the Greek term "holokaustos" meaning "completely burnt." Possibly the first printed use of the word "holocaust" to describe an imagined nuclear destruction is Reginald Glossop's 1926: "Moscow ... beneath them ... a crash like a crack of Doom! The echoes of this Holocaust rumbled and rolled ... a distinct smell of sulphur ... atomic destruction." In the 1960s the principal referent of the unmodified "holocaust" was nuclear destruction. Since the mid 1970s the capitalized term "Holocaust" has been closely associated with the Nazi mass slaughter of Jews (see The Holocaust) and "holocaust" in its nuclear destruction sense is almost always preceded by "atomic" or "nuclear."

Nuclear physicists and authors have speculated that nuclear holocaust could result in an end to human life, or at least to modern civilization on Earth due to the immediate effects of nuclear fallout, the loss of much modern technology due to electromagnetic pulses, or nuclear winter and resulting extinctions.

The theme is widely used in dystopian fiction books, films, and video games.

One of the first depictions of a nuclears holocaust is included in Olaf Stapledon's celebrated Last and First Men (1930). Unlike the post-1945 treatment of the subject, where the disaster is almost invariably the outcome of a war between states, Stapeldon depicts this holocaust as the result of class war between an arrogant ruling class and downtrodden miners in a future civilization. Abuse of the newly-discovered Atomic power source leads to what would now be called a chain reaction engulfing the entire world, so that "of the two hundred million members of the human race, all were burnt or roasted or suffocated - all but thirty-five, who happened to be in the neighborhood of the North Pole" (and from whom humanity is eventually regenerated for many more millions of years of existence). The book By the Waters of Babylon, written in 1937, also is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a sort of nuclear or atomic disaster is alluded to.

Throughout the Cold War, nuclear holocaust was something many people in the developed world were afraid of because of a perceived likelihood of occurrence. The topic became somewhat less common after the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, as many of the works created during the Cold War were primarily just commentary on that conflict. Asian work that deals with the theme and western work influenced by it often borrow much imagery from American atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II in 1945. To this date, those bombings and the failure of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 remain the only nuclear disasters from which authors and screenwriters can draw real world experience with the aftermath of such instances.

Authors, directors, and game designers have approached the topic from a variety of angles and in every major media.

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[Playbahnosh]

Hogy a picsába kerültem ide? o.O

[wpl955g]

Kinda ironic at 1.39, ‘All that talk about standing at the door of your home shelter with a gun and shooting your neighbour down if he tried to get in…'. Larry Gates, the chap who plays Mr Grove (the one initially opposed to the shelter) appeared in a Twilight Zone episode entitled The Shelter, where he was the only one on his block who's built one, and his neighbours all fight to get in before the bomb is dropped. Check it out: /watch?v=zuj2yuoC3PY

[ElmahdiiEl]

There IS nothing sad about this. The truth IS the light but sometimes tht light IS absolutely blinding. "no one thinks about IT much anymore, to many crisis to many scares, so we push IT to the back of our minds so IT waits" The masses are under this type of spell/apathy.

PEACE

[computerfreaq17]

@RSCII That's why we stay underground with supplies until the fallout dies out...

[rjc071]

Funny thing, people back then were safer then than we are now. Sad but true.

[RSCII]

I love how painfully naive so many people were back then. As though a fallout shelter is going to make one goddamn bit of difference. Too close to the blast range and you are toast anyways. Far enough away and you may survive a little while, but the nuclear fallout will cause you to die a slow and painful death. Either way, the shelters were a false sense of security in what was arguably a much simpler time.