Bomb news: the nuclear threat is reborn in books, series and movies

The screen is occupied by a scientist who, with eyes like two light bulbs in all their electrical splendor, seems to question himself beyond time. It is Robert Oppenheimer, who 48 years after dying from throat cancer – he drank and smoked too much, the doctors warned him – has been the cultural figure of the moment for months. Christopher Nolan, director and screenwriter of the film Oppenheimerwinner of seven Oscars on March 11, said in an interview that the American physicist was the most important man of the 20th century because with him human beings obtained the ability to blow up the entire planet.

The spectacular notoriety of his scientific vicissitudes, the political betrayals and the traps of Soviet espionage experienced by the New York researcher and his team from the Manhattan Project has surprised many. After all, it is a film for adults in times of youth hero franchises, a long, dark film with no possible happy ending that dissects a deadly serious issue.

One of the keys to its global success is perhaps that it is fatally linked to the present, when the war between Russia and Ukraine, the conflict in the Middle East and the tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan bring back a certain air of the Cold War and its arms escalation. Vladimir Putin has been threatening to unleash a nuclear conflict for some time and this month the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, warned about growing geopolitical tensions saying that “humanity cannot survive an Oppenheimer sequel.”

They are dark echoes of the past that are renewed in the present. “Yes, being very different times, I would say that there is a certain revival of the Cold War. The idea of ​​rearmament and the tension of balance, of fear of entering into a direct confrontation, reaching a level of brutal destruction,” reflects Mariano Aguirre, author of Cold War 2.0. (Icaria, 2023). In his book, Aguirre brings together the great differences between eras – now the struggles between countries occur between different types of capitalism, without a trace of socialism or communism and between a fragmentary multilateralism of blocs, more complex than the United States equation. vs USSR of yesteryear― but highlights certain similarities between the period between 1947 and 1991 and the current one. There are the processes of escalation and rearmament, the indirect confrontation between superpowers with atomic capacity, the proxy wars or proxy wars (as is the case in Ukraine), brutal cuts in civil liberties in Russia and also a certain air of cultural cancellation in the West if, for example, the expansion of NATO's area of ​​influence is questioned.

Aguirre, associate member of the think tank London's Chatham House, also highlights the similarities in the growing importance of the arts of diplomacy, negotiations and contacts behind closed doors, in the exchange of hostages or in the influential role of certain media. Examples of this type of action would be the exchange of women's NBA superstar Brittney Giner for a Russian arms dealer, the situation that Evan Gershkovich, a journalist from The Wall Street Journal, prisoner for a year in Russia accused of espionage, or the case of the United States leaking to the media that diplomatic sources had already warned Putin's Government about the possibility of attacks in the capital, which occurred in the Crocus room, northwest of Moscow .

The bomb and you

It was the journalist George Orwell who first spoke of the concept of the Cold War as a radical geopolitical change, due to the possibility of self-destruction that the atomic bomb entails. He wrote about it in an article published on October 19, 1945 in the magazine Tribune, rescued now by Byron Books in the book You and the atomic bomb and other writings, forthcoming. In his essay, Orwell warns that living in the shadow of the nuclear threat “is a peace that is not a peace,” but rather a new warlike landscape that he named the Cold War, which now seems to be revived again.

This atmosphere is experienced in public reports, non-fiction books and novels. In 2023 the think tank Bruegel of Brussels already warned that we were heading towards a new Cold War between two large blocs led, respectively, by the United States, the hegemonic power, and China, the emerging one. For their part, researchers from the Royal United Services Institute detect that Russia is returning to some of the methods of the 1970s and 1980s, involving agents clean in long-term espionage missions, so appreciated in Moscow since Soviet times, as was the case of the theft of atomic secrets by Klaus Fuchs of the Manhattan Project. And from the Elcano Royal Institute, analyst Jesús A. Núñez Villaverde warns that the latest movements that NATO seems to be going to carry out “take us back to times that we mistakenly believed were over, with the only exception that, if before we talked from the European Union, now we do it from Russia.”

As for books, in addition to the publication of the works of Aguirre and Orwell, Cold War. An unfinished storyby Carlos Sanz Díaz and José Manuel Sáez Rotko, (Synthesis), The New Cold War. The United States, Russia and China from Kosovo to Ukraineby Gilbert Achcar New Cold War (Atlantic Books), by Robin Niblett, and shortly, New Cold Wars. China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America Struggle to Defend the Westby David E. Sanger, journalist for the The New York Times security expert. There are also novels like My father, a Russian spyby Alejandra Suárez (Ediciones B) or Spy and traitorby Ben Macyntire (Review), or The Red Hotel: The Untold Story of Stalin's Disinformation War, by Alan Philps (Headline Books).

Facts and fictions

That old icy air also revives on the screens, in games, series or movies. The video game franchise Call of Duty triumph with Call of Duty; Black Ops Cold War set i
n 1981, where two of its characters are Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, and the protagonist is a supposed Soviet spy who seeks to steal American nuclear secrets. The documentary series is on the platforms Inflection point. The bomb and the Cold War (Netflix, 2024) which in nine chapters tells how close we came to experiencing a real apocalypse in the sixties. As for possible fictional apocalypses, at the premiere of Oppenheimer in 2023 he joined Asteroid Cityby Wes Anderson (Palm d'Or at the last Cannes Festival), set in the 1950s, in the context of nuclear tests in the American desert near the Mexican border (although it was filmed in Chinchón and Aranjuez).

“On August 6, 1945, in the blink of an eye the world changed completely. That had a full impact on popular culture, and also on comics,” reflects Giovanni Pasco, cultural analyst. Pasco, also known as GO! the monitor geek On his YouTube channel, specialized in the sociopolitical reading of comics, he emphasizes that since that distant 1945 in the United States, figures of highly politicized superheroes emerged, fully immersed in that warlike present of the bomb and its consequences on the planet: The Fantastic Four They were a family exposed to cosmic rays in a rocket when they raced to beat the communists in the space race, the incredible Hulk was a scientist accidentally exposed to gamma rays during a test, Spiderman It was a boy bitten by a radioactive spider and The Watchmen exemplifies a dystopian fiction that goes back to the Cold War era, where the world is constantly on the brink of nuclear disaster. And it is not about the past or future, but about the present: all of these are superheroes who continue to be transmuted into films or series to this day.

Perhaps the Cold War never completely went away. After the 246,000 civilian deaths from bombs little boy and fat man launched on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, after the decades-long psychological confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States led the American civil defense service to broadcast radio and television spots on how to behave in the event of a Soviet attack (with the voices and faces of Johnny Cash, Groucho Marx, or, uh, Boris Karloff), the fear of the bomb and its geopolitical consequences reappears.

Barbara Moran, American science writer and author of The Day We Lost the H-bomb (Presidio Press, 2009) about the accident in Palomares, believes that cultural concern about the bomb changes over time. Before, in movies “maybe there was fear of radiation, mutations and nuclear destruction,” he says, while now people seem to be more “concerned with human weakness, betrayal and political consequences.”

Regarding world political leaders, it happens that their connection with the times of the Cold War is very close. “For better or worse, Joe Biden was trained in those times and knows very well the potential dangers of nuclear confrontation between nuclear powers, and Putin was molded as a spy in the last years of the Cold War, in the times of decline and disappearance of the USSR,” Aguirre emphasizes.

Against all odds, intrigues between spies and the nuclear threat are back in the news. It is something that seems old, like from another world. As Agent John Preston played by Michael Caine tells them in the film The Fourth Protocol (John Mackenzie, 1987) to the different bosses of the secret services, faced with their conspiracies in the heat of atomic danger: “It's about time they put you all in a fucking museum.”

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