Before Dr. Strangelove: Nuclear Science Fiction Before the 1960s #SciFiSunday

For a director who is famous for how cold his movies can be, it’s odd to think about how funny some of Stanley Kubrick’s best movies can get. Barry Lyndon, Full Metal Jacket, and even A Clockwork Orange have their funny moments. It’s also telling that, Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick’s only full-on comedy is also his darkest, ending, as it does, on a nuclear holocaust, accompanied ironically by the stylings Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again.” It would take Kubrick to see the dark humor at the heart of cold war politics. But how did science fiction approach nuclear war before Dr. Strangelove? Here’e more from Classics of Science Fiction:

It took time for science fiction writers to put two and two together and imagine an atomic war that could create total annihilation of our species. I’m having trouble discovering when the public first encountered ideas about atomic war in the news and popular science and when science fiction writers used the ideas. Were the writers first? Could Nevil Shute have been the first to imagine self-extinction in On the Beach?

Judith Merril might be the earliest science fiction writer who explored a limited atomic war. However, I haven’t read her book yet, but in the TV drama, many of the major American cities are destroyed, and we destroy many of the enemy’s big cities, but people in small towns survive. CONELRAD was established in 1951 and is featured in the TV drama, but I think it was too early for the novel. That means the public was well aware of the atomic war possibility, I’m just not knowledgeable by how much. What did science fiction writers have to work with at this time?

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