World War III, sometimes abbreviated to WWIII, is a common theme in popular culture. Since the 1940s, countless books, films, and television programmes have used the theme of nuclear weapons and a third global war. The presence of the Soviet Union as an international rival armed with nuclear weapons created persistent fears in the United States and vice versa of a nuclear World War III, and popular culture at the time reflected those fears. The theme was also a way of exploring a range of issues beyond nuclear war in the arts. U.S. historian Spencer R. Weart called nuclear weapons a "symbol for the worst of modernity."
During the Cold War, concepts such as mutually assured destruction (MAD) led lawmakers and government officials in both the United States and the Soviet Union to avoid entering a nuclear war. Various scientists and authors, such as Carl Sagan, predicted massive, possibly life-ending destruction of the Earth as the result of such a conflict. Strategic analysts assert that nuclear weapons prevented the United States and the Soviet Union from fighting World War III with conventional weapons. Nevertheless, the possibility of such a war became the basis for speculative fiction, and its simulation in books, films and video games became a way to explore the issues of a war that has thus far not occurred in reality. The only places that a global nuclear war has ever been fought are in expert scenarios, theoretical models, war games, and the art, film, and literature of the nuclear age. The concept of MAD was also the focus of numerous film and television works.
Prescient stories about nuclear war were written before the invention of the atomic bomb. The most notable of them was The World Set Free, written by H. G. Wells in 1914. During World War II, several nuclear war stories were published in science fiction magazines such as Astounding. In Robert A. Heinlein's story "Solution Unsatisfactory," the US develops radioactive dust as the ultimate weapon of war and uses it to destroy Berlin in 1945 and end the war against Germany. The Soviet Union then develops the same weapon independently, and war between it and the US follows.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 made stories of a future global nuclear war hypothetical rather than fictional. When William Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, he spoke about Cold War themes in art, expressing concern that younger writers were too preoccupied with the question of "When will I be blown up?"
1900s
As early as 1907, H.G.Wells in The War in the Air described a catastrophic global conflict leading to the collapse of civilization, survivors reduced to a semi-medieval life among the ruins.
1930s
American cartoonist James Thurber published the short story The Last Flower in November 1939, two months after World War II officially began. The story predicts a series of world wars, and begins with the line "World War XII, as everybody knows, brought about the collapse of civilization." The book depicts a post-apocalyptic Stone Age human society.
1940s
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the "atomic age", and the bleak pictures of the bombed-out Japanese cities that were released shortly after the end of World War II became symbols of the new weapons' power.
On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, codenamed "Joe 1". Its design imitated the American plutonium bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.
1950s
American fears of an impending apocalyptic World War III with the communist bloc were strengthened by the quick succession of the Soviet Union's nuclear bomb test, the Chinese Communist takeover in 1949, and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. Pundits named the era "the age of anxiety," after W. H. Auden. In 1951, an entire issue of Collier's magazine was devoted to a fictional account of World War III; the issue was entitled "Preview of the War We Do Not Want", in which war begins when the Red Army invades Yugoslavia, and the United States responds by conducting a three-month bombing campaign of Soviet military and industrial targets. The Soviet Union retaliates by bombing New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Detroit.