Thirteen films that are essential to understanding the nuclear age

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a special issue this month (July 2026) dedicated to Doomsday and the Movies. There are great articles about many specific movies. They asked me to come up with a list of 13 essential films for understanding the nuclear age, which I am reprinting below (with their blessing). I also (quite laboriously) chose the film clips to accompany all of them, which I thought captured the aspects that I thought made them “essential,” without necessarily spoiling the films (and sometimes their most iconic scenes) for those who have not seen them.

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 t…