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'Dr. Strangelove' (1964) -

Stanley Kubrick directed this movie about a general who tries to pull the world into a self-destructive nuclear war.

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'Godzilla' (1954) -

Sadly, Japan does have a history with nuclear bombings. In this fictional depiction, Godzilla is a giant prehistoric creature awakened by nuclear radiation.

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'Silkwood' (1983) -

'Silkwood' is a biopic about plutonium plant employee Karen Silkwood. She was a whistleblower who died under mysterious circumstances.

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'Them!' (1954) -

'Them!' was the American answer to the Japanese 'Godzilla'. The monsters in question were radiation-mutated gigantic ants.

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'The Hunt for Red October' (1990) -

The Soviet Union's newest nuclear submarine, the Red October, goes rogue, and America goes looking for it as fears of a nuclear attack loom.

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'Split Second' (1953) -

Escaped criminals hold a group of people hostage in a ghost town that is scheduled to be destroyed by a nuclear bomb.

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'Superman IV: The Quest for Peace' (1987) -

Christopher Reeve's final Superman movie has a clear anti-nuclear message. After all, Superman gets rid of all nuclear weapons by throwing them into the sun!

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'Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull' (2008) -

In the opening scene, we can see Indiana Jones at a nuclear test site. He manages to take shelter in a fridge and survive the blast.

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'WarGames' (1983) -

In 'WarGames,' we see a teenager hacking into a military computer and playing the game Global Thermonuclear War. It turns out the computer is run by artificial intelligence, and the threat of a real nuclear war becomes real.

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'Fail-Safe' (1964) -

The movie covers the Cold War-related anxiety over a nuclear conflict.

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'Crimson Tide' (1995) -

'Crimson Tide' deals with conflicting interpretations of an order to launch a nuclear attack, circumstances that parallel a real incident that took place aboard the Soviet submarine B-59 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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'Beneath the Planet of the Apes' (1970) -

'Planet of the Apes' (1968) and its subsequent sequels (which are prequels) all touch on nuclear subjects. In 'Beneath the Planet of the Apes' (1970), we meet a group who worship a nuclear missile known as the Alpha-Omega Bomb.

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'On the Beach' (1959) -

The movie is set Melbourne, Australia, which was the only major city still standing in the aftermath of a nuclear war in this work of fiction.

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'Matinee' (1993) -

'Matinee' (1993) is a fun movie despite its subject—nuclear fears in America during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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'The Bedford Incident' (1965) -

The captain of the American destroyer USS Bedford is in determined pursuit of a Soviet submarine detected off the coast of Greenland. The story is based on a real-life incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the aforementioned Soviet submarine B-59 was pursued in the Atlantic Ocean by the US Navy.

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'The Dead Zone' (1983) -

Christopher Walken plays a man who can foresee the future. When he meets a candidate for the US Senate, he has a vision of him dropping the nuke on the Soviet Union as president.

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'The Dark Knight Rises' (2012) -

Gotham City is held hostage with a nuclear weapon and Batman tries to save the day.

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'The China Syndrome' (1979) -

'The China Syndrome' is about an accident at a nuclear plant. Coincidently, 12 days after the  movie came out, the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania occurred.

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'Mission: Impossible – Fallout' (2018) -

Ethan Hunt and his crew try to recover three plutonium cores from the bad guys.

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'Thirteen Days' (2000) -

The film depicts how close America was to nuclear warfare during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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'Goldfinger' (1964) -

James Bond tried to stop an evil businessman from  irradiating America's gold supply in Fort Knox with a bomb.

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'The Sum of All Fears' (2002) -

A CIA analyst tries to stop a neo-Nazi faction from detonating a nuclear bomb that would trigger a conflict between the US and Russia.

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'K-19: The Widowmaker' (2002) -

The captain of the Soviet Union's first ballistic missile nuclear submarine, the K-19, tries to prevent a nuclear disaster that would trigger a war with the US.

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'Twilight's Last Gleaming' (1977) -

Robert Aldrich's political thriller is about a rogue Air Force general who escapes a military prison and takes over a nuclear missile silo. He then threatens to start World War III unless the president reveals a piece of top-secret intelligence on national television.

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'Battle Beneath the Earth' (1967) -

China uses high-tech burrowing machines to tunnel through the Earth and plant nuclear bombs in strategic locations under the US.

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'Space Cowboys' (2000) -

Retired test pilots are sent into space to repair an old Soviet satellite, only to find out that it is loaded with nuclear missiles.

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'Under Siege' (1992) -

Arms dealers try to take over a US Navy battleship in order to sell the ship's nuclear-tipped Tomahawk Cruise Missiles.

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'Kiss Me Deadly' (1955) -

This film noir revolves around a private investigator, a hitchhiker, and a mysterious box that cannot get into the wrong hands. We won't tell you what's in the box, but it certainly is radioactive!

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'The World Is Not Enough' (1999) -

This James Bond movie features a terrorist who steals a nuclear bomb in order to create an accident with a stolen nuclear submarine, in order to increase petroleum prices.

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'Oppenheimer' (2023) -

This Christopher Nolan thriller is a biopic about theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who became known as the "father of the atomic bomb."

Sources: (IMDb) (Yardbarker) (MovieWeb)

See also: The man behind the movie—Who was J. Robert Oppenheimer?

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