The 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick) came after the major nuclear scare of the 1950s and immeidataely after the confrontation between the United States and Russia over missiles in Cuba. It was produced at the height of the Cold War and the tensions of that period. The vision of nuclear power in the movies turned away from the power and ascendance nuclear power gave to the United States to a greater concern for the threat it posed to the United Stats and the world at large. The vision now was of the Apocalypse, to be brought on by a chain reaction as in the film On the Beach (1959) so that all life on earth would be wiped away in a nuclear war. In that film, the image was less of the devastation of direct bombing and more of the lingering death that would ensue from radiation and fallout after the war. The same images were given comic treatment in Dr. Strangelove (1964), with the result the same--the end of the world as we know it. Fail-Safe (1964) covered the same issues in a serious way, and if the world did not end in this film, the calculated destruction that resulted from an accident raise fears to a high level. Dr. Strangelove gains pwoer from the time in which it was made and the international tensions of that era.
Mary W. Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein is a cautionary tale about the excesses of science in which a being is created and then turns on his creator. In the 1950s and into the 1960s, America passed through what might be called a Frankenstein-moment as nuclear power burst on the scene first as a wonder that had been harnessed by American scientists in time to end World War II and then was perceived more and more as a threat because our enemies also had this awesome power. Americans quickly learned about the dangers posed by nuclear energy, dangers in the form not only of unimaginable destructive power but of radiation sickness and death. ...