Iconography of an Apocalypse

An Introduction

Recently I watched Terminator Zero, which like every Terminator movie—or TV show in this case—is about many things, but specifically it’s about the end of the world. I think a lot of things are in some way about the end of the world nowadays.

It’s not hard to see why. The climate is fucked, society is generally seen to be on the decline, wealth inequality is at an all time high. Things are going poorly. In many ways it feels like we are already living in the pre-apocalypse, and there is a palpable anger and disgust in the air.

But this is far from the first time that we’ve considered the end of the world. Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, the Norse, etc also had notions of the end times. The difference is that those end times were natural, in that they were the result of the gods, the fundamental forces of the world. Nowadays we no longer need the gods, we have tactical nukes. We have deus ex machina, god from the machine.

And the thing about the nuclear bombs is that—like the presence of buses once you started taking them as a child—once you notice them, you cannot unsee them. They’re everywhere.

And nuclear everything has become a part of iconography, of culture, in such a way that its use has mutated from concrete to abstract to somewhere in between.

And that’s what I want to talk about. What does the end of the world look like? What role does nuclear weapons play in that iconography? And how have nukes been used and represented within current film and literature?

Anatomy of an Apocalypse

There are a lot of narratives around the end times. It’s perhaps one of the most enduring ideas that humanity has ever conceptualized. Just as there have always been creation myths, there have also been destruction myths. For centuries the end has been either biblical or natural in nature. Not within the hands of man but within the hands of the divine (or nature). As technology progressed, and our ability to self-annihilate ourselves become every closer, this had begun to shift. Works like Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds describes an end via alien invasion, and H.G Wells The Shape of Things to Come describes an end via (pre-nuclear) war. The causes have begun to shift from biblical to secular. We have taken our destruction into our own hands.

But still the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent a titanic shift in the imagery of the end times. In the next decades, vast swathes of literature about apocalypse now have nukes as their instruments of death, from On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1957), various episodes of The Twilight Zone, Fallout, Adventure Time, The 100, and many more.

What stands out other than the sheer volume of stories about nuclear apocalypse, but the proliferation of apocalyptic narratives as a whole. While the causes have diversified to include alien invasions, ecological collapse, societal breakdowns, and zombie outbreaks, nuclear weapons seem to have served as a harbinger of the existential terror that would henceforth define much of our media.

Seeing all this media about the apocalypse, you have to ask why. Why is this such a significant cultural event? What is it in ourselves that is being reflected in all this media? I think the answer is simple, it’s what people are suspecting. As I already said, there is a feeling that we are living in the pre-apocalypse. That the world is in decline, and a breaking point is approaching. There are so many tensions right now. Diplomatic tensions, social tensions, ecological tensions. Any of them could trigger a collapse, but not all of them can trigger an apocalypse. Not on their own. And that’s where the nukes come in, they are the endgame when tensions finally snap. A means to a literal end, to lash out at everyone, to annihilate everything in a focused yet blind rage.

Yet this paradoxically coincides with a sort of dissociation from the past harm and future danger that the atomic bombs represent. I think that this is one avenue where apocalypse stories can be constructive. They can help remind us of the real human cost. It’s easy to drown in the sheer scale of the potential destruction. To conceptualize the threat as a game between nations, and then to view its consequences through that lens. We use game theory to rationalize war, and its consequences. And nowhere is this more pervasive than in the medium of games.

Game of Death

DEFCON is a—critically acclaimed—2006 strategy game in which players compete with each other to cause the opponents the maximum casualties while minimizing their own. Typical gameplay sees heavy casualties from all sides. Interestingly, gameplay continues until at least 80% of available nukes have been launched or destroyed.

On one hand, the game was effective in warning players of the dangers of nuclear warfare. In a study by Concordia University, participants were divided into groups, with group 1 playing DEFCON and group 2 reading articles on nuclear weapons. DEFCON players were less likely to believe that they would survive a nuclear war, but also less likely to believe that one would happen. It is effective anti-nuclear propaganda, right?

On the other hand, the idea of gamifying the nuclear war is horrifying. The language of the game is inherently dehumanizing. 1 million deaths is labeled the awesome “megadeath”, while 1 million survivors are labeled the banal “survivor”. DEFCON places the player in the position of the state, and not the individual, and the format of a strategy game necessitates a level of detachment from the horrors of their actions. Players are encouraged to think of destruction and protection in utilitarian terms. Enemies defeated and civilians saved. It’s a numbers game.

This utilitarian mindset pervades the game and its players. In forums, the players laud the game, saying “DEFCON was developed not just as a nuclear strategy game, but as a way to send a horrifying message. To make people feel the full awful weight of such skirmishes. And it was ridiculously effective at this.” (artificial, DEFCON Steam Discussion) In this post, and the subsequent discussion, you notice the way that the message is described in gamified strategy terms. The point that the game is making is that regardless of strategy, it’s impossible not to suffer heavy casualties against other skilled players. Mass death is inevitable. User Ufnu is informative here

Hi!

I am not trying to specifically reproduce the dark atmosphere of DEFCON, instead ICBM is more focused on different strategic doctrines.

In DEFCON you definitely get this depressing feel and the general understanding of the nuclear war implications, but one question remains unanswered. Like “ok, I see that a nuclear war cannot be won against the equal nuclear power, but WHAT IF I am smart enough to get some advantage before starting it?”

So in ICBM you can be that smart a$$ and try to implement your own strategy to disable enemy possibility to respond, thus breaking the MAD principle.

And the game tries to show that any strategy will still result in MAD, even if you lose less than your enemy. Unless you play 1v1 against a novice player, any war is extremely bloody and all sides suffer a lot.

–Uhra

This aligns with the message presented in the 1983 movie War Games. In this movie, high school student David Lightman stumbles upon an artificial intelligence named WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) while wardialing numbers looking for online games to play. In its climax, WOPR attempts to unlock the nuclear codes and launch America’s arsenal of missiles. To stop it, David directs it to play tic-tac-toe against itself. This results in a long string of draws as WOPR learns futility and the concept of no-win scenarios. When WOPR gains access to the nuclear codes, it first cycles through all its simulated nuclear war scenarios, finding that none result in a win, or as the computer says “WINNER: NONE”. Having discovered mutually assured destruction, the computer remarks that nuclear war is “A STRANGE GAME. THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY.”

What’s missing, you’ll note, is any moral reasoning. This is unsurprising within the story given that it’s being said by a computer. However, by having this be the climax, the story also takes this same stance. The issue of course is that mutually assured destruction ought not to be the foundational reason behind which we should halt nuclear war. Nuclear war would not be made better if there was some way in which one side could annihilate the other without repercussion. Like DEFCON, war games boils down opposition to nuclear war into a game which incidentally is not advantageous for either time.

This whole discussion might make you think that games are inherently a poor medium with which to express the concept of apocalypse or of nuclear war. I disagree.

Let’s talk about the iconic 1980 arcade game missile command. Missile command has you fight off increasingly difficult waves of nuclear attacks from annihilating your small settlement.

Unlike DEFCON, the format of missile command—that being an arcade game—works in its favor. In Missile Command, winning is impossible. You will lose, the question is how long you can last. And that’s how Missile Command can make the player feel dread. While it does not have the graphical fidelity to properly express its violence, its gameplay does. The player experiences a frantic, desperate battle against the inevitable, just as the tower operators that they embody do within the game.

The issue with gamifying MAD is when the consequences are also boiled down to that same gamified terminology. Nuclear war is not conceptually terrifying because there is no winner in a battle between skilled adversaries, as Uhra describes. It’s terrifying because of what it will do to people, animals, and the earth itself. The cost of nuclear war is not borne by nations, it is borne by individuals.

Event Horizon

One of the insidious things that has happened as the imagery of nukes has permeated all of popular culture is the dilution of its personal horrors. While the nukes still pose an existential threat, and no rational person would disagree with such a sentiment, there is a feeling of disassociation. We feel protected by MAD, insulated by the Nash equilibrium that we occupy, that launching nukes would be a net negative for any instigator. This is true, but it should not comfort us as much as it has. The shadow of a nuclear apocalypse looms as large as it ever has.

Disassociation is deeply intertwined with the pervasiveness of apocalyptic stories in modern media. These stories serve as a mirror to our fears and uncertainties, and they proliferate because they allow us to process the enormity of existential threats in ways that feel accessible. The narratives are compelling not just because they depict destruction, but because they reflect our anxieties about control, responsibility, and the fragility of civilization.

And yet, as these stories multiply, their impact can diminish. Repeatedly witnessing the end of the world, whether in movies, games, or literature, risks turning catastrophe into entertainment. The gamification of nuclear conflict exemplifies this. By translating the horrors of nuclear war into systems of strategy and play, we risk framing annihilation as an abstraction—a puzzle to be solved or a scenario to be mastered. This detachment from the human cost of nuclear war reduces its moral urgency, making it easier to engage with the apocalypse intellectually rather than emotionally.

But this too tells us about ourselves. Media is a two way street. It shapes and is shaped by the world around it. The gamification of nuclear conflict, the proliferation of apocalypse media, are all reflections of our modern sensibilities of conflict, its causes, its effects, and its harbingers.

References

1. M. Kudō, “Terminator Zero.” Production I.G., Japan, 2024
2. “DEFCON: Everyone Dies.” Introversion Software, United Kingdom, 2006.
3. “Missile Command.” Atari Inc., United States, 1980.
4. “War Games.” MGM/UA Entertainment Company, 1983.