Nuclear war themes are present even in products aimed at children. Consider this gum wrapper featuring the wildly successful and controversial Garbage Pail Kids.
Students I have talked to had not even considered the implications of the logo for this popular candy whose wrapper has not changed since the fifties.
Atomic war toys and games appeared shortly after World War II, including a board game that let you bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Atomic Bomb Ring, which was sold for 15¢ and a boxtop from Kix cereal. Kids peered into the plastic to “See Genuine Atoms Split to Smithereens!” Over six million were distributed between 1947 and 1957.
Nuclear war is also a feature of several popular board and computer games, including one entitled B-1 Bomber, which allowed the player to drop warheads on Moscow and another called simply Nuclear War, which treated the subject with a macabre sense of humor. The anti-ballistic missile game Missile Command had a considerable vogue some years back and even turned up in fiction. This game combined the original 1945 atomic bomb test, named Trinity, with the bombing of Hiroshima and a future nuclear holocaust.
Such a computer game is the focus of this comic book story in which a strategic planner accidentally becomes enmeshed in his son’s game rather than the scenario he was supposed to be testing.
The cartoonist comments on the hazards inherent in playing at apocalypse by having this mishap result not only in the death of the boy’s father, but in the launching of a real nuclear war.
In this frame from the AXA strip we see her musing on prewar video games such as “Desastre Nuclear,” visible in the background.
The popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles become involved in a post-holocaust scenario in this game.
