As a biopic, Oppenheimer (2023) is a film that borrows from other genres to subvert its own. Where a biopic’s goal is to tell a true story (seemingly) in its entirety, Oppenheimer takes an expressionist approach to reality. It uses surrealist scenes to serve as literal expressions of characters’ emotions. Oppenheimer’s wife Katherine is interviewed about his affair with Jean Tatlock so she must also watch them writhe, naked, before her. 

Of these breaks from reality, the most poignant is in its depiction of nuclear disaster. It’s a horror scene in a movie that isn’t a horror film. After months of research prove successful and the bomb drops without a hitch, J. Robert Oppenheimer gives a victory speech to his weary staff who have given years of their life to this project. His triumph is undercut by visions of a world melting into a burning white, of nuclear disaster wreaking havoc over and over to the scene before him. He watches flesh rend from bone and tries to congratulate those who created the deadliest weapon in history on their hard work.

Nuclear horror is a genre born out of the atomic bomb. It came into the world with a bang but leaves a lasting impression. Oppenheimer is only the latest addition to a long history of art trying to grapple with a world after the A-bomb (okay, well, not the latest addition, but it was when I first started writing this article in July of last year). In this article, I want to dive into the history of how nuclear horror came to be. We’ll look at what kinds of fear it taps into and how it remains relevant, even today. 

The creation of the bomb and the birth of all evil

“Listen up – there’s no war that will end all wars.”

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

July 16, 1945. A New Mexico landscape is changed forever. The Trinity tests, dramatized in Oppenheimer, are often portrayed as a paradigm shift, a point of no return. When it comes to these weapons of mass destruction, their usage by a government that controls them is not a matter of if but when. Oppenheimer expands on this point, making it one of the central concerns of the movie. But it’s not the first piece of media to talk about the Trinity tests. 

“There’s a sort of evil out there. Something very, very strange in these old woods. Call it what you want. A darkness, a presence. It takes many forms but… it’s been out there for as long as anyone can remember and we’ve always been here to fight it.”

Sheriff Truman, “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer” season 1, episode 3 of Twin Peaks

Season 3, episode 8 of Twin Peaks takes us to New Mexico on the night of the Trinity tests, where the bomb’s explosion gives birth to BOB, a spirit of pure evil and the cause of all suffering in the show’s previous seasons. 

“In Hiroshima in America, Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell argue that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki represents the foundation of contemporary American malaise. No longer the repository of freedom, but instead mass murder, the nation forced itself into historical amnesia. The film art of Kubrick and now Lynch are antidotes to this process of repression, a gesture of hope for redeeming the original, redemptive project of the United States.”

Walter Metz, “The Atomic Gambit of Twin Peaks: The Return”

In essence, nuclear horror taps into the idea that there is a great evil in this world, and humanity put it there. It is not a Satanic figure, one external to us who seeks to drag us down to his level. It is our legacy, our fault. What is a bomb if not a symbol of total destruction? 

To explore this idea, Oppenheimer takes the traditional optimism at the core of biopics and the spirit of ingenuity common to what I’m going to call “science movies” and sets it against a backdrop of war. These concepts have an inherent tension. War is destructive and violent whereas “science movies” are hopeful and constructive. They are often biopics about a wonderful life worth making a movie about, about a scientist whose devotion to academia leads them to discover the secrets of the universe. It’s The Theory of Everything (2014) and Hidden Figures (2016). It’s the joy of discovery. Science is this beautiful culmination of a deeply human curiosity. What makes us human is how we look up and see stars. Yadda yadda. All of this is present in Oppenheimer; you see the joy of exploration; music swells as the experiment yields results. The human mind is creative and wonderful and finds pathways never before uncovered. And yet, all the while, it is impossible to forget that all this creative energy is being poured into the creation of a weapon. Not just any weapon. A weapon that will forever change the world.

The horror comes not because there is suffering, but because it is our fault. Or as Nietzsche put it so succinctly: “God remains dead. And we have killed him.” 

In 1961, Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki wrote “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima”, a piece inspired by the dropping of the atomic bomb (and which David Lynch uses in Twin Peaks). The threnody is a master class in tension, unmasking the terror at the core of nuclear horror. It is uncomfortable to listen to: high-pitched and erratic, underscored by a crackling noise reminiscent of a radiation detector. Even its rests are not true silence for there is always some noise going on in the background. The sound is metallic, unnatural. This is not music that soothes. 

Although not inspired by the same event, George Crumb’s “Black Angels” uses a lot of similar techniques. “Black Angels” is also a threnody, a wailing ode, although it references the horrors of the Vietnam War. Like “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima”, it uses whining noises that many would be remiss to call music to express a sound of suffering. Its aggressive start is like the screaming of insects. To hear music inspired by warfare is to hear the victims of humanity’s greatest sins. 

The birth of all evil? A brief interlude, or how I learned to stop taking David Lynch at face value and love nuance in my criticism of the United States

The idea that the atomic bomb is the birth of all evil is quite a statement. As Jack Nicholls puts it in “Twin Peaks – Or How David Lynch Never Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” the Trinity Test in Twin Peaks acts as an “Original Sin for America (at least if you leave out slavery and racial genocide, as Lynch usually does).” And fair enough. How can a country that has also participated in centuries of chattel slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the destabilization of any government deemed not capitalist enough really point to any one origin of evil? Lynch’s romanticization of an “era of innocence” before the bomb only works if we are willing to accept the 1940s, 50s, and 60s as innocent. 

I think, when it comes to nuclear horror, “the bomb” offers an easy way out. It’s easy to point to a literal weapon and say “Look. There it is. The worst thing that humanity has done” while ignoring the more embedded and insidious atrocities that are committed on a daily basis to maintain the current social order. Modern slavery exists and that has nothing to do with the atomic bomb. You see a similar flattening effect in art and media about World War II, where Nazis provide a simplistic image of the evil enemy we must defeat. War is easier to palate when there are good guys and bad guys. 

Interlude over

The bomb that changed everything

It’s easy to forget if you didn’t live through it (I didn’t), but the age of MAD was, well, that. Mad. Terrifying. Though not the singular root of all evil, the bomb did change the world. School children practiced hiding in bomb shelters; families prepared for the apocalypse; local councils printed and distributed leaflets about nuclear fallout and the half-life of uranium-235. It was a pervasive fear that gripped a generation.

And before that fear leaked out into the public consciousness, there was the bomb itself. 

“It’s not the Trinity test but I recently came across a horrific depiction of the bombings in Japan which really got me…There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated.” 

Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

It’s estimated that between 110 and 200 thousand people died during the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that’s just counting victims at the time of the bombing. As Nagasaki survivor Yoshiro Yamawaki explained in a profile for Time, “‘The atom bomb killed victims three times,’ a college professor once said. Indeed, the nuclear blast has three components – heat, pressure wave, and radiation – and was unprecedented in its ability to kill en masse.”

The limited footage we have of the bomb’s immediate aftermath is haunting. Yōsuke Yamahata was a Japanese photographer who took hundreds of exposures of Nagasaki in the days after the bombing. His photography is an important historical documentation of the total devastation that the bomb wreaked. Yamahata himself died twenty years after taking the photos, from cancer, at age 48.

It’s no surprise that, in the wake of this devastation, it was Japan that gave the world the most famous example of nuclear horror ever made: Gojira, or as it’s known to English-speaking audiences, Godzilla (1954). 

“…Where science destroys, art defiantly restores. While scientists studied test subjects, Japanese artists sought how to preserve and convey the intangible — stories of loss, helplessness, and anger —, and interpret how the atomic attacks deeply affected the social, political, and cultural landscape of postwar Japan. The artist’s voice is a critical, but often overlooked, piece of the nuclear narrative.”

Lovely Umayam, “Little Boy to Nuclear Boy”

Now a multi-film franchise featuring a whole pantheon of kaiju, Godzilla’s beginnings were somber and focused. Created less than 10 years after the bombs dropped, the 1954 Japanese film is serious in tone and haunting. It’s a film that I watched for the first time as research for this article, and it was completely tonally different from what I expected. In the general cultural awareness, Godzilla movies are schlocky, B-movie creature features with more style than substance. The 50s saw a whole onslaught of this nuclear-fear-driven genre of movie in which Animal A is exposed to some kind of radiation, grows in size, and attacks a carefully constructed city set. 

But the original Godzilla is a sober affair, reminding me more of Twelve Angry Men than something in the realm of Them! So much of the movie features conversation rather than action: they discuss the monster, the ethics of killing it, the morality of weapons of mass destruction, the reality of a post-nuclear future. The movie is also not a subtle allusion to the A-bomb. It directly references it, weaves it into the fabric of its world. In one scene, a citizen laments surviving Nagasaki only to end up in Godzilla’s path of destruction. Godzilla weaves together nuclear reality with fictional imagination. Godzilla only attacks because he is woken by underwater atomic tests in Bikini Atoll, tests that the United States actually performed during their post-war occupation of Japan.

When there are action sequences, they are anything but silly. In “Godzilla (1954) Is a Dark Meditation on Nuclear Weapons”, JP Nunez explains how seriously the loss of human life is felt in the original movie, especially compared to later incarnations in the franchise and genre: “When you watch a modern kaiju film like Godzilla vs. Kong, it’s easy to forget that people die every time these titans smash a building. All you see is the fun action, so you don’t really think about the human lives that are lost when a giant monster rolls through a city.” There are two scenes from Godzilla (1954) that particularly stick out to me as brutally honest. In the one, a woman clutches her children in fear amidst a burning city. Don’t worry, she promises, they will be with their father soon. In the other scene, a doctor performing medical exams after one of Godzilla’s attacks holds up a radiation detector to a seemingly unharmed child, then shakes his head sadly and scribbles something on a medical chart. 

Godzilla himself is modeled after atomic bomb survivors, his mottled skin deliberately evocative, his head the shape of a mushroom cloud. According to the movie’s director Ishirō Honda, Godzilla’s design made radiation visible. Godzilla simultaneously represents nuclear weapon and nuclear victim, placing him in an interesting space, empathetically, for Japanese audiences still reeling from their own run-ins with nuclear horror. Despite his destructive warpath, some Japanese audiences cried at his death. It was, in a way, a tragedy. The movie itself seems to agree; his death is not some glorious battle scene but a grim, set-jawed moment.

“One gets the feeling, particularly in the Japanese films, but not only there, that mass trauma exists over the use of nuclear weapons and the possibility of future nuclear wars. Most of the science fiction films bear witness to this trauma, and in a way, attempt to exorcise it.”

Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster” 

So, how did we end up with this vision of Godzilla as a silly monster movie? Well, not to oversimplify, but it kind of comes down to guilt and distribution rights. In their video “Godzilla: The Soul of Japan”, Kristian Williams explains that Gozilla as we know him today is “as much of an American invention as he is a Japanese one.” While the film came out in Japan in 1954, it didn’t make it to American shores until a couple of years later. And when it did, it came with some pretty major changes. To start, Godzilla (1956) pastes in an American character to serve as its protagonist because Lord forbid audiences in the 1950s sit through a movie that doesn’t have a dashing star-spangled hero. But also, more importantly, the 1956 edition of the movie cuts out most of the original’s political messaging. In fact, it barely, if ever, references the bomb. 

To make matters worse, that 1956 abomination (abombination?) was pretty much the only version of the movie available to audiences around the world until the original Japanese film made its global debut in 2004. For half a decade, Godzilla inadvertently represented two sides to the psychic response to the nuclear bomb: a close, measured look at its implications from the victims and an unwillingness to grapple with its political implications from the instigators.

We see this decoupling of “bomb” and “victim” in a lot of Western nuclear horror. For example, for all their focus on the horrors of the Trinity Tests, both Twin Peaks and Oppenheimer completely ignore the literal effects they had on the populations that surrounded them. It’s all well and good to think about the symbolic horror that comes from the dropping of the first atomic bomb on G-d’s Green Earth, but what about the real horror that continues to affect communities today?

In the movie, Oppenheimer chooses the New Mexico desert as a testing ground because it is deserted and isolated. He makes this offhand comment that “some natives” use it as a burial ground but it is otherwise uninhabited. Even if this was the extent of the land usage, this comment is chilling. How callously he disregards the importance of a people’s place of grieving. 

But the truth of the situation is so much worse. In an interview with Science History, Tina Cordova, whose family lived in Tularosa in 1945, less than 100 miles from where the Trinity Test took place, explains: “The Manhattan Project was an invasion of our land and lives…And the film feels like that too. Without all the Hispanic and Native people . . . Los Alamos doesn’t exist . . . the Manhattan Project doesn’t happen . . . but we don’t think they’ll ever tell that story.”

A consistent and alarming feature of much of nuclear horror comes from its willingness to so often turn away from its own victims. The communities near Trinity were mostly rural, relying on open cisterns to collect drinking water and raise livestock for consumption. These communities are now plagued by cancer, cancer at a significantly higher rate than the rest of the country, even now, three-quarters of a century later. If you read accounts of the people who lived in the area at the time of the tests, the effects they suffered are eerily reminiscent of the accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

“I remember seeing lots of different clouds. I broke out in a rash, my whole body. Burns and blisters. I was sick, nauseous all the time after that… My toenails fell off, and my fingernails, and I lost my hair. A year later my teeth fell out.”

LaVerl Snyder, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War

Dead man walking: the horrors of radiation

“This is the one-two punch of the atomic bomb: impact and aftermath. After the annihilating blast comes the radiation, the creep of poison that makes your cells betray you from within. No wonder nuclear horror films are saturated in paranoia, fear of enemies external and internal blooming over them like a mushroom cloud… Destruction is at once just around the corner and already complete.”

Katy Waldman, The Nuclear Monsters That Terrorized the 1950s

There is something about a nuclear bomb that is uniquely horrific, not just because of the volume of destruction it can cause, but in the way its deadliness comes in waves. Death by radiation comes with a host of implicit horror that is, in part, why I think nuclear horror continues to capture our imaginations. It intersects with body horror and our terror of decay. Radiation poisoning and its effects seem like something from the pages of an evil artist.

“I’m dead but I don’t know it

(He’s dead, he’s dead)

I’m dead but I don’t know

(He’s dead, he’s dead)

I’m dead but I don’t know it

(He’s dead, he’s dead)

Please don’t tell me so

Please don’t tell me so

(You’re dead!)”

Randy Newman, “I’m Dead (but I Don’t Know It)”

There’s a scene in Chernobyl, the miniseries about the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown, that perfectly encapsulates the horrors of radiation. Firefighters are called to the Chernobyl power plant for what is, allegedly, just a standard fire. One firefighter innocently picks up a piece of metal, unaware that it is deadly, radioactive graphite. The dramatic irony of the scene is horrific; as the audience, we realize that the second he touched the metal, he was already dead. He’s standing around, walking, manning a firehose, but he’s on borrowed time. He is dead and he doesn’t know it. All of the men at the scene are. They have been since the second they arrived. 

There is a disconnect in death by radiation, something abject and inevitable. Most violent deaths depicted in horror tend to be quick: bodies transformed to meat, flesh slashed, exploded, ripped apart. Death by radiation has equally disturbing consequences, but they don’t kick in immediately. They start as a cough. The victim looks normal, human. They do not feel the poison enter their bloodstream. 

“As we see onlookers relishing in the beautiful blue glow of the reactor melting down in the distance, a mist of unseen particles rains down — Legasov referred to these particles as tiny bullets, holding the power to rip apart our cellular structure from the inside out — and the citizens of Pripyat were none the wiser that they were being murdered where they stood.”

Aaron Pruner, Hear Us Out: HBO’s Chernobyl Might Be the Most Terrifying TV Series Ever Made

To make matters worse, the horror doesn’t end with the death of the victim. A radiated body remains radiated whether alive or dead. A mother who encounters radiation passes it onto the baby she kisses goodnight; a store clerk to his customers; a lover to their beloved. It is a horror unique in the horror landscape in that it doesn’t need to exaggerate to remain staggering. As Pruner puts it “One shared touch of infected skin or atomically damaged clothing and things won’t end well for you. Sure, you may not become a member of the undead — the real result is much worse.”

Chernobyl and its portrayal of nuclear fallout captures the tense environment that must have pervaded throughout Russia in 1986. In “Chernobyl’s Unique Brand of Horror Sets It Apart”, Jack Coleman describes the somber mood the show sets for audiences as eliciting a “car crash-style fascination.” Each episode feels like the kind of disaster that you can’t look away from.

Radiation is the ultimate horror villain: invisible, deadly, only detectable with equipment that makes a sound like a demon being exorcized when it identifies the offending material. “You might not be able to feel it directly, smell it, or taste it,” explains Ben Kuchera in Chernobyl is the new face of cosmic horror, “but it means death.”

A Time Magazine piece titled After the Bomb collects the stories of various survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In it, they share their thoughts on the bombing and the horrors of radiation. You read about mysterious scabs that plague them, loss of hearing, glass shards growing out of their skin over a day later, kidney issues. There are urges to ban nuclear weapons, an assertion that they cannot coexist with mankind. Nagasaki survivor Takato Michishita draws a parallel between the pernicious nature of radiation and that of war:

“Dear young people who have never experienced war,

‘Wars begin covertly. If you sense it coming, it may be too late.’”

The end of life as we know it

“Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resorting to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all of the Allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn…”

John F. Kennedy, Commencement Speech at American University

There is no war to end all wars. There is no great weapon that ushers in an era of peace. In the media about nuclear extinction, we sense only oppression, fear, and a sense of inevitability. If there is a scrap of optimism, it is not a hope that everything will work out but a prayer that we will be delivered to safety. Somehow. 

In Godzilla, the monster is defeated by a weapon, a weapon the characters attempt to hide from the world. In fact, we feel the threat of this new weapon almost more strongly than the threat of the kaiju. The movie acknowledges that to build something destructive is an inherent invitation to not only your enemies, but to your allies, to use it. The more firepower in the world, the easier it can all burn.

Nuclear horror threatens the very foundation our life is built on: the promise of a future. Like zombie horror, which features the vestiges of what our society once was, but more destructive. Phil Tippett’s Mad God explores a twisted post-nuclear world where life is cheap and violence is currency. As Simon Abrams describes in his review of Mad God, “Imagine, if you will, a dystopian nightmare set in a post-industrialized world that’s forever teetering on its last legs, but never quite falls over.”

An even more literal interpretation of the question “What if the nuclear apocalypse actually happened?” can be found in Mick Jackon’s 1982 Threads. Framed as a documentary, the film explores what would happen if atomic bombs were dropped on the English city of Sheffield. From the immediate gruesome aftermath to the ensuing decades of social collapse, Threads keeps its gaze on the average person. What would their experience be? Who survives? What world awaits them?

The film opens with a narrator explaining that “the connections that make a society strong also make it vulnerable.” We see, from the sheer destructive might of nuclear weapons, how easily the world as we know it crumbles after a single event that lasts less than an hour. In a 2009 interview about the movie, Jackson explains that his goal with the film was explicit: to make literal and tangible the faraway-seeming threat of nuclear annihilation. “I thought that if I acted this out for them as a television drama — not as a spectacle or disaster movie — that would give them a workable visual vocabulary for thinking about the unthinkable.”

“Cathay Caruth defines trauma as the constellation of psychological agony that ensues from ‘the inability fully to witness the event as it occurs, or the ability to witness the event fully only at the cost of witnessing oneself’… In other words, the horror of the experience is so vast that at the moment of witnessing, the subject cannot make sense of the scene or, crucially, process his or her own emotional response.”

Sara Wasson and Emily Alder, “Introduction”, Gothic Science Fiction

In “The Imagination of Disaster”, Susan Sontag suggests that science fiction movies aren’t about science but about disaster. Their format as a film that deals in sounds and images forces us to actively “participate in the fantasy of living through one’s death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself.” Through nuclear horror, “universes become expendable. Worlds become contaminated, burnt out, exhausted, obsolete.” 

The scale of this threat is beyond anything previously imaginable while the scenery is repugnantly familiar. In Threads, the characters are not special or unique; they are a couple getting married; siblings, neighbors, friends, coworkers. The brief snapshot of life that you get before the bomb drops on Sheffield is mundane, average. In another world, it could be your life. 

“…There is a historically specifiable twist which intensifies the anxiety, or better, the trauma suffered by everyone in the middle of the 20th century when it became clear that from now on to the end of human history, every person would spend his individual life not only under the threat of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost unsupportable psychologically—collective incineration and extinction which could come any time, virtually without warning.”

Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster”

Cosmic horror and the powers that be

Cosmic horror is a genre birthed by writer and dickwad H.P. Lovecraft, hence why it’s often referred to as “Lovecraftian horror”. In cosmic horror, characters must come to terms with their inconsequence in the face of an entity so large or complex that it goes beyond the realm of human comprehension. As Tumblr user bramblesand explains:

“An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.

Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.

It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…

It’s an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.

This is madness.”

Nuclear horror taps into cosmic fears, not because of ancient gods or creatures that exist at a universal scale, but because it provokes the realization that total destruction lies in the hands of a few men. That governments led by fallible leaders now hold the codes to raze the Earth in a matter of minutes. You can spend your entire life being a good person, kind to your neighbors and giving and gentle, and that will not make one scrap of difference. You are insignificant in the machinations of your own country. 

Nowhere is this clearer than in the 1982 graphic novel When the Wind Blows or its subsequent 1986 film adaptation. When the Wind Blows follows the quiet lives of Jim and Hilda Bloggs, an elderly couple that’s retired to the peaceful British countryside. Their relationship is charming and bumbling, their days filled with riding country buses down winding lanes and bringing in the washing when it looks like rain. All of that is upended when the radio announces that a nuclear war is brewing, and all citizens of England must prepare. Jim and Hilda, as good British citizens, keep a stiff upper lip as they heed the warnings of their government. They have utter faith in what they are told. They follow the instructions from pamphlets, paint their windows, set aside containers of water; they listen to the radio, ready to jump into action. “We must keep abreast of the international situation, Love,” Jim pontificates, “See, the decisions made by the powers-that-be will get to us in the end.”

Within three days of the bomb striking the island, they die of radiation poisoning, alone and unprepared. 

“How do you admit your government is lying to you and putting you on the receiving end of discretionary nuclear genocide? I remember in school they showed us a film, ‘A is for Atom, B is for Bomb.’ We’ve all in our own minds added ‘C is for Cancer, D is for Death.’ The realization comes that you don’t really have a future.”

Preston Jay Truman, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War

***

As long as there has been nuclear power, there has been nuclear horror. It terrifies us, forces us to grapple with the responsibility of living on a planet with so many other souls and the newfound ability to destroy that all. The popularity of a film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, over half a century after the events it portrays, shows the cultural staying power of these concepts. In all these years, we haven’t really figured out what to do about the great and terrible promise of the A bomb. 

The 1956 edition of Godzilla ends neatly with a classic happily ever after. Humanity triumphs over the evils of nuclear power. The world is safe. We can go back to normal. The original 1954 film is less optimistic. In its closing moments, it instead recognizes that nuclear power is a Pandora’s box that can no longer be closed. From here on out, it can only be monitored:

“I can’t believe that Godzilla was the last of his species. If nuclear testing continues, then someday, somewhere in the world, another Godzilla may appear.”