Nuclear-weapons expert breaks down 8 nuclear bombs in movies and TV

Nuclear-weapons physicist Greg Spriggs rates eight nuclear-explosion scenes in movies.

He analyzes the portrayal of nuclear detonations and their effects in Steven Spielberg's "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (2008), starring Harrison Ford; "Broken Arrow" (1996), starring John Travolta; Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises" (2012), starring Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, and Anne Hathaway; and Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" (1964). He also comments on what a nuclear explosion in outer space would really look like in comparison to Marvel's "The Avengers" (2012), starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and Scarlett Johansson; and Michael Bay's "Armageddon" (1998), starring Ben Affleck, Bruce Willis, and Liv Tyler. He breaks down the underwater detonation seen in "American Assassin" (2017), starring Michael Keaton. And he explains how accurate Christopher Nolan's recreation of the construction of the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos and the subsequent Trinity test was in "Oppenheimer" (2023), starring Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, and Florence Pugh.

Spriggs has been a nuclear-weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for 20 years. He worked on a special project where he scanned, reanalyzed, and declassified old nuclear test films.

You can find more information about the Livermore National Laboratory at: www.llnl.gov

These movies show simulations of the effects of using nuclear weapons near the public. To date, the 1945 atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only instances of nuclear weapons being detonated as an act of war.