10 Lesser-Known Songs About Nuclear War to Get Your WWIII Playlist Started Right

Essential tunes for our inevitable glow-up!

You know what’s hot right now? Talking about nuclear war.

While CNN is running opinion pieces about the most likely nuclear scenarios, Joe Biden is tossing around the word “Armageddon” like he’s the second coming of Ronald Reagan. All while former world heavyweight boxing champ and current mayor of Kyiv Wladimir Klitschko promises that if Putin says he’ll use nukes, he probably means it.

Just like that time he said he’d look cool on a horse.

With all of that being the case, it’s high time we start planning for our soon-to-be-on-fire future by stockpiling essential items like food, water, and bangin’ tunes!

To that end, I’ve assembled this list of ten slightly lesser-known songs about nuclear war. That doesn’t mean the songs themselves are necessarily obscure. It’s just that, if you look up any list of songs about our eventual atomic destruction, every damn one of them includes stuff like “99 Luft Balloons” or “Safety Dance” or any number of other songs that everyone already knows about.

So, hopefully, we’re mixing it up a bit here today. Let’s see!

Was Not Was - “Walk the Dinosaur”

Did you know this late-80s novelty hit was about nuclear destruction? I certainly did not, but in my defense, I hate this song.

Don’t get me wrong, I accept that it is a very fun and catchy number. But what you have to accept is that I’m old enough to remember when this song first hit the airwaves. It was one of those records that was played all the time everywhere for a solid six months or so, and it wore me the hell out.

Watching the video again all these years later, I’m far less bothered by it. Also, knowing it’s about nuclear war makes it infinitely more rad. If you read the lyrics in general close enough, you’ll pick up the apocalypse hints from the very beginning. The secret message is most apparent in the final verse, though:

A shadow from the sky much too big to be a bird/A screaming crashing noise louder than I've ever heard/It looked like two big silver trees that somehow learned to soar/Suddenly a summer breeze and a mighty lion's roar

Those lines describe someone watching nuclear weapons fly through the sky and the moment they make impact. After that, the lyric changes from “I walked the dinosaur” to “I killed the dinosaur.” Classic human progress!

Grandmaster Melle Mel & The Furious Five - “Beat Street Breakdown”

It’s easy to miss that the dawn-of-rap classic “Beat Street Breakdown” by Grandmaster Melle Mel & The Furious Five is about nuclear war. I mean, unless you’ve listened to it from beginning to end even just once while paying the most moderate amount of attention.

If you do that, about four minutes in you’ll surely realize that the narrator wants you to know that nuclear destruction is on the horizon.

A fight for power, a nuclear shower/A people shout out in the darkest hour/Sights unseen and voices unheard/And finally the bomb gets the last word

You’ll also surely realize that there are still another three minutes left in the song. It’s very long! Seven damn minutes!

You have to get all the way through a verse about a dead movie character before the Armageddon stuff starts, and when you get there you’re probably just gonna be put off that Melle Mel tells you to not be a slave to a computer.

So learn from the past and work for the future/And don't be a slave to no computer

Whatever, old man. We call them phones now.

Gang Of Four - “I Found That Essence Rare”

The nuclear war stuff in this song comes and goes kinda quick. It’s right in the opening verse:

Aim for the body rare, you'll see it on TV/The worst thing in 1954 was the bikini/See the girl on the TV, dressed in a bikini/She doesn't think so, but she's dressed for the H-bomb (For the H-bomb)

That’s a reference to the legend that the bikini was invented to promote the H-bomb back when the United States was testing those left and right even though we were worried it might set the sky on fire.

The truth is the designer named it the “bikini” because he rightly suspected that uptight Americans would find it way more controversial than the atomic tests we were conducting on the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

My main reason for putting this one on the list, despite it including a mere passing reference to nuclear war, is because I really just want people to listen to Gang of Four. The Entertainment! album is an absolute banger that should be in every music collection. Go listen to it right damn now if you never have.

Morrissey - “Every Day Is Like Sunday”

Look, Morrissey sucks now and we all hate him. I get it. That doesn’t change the fact that I have a job to do here, and that job is supplying you with the very best in nuclear apocalypse tune-age.

To that end, Morrissey’s “Every Day Is Like Sunday” is a damn fine choice. I personally think it might be the best Morrissey solo song, but I suppose that’s an argument for another time.

In interviews, he’s mentioned that the lyrics were inspired by Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, a novel about post-apocalypse Australia after a nuclear war. You can especially hear it in the song’s bridge with its references to nuclear fallout:

Trudging back over pebbles and sand/And a strange dust lands on your hands/And on your face, on your face/On your face, on your face

The song itself isn’t technically about nuclear war, though. It’s about a town that’s so boring and dull that it might as well get nuked so everyone can be put out of their misery. I’ve lived in a few of those!

Alphaville - “Forever Young”

It’s no mystery that Alphaville’s 1984 prom theme classic “Forever Young” is about living under the threat of nuclear annihilation. You hear it right there in the opening lines of the song:

Let's dance in style, let's dance for a while/Heaven can wait, we're only watching the skies/Hoping for the best but expecting the worst/Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?

I was 8-years-old when this song came out, and let me tell you, the nuclear tension was palpable all the time. At that point in history, schools still had bomb shelters and all the kids knew that the first and best line of defense against radioactive fallout was to jump under your desk and cover your head. Shit was crazy.

That said, I have always kinda been on the fence about what response the singer was hoping to get to that question about dropping the bomb. Because a whole lot of the rest of the song is about how if he can’t stay young forever he’d rather just die now. And, like…fine, but don’t taunt Russia into taking us all with you, dude.

Prince - “The Most Beautiful Girl In the World”

Prince grew up in a Seventh Day Adventist household, so it should come as zero surprise that his music is absolutely filthy with apocalyptic imagery. The entire foundation of that group’s belief system is that the apocalypse could happen at any moment and you have to be on the watch for it constantly. That kind of stuff sticks in a kid’s head.

There are a bunch of far more familiar nuclear-destruction-referencing Prince songs that could’ve made this list. Three that come to mind off the top of my head are “1999”, “Sign o’ the Times”, and the Controversy album deep-cut “Ronnie Talk To Russia”.

But those are all so obvious! Why go that route when we can inject some goddamn romance into this list with one of Prince Rogers Nelson’s prettiest songs of all-time?

The reference to the end times comes right up top in “The Most Beautiful Girl In the World” and it is sweet enough to steal for your wedding vows:

When the day turns into/The last day of all time/I can say I hope you are in/These arms of mine/And when the night falls before that day/I will cry, I will cry/Tears of joy, 'cause after you/All one can do is die

Damn. Also, I get that he doesn’t specifically mention nuclear war, but he is clearly talking about the end of the world. Honestly, how else are we expecting it to end? No way are we gonna be patient enough to let global warming do it for us. Of course it will be nuclear war.

Violent Femmes - “Hallowed Ground”

This is a weird one! Everything about the Violent Femmes sophomore album, Hallowed Ground, is a little weird, actually. The songs on it were all written when the band was in high school, before their debut album was released.

By the time they were signed, they’d recorded several albums worth of music and decided to put their most pop-oriented stuff out first. That’s the album where “Blister In the Sun” and “Add It Up” and most of your other favorite hits come from.

With their second album, they decided to put out something a little different, and by that I mean it’s a Christian album. Not completely, but there are lots of highly religious-leaning songs that fans wanted to believe were ironic back when they came out. But nope! Turns out lead singer Gordon Gano is just a devout Baptist.

Which leads us to the title track of that second album. The religious and apocalyptic imagery are both on full display right out of the gate, with Gordon Gano reading a bit of a Bible verse:

The prophet is a fool/The spiritual man is mad/For the multitude of thine iniquity/And the great hatred

According to Genius.com, the modern and complete translation of that quote is this:

“The days of punishment are coming, the days of reckoning are at hand. Let Israel know this. Because your sins are so many and your hostility so great, the prophet is considered a fool, the inspired person a maniac."

Yikes! The rest of the lyrics are all about bombs dropping and clouds burning and blocking out the sun. It’s a heavy change in direction for a band that was singing about stealing dad’s car a year earlier.

Warrant - “April 2031”

Full disclosure alert! Of everything on the list, this is the one song I was completely and totally unfamiliar with before smashing that publish button on Substack. I found it on an exhaustive list of songs about nuclear war. I gave it a listen purely out of the curiosity that comes with finding out that the people who brought you the ‘80s hair metal classic “Cherry Pie” also had thoughts on human extinction.

Don’t get me wrong, “April 2031” is still plenty cheesy in plenty of ways.

That said, it is an interesting concept. The lyrics tell the story of a man living in a post-apocalypse version of the future (April 2031, to be exact) where life has been so bad for so long, things like blue skies and white clouds and birds are all just legends now. There’s a man-made nuclear ring around the moon and the threat of radiation sickness is always present. Looking out a window requires safety glasses. It’s a fun bit of world building that I did not expect from this band.

The song is still kinda corny, though. That I did expect.

The Postal Service - “We Will Become Silhouettes”

Man, can we get another Postal Service album? Please? Someday? Probably not. If my understanding of marital law is correct, Zooey Deschanel would’ve gotten custody of Jenny Lewis in her divorce from Ben Gibbard.

Anyway, this song! Everything about it, from the lyrics to the video to the instrumentation is reminiscent of the Cold War ‘80s. The lyrics deliver that with the subtlety of a communist hammer to the head:

I wanted to walk through the empty streets/And feel something constant under my feet/But all the news reports recommended that I stay indoors/Because the air outside will make/Our cells divide at an alarming rate/Until our shells simply cannot hold/All our inside's in and that's when we'll explode/And it won't be a pretty sight

This song more than any other on the list really captures the mood around nuclear war in the ‘80s for me, at least on the Ronald Reagan side of things. While the lyrics are all about destruction and devastation, the mood of the song is fairly upbeat.

That was the thing about Reagan. There was a lot of talk and concern surrounding the idea that he was a dispensationalist. In other words, he was someone who believed it was his responsibility to bring about Armageddon so as to clear the way for the return of Jesus. In his view of things, the United States would survive a nuclear war with Russia and it would ultimately be a good thing.

Reminder, that maniac carried 49 of 50 states in the 1984 election.

Local Natives - “Megaton Mile”

Hey! Sound off in the comments with your favorite song about nuclear annihilation! This is mine!

It’s a song from LA band Local Natives off their fourth album, Violet Street. To me, it sounds like a Motown song about Los Angeles being destroyed in a nuclear blast.

Speaking of that, I think part of the reason I like it so much is because, as far as the instrumentation goes, it reminds me of “I’ll Be Around” by The Spinners…

…which might be my absolute favorite song of all-time.

So “Megaton Mile” has that going for it. I also appreciate all the ways the lyrics play up the suddenness of the event, whereas a lot of other songs about nuclear war just focus on the bleakness afterward.

No alarms or pale riders/No teary-eyed anchors/It took so long for it all/To change with just a word

Also, it’s not a completely hopeless song, and I dig that. It’s clear that, if nothing else, the narrator and his love interest survived, as evidenced here…

Abandoned cars on the freeway/A terracotta rush hour/You heard me calling out your name

…and here…

You said it was beautiful/As much as it was terrifying

So hey, maybe Reagan was right and we will survive! Just joking, Reagan was wrong about everything.

Oh, and one last thing I truly love about this song. After that line about the blast being both beautiful and terrifying, there’s an air raid siren solo.

It’s a very cool and unique moment that, even if just for a second, might take your mind off the fact that the only reason I wrote this article is because someone’s probably gonna drop a nuke on someone soon.