SCREEN GIVES REALITY TO HUMANITY’S NUCLEAR NIGHTMARES : It Was Almost Impossible for Anyone of a Certain Age Not to Flash on Images From ‘On the Beach’ and ‘China Syndrome’ When Reports of the Soviet Tragedy Became Known : CHERNOBYL: A DISASTER THAT VALIDATED VISIONS

MYSTERY CLOUD CIRCLES EARTH! DEATH! DESTRUCTION! MUTATIONS! COULD THIS BE THE END?

Only a heartless cynic would have scribbled “Coming soon to a theater near you” beneath last week’s headlines. But as images of mass destruction gripped millions--from the highest levels of the U.S. government to the streets of Warsaw--there was a strange sense that we had all been to Chernobyl before.

And we had--in “The China Syndrome,” in “The Day After,” in “Testament,” in “Threads,” in “Silkwood” and in scores of other Hollywood films and TV programs that, for four decades, have captured and forged the mass audience’s images of the atom, as a power of both benevolence and unfathomable horror.

In a story without pictures from a place without witnesses, a frightened world conjured nightmares forged by this city of dreams.

“It’s too easy to say that life follows art,” said “Testament” director Lynne Littman. “I pictured a nightmare. If pieces of that nightmare are taking place, then there’s no sense for me (to say) ‘I told you so.’ ”

For Littman and other film makers who have dealt with the theme of nuclear destruction, the accident in Chernobyl was just as frightening as for the rest of us. What sets them apart, however, is that they have articulated their concerns for millions of others.

For the 60% of Americans born after the United States became the only nation ever to use atomic weapons on another country, Hollywood’s image of the atom may be the only image there is.

“I don’t know that I can point to any satisfaction in that,” said Nicholas Meyer, director of “The Day After.” “I don’t think the I-told-you-so syndrome is especially helpful.”

Certainly the best-known instance of film foreshadowing nuclear reality was the remarkable coincidence of “The China Syndrome” and the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island power station in Pennsylvania. The movie, which had generated plenty of pre-release controversy and was labled a fantasy by the nuclear-power industry, made its Los Angeles debut less than two weeks before the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history.

The movie even included the prophetic line that a nuclear reactor meltdown “would render an area the size of Pennsylvania unhabitable.”

“We felt vindicated on one side,” said producer and star Michael Douglas, “and certainly sad on the other side.”

Douglas, in London last week, saw clips of his film used on television news programs there to explain the events happening in the Soviet Union. He recalled the events of seven years ago.

“I was quite stunned when Three Mile Island happened, in a religious sense,” he said. “I’ve never had a great deal of religious training, but here was something that was just impossible for me to understand.”

Religious symbolism tied to the atom has long been a staple of film makers, whether portraying the atom’s presumed beneficial nature or its deadlier powers. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hollywood went for the atom with a big bang. In movies, the atom became a new kind of secular deity.

Even before World War II, the atom was making its first tentative steps into the mass psyche through pulp science-fiction novels and stories.

Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were foreshadowed in Lester Del Rey’s “Nerves,” written in 1942 and republished in 1956. The book dealt with a nuclear power station accident that threatened to become a major disaster.

The new atomic power was seen as wrathful in the barrage of so-called mutant movies such as 1954’s “Them!” that showed a colony of atomically altered giant ants overrunning Los Angeles, “Godzilla” in 1956 or 1958’s otherwise forgettable “The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman,” who grows to gigantic proportion after a heavy dose of radiation.

The atom wasn’t all bad in the 1950s, as shown by “The Atomic Kid,” the story of a prospector who acquires immunity to uranium after exposure to an atomic blast. The immunity helps to thwart some Communist spies. The movie is described in one film encyclopedia as an “inane romp which raises a few laughs.”

Flipping the ‘50s vision of the atom as humanity’s savior was “The Atomic Cafe,” a 1982 documentary compilation of government and industry pro-nuclear propaganda made to seem ludicrous in the context of today.

The new nuclear deity required a new priesthood, which made its appearance in the person of the atomic scientist-hero. There seemed to be the assumption among film makers that what the technologist had wrought, only the technologist could put asunder.

Actor John Lithgow is the newest novitiate. In “The Manhattan Project,” a film due for release next month, (see related story by Clarke Taylor), Lithgow plays a scientist who must deal with a homemade atom bomb built by a 17-year-old. (Two other soon-to-be-released films also address nuclear issues--”The Patriot,” which has a doubly topical theme of terrorists and nuclear devices, and “Class of Nuke ‘em High,” described as a comedy about a campus monster created out of nuclear wastes.)

Although not an especially weighty film, Lithgow allows, “Manhattan Project” does address the sense that humanity is ill-equipped to deal with this means of ultimate annihilation.

“There is something priestlike about the scientist who understands the inside of the atom,” Lithgow said. “All of us feel this enormous distance from the people who do understand. We kind of stand away and let them run things.”

As the 1950s mutant movies died out, a new type of nuclear film emerged. “On the Beach,” “Dr. Strangelove” and “Fail-Safe” all evoked visions of atomic horror. “Dr. Strangelove,” a black comedy, carried the ironic subtitle “Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

In more recent years, there have been popular films about life after a nuclear war, such movies as “The Road Warrior,” “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome” and “A Boy and His Dog.”

And now, according to publicist Josh Baran, who has worked for various nuclear-freeze projects, at least four movies dealing with nuclear war or weapons are either making the Hollywood rounds or have been filmed--”War Day,” “The Grand Tour,” “Miracle Mile” and “Desert Bloom.”

But it was Sidney Lumet’s “Fail-Safe” that forged the new theme that nuclear technology had outpaced humankind’s ability to control it. In it and later films, the atomic villain ceased to be wild-eyed Russians or Nature run amok. The seeds of destruction became the machines humans had constructed to control the atom.

Even Michael Douglas noted that “China Syndrome” began as a “monster movie” about a “man against this omnipotent machine.”

As the 19th Century’s artists had assaulted faith in God, film makers in the late 20th Century have set out to shatter faith in the atom.

That, said Nicholas Meyer, is the great lesson of Chernobyl. Political powers on both sides of the Cold War, Meyer said, have “encouraged a kind of blind faith in technology” and haven’t heeded warnings.

“We’re always told that it’s safe,” Meyer said. “It’s only after one of these things occurs that the exceptions are pointed out.”

Until quite recently, few films attempted to democratize the nuclear experience. Meyer’s “Day After,” one of the most widely viewed TV programs in history, was one of that mass medium’s first efforts to relate nuclear destruction to the family audience.

Littman’s “Testament” brought the issue even closer to home. With no special effects of mushroom clouds on the horizon or bodies obliterated in a hail storm of atomic fire, “Testament” concentrated on the quiet, useless struggle of one woman and her family in the aftermath of nuclear war.

Littman found the absence of images from Chernobyl especially noteworthy. With no TV or photographs from the site, she said, the public was left with only the earlier images supplied by films and television.

“The irony of this whole process is that they’ve given us no images,” Littman said. “We have been given nothing to have in our mind’s eye.”

One of the few images that did get passed along was a newspaper photo from Poland of a nurse and mother forcing iodine into a child’s mouth. It was a powerful photo, capturing the desperate impotence of humanity in the face of horror.

“That’s ‘Testament,’ ” Littman said, “almost exactly.”

Staff writer Jack Mathews contributed to this article.