Imagining the Worst: Science Fiction and Nuclear War

No sooner had the Second World War ended before articles started appearing in American periodicals graphically describing how the USA might fare in a nuclear attack[1] . Paradoxically since America emerged from the war with its mainland unscathed, its economy buoyant, and as the sole possessor of the new super-weapon, these narratives inverted the privilege of monopoly and expressed a fear of how the Bomb might be turned against the very country which devised it. These imagined attacks were all the more fearsome because they had no historical precedent other than the single bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The coinage of the phrase “Cold War” fed such fears in suggesting a state of war paradoxically present but somehow not happening, a permanent imminence.