Understanding the imaginary war

Culture, thought and nuclear conflict, 1945–90

Matthew Grant, Benjamin Ziemann, Benjamin Ziemann, Matthew Grant, Benjamin Ziemann

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781526131904
  9781784994402
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526101334
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This collection offers a fresh interpretation of the Cold War as an imaginary war, a conflict that had imaginations of nuclear devastation as one of its main battlegrounds. The book includes survey chapters and case studies on Western Europe, the USSR, Japan and the USA. Looking at various strands of intellectual debate and at different media, from documentary film to fiction, the chapters demonstrate the difficulties to make the unthinkable and unimaginable - nuclear apocalypse - imaginable. The book will be required reading for everyone who wants to understand the cultural dynamics of the Cold War through the angle of its core ingredient, nuclear weapons.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the Cold War as an imaginary war
• 2 The apocalyptic fiction: shaping the future in the Cold War
• 3 Building peace, fearing the apocalypse? Nuclear danger in Soviet Cold War culture
• 4 Sixty years and counting: nuclear themes in American culture, 1945 to the present
• 5 The imaginative landscape of nuclear war in Britain, 1945–65
• 6 German angst? Debating Cold War anxieties in West Germany, 1945–90
• 7 After Hiroshima: Günther Anders and the history of anti-nuclear critique
• 8 Hiroshima/Nagasaki, civil rights and anti-war protest in Japan’s Cold War
• 9 Catholic anti-communism, the bomb and perceptions of apocalypse in West Germany and the USA, 1945–90
• 10 ‘The nuclear arms race is psychological at its roots’: physicians and their therapies for the Cold War
• 11 Imagining the apocalypse: nuclear winter in science and the world
• 12 Images of nuclear war in US government films from the early Cold War
• Index