Most serious writing in the West about the nuclear threat from the 1950s through the era of détente speculates on what seemed the very real prospect of a nuclear holocaust triggered by the polarized ideologies of the United States and the USSR, especially as the number of nuclear warheads continued to proliferate. Not only politicians, scientists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers, but theologians, novelists, playwrights, poets, even cartoonists and children's authors were preoccupied by life in what credibly felt like a futureless world. Popular journals, Hollywood films, and mass market literature regularly exploited the cultural obsession with the apocalypse, other texts wrestled with the dangerous paradox of, on the one hand, the solipsism of extreme fear of self-perpetuated doom and, on the other, the “psychic numbing” of an era grown complacent about the prospect that much of the world could be eradicated in a matter of hours.

Despite the continuing presence...

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