Doomsday machines : technological anxiety in nuclear culture

Abstract

This work is an examination of nuclear war as it appears in the fiction, film and television of the Cold War, from roughly 1949 to 1991, proposing that the depiction of nuclear conflict in the mass culture Cold War constituted a ‘nuclear culture industry’, after the thought of Theodor W. Adorno. This work argues, through textual analysis, that depictions of nuclear war in mass culture not only introduced the concept of nuclear war to the public, but also normalised the idea of the nuclear by providing a diverse means by which artworks could confirm the authority of those overseeing nuclear weapons, even in works that appeared to dissent strongly with the nuclear order of things.