Overview

The fallout from the nuclear arms race was not limited to strontium 90 and other deadly substances: it also included the mental and imaginative world of an entire generation, adults and children alike. It produced not only nightmares, worried conversations, and activist campaigns but also a diverse array of cultural artifacts, ranging from poems, novels, and paintings to popular songs, slang, movies, advertisements, radio shows, and TV specials. Fallout offers the reflections and observations of noted historian Paul Boyer on the fascinating and complex impact of the bomb in American life from the special perspective of a person who experienced and participated in the events and movements about which he writes. Boyer provides us with a rich understanding of nuclear reality in American thought and culture after 1945.The essays range widely, from a discussion of the shattering impact of the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on a war-weary nation in 1945 to ruminations on the 1995 Enola Gay controversy, when a proposed fiftieth-anniversary commemorative exhibit of the atomic bombing of Japan at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History generated bitter controversy. The book makes clear that even though the Cold War and the superpower nuclear arms race have ended, images of nuclear menace, and troubled memories of the atomic past, continue to stir uneasily in the American consciousness and to provide a fertile theme for mass culture productions, from video games to Hollywood films to best-selling thrillers. Fallout offers a fresh, readable, and timely look at a central shaping force in American culture over the past half century.

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