Understanding the Imaginary War: Culture, Thought and Nuclear Conflict, 1945-90

This book 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 chapters chart imaginations, intellectual reflections and cultural representations of nuclear war in a comparative perspective. Understanding the imaginary war 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 debates among physicians, the chapters demonstrate the difficulties in making the unthinkable and unimaginable - nuclear apocalypse - imaginable. Thus, the collection makes nuclear culture relevant for an understanding of the history of the decades from 1945 to 1990. The book will be required reading for teachers and students in history, cultural studies and political science who want to understand the cultural dynamics and repercussions of nuclear weapons. It will be read by everyone who wants to understand how the bomb shaped the notion of a civilization that looked into the abyss of total annihilation.