Chapter One
The History of Nuclear War in Fiction
Throughout the ages--and long before the invention and development of nuclear
weapons--there had been those who prophesied that the world would end because
of man's wickedness.
Such prophesies were always believed, no matter how many times they had been
proved wrong in the past. There was a wish for, as well as a fear of, punishment.
Once nuclear weapons were invented, the prophecies gained plausibility, although
now they were couched in lay terms rather than religious ones.
Evidence, the more convincing because governments tried to suppress it, proved
that the world could be ended at the touch of a button.
Brian Aldiss, Helliconia Winter (1985)
On the island of Eniwetok, site of the atomic bomb tests of 1947-52, a man
named Traven walks among the concrete blocks, searching for something he fears
to find. He is haunted by memories of the bombing runs against Japan and by the
deaths of his wife and son in an automobile accident for which he blames himself.
He has sought out these sands, fused by the weapons tests, as the setting for his
expiation, blending his guilt with the larger guilt of humanity in creating the
possibility of nuclear war. He wanders through the blocks as through a maze,
returning constantly to the center, finding himself there "when the sun was at
zenith--on Eniwetok, the thermonuclear noon. . . . Its ruined appearance, and the
associations of the island with the period of the Cold War--what Traven had
christened 'The Pre-Third'--were profoundly depressing, an Auschwitz of the soul
whose mausoleums contained the mass-graves of the still undead."
In his classic parable for the atomic age, "The Terminal Beach" (1964), J. G.
Ballard uses the imagery of nuclear war to summon feelings of guilt, despair,
emptiness, and self-annihilation. The protagonists of Ballard's stories and novels
are often fascinated by impending doom, mesmerized by the end of time; but
Traven's quest is a more thoughtful one, an attempt to reconcile his personal guilt
with that of the culture of which he is a product expiating in advance the guilt of
destroying the human race in a thermonuclear holocaust. The freezing of time, a
constantly recurring theme in Ballard's work, is expressed in "The Terminal Beach"
by a fascination with the melted silica which bears the imprint of the old
explosions: "The series of weapons tests had fused the sand in layers, and the
pseudo-geological strata condensed the brief epochs, micro-seconds in duration, of
thermonuclear time."
Many authors have pondered the significance of the bomb in the years since
1945. World War III--the nuclear holocaust--has been fought over and over in the
pages of books and magazines. In a way, these are war stories; but nuclear war is
different from earlier wars in ways that affect its depiction in fiction. First, it is
short. Although some of our fiction depicts lengthy atomic warfare, most of it
assumes the war will be over in minutes, or hours at most. Concepts familiar from
other wars become irrelevant: conscription, the noble sacrifice of soldiers to
defend loved ones at home, the civilian support of the war effort. Indeed, the
distinction between civilian and military is largely erased except that the military
personnel most directly engaged in conducting the war are the most sheltered, and
innocent civilians the most likely casualties. In Helen Clarkson's The Last Day: A
Novel of the Day After Tomorrow (1958), one character comments: "In the old
days, men at arms were always sustained through the immoral act of killing by the
thought that they were not fighting for themselves, but for their children. Today
men ask their children to die for them."
Because nuclear war leaves no time for the traditional distinctions, many of the
qualities central to other modes of war fiction are irrelevant. Courage is of little
use, even for the preservation of one's own life. No amount of loyalty,
determination, self-sacrifice or heroism will deflect an incoming intercontinental
ballistic missile one jot from its programmed course. The hope of victory, which is
all that makes war worthwhile for most, is absent. Mere retaliation can produce at
best a pyrrhic victory, at worst, the end of life on Earth. And where traditional war
fiction appeals to the notion that in combat human character is tested and the
inner self revealed, nuclear war stories are dominated by machinery, not human
beings. The rockets and bombs dwarf the officials who launch them, and the logic
of battle is dictated by technological considerations as much as it is by the
strategic decisions of such officials.
The paradox that the entire point of nuclear war is its own prevention-deterrence--leads to yet other paradoxes. A commander in chief must convince the
enemy that he is determined to fight, if necessary, a war which can only be a
catastrophe for his own nation. The details of strategy must be carefully laid out so
that they may never be used. The more unthinkable the war becomes, the more we
must think about it. Unlike in other wars, the enemy must be well informed of our
plans and resources, for a secret deterrent is no deterrent at all.
A peculiar feature of the age of nuclear combat is the possibility of accidental
war. Wars have in the past been begun on the basis of trivial incidents,
misunderstandings, and errors in judgment; but the notion that civilization might be
ended or life on Earth be destroyed through a technical malfunction or an error in
judgment presents an absurdity of such enormous dimensions that it can scarcely
be grasped. The resultant air of futility about much nuclear war fiction is
convincing in ways that similar views of conventional war might be purposeful or
beneficent seem led by its internal logic to depict it as absurd.
The author of a nuclear war story, then, lacks many of the resources of
traditional war narratives. The genre it has most in common with is not in fact the
war story at all, but the narrative of a great catastrophe: fire, flood, plague.
Nuclear war fiction has necessarily evolved its own conventions, the specifics of
which will be explored in the following pages. It is disheartening to see how soon
the conventions that emerged from this new type of fiction became cliché, how
quickly it became possible to write utterly unoriginal works on the subject. To see
the potentially most awesome of subjects trivialized enlarges one's sense of the
capacity of the human mind for irrelevance. Yet the genre has also produced
thoughtful, powerful works, even a few works of high literary merit.
Hiroshima has had nothing like the literary impact of other great military
events. Even thought this study surveys well over fourteen hundred items--even
allowing for a generous number overlooked--the number of novels, short stories,
and plays depicting nuclear war and its aftermath published in English in any given
year since 1945 has seldom exceeded two dozen. Stories of the atomic holocaust
have never rivaled in number stories of other conflicts such as the American Civil
War or World War II. Even in those years when a good many nuclear war stories
were published, they were rarely widely read: most of them are science fiction, and
until recently science fiction has had a very restricted audience.
There is another, more important reason for the relative unpopularity of nuclear
war fiction: it can be disturbing. Even at its most escapist, it deals with a war many
readers felt to be as inevitable and final as death itself. Unlike historical wars,
World War III will not stay safely in the past to allow itself to be enjoyed. The
armchair general of World War II is reassured by the knowledge that he or she
has survived; the armchair victim of World War III had no such assurance.
Nuclear war must be the most carefully avoided topic of general significance in
the contemporary world. People are not curious about the details. Once in a decade
a book will receive a broad audience: John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946), Nevil
Shute's On the Beach (1957), Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth (1982). But
whereas Civil War buffs who will consume volume after volume about Bull Run and
Vicksburg are commonplace, there are few World War III buffs: almost everyone
seems to feel adequately informed by reading one book about nuclear war. So
thoroughly neglected is the genre that there are many notable novels which have
been almost entirely overlooked or forgotten. This study aims to bring them to the
attention of a wider public.
Some authors of this fiction are mere hacks, unthinkingly using the atomic
holocaust as just another setting for escapist fiction; but most, talented and
untalented alike, are trying to project and thus warn of the danger that confronts
us.
Novelists did not wait until August 6, 1945 to begin writing accounts of atomic
warfare. The public imagination had been inflamed with all manner of wild fancies in
reaction to the discoveries of X-rays by Roentgen in 1895, of radioactivity in
uranium by Becquerel in 1896, of radium and polonium by the Curies in 1898, and of
the possibility of converting matter into energy according to Einstein's relativity
theory of 1905. Popular fiction was not slow to adapt the new knowledge to military
uses.
The atom was viewed as harboring world-shattering power as early as 1895: in
Robert Cromie's The Crack of Doom (London: Digby, Long), a group of madmen are
barely thwarted in their plot to use an atomic device to undo creation. Novelists
were particularly prodigal in the invention of all manner of miraculous rays. In
George Griffith's The Lord of Labour (written in 1906, published in 1911) the
Germans invent a ray which can "demagnetize" metal in such a manner that it
crumbles into dust on impact. The British fleet is manipulated into destroying itself
when it fires its guns at the ray-wielding enemy fleet of wooden ships. But AngloSaxon ingenuity and civilization triumph as the English retaliate with helium-radium
bullets of stupendous explosive power. The supposed healing powers of radioactivity
were touted as early as 1907 in a story titled "Itself" by Edgar Mayhew Bacon (The
Black Cat, July; reprinted in Samuel Moskowitz, ea., Science Fiction By Gaslight: A
History [New York: World, 1968]). Also in 1907 Upton Sinclair wrote a play
concerning atomic weapons which remained unpublished and unproduced until he
revised it as a novel in 1924: The Millenium: A Comedy of the Year 2000 (2 volumes,
Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius, 1924). In it tiny radium weapons are carried by
guards. The new element radiumite, which produces atomic energy, kills all life on
Earth when a mad professor smashes a jar full of it. Only eleven humans who
happen to be flying in an airplane survive. Edgar Rice Burroughs had his Martians
also using radium bullets in 1912 in Under the Moons of Mars (later retiled A
Princess of Mars).
Popular articles and books on the mysterious new sort of energy proliferated
during the early years of the twentieth century, among them Frederick Soddy's
Interpretation of Radium (1908). Soddy's lucid explanation of the new science was
cited by H. G. Wells in 1913 when he wrote what is usually cited as the first novel
depicting a war involving atomic weapons, The World Set Free (published in 1914, on
the eve of World War I). As Ritchie Calder points out in his introduction to the
Collins edition, Wells made plenty of errors. He imagined bombs behaving rather
like reactors, sustaining continuous seventeen-day-long volcano-like explosions. He
confused chemical and atomic reactions and erroneously supposed that the end
product of radioactivity would be gold (fortuitously destroying the precious-metal
monetary standard). Yet, considering that most popular writers saw in radioactivity
a form of magic capable of all manner of miracles (see, for instance, Philip Francis
Nowlan's Armageddon 2419, first published 1928-29), and that early science fiction
was distracted by variegated rays which could cause invisibility or shrink a man to
the size of an atom, it is remarkable that Wells was able to make as much sense out
of the knowledge of his day as he did. He understood Einstein's theory well enough
to grasp that atomic energy would be derived from the annihilation of matter; the
"Carolinium" used in his bombs bears some resemblance to plutonium; and his atomic
bombs are delivered from the air.
The novel, which appeared in 1914, belongs to Wells's pontificating middle period
and is relatively plotless, consisting in the main of lectures on history and an
account of a utopian but authoritarian world government with a monopoly on atomic
weapons. Wells's vision of a united world did not, of course, need the new scientific
discoveries to prompt it; but he was not to be alone in imagining that the
overwhelming power of the atom would force humanity to set aside its petty
nationalistic disputes. Indeed this sanguine view was a mere repetition of the hopes
expressed upon the invention of weapons such as TNT, which were also supposed to
make war inconceivable. Wells's novel, like Hollis Godfrey's The Man Who Ended
War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1908), and other, similar tales discussed in Merritt
Abrash's "Through Logic to Apocalypse: Science-Fiction Scenarios of Nuclear
Deterrence Breakdown" (Science-Fiction Studies 13 [1986]: 129-30) anticipated
post-1945 works in which atomic blackmail per se forces peace on the world-stories that might best be called "muscular disarmament" fiction.
Growing interest in the theme is illustrated by Wings Over Europe: A Dramatic
Extravaganza On a Pressing Theme, a play by Robert Nichols and Maurice Browne
(1929). The British cabinet is confronted by a young man, the son of the prime
minister, who has penetrated the secrets of the atom sufficiently to create worldwrecking bombs and the transmutation of matter. He envisions a utopia
administered by benevolent England, but the greed and militarism of the cabinet
members frustrate his endeavor. In despair, he determines to destroy the world,
but is killed by a truck just before setting off the explosion. Just as the world
seems safe for capitalism and warfare once more, word arrives that the Guild of
United Brain Workers has independently discovered the secret and has placed
atomic bombs in airplanes circling above all the major capitals of the world, aiming
at global rule, underlining the theme that scientific discoveries cannot be kept
secret indefinitely. The secretary of state for foreign affairs gains possession of
the first discoverer's triggering mechanism and plans to confront the Guild with it.
The ending is left in suspense. The play was staged with some success in New York
as well as in London. Also in 1929, Capt. S. P. Meek's "The Red Peril" depicted the
use of atomic weapons against invading airships of the USSR.
In 1932 Harold Nicolson, diplomat and biographer (also the husband of Vita
Sackville-West), published another early muscular disarmament novel, Public Faces;
in it the British impose universal disarmament through their monopoly of atomic
bombs delivered by rockets strongly resembling cruise missiles. Nicolson's weapons
are far more powerful than those of Wells: one dropped off the coast of Florida
creates a tidal wave which kills eighty thousand people, shifts the course of the
Gulf Stream, and permanently alters the climate. Nicolson was less interested in
technical matters than in the political maneuvering of the great powers in which
peace and British supremacy are ensured by the boldly illegal stroke of an
imaginative, headstrong minister.
In contrast, Eric Ambler, in his first spy thriller, The Dark Frontier (1935),
depicted an atomic bomb whose power to dig a mere eighty-foot-wide crater is
treated as a terrible threat to civilization. An idealistic and adventurous physicist
risks his life to destroy the creator of the weapon and all of his notes in the Baltic
dictatorship of Ixania. He does take into account that what has been once invented
can always be reinvented later, but imagines that the world might become peaceful
enough in the meantime to be able to handle atomic power.
In a 1989 Introduction to the 1990 reprint of his novel, "I lay no claim to special
prescience. Having had a scientific education and through it gained access to
academic journals, I had read about the early work of Rutherford, Cockcroft and
Chadwick in the field, and understood some of its implications. How superficial that
understanding was will be apparent now to any high school senior" ("Introduction,"
The Dark Frontier, New York: The Mysterious Press, 1990, p. xi). The fuzzy physics
described in the novel have nothing to do, however, with the physics of a real
atomic bomb.
J. B. Priestly escalated the potential carnage in his 1938 novel, The Doomsday
Men, in which a group of religious fanatics come close to succeeding in their plot to
destroy the world by bombarding a lump of a newly discovered radioactive element
with a cyclotron, creating a reaction which would have completely disrupted the
Earth's crust, peeling it like an orange. But throughout the twenties and thirties
most popular articles and books on atomic energy focused on its peaceful uses. The
utopia of tomorrow would be created through cheap and abundant atomic power, not
through atomic blackmail. In 1922 Karel Capek's The Absolute at Large envisioned a
cataclysmic world war brought on by the development of a "Karburator" which
liberated pure energy from matter; but the new technology is not itself applied to
weapons and civilization is destroyed by conventional means.
The U.S.-supported research which led to the Manhattan Project began in 1939
amid the greatest secrecy, and the following year the publication or further
articles on atomic theory was prohibited in Britain and America. But just before
wartime censorship was imposed, the announcement of the successful splitting of
uranium 235 and the possibility of power derived from a chain reaction led to a
spate of newspaper and magazine articles hailing the atomic utopia of the future
and darkly hinting at the possibility of weapons being designed by Nazi scientists;
see, for instance, the front page article by William L. Laurence, "Vast Power Source
In Atomic Energy Opened by Science," The New York Times, May 5, 1940; R. M.
Langer, "Fast New World," Collier's, July 6, 1940; and "The Atom Gives Up" by
Laurence in The Saturday Evening Post, September 7, 1940. In a sense, the
Manhattan Project shut the door after the horse had been stolen, as was
acknowledged in a September 8, 1945, editorial in The Saturday Evening Post
revealing that the War Department tried to prevent the distribution and reading of
the Post's 1940 issue even in public libraries across the country. The basic
principles of atomic fission and the possibility of a uranium bomb were common
knowledge, and wartime censorship hid little that spies did not already know; but
popular articles on the subject ceased to appear and the public seemed to forget
about the whole issue during much of World War II.
Only in science fiction did speculation continue, principally in the pages of
Astounding Science Fiction. Editor John W. Campbell, Jr., was by far the most
influential editor in science fiction during the thirties and forties, fostering new
approaches to science fiction, introducing new writers, and assigning story topics to
his authors. He was fascinated by things atomic, and continually urged others to
create stories on the theme. Throughout the 1930s he had written stories
depicting the atomic weapons of the future. While often upstaged by various rays
and beams, atomic blast weapons and bombs appear again and again in stories
written both under his own name and under his pseudonym, "Don A. Stuart."
Sometimes the atomic weapons are capable of ending civilization, or even
obliterating the human race, but ultimately they prove in almost every case to be a
means of liberation.
Evidently unaware of the wartime ban, Campbell published in May 1941 a story
with a more alarmist view, Robert A. Heinlein's "Solution Unsatisfactory," which
came very close to describing the Manhattan Project itself: "Someone in the United
States government had realized the terrific potentialities of uranium 235 quite
early, and, as far back as the summer of 1940, had rounded up every atomic
research man in the country and sworn them to silence." Heinlein overestimated the
difficulty of controlling an atomic explosion, so that what his scientists develop by
1945 is not an atomic bomb, but radioactive dust, which they drop with devastating
consequences on Berlin.
Heinlein's technical errors are unimportant. More significantly, he understood
that atomic weapons research could not be kept a secret, and that America's
nuclear monopoly would be unlikely to create international stability unless it
imposed a new world order. Accordingly, the President issues a peace proclamation,
that, "divested of its diplomatic surplusage," says, "The United States is prepared
to defeat any power, or combination of powers, in jig time. Accordingly, we are
outlawing war and are calling on every nation to disarm completely at once. In other
words, 'Throw down your guns, boys; we've got the drop on you!' "
Unfortunately, the scientists of the USSR--in the story dubbed the "Eurasian
Union"--have also discovered the uses of atomic dust, and the result is the
devastating Four-Days War. (If Heinlein's understanding had been more widely
shared by his countrymen, the U.S. might have been spared the atom spy hysteria
of the postwar era in which politicians seemed to think that the secrets of fission
could be patented and kept secret.) In the war the enemy is destroyed, but power
is seized by the colonel who conceived of using the radioactive dust in the first
place. The world is now at peace, but it has become a vast dictatorship; hence the
story's title.
In 1942 a story entitled "The Incredible Slingshot Bombs" by Robert Moore
Williams appeared in Amazing Stories. A retarded boy nicknamed "Tommy
Sonofagun" stumbles through a time warp created by a high- tension line tower into
a factory which makes pebble-sized atomic bombs; bringing some of them back to
his own time, he creates havoc with his slingshot. He is blown up on a return trip
when he stumbles with his pockets full of the miniature bombs. This story is
notable mainly because of the reaction of a pair of Russian critics, Viktor
Bokhovitinov and Vassilij Zakhartchenko, who were doing an article on American
science fiction for the Literaturnaya Gazyeta ("The World of Nightmare
Fantasies," March 23, 1948, translated and reprinted in Astounding, June 1949): "A
hooligan with an atomic slingshot, isn't this the true symbol of modern
imperialism?" The authors failed to note the pre-Hiroshima date of the story. In
retranslation, the title became "The Incredible Pebbles."
So long as the Manhattan Project security remained in force, stories of atomic
doom remained rare. Another notable exception is Lester del Rey's Nerves
(originally in Astounding, September 1942; expanded, New York: Ballantine, 1956),
which describes a near-disaster in a malfunctioning atomic power plant which
threatens to destroy several states. The scientists who keep the true extent of
the danger secret from the public are depicted as heroes whose titanic efforts
preserve the future of atomic energy by preventing the unscientific hysteria which
would inevitably result were the nature of the threat to become generally known.
Another and much more fantastic atomic plant disaster story was Malcolm
Jameson's "The Giant Atom," in which a device resembling a cyclotron creates an
ever-growing atom which threatens to consume the entire planet. Published in
Startling Stories in 1943, it was reprinted posthumously after Hiroshima and
Nagasaki under the opportunistic title Atomic Bomb, although Jameson's variation
on the Frankenstein's monster theme bears little relationship to the new weapon.
Heinlein's "Solution Unsatisfactory" demonstrates clearly that during the early
1940s anyone possessing a more than casual familiarity with the material published
on atomic science before the imposition of censorship could extrapolate the
possibilities more accurately than Jameson had.
A crisis of sorts was reached in the publication of pre-Hiroshima atomic war
fiction with the appearance in Astounding, March 1944, of Cleve Cartmill's
"Deadline," containing a description of an atomic bomb accurate enough to cause
agents from the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps to call on both Cartmill and
editor Campbell. (This story has been told many times with little variation. See, for
instance, H. Bruce Franklin, Countdown to Midnight [New York: DAW, 1984], 15-16;
but the definitive version would seem to be Albert I. Berger's, in The Magic That
Works: John W. Campbell and the American Response to Technology, San
Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1993. Campbell claimed that he argued with the
government agents that his readers were so used to reading stories involving atomic
science that if he were to ban such tales from Astounding in the future they would
become conspicuous by their absence. In February of 1945, the magazine published
"The Piper's Son"--the first of Henry Kuttner's "Baldy" tales, later collected as
Mutant-- depicting telepathic mutants whose powers are the result of radiation
from an atomic war. One can hardly avoid the conclusion that Campbell was
preparing himself a reputation as a prophet as he continued to publish Kuttner's
sequels in June and July. The fourth tale, "Beggars in Velvet," undoubtedly also
written before Hiroshima, was published in December in the same issue with an
editorial by Campbell hailing the advent of the atomic age.
Kuttner's stories hardly posed a threat to national security: the war was placed
in the distant past, and its effects, though they were later to become commonplace
in fiction, were thoroughly fantastic. Campbell was treading on thinner ice in
publishing Robert Abernathy's "When the Rockets Come" in March 1945. It depicts
the atomic bomb as a horrifying weapon whose effects expose its users as morally
bankrupt. Abernathy's story anticipated the liberal reaction to the bomb which
would be fully developed in fiction only years later.
In Fritz Leiber's "Destiny Times Three" (Astounding, March, April 1945),
Heinlein's fears that the new technology may be incompatible with democratic
government are reflected as "subtropic" weapons are developed on three alternate
versions of Earth. On one world the knowledge is public property; on another an
attempt is made to suppress it; and on a third it is monopolized by a dictatorship.
The dictatorship invades the other two. Just as America was reaching the pinnacle
of its power in the world, these science fiction writers were warning that the new
atomic age was as likely to prove a disaster as a triumph. Their warnings went
unnoticed by the general public, of course, and were probably unheeded even by
most seasoned science fiction fans, jaded by decades of stories of planet-busting
beams and rays depicted with casual bravado.
Author Philip Wylie, not fortunate enough to be working for the privileged
Campbell, found that when he wrote a story depicting a Nazi conspiracy to rule the
world through atomic bombs he could not get it published. According to records in
agent Harold Ober's files, Wylie submitted "The Paradise Crater" to him on
January 13, 1944; Blue Book, a popular men's fiction magazine, bought the story,
then canceled its publication. A note dated July 3, 1945 explains the cancellation as
prompted by security considerations: "War Dept. objects to the use of this.
President Conant of Harvard is working on something similar. He promised not to
offer to any magazine. Cancel sale." (James Conant was chairman of the National
Defense Research Committee and very much a part of the Manhattan Project.
Source of quote is a letter from Alice Miller of Harold Ober Associates.) According
to H. Bruce Franklin, Wylie was placed under house arrest and even threatened with
death for his indiscretion (see Countdown to Midnight, p. 15). A month later, the
magazine repurchased the story, and a note was added to the file reading, "Atomic
bomb released on Japan Aug. 6, 1945." So Blue Book accomplished the coup of
publishing the first atomic bomb story after Hiroshima even though it had been
written over a year and a half before. Thus inadvertently began Wylie's long
collaboration with the government's nuclear weapons planners which was to result in
four short stories and three novels relating to nuclear war.
"The Paradise Crater" is an unexceptional counterespionage story in which the
hero sabotages the Nazi villains' store of atomic bombs. An enormous explosion
results: flames shoot forty thousand feet into the air; an earthquake wreaks havoc
throughout much of the western United States and Canada; a tidal wave roars west
from the shores of California and inundates thousands of "Japanese savages on
distant Nippon" (the defeated Asian enemy having evidently reverted to
barbarism). The mountain within which the bombs were built becomes a crater two
miles deep and thirty across. Ever since writers began to grasp the significance of
Einstein's E = mc2, they had been enthusiastically predicting that a cupful of coal
could power an entire city. It is not surprising that Wylie supposed that the
detonation of a large number of nuclear weapons would create a cataclysm.
As we have seen, the tendency to think of atomic weapons in apocalyptic terms
existed even well before the first one was detonated; it has persisted ever since,
although this is not a universal pattern, nor even the dominant one. The earliest
reactions to use of the bomb on Japan were fraught with ambivalence. For example,
Wylie's first post-bomb article, published in Collier's, September 29, 1945, was
entitled "Deliverance or Doom?" The first published fictional response to Hiroshima
was a brief sketch written by Theodore Sturgeon and entitled "August Sixth 1945,"
which appeared in the letters column of the December issue of Astounding.
According to a personal conversation with the author, it had been intended as a
regular submission, and Sturgeon remained to the end of his life disgruntled that
Campbell avoided paying him for the piece by treating it as mere correspondence. It
encapsulates and gives classic expression to the science fiction community's
ambivalent reaction to the bomb: self-congratulation on having predicted the
astonishing new technology, mixed with apprehension about the threat it posed to
civilization. Man, wrote Sturgeon, "knows--he learned on August 6, 1945, that he
alone is big enough to kill himself, or to live forever." Atomic science threatens
universal extinction, but it also holds out the promise of immortality.
Albert I. Berger has shown how widespread was the self-congratulatory mood
among science fiction writers at that time in an important article, "The Triumph of
Prophecy: Science Fiction and Nuclear Power in the Post-Hiroshima Period."
(Science-Fiction Studies 3 [1976]: 143-50). The jubilation with which so many
writers greeted the new era matched the general American euphoria over the
defeat of Japan. Brian Aldiss, who was to write one of the most moving accounts of
the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust in his 1964 nuclear accident novel Greybeard,
recalls with what relief he and his fellow soldiers poised to invade the islands
greeted the news of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (personal conversation
with author). The generally optimistic mood of the popular press is reflected in an
anthology hastily assembled by Pocket Books in August of 1945, The Atomic Age
Opens. The cover blurb conveys the same message as Sturgeon's little sketch:
"THE END OR THE BEGINNING? When the United States Army Air Forces
dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, it meant the end of Japan as a warmaking power--and the beginning of a new age. For, with this newly-released force,
man can destroy himself or create a world rich and prosperous beyond all previous
dreams."
Campbell immediately began to publish editorials about the wonders of the
atomic age. The following year Pat Frank--later more well known for his sobering
account of atomic war, Alas Babylon--reduced the threat of universal sterilization
through radiation to a joke in his best-selling Mr. Adam. In this work, a nuclear
accident leaves only one man fertile, and he is pursued by millions of desperate,
would-be mothers. At about the same time, Captain Walter Karig of the U.S. Naval
Reserves produced a little pamphlet partly aimed at arguing for the continuing
importance of the navy in the atomic era, but which provided his sailors with all
manner of Buck Rogers gimmickry suddenly made plausible by the new technology.
A. E. Van Vogt, like Kuttner before him, seized on the notion of war-induced
radiation creating superhuman traits in his series of stories begun in 1946 and later
collected as Empire of the Atom. Arthur C. Clarke treated the invention of the
bomb whimsically, as an example of human feistiness and gumption, in "Loophole"
(Astounding, April 1946). Henry Kuttner's "Rain Check" (Astounding, July 1946) was
hardly more serious.
Outside of science fiction, the bomb was greeted with a mixture of exhilaration
and alarm which led to an intense discussion of its significance in the first years
following the war (an interest which was not to be maintained for long). Yet,
although some Americans and Britishers viewed the dawning of the atomic age
sanguinely, and although the major outlet for fiction on atomic themes was tightly
controlled by John Campbell, who not only strongly favored science and technology
but also insisted on a generally optimistic mood in the works he published, plenty of
stories in a grimmer mood found their way into print in 1946. New Yorker writer
Roger Angell expressed his disgust with the military's infatuation with the bomb in
"Some Pigs in Sailor Suits." Herman Hagedorn, author of popular boys' books and
jingoistic follower of the precepts of the Moral Re-Armament Movement, was
appalled at the devastation wrought at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He created a booklength denunciation in verse of America's use of the bomb as a crime against
humanity and a sin against God, a volume popular enough to go through many
printings and two editions (The Bomb that Fell on America). Science writer Louis
Nicot Ridenour warned of atomic Armageddon in the pages of Fortune magazine
("Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse"), as did Ray Bradbury in Planet Stories ("The
Million-Year Picnic"), and Philip Wylie in Collier's ("Blunder"). Isolated, unknown
authors were stirred to issue warnings here and there (Benjamin Belove in America,
F. Horace Rose in England). Will Jenkins dedicated his cautionary Murder of the
U.S.A. to John Campbell, whose March 1946 editorial may well have suggested the
idea for the novel, although he avoided using his science fiction pseudonym
("Murray Leinster") and published the novel first in Argosy, not in Astounding. And
Campbell himself occasionally published cautionary (or, to use the more vivid science
fiction term, "awful warning") atomic war stories during 1946, by Paul Carter, A.
Bertram Chandler, Chan Davis, and Theodore Sturgeon. The mood of euphoria which
dominated so much writing about the atomic age was based in large measure on
America's monopoly of that power. These writers, whose business was
prognostication and who knew only too well that scientific secrets cannot be long
preserved, quickly realized that the bomb posed as much of a threat to its
inventors as to their enemies.
During 1947 Astounding overwhelmingly dominated the publishing of nuclear war
fiction with over a dozen stories, many of them awful warnings sharply in contrast
with Campbell's generally optimistic editorial stance. Poul Anderson's first
published story, "Tomorrow's Children," written jointly with F. N. Waldrop, took a
less sanguine view of radiation-induced birth defects than preceding stories like
those of Kuttner. The best known story published that year was Theodore
Sturgeon's "Thunder and Roses," which--despite the fact that most of its literary
merit resides in its title--remains a striking argument against the theory of nuclear
deterrence.
But Campbell's taste reasserted itself forcefully in the following year, in which
the number of atomic war stories in Astounding dropped by three quarters and only
one (Judith Merril's memorable "That Only a Mother") could be considered an awful
warning. Despite this fact, a correspondent complained in the September 1948
issue of the excessive number of nuclear war stories appearing in the magazine.
Campbell reassured him and other concerned readers: "We have specified to our
authors that the 'atomic doom' stories are not wanted...."
Despite this announced change in policy, Campbell published some "atomic doom"
stories in 1949 (Alfred Coppel, "Secret Weapon"; Kris Neville, "Cold War") and
succeeding years, but most of the atomic war tales in Astounding were either
frivolous (like Van Vogt's continuing "Empire of the Atom" series) or absurdly
upbeat. An atomic war story perfectly reflecting Campbellian optimism--though it
departs from the realistic style which Campbell preferred--is A. E. Van Vogt's
"Resurrection" (published as "The Monster" in August 1948). When creatures from
another world investigating the cause of Earth's destruction resurrect a man in
order to question him, he uses a nuclear device to battle them in an atomic duel
from which he emerges triumphant. The resuscitated hero will use the technology
of the defeated aliens to revive and grant immortality to the entire human race.
Lest the preceding holocaust raise any doubts about the goodness of human nature,
it is strongly hinted that Earth had been devastated not by people but by the
ancestors of these very aliens.
Fredric Brown's 1949 story "Letter to a Phoenix" also matched Campbell's
philosophy, mixing positivism with the power of positive thinking. Brown's
protagonist is made nigh-immortal by exposure to bomb radiation and thus can
report that the holocausts which periodically almost annihilate the human race are
actually necessary to perpetuate the species, which--without this invigorating
tonic--would die out like every other race in the universe.
Henry Kuttner's 1947 Astounding story, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow," similarly
argued that atomic war might prove a fine method of birth control and stimulate
scientific research, creating a utopia. Irrelevance could go no further, and the
magazine soon almost ceased publishing atomic war stories altogether, with
occasional exceptions reminiscent of the immediate postwar period (Walter M.
Miller, "Dumb Waiter" [1952]; Morton Klass, "In the Beginning" [1954]). The 1951
Twentieth-Century Fox muscular disarmament fable, The Day the Earth Stood Still,
was based on a pre-atomic age Astounding story ("Farewell to the Master" by Harry
Bates, October 1940), but the original tale entirely lacked the antiwar message of
the film. The film-makers would have been hard pressed to find a real anti-nuclear
war story in the fifties version of the magazine. The days when Astounding had
dominated nuclear war fiction were over.
The magazine itself went into a steep decline in the early fifties as it faced
stiff competition from two new competitors, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction and Galaxy. Atomic doom stories by authors such as Damon Knight, Cyril M.
Kornbluth, James Blish, and Fritz Leiber, which might have appeared earlier in
Astounding, were published in the new magazines. Although Campbell had published
the early work of Walter M. Miller, Jr., the stories which were later to become the
first widely known science fiction treatment of the atomic war theme, A Canticle
for Leibowitz, appeared instead in Fantasy and Science Fiction (1955-57). But
Campbell's refusal to adopt a negative tone about the danger of nuclear war meant
that superior stories appeared even in pulps ranked far inferior to Astounding in its
glory days, like Future Science Fiction (H. Beam Piper's "Flight from Tomorrow,"
September, October, 1950) and Thrilling Wonder Stories (Fritz Leiber's "The
Foxholes of Mars," June 1952).
Outside of science fiction, novelists and short story writers were slow to
respond to Hiroshima. Aside from Wylie, who maintained a connection for many
years with science fiction, the only generally well known author to write an atomic
war novel by 1948 was Aldous Huxley, whose Ape and Essence was more of a
restatement of the anti-utopian themes of Brave New World than a serious
meditation on the probable consequences of a future holocaust. He did grasp the
genetic danger, and remains one of the few writers to treat seriously the problems
of radioactive soil for agriculture. In fact, few novels depicting nuclear war either
outside or inside of science fiction were published before 1950. Those that were
not well known or not widely reviewed or sold. Some of the reluctance of authors to
explore the new theme may be attributed to war- weariness. In the five years
after Hiroshima, not much conventional war fiction was published either. Of course,
George Orwell's 1984 (1949) uses atomic war as part of its background, but nuclear
weapons play such a minor role in the novel that most readers have probably
forgotten that he touched on the subject at all.
However, during this same period Ray Bradbury was writing a series of stories
which would appear knitted together in book form in 1950 and become for many
years (until Shute's On the Beach [1957]) the best known fictional work dealing
with nuclear war: The Martian Chronicles. Indeed, it was for over a decade the
best- known piece of modern science fiction writing. Although the immense success
of Bradbury's book can be attributed mostly to the sensuous exoticism of his
Martian setting and characters, the book is significant for the political
development it marked. The Martian Chronicle. turns its back on the postwar vision
of the American Century. It deplores our crass commercialism, reminds readers of
the nation's crimes against the Indians and blacks, and battles against the forces
of censorship, albeit in a distinctly bizarre fashion, in the tale entitled "Usher II."
No modern writer is more typically American in his themes and attitudes than
Bradbury; yet repeatedly his fiction hints at or clearly depicts the monstrous
crimes that lurk beneath the Norman Rockwell exteriors of his protagonists.
The Martian Chronicles is the story of humanity which is punished for its
genocidal deeds by committing genocide on itself. Having killed off most of the
Indians, having driven desperate blacks to flee the lynch-law South for Mars, and
having contemptuously--almost without noticing--annihilated the wise, gentle
Martians, humanity destroys itself in an atomic holocaust which is one last act of
typical, unexplained stupidity. It is not necessary to explain why nuclear war
consumes the Earth: it is the logical consequence of the parochialism, bigotry, and
greed which are displayed in the earlier chapters.
The book concludes on a muted note of hope as the human race survives in two
families who have fled to Mars. In Bradbury, any hope for the future lies not in
society at large, but in the decency of individuals. This story, "The Million-Year
Picnic," had been his first published response to Hiroshima, and it comes close to
condemning humanity in toto. So anxious is the protagonist to eradicate the past
that he resorts to censorship, burning various papers and volumes in a way that
clashes curiously with the theme of "Usher II," and even more with Bradbury's
passionate denunciation of book-burning, Fahrenheit 451 (earliest version, 1951).
Ironically, book-burning is the solution to the failure of civilization caused by
nuclear war in The Martian Chronicles whereas a nuclear war ends the tyranny
which instituted book-burning in Fahrenheit 451.
It is inconceivable that John Campbell could have published "The Million-Year
Picnic," even if Bradbury had offered it to him. In fact it is surprising to find such
a work widely read and appreciated by a nation which we have been told was
undergoing The Great Celebration. But even in the early fifties, there were plenty
of Americans who abstained from the nation's love affair with itself, and a
disproportionate number of them were science fiction fans.
The reasons for this phenomenon are not difficult to discover. Since the
thirties, science fiction writers had encouraged their readers to think of
themselves as superior beings like the mutant telepaths in A. E. Van Vogt's Slan
(Astounding, September, October, December 1940) or Henry Kuttner's "Baldy"
stories. When homo superior emerged in the world of science fiction, he was almost
always more sympathetic than the ordinary humans who formed bigoted mobs bent
on his destruction. Undoubtedly such stories had strong appeal for the largely
adolescent male readership of bookish social misfits who purchased much of the
science fiction of the forties and fifties, and who exercised a powerful influence
over its content through their highly organized and articulate fan organizations,
publications, and conventions. The evidence of published accounts of fandom clearly
points to a profound sense of alienation from American mass culture and a fervent
belief that the reading of science fiction provided a superiority often experienced
with religious intensity. The cult-like of nature of American science fiction cut it
off from a wider audience for decades, but in the early fifties it provided a haven
for heretical and potentially threatening writings like Bradbury's.
The traditional formula for science fiction had been to pose a problem and find
a technical development which would solve it. In the early 1950s, the formula for
many Galaxy and Fantasy and Science Fiction stories was to posit a technical
development and discover what could go wrong with it. Atomic war stories with a
distinctly jaundiced cast to them poured forth: Fritz Leiber's "Coming Attraction"
and "A Bad Day for Sales," Damon Knight's "World Without Children," Cyril M.
Kornbluth's "With These Hands," Ward Moore's "Flying Dutchman" and "Lot,"
Wilson Tucker's The Long Loud Silence, Ray Bradbury's "The Garbage Collector,"
Philip K. Dick's "The Defenders" and "Second Variety," and James Gunn's "The Boy
with Five Fingers." So powerful was the trend that editor H. L. Gold complained in
the January 1952 issue of Galaxy, "Over 90% of stories submitted still nag away at
atomic, hydrogen and bacteriological war, the post-atomic world, reversion to
barbarism, mutant children killed because they have only ten toes and fingers
instead of twelve.... Look, fellers, the end isn't here yet."
Meanwhile most American writers were ignoring the entire subject. There were
two principal reasons for this fact. One was that the ghettoization of science
fiction in the United States tended to prevent mainstream authors from writing
stories set in the future. The other was that most Americans feared communism
far more than the bomb, and were not prone to criticize the maintenance of a
nuclear balance of terror which seemed to favor the West. Some even urged a
preventative war, a first strike in which America's God-given might would crush the
evil Soviet empire, as in the hypocritically titled October 27, 1951 issue of Collier's
magazine, "Preview of the War We Do Not Want."
In England the situation was very different. Since long before the days of H. G.
Wells, British writers had felt free to address their tales of times to come to a
general audience with an expectation of being well received. In addition, although
Britain had shared in the Allied victory and was led by Churchill, a formidable voice
in the cold war, its people had personally experienced the effects of Nazi bombs
and rockets and had seen large areas of their most important cities laid waste by
them.
In addition, whereas the bulk of the early American nuclear war fiction
appeared in small-circulation magazines, most of the British fiction was published as
novels which were accessible to a wider and more varied audience. Much of their
writing was mawkish in tone and scientifically ludicrous, but the British authors
conveyed a sense of terror and despair usually lacking in the works of their
transatlantic colleagues who were often bent on demonstrating that the impending
holocaust could be survived, averted, or even turned to profit. In 1948 alone George
Borodin's The Spurious Sun, Roald Dahl's Sometime Never, J. Jefferson Farjeon's
Death of a World, and Pelham Groom's The Purple Twilight were published in
Britain. The output of British nuclear war fiction remained for many years
spasmodic and idiosyncratic. It did not sort itself readily into identifiable genres,
as did that of the Americans, and it did not form a tradition, so that each author
seems to be unaware that he or she has any predecessors.
On both sides of the Atlantic the publication of nuclear war fiction remained at
a very low level (except for the anomaly of 1947 created by John Campbell's
temporary enthusiasm) until 1952. The Russians had tested their first bomb in
1949, creating in this country a hysterical search for the villains who had sold them
our atomic secrets. The mania for finding spies everywhere is reflected in Judith
Merril's outstanding 1950 novel, Shadow on the Hearth, in which--although fifth
columnists are responsible for aiding the Russians to home in on American targets-the blind anti-communism of the general public deprives the nation of the aid of a
suspect but brilliant scientist: a striking prognostication of the fate of J. Robert
Oppenheimer three years later. In 1950 Julius Rosenberg was arrested as well, but
the search for someone to blame diverted attention from the danger posed by the
weapons themselves.
It was the explosion of the first American thermonuclear device in November of
1952 and of the first Russian hydrogen bomb a year later, obviously the product of
independent research not inferior to our own, which reawakened public concern.
Whereas some public officials like Bernard Baruch had spoken of the atomic bomb
in apocalyptic terms immediately after Hiroshima, the general public seemed to be
unable to comprehend the magnitude of the destructive potential it represented.
(See Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the
Dawn of the Atomic Age [New York: Pantheon, 1985], 54). If the average reader
happened upon one of the narratives depicting a cataclysmic atomic war, he or she
probably dismissed it as wildly hyperbolic. This judgment might not have been too
far wrong, considering that a writer as sober as Philip Wylie was depicting a chain
reaction capable of consuming in a flash both Earth and Moon (in "Blunder" [1946]).
But the H-bomb had a somewhat different effect on the public than had the Abomb. Whereas the threat posed by the latter had been somewhat obscured by its
role in ending World War II, the new weapon was developed by both East and West
during a period of extreme tension highlighted by the ongoing Korean War and by
the appointment of John Foster Dulles to the post of U.S. secretary of state.
Dulles developed the doctrine of "massive retaliation" and harbored fantasies of
"rolling back" the Russians from Eastern Europe. Despite the fact that fans and
editors alike had complained that nuclear war was an exhausted theme, 1953 proved
a record
year for science fiction dealing with the subject. In Britain, John Wyndham
reflected the tensions of the time in The Kraken Wakes, in which the Americans
and Russians almost fail to defeat invading tentacled sea monsters because each is
convinced their predations are the work of the other side.
The next year another event marked the decisive point in turning public
attention to the danger of atomic war. On March 1, 1954, the Bravo H-bomb test
near the Marshall Islands fatally contaminated sailors aboard a Japanese fishing
vessel known as the Lucky Dragon. That their citizens--now our allies--should once
more be victims of American radioactive fallout created an uproar which destroyed
forever the conspiracy of silence which had made the topic taboo in postwar Japan.
In the West, people finally realized that even when one was not exposed to the
direct effects of the bomb, its fallout could be deadly.
The year 1954 had provided an abundance of other news stories calculated to
attract the attention of the public to atomic warfare. After long delays,
negotiations about the uses of atomic power began seriously, although no agreement
was to be reached for four more years. A new version of the Atomic Energy Act
was passed. On March 31 Atomic Energy Commission Chair Lewis Strauss aroused a
furor by commenting to the press that a single bomb could destroy any city on
Earth. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance was removed in April, and interest
in the atomic spy theme was revived. On September 24, Aikichi Kuboyama,
fisherman, died of the radiation disease to which he had fallen victim on the Lucky
Dragon during the Bravo H- Bomb test.
Interest was sustained by related events the next year. On January 31, 1955,
the Russians modified their long-held position disparaging the effectiveness of
atomic bombs when they pointed out that only a few weapons would be needed to
destroy crucial Western centers of power. The United States continued to test
bombs in Nevada that spring. In March, Dulles and Eisenhower threatened the
Communist Chinese with tactical nuclear weapons if they should attempt to seize
the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, although Leo Szilard had warned the previous
month that such an act would likely precipitate a devastating holocaust in which
both sides would be destroyed. And Federal Civil Defense Administrator Val
Peterson speculated about the possibility of creating a cobalt doomsday bomb, a
device which was to find a prominent place in much later fiction (probably as much
because of its repeated discussion by Herman Kahn as for any other reason). In
Great Britain the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, spearheaded by philosopher
Bertrand Russell, was claiming headlines. Russell wrote a number of fictional
sketches on the theme of atomic war about this time, although some of them
remained unpublished until after his death. At no time until the Cuban missile crisis
did the world seem poised so close to the brink of nuclear war.
The result of all this activity and concern was the publication in 1955 of a large
number of novels depicting atomic war or its aftermath, including such notable
works as Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow, C. M. Kornbluth's Not This August,
John Wyndham's The Chysalids, and the first part of Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A
Canticle for Leibowitz. The nuclear war novel had come of age. Magazine editors
may have wearied of the subject, but book publishers were becoming interested and
would dominate the genre henceforth. In no year before had so many novels been
published depicting nuclear war.
During the next year's presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Adlai
stevenson called for an atomic test ban, with considerable initial support from the
public. The long debate which followed kept public attention focused on the bomb,
but to some extent the test-ban debate was a distraction which directed attention
away from any attempt to deal with the greater danger of nuclear war itself. Even
in the midst of this debate, authors were not able to sustain readers' interest in
nuclear war: 1956 marked a low point in the publication of such fiction, although two
mainstream works attracted some attention--Martin Caidin's The Long Night and
Herman Wouk's The Lomokome Papers.
Though Eisenhower had abandoned the notion of beginning negotiations for a
test ban treaty when the Russians publicly supported Stevenson's proposals--thus
laying the administration open to the possibility of charges that it was not being
sufficiently anti-Communist--the debate continued, as did the test. America
exploded no fewer than twenty-four bombs in Nevada in 1957. In April, Khruschev
boasted that the Russians possessed a superbomb capable of melting the polar
icecap. But the impact of all of this was slight compared to the shock created by
the Russian launching of the world's first satellite, Sputnik 1, on October 4. Clearly,
if the USSR had rockets good enough to place a satellite in orbit, they were a
serious threat to our security. When they followed up their fear by launching even
heavier satellites, the effect was shattering.
For the first time Americans felt themselves to be in an inferior position,
although in fact their atomic arsenal still enormously outweighed that of the Soviet
Union. Russian proposals for some kind of trety began to look more attractive. Not
much nuclear war fiction of significance was published in English that year
(although Agawa Hiroyuki's important Devil's Heritage was published in Japan). In
fact there was just one novel which was widely read, and it was to prove the most
influential work of its kind for the next quarter of a century and the only one most
people ever read: Nevil Shute's On the Beach.
Shute used an Australian perspective ideally situated to address the fears
about fallout which had been mounting since 1954. As his novel begins, the atomic
war is already over. The powerful effect which this slickly written tale had on its
readers can be attributed to its insistence on the relentless, inescapable advance
of the zone of radioactivity, removing all trace of human life from latitude after
latitude on its way south. Inferior to the 1959 film based on it, the novel is
unconvincing in its plot, its characters are stereotypes (too many of them deny the
inevitable in the same way), and the love story is mawkish. But what makes On the
Beach nevertheless one of the most compelling accounts of nuclear war ever
written is its almost unique insistence that everyone--without exception--is going to
die. Shute directly addresses the most primal fears of the human race, which has
spent most of its history denying or compensating for the fact of personal death,
and does so with a relentlessness which the complex technique of a more
sophisticated writer might have muted. For once, there are no distractions: no
invading aliens, no super-fallout shelters to protect the protagonists, no struggle
back from a dreadful but exciting postwar barbarism. There are simply a man and a
woman reaching the agonizing decision to kill their only child in its crib and commit
suicide as the rest of the human race expires around them.
The number of novels and stories in which everyone dies in a nuclear war is
negligible. It is quite irrelevant that the sort of universal extinction through fallout
which Shute depicts is almost impossible (indeed, most critics have been so quick to
denounce his hypothesis that they have failed to note that he specifies that both
sides made extensive use of doomsday-style cobalt weapons, though he provides no
rationale for this insane act). Nor does it matter that the recently developed
theories of nuclear winter make Shute's pessimism seem somewhat more realistic.
What gives the novel its significance is the fact that it forced the general public to
focus on atomic war as a threat to personal existence at a time when there was
widespread concern about fallout from testing. The experience was a harrowing one
for many readers, and most of them seem to have considered it sufficient.
Although many nuclear war novels superior to Shute's were to be published in
succeeding years, none of them would be nearly as widely read. Its closest
competitor was Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon in 1959, which was considered shocking in
its day but which is remarkable mainly for the good fortune of its principal
characters who survive nicely with only a minimum of preparation on the bare
fringes of a distantly depicted holocaust.
The worldwide success of On the Beach finally caught the attention of
mainstream writers who began to turn out holocaust novels, innocent of the fact
that the theme was considered exhausted by many in the science fiction community.
The year 1958 saw the publication of such works as Peter Bryant's Two Hours to
Doom (later to be transformed into Dr. Strangelove), Helen Clarkson's The Last
Day, and Mervyn Jones's On the Last Day. Although interest in the topic began to
revive in the science fiction magazines as well, it was no longer the property of the
science fiction community. In 1959 mainstream realistic works written in a serious
vein dominated the field. John Brunner, who wrote mostly science fiction and who
was then involved in British bomb protest activities, suggested in his political novel,
The Brink, that Western paranoia about the Russians was more hazardous to world
peace than the Russians themselves. In Britain, where left-wing politics were not
absolutely beyond the pale, the novel could be marketed; but it is unique among his
many books in never having been published in the United States.
During 1959 the history of the bomb was explored in Pearl S. Buck's fictional
account of the Manhattan Project, Command the Morning. Edita Morris, like
Brunner an anti-bomb activist, movingly depicted the impact of the bomb from the
Japanese point of view in The Flowers of Hiroshima. Hans Hellmut Kirst's bestselling The Seventh Day made the escalation of a war over Germany all too credible.
And in England, Mordecai Roshwald's Level 7 made the death of the human race
even more compelling than had Shute; the novel does not strive for scientific
credibility but succeeds as a parable.
This was also the year in which the most nuclear war fiction of high quality
appeared until 1984. It also marked the definitive end of the illusion fostered for
so long in the science fiction community that the theme had been exhausted. The
nuclear war science fiction of the early 1960s rose to new heights as writers took
up the challenge signified by the achievements of authors in 1959, and as the field
as a whole matured with the advent of a new generation of writers bent on
wrenching science fiction out of the pulp ghetto. Along with a large number of
inconsequential works, some important ones appeared, including Edgar Pangborn's
Davy (1962) and Philip K. Dick's Dr. Bloodmoney; or, How We Got Along After the
Bomb (1956). Science fiction writers may have temporarily lost their ascendancy in
the nuclear war novel in the late 1950s, but they reclaimed it in the sixties and
have retained it ever since.
The year 196O, marked by the U-2 incident and the Sino-Soviet split, produced
few notable works other than Alfred Coppel's Dark December (one of the best
nuclear war novels ever published) and H. A. Van Mierlo's By Then Mankind Ceased
to Exist (probably the worst). The next year was dominated by discussion of fallout
shelters in the public press, as the Russians built the Berlin Wall and resumed
testing in the atmosphere, and the United States undertook its first major shelter
program. Shelters both natural and artificial are prominent in the fiction published
in 1961 and 1962, in works like Gina Berriault's The Descent (New York: Atheneum),
a marvelous satire on the entire civil defense craze; Daniel F. Galouye's moving
Dark Universe, in which refugees have lived in the dark underground for so many
generations that they have forgotten what light is; James White's Second Ending,
with its fantastic automated hospital which preserves the single specimen from
which the human race will be recreated; Robert Moore Williams's absurd The Day
They H-Bombed Los Angeles, in which ordinary folks mingle with movie stars in Los
Angeles fallout shelters; and George H. Smith's The Coming of the Rats. Novels set
in various sorts of shelters had been published at intervals before this, but not in
such numbers.
The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 did not find much resonance in nuclear
war fiction. After reaching the brink of a real nuclear war, most people seemed to
want to forget the subject as quickly as possible; and a year later Kennedy's
assassination rendered fiction which might imply criticism of his nuclear diplomacy
in bad taste. Pierre Salinger did not publish his novel loosely based on the missile
crisis until nearly a decade later (On Instructions of My Government [Garden City,
New York: Doubleday, 1971]). Out of the considerable amount of nuclear war fiction
published in 1962, the most notable literary achievement was the beginning of
Edgar Pangborn's Davy in which he created the postholocaust world in which he was
to work for the rest of his life. The dangers of brinksmanship were illustrated in
1962's best-selling Fail-Safe by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler.
The United States, Great Britain, and the USSR finally signed a treaty banning
testing in the atmosphere in 1963, and there was for a time a general easing of
tensions with the Soviet Union. But all during the early sixties there arose in the
West an extreme paranoia about the Chinese, no longer on the leash of the
Russians, who were perceived as being far more reasonable. This paranoia finds its
quintessential expression in Bernard Newman's absurd classic of Sinophobia, The
Blue Ants (1962).
Now permanently established as a subgenre of science fiction, nuclear war
stories and novels of merit continued to appear throughout the sixties from such
authors as Ray Bradbury ("To the Chicago Abyss" [1963]), Philip K. Dick (The
Penultimate Truth [1964] and Dr. Bloodmoney), Edgar Pangborn (besides Davy,
mentioned above, The Judgment of Eve [1966]), Thomas M. Disch ("Casablanca"
[1967]), and Harlan Ellison ("I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" [1967]), among
many others. But the nuclear war science fiction of the sixties had no focus. There
was no equivalent of the old Astounding (now retitled Analog and still rejecting
atomic doom stories) to develop a tradition. In any case, the magazines were
ceasing to play an important role in developing new themes as paperback books
began to dominate the market.
The nuclear war theme flourished in the sixties at least partly because of the
"New Wave" phenomenon in science fiction which involved many younger writers who
were drawn to apocalyptic and anti-technological themes. They found in nuclear war
the perfect expression of what disgusted them in much traditional science fiction.
In the 1940s science fiction had promoted itself as prophetic and inspirational. In
the 1950s it had been diagnostic and critical, but typically provided some sort of
happy ending. But in the 1960s the dominant mood of much of the best writing could
only be described as nihilistic. At last science fiction found a fictional voice
appropriate to the nightmare of nuclear war.
As had been true since 1945, isolated individuals outside of this tradition or any
other tradition passionately turned out deeply felt warnings against atomic
Armageddon which went almost entirely unread. Among the better idiosyncratic
sixties novels are Derek Ingrey's absurdist Pig on a Lead (1963), Stephen Minot's
sternly intellectual anti-intellectual Chill of Dusk (1964), Virginia Fenwick's uneven
but interesting America R.l.P. (1965), and John R. Vorhies's remarkable study of
nuclear strategy and politics, Pre-Empt (1967).
Public attention was briefly captured by the antiballistic missile debate of 1969,
a year which witnessed the publication of more nuclear war fiction than any other
between 1965 and 1974. But throughout most of the latter sixties the U.S. was
preoccupied with Black Power, psychedelia, student protest and--above all-Vietnam. Traditional nuclear war fiction seemed incongruent in this setting. Nuclear
blackmail and sabotage novels proliferated, especially in Britain, for an audience
that yearned for simpler days; but the younger generation which dominated the
readership of science fiction and therefore of nuclear war fiction was absorbed in
other pursuits. Few of the young American antiwar protesters knew of or cared
about the earlier generation of ban-the-bomb protesters in the U.S. and Britain.
The protesters' concerns were reflected in nuclear war fiction through heavy
irony in 1969 in Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog and Norman Spinrad's "The Big
Flash," but these stories were not expressions of the youth movement, merely
observations on it. Authors on the Right worked out their frustrations over the
Vietnam era after the youth revolt was stifled, in works such as Clive Egleton's A
Piece of Resistance (1970) and its sequels, Last Post for a Partisan (1971), and The
Judas Mandate (1972), Oliver Lange's Vandenberg (1971), Mario Pei's "1976"
(1971), Christopher Priest's Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972), W. D. Pereira's
Aftermath 15 (1973), and General Sir John Hackett's The Third World War: A
Future History (1978).
The most dyspeptic--nay, apoplectic--of these nuclear war novels which used the
holocaust to berate duped, treasonous, destructive youth is Allen Drury's
culmination of the series he began with Advise and Consent, titled The Promise of
Joy (1975). In this delirious attack on the late antiwar movement, a courageous
president battles almost alone against a spineless Congress, gruesomely violent
pacifists, and a wildly leftist partisan press to defeat the Reds and avert the
holocaust by negotiating from strength. If in the early sixties the rage of the
young in revolt found its expression in nuclear war themes, the same themes were
used in the seventies to express the rage they had aroused in their elders.
The outstanding achievements in science fiction during the seventies were
James Blish's The Day After Judgment ( 1971), James Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Man
Who Walked Home" (1972), Edgar Pangborn's The Company of Glory (1975) and
Still I Persist in Wondering (1978), Brian Aldiss's The Eighty-Minute Hour (1974),
Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines (1978), and Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake
(1978). It is no coincidence that half of these authors (including Tiptree, whose
real name is Alice Sheldon) are women; during the seventies the women's movement
profoundly influenced science fiction. Stars like Ursula LeGuin and Joanna Russ
attracted unprecedented numbers of young female readers, and many outstanding
women writers began using science fiction to address the concerns of a new
audience profoundly influenced by feminism. Writers like Charnas and McIntyre are
part of a revisionist movement within the field which has been reshaping the
postholocaust landscape along with every other element in science fiction in recent
years. They have concentrated in particular on rejecting the traditional
misogynistic neobarbarian fantasy, an endeavor in which they have been joined by
male feminist writers like Paul O. Williams (The Pelbar Cycle [1981-85]).
Aside from right-wing thrillers and science fictional treatments of the
postholocaust world, however, the last half of the seventies marked a low point in
the creation of nuclear war fiction. In absolute numbers, never had so little been
published since 1945. By way of an exception, one of the finest of all postholocaust
novels, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, appeared in 1980 and sold well.
Not until protests in Europe and America over the deployment of new missiles
and agitation for a weapons freeze reawakened public concern with the issue did
nuclear war fiction began to revive, with works like Yorick Blumenfeld's Jenny
(1981), Raymond Briggs's When the Wind Blows (1982), and Whitley Strieber and
James Kunetka's Warday (1984), its title suggestive of the controversial 1983
made-for-television movie The Day After. The most recent development is the
proliferation of right-wing adventure novels with postholocaust settings, a trend
which will be discussed in detail in our concluding chapter. Whether the current
flurry of interest in the subject can be sustained remains to be seen. The year
1984 marked the all-time high point of nuclear war fiction publishing in terms of
numbers of works. The past pattern has been a sharp peak of activity followed by a
decline, and 1985 saw the appearance of a somewhat smaller, though still
substantial, number.
This survey would be incomplete without reference to what I consider the finest
novel ever published in English depicting the consequences of nuclear war, Ibuse
Masuji's Black Rain. Written in 1965 and translated from the Japanese in 1967, the
historical event to which this work responds is the bombing of Hiroshima. Ibuse is a
journalist who drew on the diary of an acquaintance and the memories of other
survivors to recreate the experience of the hibakusha, the victims of the
Hiroshima bombing. Written in an understated tone, and with a thread of subtle
irony running through it, this novel is nevertheless by far the most devastating
account of the effects of nuclear war ever written. The destruction, the wounds,
and the effects of radiation disease are depicted in minute detail. A host of
powerful images is presented: telephone poles burn like candles, lead from melted
power lines has left a trail of silver droplets, a baby girl plays with her dead
mother's breasts. The main psychological reaction of the victims is shock. Some try
to go on about their business as usual, absurdly attempting, for instance, to report
to offices which have been vaporized. The traditional modesty of Japanese women
prevents many of them from seeking medical attention, as this example highlights:
At one sundry goods store this side of Mitaki Station on the Kobe
line, they had found a woman who had got in unnoticed and died in one
of their closets. When the owner of the store dragged the body out,
he found that the garment it was wearing was his daughter's best
summer kimono. Scandalized, he had torn the best kimono off the
body, only to find that it had no underwear on underneath. She must
have been burned out of her home and fled all the way there naked,
yet still--being a young woman--sought something to hide her
nakedness even before she sought water or food.
The vast bulk of accounts of imaginary nuclear wars pales in contrast to such
touching, vivid reports of human suffering. There are a number of works containing
such stories: Agawa's Devil's Heritage; Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1982); Morris's
Flowers of Hiroshima and The Seeds of Hiroshima (1965); Edwin Lanham's The
Clock at 8:16 (1970); and the stories collected in Oe Kenzaburo's The Crazy Iris
and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath (New York: Grove, 1985). All of them
are affecting, but none possesses the powerfully simple artistry of Black Rain.
Nuclear war fiction has been written from the perspective of politicians who
started it, of our descendants who may undergo it, and of investigating aliens from
the distant stars; but the perspective which makes the experience a vivid reality is
that adopted by Ibuse, of the real-life victims. Most other authors have written
about nuclear war without really confronting it. They show how it can be prevented
or survived, use it as a club to thrash a political foe, fantasize about it as a source
of magic, revel in the disorder which follows in its wake, wield it to clear the way
for a future utopia, or create through it a kind of nostalgic--albeit radioactive-pastoral.
The authors cannot be blamed entirely. Their readers have a very low tolerance
for realism on this subject. If the relatively benign holocausts of Alas, Babylon and
The Day After are considered shocking by their contemporary audiences, clearly
not many people have been paying attention even to the facts available since August
1945. To acquaint people with the facts, all the fantasies of the future lumped
together are not as valuable as Black Rain.
In the chapters which follow, the various features of nuclear war as they have
been depicted in a selected number of novels and short stories are surveyed.
Because relatively few works contain thorough depictions of the course such a war,
some names like Wylie's and Clarkson's will of necessity come up in various
contexts. Their books are simply too valuable as resources to be disposed of in a
single chapter. On the other hand, there are a great many interesting works
discussed in the Bibliography which are nowhere mentioned in the following
chapters. There was simply not space for an exhaustive treatment of all the worthy
authors.
The analysis includes a discussion of the causes of nuclear war in fiction, the
nature of fictional attacks and their immediate aftermath. The fourth chapter
covers a variety of ways in which a fictional nuclear war is commonly depicted as
performing important transformations: the complete destruction of all life;
radically transformed social mores; new social systems; and the creation of new
types of people and animals. The final chapter considers the political effects of
nuclear war fiction and tries to draw some conclusions for the future. This volume
is organized in such a way as to concentrate on the phenomenon of nuclear war as it
is commonly depicted, exploring the ways in which mass consciousness is molded and
reflected by the writers of popular fiction.
Chapter Two
The Causes of Nuclear War
Nuclear war in fiction is distinctive not only in the way that its course and
aftermath are portrayed, but even in the portrayal of its causes. A number of the
more popular causes of holocausts are considered in the following pages: accident,
madness, the "bolt from the blue" attack by the Russians or others, terrorism, and-most peculiar of all--the actions of vicious pacifists. The estimate that we make of
the likelihood of a nuclear war is linked to our notions of its likely causes, so that
these latter provide one of the most significant indices to attitudes on the subject.
In the majority of cases, such wars are presented as beginning by accident or
from unspecified causes. So overwhelming is the prospect of a nuclear holocaust
that authors rarely provide reasonable justifications for what seems to most people
the ultimate act of political madness. Undoubtedly the strong streak of fatalism in
our attitudes toward nuclear war helps to create this pattern. The thought that the
end of civilization or of life on Earth could be precipitated by a mechanical
malfunction or by the impact of a meteor being misinterpreted also appeals strongly
to the absurdist mentality of many writers, and a very great number of fictional
nuclear holocausts are set off in error.
The best known depiction of an accidentally caused nuclear war is Eugene
Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's Fail-Safe (1962). Like all such accounts, the detailed
criticisms Burdick and Wheeler make of defense equipment and procedures can be
and have been answered; but such novels function primarily on the metaphorical
level. Any particular accidental war is extremely unlikely, but the fact that
accidental war is possible at all is horrifying. In any case, the authors of Fail-Safe
demonstrate fairly convincingly that once matters escalate to the level of a red
alert, the irrationality inherent in cold war animosity makes the plunge toward
oblivion almost inevitable. The least persuasive part of the novel is not the series of
mischances which leads to an unintentional attack on Russia, but the resolution by
which the president of the United States--in.a parody of the sort of limited war
described by Herman Kahn (depicted as Dr. Groteschele in the novel)--agrees to
limit the war by sacrificing New York City in exchange for having accidentally
destroyed Moscow. A year earlier, in "The Day They Got Boston," Herbert Gold had
also used the idea of an accidental nuclear war being managed through negotiations,
but he had treated it satirically, foreseeing that it would be impossible to limit
hostilities once begun.
Reports of Strategic Air Command alerts being prompted by meteor showers
are reflected in several novels, such as Paul O. Williams's The Dome in the Forest
(1981). In Mordecai Roshwald's Level 7 (1959), the danger of what is now called a
"launch on warning" tactic is underlined when the enemy (unspecified) accidentally
begins a war which is automatically carried on by the machines of the other side.
Computer malfunctions of one sort or another trigger some fictional atomic wars,
though fewer than might be supposed. More common is the defense computer so
intelligent that it assumes control of humanity, as in D. F. Jones's Colossus series
(1966-77). (See Carolyn Rhodes, "Tyranny by Computer," in Thomas D. Clareson, ea.,
Many Futures, Many Worlds: Theme and Form in Science Fiction [Kent, Ohio: Kent
State University Press, 1977], 83-84.)
In a variation on the Frankenstein theme--or better, the theme of the
sorcerer's apprentice--more than one author has depicted battle machines which go
on fighting long after their masters have disappeared. Thus nuclear war can be its
own cause. The earliest example is Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s story "Dumb Waiter"
(1952). Philip K. Dick inverted the theme in "The Defenders" (1953), in which the
robots lie to their human masters, creating the illusion of a war which has long since
ceased. In the same year Dick followed Miller's lead in "Second Variety," in which
the robots take over. He returned to that device in 1955 with "Autofac," and finally
developed fully the phony-war theme first explored in "The Defenders" in his 1967
novel The Penultimate Truth. David R. Bunch's Moderan (1959-70) depicts a world
in which atomic war continues of its own momentum long after its rationale has been
forgotten. Keith Laumer has accidentally reactivated battle machines running amok
in the stories collected as Bolo: The Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade (1976).
Battle machinery turning on its masters found its way into the mass media in the
1970s in the television series Battlestar Galactica, albeit without nuclear weapons.
The theme reached its most sophisticated development in Gregory Benford's
outstanding 1984 novel, Across the Sea of Suns. Such stories provide a metaphor
for the way in which nuclear weapons tend to acquire a life of their own. Strategy is
often dictated by the possibilities of technology. A new weapon is invented, then a
war must be designed to fit it. Once the technology is in place, it cannot usefully
serve its makers except as a deterrent; instead they must serve it.
Conspicuously absent as a cause of nuclear war is the mad scientist. These evil
geniuses had populated science fiction since its earliest days, Drs. Frankenstein and
Jekyll, H. G. Wells's invisible man and his Dr. Moreau being famous examples. But by
the forties, the mad scientist had been relegated, by and large, to radio and movie
serials and to the comic strips. In science fiction short stories and novels the
scientist was usually the hero. Few criticized the physicists of the Manhattan
Project for their role in developing the bomb. The doubts and fears about their
role expressed by Oppenheimer and Szilard have found few echoes in fiction
except in the novels depicting the Manhattan Project itself, the best of which is
James Thackara's America's Children (1984). Even here, these scientists are
troubled, but they are neither mad nor evil.
Many science fiction writers understood that the power of the new weapon
threatened civilization and perhaps human survival, but they placed the
responsibility for the coming holocaust on the shoulders of politicians or military
men and argued that science still provided humanity's best hope for the future.
One must search diligently in the years immediately following Hiroshima to discover
an unambiguous fictional attack on nuclear scientists, and what one finds--F. Horace
Rose's The Maniac's Dream: A Novel of the Atomic Bomb (1946)--is eccentric,
unrepresentative, and almost unread. In this book, a group of atheistic scientists
try to prove the nonexistence of God by destroying most of the world with nuclear
weapons. They are foiled by the protagonist and the pious daughter of one of the
scientists aided by God himself, who strikes down the maniac of the title.
The mad scientist does not reappear as a cause of nuclear war in fiction until
1963, and then only as a by- product of the film Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned
to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which was subsequently novelized by Peter
George and included the bizarre scientist of the title. Note that Strangelove is not
the instigator of the war, however; that role belongs to the crazed anticommunist
General Jack. D. Ripper. Strangelove himself--an amalgam of Kahn, Teller, and
Kissinger--was an invention of Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern, who wrote the
film script. The novel which inspired the film, George's Two Hours to Doom (1958;
American title Red Alert), was a serious treatment of the theme of the danger of
war started by a madman.
Philip K. Dick responded to the movie with Dr. Bloodmoney; or, How We Got
Along After the Bomb (1965) about a scientist who causes a worldwide catastrophe
unintentionally by incorrectly certifying that a high- atmosphere bomb test will be
safe. Driven insane, he later sets off more bombs, but the war itself is not directly
his responsibility. Dick came closer to blaming the scientist in Deus Irae (1976; cowritten with Roger Zelazny), but the theme is treated with great irony: the
scientist longs for martyrdom but is instead worshipped by his ignorant victims.
These two novels represent perhaps the most negative portraits in science fiction
of scientific responsibility for nuclear war, and they seem very moderate indeed.
If mad scientists don't begin nuclear wars, mad generals occasionally do. The
general in Two Hours to Doom must have seemed frighteningly convincing in 1958.
If one accepts his premises--that the Russians must be destroyed at almost any
cost--then his passionate arguments make a good deal of sense. He reflects the
attitudes of many Americans and certainly the public posture of many politicians at
the time that the novel was originally written. George's character fails in his quest
to make the world safe for American democracy because he hasn't realized that
the Russians have secretly built but not yet announced a doomsday device which will
automatically destroy the world if the USSR is attacked, a circumstance which
renders his planned first strike suicidal. (This twist in the plot can be criticized as
a deus ex machine.) One might be tempted to view this conclusion as a warning
against assuming that any first strike can be guaranteed success, since one can
never be sure what the other side may do, but George ultimately places his hope in
the improvement of the balance of terror.
Whereas in Two Hours to Doom he had avoided the threatened nuclear holocaust
by a fortunate accident, in Dr. Strangelove George faithfully follows the movie by
having the mad general's scheme play out to its disastrous conclusion.
It is surprising that the notion of a crazed military man armed with nuclear
weapons has not been treated seriously more often. Back in 1949 in "The Long
Watch," Robert A. Heinlein depicted a lunar of ficial who tried to rebel against
Earth's government by using nuclear blackmail. George H. Smith created a Russian
counterpart to General Ripper in his 1963 novel Doomsday Wing. The attack on New
York in Robert Buchard's Thirty Seconds Over New York (1969) is the result of a
pyromaniac colonel; but he is Chinese, and in thrillers the Chinese are assumed to be
capable of any madness, as we shall see.
Despite the fact that George lent his name to the novelization of Dr.
Strangelove, whether he actually wrote it or not (see the discussion of this
question in the bibliography entry), he obviously took the notion of an insane
military officer seriously because he returned to it in his 1965 novel Commander-l.
He acknowledged the weaknesses of his original plot, but concentrated this time on
the mad submarine commander James Geraghty, who appoints himself ruler of the
postwar world but who is in no way responsible for the war itself.
The vision of a submarine commander armed with nuclear weapons and difficult
if not impossible to control from headquarters has often been presented in
nonfictional discussions of the danger of accidental war; yet only Mordecai
Roshwald in A Small Armageddon (1962) has treated the theme in nuclear war
fiction, and done so in a farcical manner. Speculation about psychological pressures
on the "men whose fingers rest on the button" finds expression in Kris Neville's
"Cold War" (1949), where the stress of serving as the guardians of the ultimate
deterrent leads a military crew to crack and set off an attack. The power eats at
them, Neville writes, "like marijuana." Similar tensions seem destined to precipitate
the holocaust in Donald Barthelme's "Game" (1965).
There are plenty of serious novels which search for causes of nuclear war more
realistic than technology run wild or generals gone mad. Many of them reflect the
assumptions of those who develop United States nuclear war doctrine. The most
common of these assumptions is that the Russians might be willing to attempt
either a conventional invasion or a first strike against the West. As might be
expected, the vast majority of works depicting such an attack were written during
the late fifties and early sixties, when the cold war was at its height and the
Russians had developed their ICBMs to the point that they posed a genuine if
limited threat to our mainland, a threat made graphic by the launching of the first
Sputnik in 1957. Although the atomic bomb was first used by the United States
against Japan, there are those who still argue that President Truman intended the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at least partially as a warning to the USSR.
Whatever the truth of that theory, it was certainly widely accepted after the war
that the most likely target of future nuclear bombings would be Russia, and the
fiction of the time naturally reflects that supposition.
Most often it is not considered necessary to propose a rationale for such an
attack. The Russians are depicted as single-mindedly bent on dominating the world,
even if that world should consist in large part of radioactive rubble. These early
works contain little in the way of political theory. Conflict with the Soviet Union is
simply viewed as inevitable. In this respect Robert A. Heinlein's 1953 story
"Project Nightmare" is typical. Heinlein, like Wylie more attentive to technical
realism than most, realized early on that it would be possible to smuggle small-scale
bombs into this country, making a devastating attack possible even before the
Russians had perfected the ICBM. When an array of such bombs is discovered,
Heinlein's army uses trained psychics to prevent them from exploding and then sets
the same psychics to devastating Russia--with notable glee--by exploding its own
bombs on site. Heinlein is an interesting figure in the history of nuclear war fiction.
Perhaps the most widely read science fiction author during certain periods, he has
been deeply patriotic, extremely hostile to communism, and generally willing to
glorify the military and the heroism of combat--see, for instance, his notorious
novel glorifying militarism, Starship Troopers (1959). K. A. MacDermott analyzes
Heinlein's politics in an article entitled "Ideology and Narrative: The Cold War and
Robert Heinlein" (Extrapolation 23 [1982]: 25~69), finding a fairly direct
correlation between cold war politics and the attitudes presented in Heinlein's
fiction. However, Heinlein was no simple jingoist in the fifties. He was genuinely
alarmed about the dangers of nuclear war and often wrote articles and stories
warning his readers of the impending cataclysm. These are conveniently collected in
Expanded Universe: The New Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein (1980). Because of his
belief that nationalism and nuclear weapons were a fatal combination, he advocated
a world government, as did many in the wake of Hiroshima.
Rabid militarism was far more common in the fifties than Heinlein's position.
Some writers went so far as to advocate that the United States make a first strike
against the enemy. Even after the Russians developed (or stole, as was commonly
thought), the A-bomb, the prospect of annihilating their country with a devastating
nuclear attack was irresistibly attractive to many. Perhaps the most striking
elaboration of this fantasy has been mentioned in chapter 1, the special issue of
Collier's magazine for October 27, 1951, entitled "Preview of the War We Do Not
Want." The Russians here are joyously liberated from their cruel Communist
masters by a righteous nuclear assault on the Soviet Union, prompted by its
invasion of Yugoslavia. It is somewhat alarming to note that in a number of works
based more or less realistically on official American foreign policy statements, the
United States--while responding to Soviet aggression--is nevertheless the first to
use atomic weapons. Edward Teller, "father of the H-Bomb," offered a scenario
called "A Concise History of the Crostic Union War" in his 1962 book The Legacy of
Hiroshima. He proposed that a limited nuclear war with the Russians could be
fought and won given a sufficiently determined president. For an updated version of
such scenarios, see William M. Brown's 1975 study for the Defense Civil
Preparedness Agency entitled The Nuclear Crisis of 1979. From the time of
Dulles's announcement of the massive retaliation strategy for Europe, to the
United States government's current refusal to make a no-first-use statement, the
only nation on Earth which has announced it might begin a nuclear war in response to
a conventional threat has been the United States. War-gamers are keenly aware of
that fact, and use it in their prognostications.
A few liberal novels portray the danger that the United States will strike first
because of paranoid fears of attack. John Brunner's The Brink (1959), in which
such an event is narrowly averted, is an unusual anti-cold war story which depicts
the world as being endangered more by American anticommunism than by Russian
aggression. When a Russian rocket crashes near an American missile site, bombers
are sent out to retaliate, but an officer realizes that the missile was simply a
misdirected spacecraft and recalls them. Even though he has saved the world from
accidental holocaust, he is accused of treason and suspected of being a Communist,
as is a liberal minister who has preached against bomb tests. Brunner's work is a
scathing attack on American militarism, chauvinism, racism, and paranoia. A similar
theme is treated by S. B. Hough's Extinction Bomber (1956). Both of these works
were published exclusively in Britain, and both depict near-wars rather than actual
wars.
In Burdick and Wheeler's Fail-Safe the United States attacks first, of course,
but blame is evenly distributed since the technical failure which leads to the
catastrophe is caused by Russian jamming of our radio communications. America was
simply not pictured as an atomic aggressor by anyone. To the average novelist,
especially in the cold war era, a war of conquest against the West launched by the
Russians seemed far more probable, or even inevitable.
During the Vietnam era, America's trustworthiness was occasionally called into
question, notably in Norman Spinrad's "The Big Flash" (1969), which draws
inspiration from the apocalyptic imagery of much psychedelic rock music
(particularly that of The Doors). In Spinrad's tale, the scheming military uses the
mesmerizing power of electric rock to gain approval of the younger generation for
the use of nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia. (This premise recognizes the odd
contradiction between the antimilitary mood of youth in the late sixties and the
extremely violent imagery of many of its most popular songs.) The cynical generals
underestimate the power of music, however, and the story ends not in the wave of
sympathy they had hoped for but in the unleashing of World War III. The story
captures vividly the apocalyptic mood of the end of the decade in which many in a
generation impatient with politics as usual longed for instant solutions. Spinrad's
story makes no claims to realism, but as a metaphor it is quite striking.
Yet there are those who--while not supporting a preemptive strike-nevertheless believe that a nuclear war could be survivable, and even beneficial to
the interests of the West. An up-to-date Russian invasion scenario has been
depicted by a retired British general, formerly of NATO, Sir John Hackett. In
collaboration with his military colleagues, he has produced two volumes of nuclear
age war-gaming entitled The Third World War: A Future History (1978) and The
Third World War: August 1985 (1982). These works, replete with maps,
photographs, and detailed descriptions of every major weapon in the arsenals of
both sides, are hardly novels at all. They are rather lightly fictionalized essays on
the probable course of a European war initiated by Russian aggression. Without
much in the way of characters or plot, the books are almost unreadable; but they
provide a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of the military strategists
associated with NATO.
The war begins in Germany in 1985 and escalates slowly (a major assumption of
Hackett's, and one which he shares with few other novelists). Only toward the
conclusion of the book, almost as an afterthought, are atomic weapons used,
destroying--not Moscow, London, or New York--but first Birmingham and then
Minsk. The nuclear warning shot across the Soviet bow precipitates the same sort
of nationalist rebellions which dismember the USSR in Collier's 1951 World War
III issue and in Philip Reynolds's When and y (1952), with much less justification.
Hackett's main aim seems to be to make a case for preparing for a conventional
war in Europe, but he rather undermines his own cause by creating a situation in
which the superior weapons of the West leave the Russians no choice but to
retaliate in desperation with nuclear bombs. Clearly if superior conventional
weaponry is no deterrent to a nuclear war and the Russians are foolish enough to
ignore the nuclear deterrent, nothing can be done to prevent them from launching a
suicidal attack on the West.
Hackett takes such pains to make his work up-to-date, setting it in the very
near future, that parts of it are already dated. The sequel, which gives details
skimmed over or ignored in the first volume, considerably revises his view of the
world situation. While he was the first author to deal with the danger of
electromagnetic pulse radiation (EMP), he disposes of it cavalierly and
unconvincingly by stating that it was successfully barred by the Partial Test Ban
Treaty of 1963. In an odd way, Hackett trusts the Russians. He trusts them not to
launch the sort of war he would find impossible to fight. He also assumes a massive,
deep- seated hatred by the Russian people toward their government, which needs
only slight stimulus to set off a revolt. The heartening prospect of a disintegrated
Soviet Union and a largely intact Western Europe makes a brisk nuclear exchange
almost attractive, although in a postscript Hackett acknowledges that the Russian
decision not to launch an all-out strike to defend itself is almost incredible, an
admission which underlines the weakness of his whole scenario.
One chapter of the sequel depicts the dismantling of the Russian nuclear
arsenal. Striving for realism, Hackett allows China to keep its bombs while the
Europeans agree to disarm if other Third World nations follow suit. (In addition,
Hackett shows himself to be no hidebound conservative by praising the deeds of a
female bomber pilot and generally supporting the use of women in combat.) In
general, Hackett's combination of technological sophistication and political
naivetˆ© is frightening because it suggests the state of mind prevalent among many
who hold in their hands the fate of humanity. What is even more frightening is the
warm reception Hackett's work received in many powerful conservative circles, and
its commendation by President Ronald Reagan, who was greatly impressed with it.
Again and again it is assumed that the Russian nuclear arsenal is intended for
aggressive use. Never--except in Bertrand Russell's "Dean Acheson's Nightmare"
(1954--are the Russians seen as primarily on the defensive. Indeed, their
aggressiveness often verges on madness. Philip Wylie, in his 1963 novel ironically
entitled Triumph, proposes that the Russians will deliberately sacrifice the
Northern Hemisphere, including their own nation, in order to use their remaining
nuclear weapons to blackmail the rest of the human race into submission. A remnant
of the Communist party will rule over a remnant of humanity. Although the Russian
scheme fails only in one crucial respect--all the Russians are killed--Wylie clearly
intends his novel, like his other, similar works, to be a warning. But how can a nation
of kamikazes be deterred? In common with several other authors, Wylie depicts an
enemy so crazed by the lust for world domination that no conceivable action can
prevent it from executing its schemes.
Deterrence is treated more credibly in certain other novels. Pat Frank wrote
two works in which he warned of a pair of "missile gaps": Forbidden Area (1956) and
the much better known Alas, Babylon (1959). In the former, he suggests that the
Russians might launch a preemptive strike before our ICBMs can be based; and in
the latter he echoes Kennedy's concerns that the Russians could successfully pull
off a first strike (they are prevented from succeeding only by the fortuitous
defection of a Russian turncoat). Oddly enough, in the final pages of Forbidden
Area, the United States rejects the opportunity to launch its own unilateral attack-which would definitely defeat the USSR--because of fears by government officials
that such an all-out attack might result in ecocide, a consideration not previously
mentioned. Frank was careful not to raise this prospect in Alas, Babylon, where the
war is relatively benign. Ultimately Frank imagines, with many of his
contemporaries, that the Russians are far less rational than the Americans. He
grants that nuclear war is madness on a global scale in these novels, but
nevertheless feels that such a war, deliberately instigated by the Russians, is
probable if our deterrent is inadequate.
Forbidden Area is an essay in military preparedness, depicting the army and air
force as incredibly reluctant to consider warnings of the danger posed by a midfifties window of vulnerability. Similarly, Alas, Babylon begins as an essay in civilian
preparedness, preaching the need for an effective civil defense program. Yet Frank
cannot resist the logic of nuclear war. In his farcical first novel, Mr. Adam (1946),
as noted in chapter 1, he had depicted the sterilization of every human male but one
through a nuclear accident. He criticizes his own frivolousness in Forbidden Area:
"Years ago a fellow wrote a story about all the men being sterilized by a big nuclear
explosion. If there had been a war, I don't think anything so quick and simple would
have happened. It would have been much worse. A big bang, and then a long, long
whimper." As Frank continued to write about the subject of nuclear war, the
prospects he depicted became more and more grim, although his main aim remained
to warn his readers to preparedness. It is a common pattern, recalling Philip
Wylie's development in particular. The serious contemplation of atomic warfare has
a sobering influence on some minds.
One of the best known accounts of a European war escalating to a nuclear
holocaust is Hans Hellmut Kirst's The Seventh Day (1959). For the most part it is a
slick political thriller which--like Ewart C. Jones's Head in the Sand (London:
Arthur Baker, 1938)--was written in response to the Hungarian uprising of 1956.
Similar events in Poland cause a war in Germany, the setting of most of the novel,
which is only natural considering that Kirst is German. He creates a large,
sympathetic cast of characters and then destroys them one by one, an effective
technique which, however, is seldom used by other writers of nuclear war fiction.
Normally they concentrate on a relative handful of characters, usually located in a
single area. But in many other political novels and in a host of spy stories, the
threat of a Russian nuclear attack functions primarily to heighten the tension of a
crisis, as in Fletcher Knebel's Night of Camp David(1965), and nuclear war is simply
a peripheral interest.
In distant second place as an attacking nation is China. Occasionally, as in
Mervyn Jones's On the Last Day (1958), the Chinese figure as allies of the
Russians; but after the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, this ceased to be a realistic
scenario. However, one of the clichˆ©s of American foreign policy during the
sixties was the belief that when Mao said that a nuclear attack could not destroy
China because millions of its immense population would survive, he was
demonstrating a near-suicidal recklessness. (It seems more likely that he was
merely whistling in the dark, since the only realistic "deterrent" China had to a
nuclear attack by one of the two superpowers was its mere ability to survive.) This
analysis of the Chinese point of view turns up occasionally in fiction. While no
author has suggested that China is capable of devastating the United States with
its own small atomic arsenal, more than one has presumed that her leaders might
engineer a war between the Soviet Union and America which would leave them
unchallenged rulers of the world.
I have already mentioned Bernard Newman's The Blue Ants: The First Authentic
Account of the Russian- Chinese War of 1970 (1962). It is an extreme example, but
it well expresses the paranoia which suffused American views of the Chinese in the
sixties. Bound in a lurid yellow cover, this bizarre work tells of the plot by the
fiendish Feng Fong to trigger an East-West war which will leave China master of
the Earth. This is perhaps the earliest example of a fictional Russo-Chinese nuclear
war, a theme which has become more common in recent times as border skirmishes
have lent some credibility to such a scenario.
In the 1970s and 80s tensions in the Near East rendered the Arab-Israeli
conflict as the precipitating cause of a nuclear war credible. See, for instance,
Thomas N. Scortia's Earthwreck! (1974), David Graham's Down to a Sunless Sea
(1979), and Luke Rhinehart's Long Voyage Back (1983). More often than not the
Israelis are depicted as striking first--probably because they are the Middle
Eastern nation most widely suspected of having nuclear warheads-- although in Dean
Ing's Pulling Through (1983), the Iraqis institute the use of such weapons. Other
combinations of combatants are rare. Originality of political alignment is, however,
a distinguishing feature of the absurd The Texas-Israeli War: 1999 (1973) by Jake
Saunders and Howard Waldrop. The Irish attack Britain with LSD, which leads a
crazed prime minister and parliament to launch a nuclear attack. The unlikely
coalition of Ireland, China, and South Africa is formed, fighting against a BritishAmerican-Russian coalition. The bizarre politics of these alliances are not explored,
their main function being to leave the Israelis the sole relatively untouched nuclear
power so that the authors can send Jewish mercenary soldiers in tanks across the
southwestern deserts to rescue the president of the United States, kidnapped by
rebellious Texans.
It would be inaccurate to leave the impression that the Russians are usually
portrayed as the primary instigators of fictional nuclear wars. As noted at the
outset of this chapter, most often no political cause is specified; rather the war is
either an accident or a cataclysm of the distant past whose details are lost to
human memory. Clearly authors are hard pressed to create a credible political
scenario in which the decision to use nuclear weapons can be depicted as rational;
most prefer to describe a "bolt from the blue" or simply evade the question. In a
few cases, such evasion is purposive, as in Roshwald's Level 7, which avoids
specifying either the victim or the aggressor nation so that he can concentrate on
human suffering, not on international politics. And Will F. Jenkins creates a
mystery around the theme "Who launched the attack?" in his novel The Murder of
the U.S.A. (1946). He outlines a method by which a sneak attack could be launched
by a nation wishing to conceal its identity but never identifies the attacking
country. Jenkins, unlike Roshwald, is extremely nationalistic and strongly argues for
retaliation, but it is difficult to see why he does not specify the identity of the
attacker unless he simply found the task of drawing up a credible scenario beyond
him.
In thrillers, terrorists of various stripes, including apolitical atomic
blackmailers, threaten to precipitate nuclear war, but they are almost always foiled
at the last minute. One exception to this rule is the excellent account of
clandestine bomb-building by Nicolas Freeling entitled Gadget (1977), which ends
with most of the world's leaders being killed. Another variety of terrorist --the
violent pacifist--poses a more serious threat in muscular disarmament novels.
Usually written from a conservative anti-Communist perspective, such works see
anti-bomb crusaders as likely to precipitate the very sort of war they claim to want
to prevent. Figures loosely based on repentant nuclear scientists like Szilard and
Oppenheimer threaten the world with nuclear holocaust unless it agrees to disarm
in Alan Gardner's The Escalator (1963) and John Briley's The Last Dance (1978). A
similar mad scientist-pacifist menaces human survival in Bob Shaw's Ground Zero
Man (1971). And as noted in chapter 1, there are no more violent, vicious, and
treasonous antiwar activists than those in Allen Drury's portrait of the Vietnam era
movement, The Promise of Joy (1975).
In right-wing fiction, muscular disarmament is admirable only if it is carried out
by the right people. Bernard Newman, for instance, mercilessly mocks the British
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and United States antiwar groups in Draw the
Dragon's Teeth (1967), but endorses the scheme of the Legion of a Thousand to
force disarmament on the world. China's reluctance to cooperate forces the legion
to smuggle nuclear bombs into that country to destroy its plutonium processing
plant. In Martin Caidin's The Mendelov Conspiracy (1969), a similar group uses
superpowered flying saucers to enforce its demands. Again the Chinese are
reluctant, and this time Russia and the United States must threaten a joint invasion
to get them to cooperate.
A few authors seem to endorse the schemes of pacifists. James MacGregor's A
Cry to Heaven (1960) depicts a wealthy eccentric who kidnaps prominent people and
flies them into the area of a planned H-bomb test to bring it to a halt, with seeming
success. And in William C. Anderson's farcical Pandemonium on the Potomac (1966)
the British hoax the world into disarming by sending emissaries claiming to be from
Venus who--like the aliens in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)--claim to have
irresistible powers at their command. The best known of all muscular disarmament
novels is, of course, Leonard Wibberley's The Mouse that Roared (1955); but in
that instance the superweapon turns out to be a dud.
Pacifism has not fared well, then, in nuclear war fiction. Several novels depicting
the period after Hiroshima involve scientists who campaign for peace, but these are
mostly Oppenheimer/Szilard figures concerned to prevent a holocaust (they also
pay for their activism by being treated as security risks); they are not pactfists as
such. Only Helen Clarkson's The Last Day (1959) articulates a consistently pacifist
view of nuclear war. An advocate of the doctrines of Gandhi, Clarkson points out
that the usual clichˆ©s about dying for one's country make no sense when one's
government is engaged in ensuring the death of its own citizens and the destruction
of its territory. Clearly analyzing the qualities which make nuclear war distinctly
different from traditional war, Clarkson anticipated many of the arguments used by
Jonathan Schell in The Fate of the Earth (1982). But rarely in these liberal works
do pacifists succeed in gaining power. That happens mainly in the nightmares of
conservatives, as in the pacifist dystopias to be discussed in chapter 4.
Other sorts of civil revolt--including race riots in W. D. Pereira's Aftermath 15
(1973) and youth rebellions in G. R. Kestavan's The Pale Invaders (1974) have
precipitated fictional nuclear wars. In fact almost any political position or
movement a writer finds obnoxious, left or right, has been shown to be liable to
lead the world to an atomic death. What more clinching argument could one wish for
in a political argument than a rousing holocaust? Yet though there is an abundance
of candidates for most likely instigator of the end of the world, most authors care
little who begins the war. The very possibility of a holocaust may render such
considerations irrelevant in many people's minds: a large proportion of readers and
writers alike were convinced that we were doomed to destroy ourselves in a nuclear
war, that it was only a matter of time until the holocaust came.
Chapter Three
The Short-Term Effects of Nuclear War
One might suppose that the depiction of the immediate consequences of a
nuclear war would be a primary subject of the fiction under consideration here. Far
from it. Aside from those few authors whose subject is the atomic bombing of
Japan, only a relative handful of authors concern themselves with the detailed
description of the effects of atomic bombing. Many are more interested in the
politics or long-range social effects of the war. The images so haunting from John
Hersey's Hiroshima (1946) are rare in fiction, although that work obviously is a
source for some writers.
Of those images, the ones preferred are those with symbolic portent: the
shadows etched permanently on walls and sidewalks; the bizarrely juxtaposed
fragments of urban civilization, blown out of context; the melted eyeballs, like
Oedipus', having seen too much. Writers do not flinch from depicting the savagery
and violence of the post-nuclear war age, but they are not eager to describe the
moment of impact or to explore the rubble left behind. Metaphor too often
becomes a tool for evading realism, moderating the horror by transforming it into
art)fice.
This passage from the rather frivolous novel, The Texas-lsraeli War: 1999,
grimmer than most, is a good example:
The bodies of '93 [the date of the war] were usually found quietly at home. You
remember the stale beer and the husks of popcorn on a TV tray beside a man, who
was himself a dry husk, glued by decay to the velvet cushions of a recliner. You
remember the child who had spasmed and died on the stairs of a split-level in
Modesto. A body goes liquid and sometimes runs like jelly. These, like the child in
Modesto, were the worst to find.
You never stopped finding them. The corpses of lovers, glued together belly to
belly, becoming one. The old ones who died in the park and poisoned pigeons with
their gray flesh. Homes became funeral vaults. Skyscrapers became elaborate,
gleaming mausoleams.
Such insistent irony calls attention to itself and not to the reality it purports to
describe. Wildly forced surrealistic images of the effects also abound, as this one
from Richard Wilson's "Mother to the World" (1968): "Several times he found a car
which had been run up upon from behind by another. It was as if, knowing they
would never again be manufactured, they were trying copulation."
As has been noted, one of the features which distinguishes nuclear from
conventional warfare is the brevity of the period of combat. There is not time for
the leisurely depiction of complex battle scenes. The nervous tensions which mount
during the period before an attack are well depicted in such suspense novels as
Fail- Safe and Two Hours to Doom, but in many of these the suspense takes the
place of the action: the attack is in fact thwarted.
Although some authors strain credibility by stretching nuclear war out over a
long period of time (Fritz Leiber, "Creature from Cleveland Depths" [1962], David
Bunch, Moderan [1959-70]), even a slight commitment to realism forces most of
them to concentrate not on combat, but on survival after the attack. Even those
authors most concerned to stress that nuclear war can be winnable find themselves
spending little time on battle scenes.
A few authors set themselves the task of seriously depicting the likely impact
of a nuclear war on ordinary people. One of the earliest and still one of the most
interesting is Judith Merril's Shadow on the Hearth (1950). A young mother is
trapped in her home with her two daughters when the bomb drops. Her panic and
fear are well detailed. The fact that she is a stereotypically timid and irrational
female is somewhat compensated for by the mature, intelligent competence of her
teenaged daughter. In fact, an important theme of the novel is the process through
which she is forced to acknowledge that her daughter is growing up. Worry about
food and water, gas and electricity are dealt with in detail, more thoroughly than in
Pat Frank's much better known Alas, Babylon (1959). And Merril concentrates, as
Frank does not, on the danger of nuclear fallout. Merril understands how terribly
difficult it is to persuade a young child that the front yard is no longer a safe place
to play, and she movingly depicts the anguish of the older members of the family
when the little girl is struck down by radiation disease, described in great detail.
Consciously and deliberately a woman's view of nuclear war, Shadow on the Hearth
is a far more universally pertinent story than a political thriller like Two Hours to
Doom because it confronts the inescapably personal nature of the war's impact. As
the family is confined to its home, a high-pressure atmosphere develops in which
emotions flare repeatedly and relationships are strained and redefined. The
battleground is the neighborhood; the war throws its blighting shadow across the
domestic hearth. Circumscribed as it is, the domestic drama of nuclear war is more
serious than conventional political drama, particularly since personal survival is likely
to be immensely more important in the postwar era than politics.
Philip Wylie is another partial exception to the pattern of avoiding concrete
details of suffering under the impact of atomic bombing. Most of Tomorrow! (1954)
is devoted to establishing the main characters and their attitudes to ward civil
defense. Once the attack comes, there is no question of an effective military
defense--only retaliation. The task of the survivors is to recover from the
catastrophe of the war. Yet Wylie does something quite unusual: he depicts moment
by moment the events which occur during the explosion of a thermonuclear weapon.
This is a difficult task for several reasons. In describing such a brief event the
novelist is robbed of many of his most effective tools, particularly when dealing
with victims near ground zero. There is no time for character development, even
for dialogue, spoken or interior; human beings cannot react in so brief a time. The
story must be told on the level of physics and chemistry, and to do this well, one
must have the sort of scientific sophistication which Wylie acquired in his work on
civil defense, and which few other authors have shared or bothered to acquire.
Wylie knows that if there is to be a human reaction to the experience of
standing on ground zero it will have to be very brief indeed:
There it is, he thought strangely
It was quite long, dark, but with a flare of fire at the tail end that shone palely
against the winter sky. It had a place to go to, he supposed, and it must be near its
place. The nose end was thin and very sharp.
Then, where it had been, almost overhead by that time, a Light appeared.
It was a Light of such intensity that Coley could see nothing except its lightness
and its expanding dimensions. He felt, at the same time, a strange physical
sensation--just a brief start of a sensation--as if gravity had vanished and he, too,
were a rushing thing, and a prickling through his body, and a heat.
And he was no more.
Wylie goes on for several pages to describe how the buildings melt, then
vaporize; how the light and heat of the impact rush out through the city; how the
fireball ignites distant objects: "Clothing caught fire, the beggar's rags, the
dowager's sables, the baby's diapers, the minister's robe. Paper in the gutter burst
into flame. Trees. Clapboards. Outdoor advertising signs. Pastry behind bakery
windows. In that second, it burned." The fires are then blown out by the shockwave
which accompanies the blast of lethal radioactivity, and the second generation of
fires begins.
Various details in Wylie's description can be quibbled with, yet in the decades
which have passed since the publication of Tomorrow!, no author has equalled this
description. Wylie's achievement demonstrates that strained metaphors and heavyhanded irony are not necessary to convey something of the force of a nuclear
explosion: an informed and detailed delineation of the facts can be quite adequate.
The city so vividly annihilated here is a typical American city, its streets given
the names of thousands of towns and cities. Whereas particularization is ordinarily
a virtue in fiction, here the general nature of the setting increases the impact of
the description by forcing the readers to think in terms of their own hometowns.
Wylie does not spare his readers details of the aftermath, either. In both
Tomorrow! and Triumph (1963), he goes out of his way to provide gruesome
descriptions of the carnage caused by the bombing. A man runs down the street on
bloody stumps, his feet blown off, a woman's arm is converted to "bloody pulp," a
woman carries her dead baby, its intestines leaking from its back. In a later
passage in Tomorrow!, the protagonist sees a woman sitting down on some steps
across the street, bleeding profusely, and vainly trying to thrust an unborn baby
back within her rent-open abdomen. Gore like this is almost unparalleled; where it
occurs outside of the Hiroshima novels, it is the consequence of postattack
violence, and not the bomb.
Wylie is unusual in another way. Like Merril and a few others, he depicts
ordinary people as being kind and helpful to each other after the bomb drops.
Immediate mob violence or gang warfare is far more common in other works.
The collapse of national unity has been depicted in many novels, but nowhere
more harshly than in Wilson Tucker's The Long Loud Silence (1952), in which the
eastern half of the country has not only been bombed, but sown with pneumonic
plague. The surviving western half has quarantined everything east of the
Mississippi and left the inhabitants to die. The story depicts a surviving former
soldier's quest to cross the river. Although a welldetailed account of the effects of
the war is presented early in the novel, the protagonist himself is so brutal and
violent that it is difficult to identify with his quest for safety. He is clearly as
much aggressor as victim.
Among the novels which followed the popular success of Nevil Shute's On the
Beach (1957) perhaps the best of all is Helen Clarkson's The Last Day: A Novel of
the Day After Tomorrow (1959). She accomplishes in a much more impressive
fashion what Frank's Alas, Babylon tried to do the next year: to depict the effects
of a nuclear attack on a small group of ordinary people struggling to survive on the
fringes of the nuclear war. The setting is a summer home on an island off the New
England coast. As in Alas, Babylon, some of the inhabitants continue to think in
terms of World War II. Others are at first glad to think that the art)ficiality of
modern civilization has been swept away, restoring primitive simplicity; but the
author clearly dismisses such nostalgia as nonsense.
What is particularly striking about Clarkson's novel is its careful delineation of
the effects of radiation disease on the various characters as they die one by one.
Since they have been well drawn, the reader feels their sufferings acutely.
Realistically but horribly, the children die first. The novel argues persuasively the
futility of fallout shelters and civil defense in general and provides a detailed
picture of the inadequacy of medicine to deal with radiation poisoning. The novel
reads as if it might have been commissioned by an activist group like Ground Zero
or Physicians for Social Responsibility. The domestic details, emphasis on the
suffering of children, and rejection of the anti- Communist hysteria of the fifties
are reminiscent of Judith Merril's Shadow on the Hearth. But The Last Day is a
much grimmer novel in that the main characters do not survive--indeed, it is implied
that all life down to the microscopic level will be extinguished. Like On the Beach
and only a handful of others, this novel concentrates not on survival but on death.
Some of her technical details can be faulted: even if all radio stations were
blasted off the air (unlikely), one would still hear plenty of static and other noise on
a properly functioning radio; and microbes, insects, and even more complex forms of
life can be expected to thrive in a world irradiated by the worst nuclear war
(setting aside such possible effects as the destruction of the ozone layer and a
nuclear winter, which are not considered by Clarkson).
Nevertheless, her work contains far fewer incongruities and scientific lapses
than most. Whereas Wylie tries to argue that nuclear war can be prepared for and
survived, Clarkson insists that such a war is suicidal. The Last Day is unique in
combining technical accuracy with humane values.
As shown in the last chapter, the antiwar stance of Clarkson is rare. One might
suppose that the authors of these works would frequently have been pactfists, but
such is not the case. Setting aside the large bulk of popular fantasies in which the
world of the new dark age allows free reign for neobarbarian violence, almost every
work realistically depicting nuclear war just)fies either retaliation, armed
resistance to invasion, or ruthless violence against fellow citizens in the chaotic
aftermath of the attack. Among the immediate psychological effects of a nuclear
attack one would expect to see guilt and anxiety to avoid more bloodshed, but these
are rarely depicted. Even Shute, whose characters in On the Beach often seem
exhausted and drained of hostility, depicts some who seek violent thrills, notably in
sports car racing.
Another exceptionally thoughtful work is Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka's
Warday (1984), which seems deliberately to address many topics inadequately
treated by their predecessors. Warday distinguishes between an immediate phase
of rioting and looting mixed with shock, and an extended period of cooperation and
charity mixed with self-interest and selfishness. Their depiction of society after
the bomb is far more convincing than the nightmare visions of the majority of
writers.
However, it is difficult to believe that an intact California would quite so
ruthlessly--or successfully--exclude refugees as Strieber and Kunetka describe.
Their point is undoubtedly to establish that even a limited nuclear war from which
the United States suffered little direct physical damage would destroy it as a
nation. The authors have taken pains both to research their material carefully and
to shape it differently from their predecessors. Warday is essentially a postwar
novel, with only a few pages devoted to description of the war itself, but those few
are well done. Each author, in his own persona, tells of his experience separately.
Strieber's version is particularly impressive: the light, the blast, the ensuing chaos
and confusion--all are vividly described without any distracting striving for fancy
literary effects.
"Strieber" cannot at first understand what has happened. But he soon does:
It was the sky over Queens and Brooklyn that enforced the notion of a nuclear
bomb. Through the dusty air I could see ash-black clouds shot through with long
red flames. These clouds were immense. They stretched up and up until they were
lost in their own expanding billows. There was no impression of a mushroom cloud,
but I knew that was what it was, a mushroom cloud seen so close that it didn't look
like a mushroom.
The picture is an accurate one, but original because of its point of view.
Strieber and Kunetka may also claim to be the first to have treated thoroughly the
effects of electromagnetic pulse radiation, first widely discussed while they were
preparing their book. They perhaps overdo its effects; but even in this case they
carefully distinguish between modern automobiles with electronic starters which
are immobilized by the deliberately induced EMP, and older vehicles which can still
run. The war they depict is too limited to have precipitated a nuclear winter, even
had the theory been fully developed before they finished their novel.
Warday lacks a real plot, its characters are shallow, and its style is merely
serviceable. Its literary importance is neglible. But as a piece of carefully
researched documentary-style educational material, it stands head and shoulders
above other similar novels which approach the subject of nuclear war realistically
such as Tomorrow! or Martin Caidin's The Long Night (1956).
The fiction of nuclear war uses many settings, but the one uniquely its own is the
shelter. During the early sixties, backyard fallout shelters became a controversial
fad, and larger shelters improvised from the basements of public buildings became
so commonplace that hardly anyone noticed their distinctive radioactivity symbol.
Ordinary shelters play little role in fiction: there is an abandoned one in Walter M.
Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1955), and another which bounces its
inhabitants improbably into the future in Robert A. Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold
(1964). Much more common are fabulous, lavishly appointed underground retreats
built by far-sighted millionaires. When the scale of shelters is more realistic their
effectiveness is often satirized. Civil defense as a truly effective protection
against nuclear war is seldom taken seriously. Exceptions are Merril's Shadow on
the Hearth and Wylie's Tomorrow!, the latter dedicated "to the men and women of
the Federal Civil Defense Administration."
Although its title leads one to expect otherwise, there is not much to be learned
about life in a fallout shelter from Jerry Ahern's series of novels, The Survivalist
(1981-1990). Although Ahern also knows a good deal about the technical aspects of
nuclear war, he plunges into the wildest fantasy: California and Florida are split off
the continent into the sea, for instance. He is more anxious to display his knowledge
of various weapons and ammunition than to deal with the reality of nuclear war:
Ahern carefully avoids exposing his hero to radiation, which his skill and ferocity
would be powerless to combat. Instead, John Rourke's postholocaust adventures
become a Wild West romp across America.
Dean Ing's Pulling Through (1983) is a more practical guide to the survival of a
nuclear attack, including detailed plans for air filters, radiation meters, and other
items. Its focus on the tools and techniques of survival, however, means that very
little is seen of the effects of the bombs on the world outside the hero's
basement. Ing seems to be concerned with refuting the survivalist stereotype
promoted by writers like Ahern, for his protagonist displays compassion for others,
sacrifices himself to aid friends and strangers alike, and ridicules the notion that
indiscriminate gunplay is useful. He kills, but reluctantly. Few psychological
problems arise among the inhabitants of Ing's shelter, and they are readily dealt
with; he is mainly concerned to show that his various devices can save lives.
It is striking that Ahern's lavishly appointed retreat is not in fact used as a
fallout shelter, but merely as a place for recuperating one's forces and gathering
supplies before setting out for more adventures. Only Ing, of all these novelists,
has tried to provide a detailed, accurate account of what life in a fallout shelter
would really be like, complete with the danger of asphyxiation, sanitation
breakdowns, and malnutrition. Even so, it is undoubtedly too sanguine.
During the shelter fad of the early sixties a good deal of debate went on about
the morality of fallout shelters, especially when some owners announced they would
shoot any neighbors who tried to break into their underground havens. Rod
Serling's script for a Twilight Zone episode entitled "The Shelter" (reprinted in
From the Twilight Zone [Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1962]) explores this
possibility, although deaths both by selfdefense and by nuclear devastation are
avoided when the alert proves to be a false alarm. The moral dilemma which
confronts a shelter inhabitant is thoughtfully considered in Sven Holm's Termush
(1967), in which the residents of an exclusive hotel/shelter are besieged by other,
less fortunate survivors seeking medical attention. In the end it becomes clear even
to some of the wealthy residents that they cannot expect to escape the fate of
the rest of humanity, and they are driven out into the war-blasted world. Since
most authors do not think that any reasonable civil defense program can be truly
successful, there are not many serious proposals for shelters which could feasibly
protect a very large portion of the population. What we do find instead are
varieties of supershelters, designed and paid for by the rich for their own
protection. The supershelter which evolves into the complete underground habitat
is the truly distinctive setting of the fiction of nuclear war.
In Philip Wylie's Triumph, a classic supershelter proves effective, although the
author stresses that similar protection could not conceivably be afforded any
sign)ficant number of Americans. Wylie's faith in civil defense would seem to have
been somewhat shaken between 1954, when he wrote Tomorrow!, and 1963, when he
wrote Triumph. He depicts ordinary shelters as death traps incapable of saving the
lives of the minority which has the presence of mind to take refuge in them. His
supershelter is very deeply buried and exceptionally well appointed, being provided
with massive protective doors, diesel generators, air treatment and filtering
facilities, fresh water from artesian wells, a sewage treatment plant, a machine
shop, a library, roller skates for recreation, and a wine cellar for the builder's
alcoholic wife. Wylie avoids the moral dilemmas raised by the shelter debate by
making his refuge so roomy that it can accommodate two stranded children and a
passing meter reader, as well as the host's family and friends.
Shelters are satirized in "Fresh Guy" (1958) by E. C. Tubb, in which all human
beings have hidden underground in "tombstones," abandoning the Earth to a host of
vampires, ghouls, and werewolves who eagerly await their reemergence. The story is
little more than a grisly joke, but the image of shelters as mere food storage
lockers is a striking one. British civil defense plans and public ignorance about
nuclear war are treated with bitter irony in Raymond Briggs's cartoon book When
the Wind Blows (1982), in which a middle-aged working class couple is depicted
trying vainly to follow the government's directives before and after a nuclear
attack.
The entire civil defense enterprise was mercilessly and hilariously satirized by
Gina Berriault in her novel The Descent (1960), in which the military masks its
aggressiveness by promoting an extensive diversionary publicity campaign featuring
such absurdities as Miss Massive Retaliation singing:
slow my heart to little bits
Never, never call it quits Mister,
send your missile my way.
A simple professor who has been recruited to represent the government's
humanitarian concern for its citizens throws himself sincerely into promoting world
peace, but when his daughter dares publicly to plead for disarmament, he is
deprived of his post, attacked as a subversive, and hounded from job to job, his
academic career in ruins. He finally gets a job in construction as a result of an everescalating shelter-building race. Berriault's insistence that only the young girl has
the courage to speak out underlines the fact that she views the rejection of civil
defense as an issue of special concern to women. And indeed, almost all survivalist
writing is heavily male-oriented. The Descent, like The Last Day, calls into question
the sanity of the entire defense establishment and makes clear that no shelter plan
can make nuclear war tolerable.
There are shelters for the military from which leaders can conduct the war, of
course. They provide the setting for most of Will F. Jenkins's The Murder of the
U.S.A. (1946) and large parts of both the film and Peter George's novelization of
Dr. Strangelove. The latter satirizes the ambitions of military shelter builders by
having Dr. Strangelove himself propose a century-long underground period for the
leaders, to be provided with sexy women in a ratio of ten to one. However even the
building of shelters in abandoned mineshafts is not a purely defensive measure to
the military mind, but part of the arms race: in General Turgidson's words, "Mr.
President, we must not allow a mine-shaft gap." George's novel is more typical than
Jenkins's in using the military supershelter as a vantage point from which to
criticize the military.
One of the most elaborate military shelters is the setting for Mordecai
Roshwald's memorable and powerful novel Level 7 (1959). The work derives its
power not from scrupulous scientific accuracy--it is more Kafkaesque fantasy than
realistic speculation--but from the sense of oppressive claustrophobia and everadvancing doom which its setting evokes. The work consists of the diary of a button
pusher--one of those responsible for launching nuclear missiles--living four
thousand feet underground at the lowest level of a sevenlevel shelter. Level 7 is a
somber account of the loss of hope and growth of terror as the levels above the
narrator one by one succumb to the effects of the war and fall silent, a sevenstage holocaust that deconstructs, as it were, the results of the seven days of
creation in Genesis.
The novel, sardonically dedicated "to Dwight and Nikita," mocks the pretentions
of political leaders of both sides. Each claims to have won the war and both spend a
good deal of time trading insults. The militaristic culture of Level 7, a portrait of
neither contemporary Russian nor American society, is strikingly similar to the
oppressive world of Evegeny Zamiatin's We (1921), especially in its denial of
individual privacy and identity (in both works people have numbers instead of names,
for instance). And the death of the Earth is even more absolute in Level 7 than in
On the Beach, and more powerfully conveyed.
Roshwald has a metaphorical turn of mind, and his work contains many striking
images of the war. One key example is a parable written by the depressed and
anxious narrator at the end of his diary entry for April 26, and addressed to the
coming generations. The narrator has not yet consciously realized how much he
detests his situation, but the parable reveals his growing doubts. In it the
Promethean ambition of the human race has led it simultaneously to shut itself off
from nature in cities and to transcend its natural habitat by creating a gigantic
mushroom which can take it high above the surface of the Earth. Unfortunately,
the scheme backfires:
As time went by, the mushroom grew so big, and its smell grew so strong, that some
people began to be afraid of it. So they looked for a place to hide. There was no
place they could find on earth where they could not smell the mushroom, so they
started to dig down.
Down they dug, down down, down . . . until they arrived at Level 7. And when they
got to Level 7 they could not smell the mushroom any more.
But the thing they had escaped from was still growing and growing, swelling and
covering the whole earth with shadow and stink, until one day--it burst.
In a split second the mushroom exploded into millions of little pieces, and the air
carried the particles into the people's boxes, into their flying gadgets, everywhere.
And everyone who was touched by a particle, or who smelled the bad odour, died.
And it was not long before there was not a single person left alive on the surface of
the earth. Only the few who had dug into the earth survived. And you, children, are
their offspring.
The bomb is here not a weapon of liberation, but a tool of self-entrapment,
dooming its possessors to entombment which sacrifices the very freedom it was
constructed to defend.
A more light-hearted parable of the absurdity of nuclear war using shelters as a
thematic center is Philip K. Dick's "The Defenders" (1953), in which the people,
having lived underground for eight years and leaving the atomic war to be
conducted by automatic machinery and highly intelligent robots, find that their
mechanical servants--wiser than they--have decided that the war is pointless
except as an exercise in mass psychotherapy. As a result, they have faked the war,
constructing elaborately detailed models of various cities and demolishing them on
television. Their main task has been the restoration and maintenance of the planet
until such time as the human race shall have purged itself of its war madness and
become fit to emerge and live in harmony. The optimism of this story is striking,
especially for Dick, who wrote other, bleaker tales on the theme of automated
warfare. Whereas war machinery is usually depicted as a metaphor of the
inevitability and irreversibility of war in the modern age, this story presents it as a
source of salvation, albeit a satiric one insofar as the human race must be rescued
from its own stupidity by its own creations.
Fallout shelters have been used in a number of ways in fiction: as a highpressure environment for the blossomimg of love affairs, as a refuge for religious
cultists, as emotional pressure cookers provoking violent conflict, and even as timetravel machines. Indeed they have usually served every purpose except that for
which real shelters are ostensibly designed: the protection of their inhabitants
from blast and radiation. Whatever their perspective, all but a handful of authors
writing about shelters view them as metaphors for racial suicide, a symbol of the
self-defeating nature of nuclear weapons, which make us our own prisoners of war.
Again and again the shelter is portrayed as a trap. It provides only the illusion
of safety, or such protection as it affords comes at an intolerable cost. On the
simplest level, such stories represent objections to the notion that the problems
posed by the prospect of nuclear war can be readily solved by technical means. On
another level, they express a refusal to accept confinement as a satisfactory mode
of existence. In Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His (1969), for instance, the
underground world represents the rigidly repressed conformism of middle-class
America, while the barbarian surface represents the dangerous but invigoratingly
anarchic world of the youth subculture.
Once the survivors have emerged from their fallout shelters, their suffering is
often only really beginning. Looting, rape, gang warfare, and random violence are all
commonplace. Almost every writer depicting the immediate postholocaust world
imagines the swift collapse of civilization and a more or less definitive reversion to
barbarism, perhaps to be mitigated in the long run by the development of a new
feudalism.
But an alternative fate awaits many fictional holocaust survivors, and it is a fate
much on the minds of Americans today in popular books and films, as it was during
the 1950s: a vicious dictatorship imposed by invading Russians. The ruthlessness of
these invaders could hardly be bettered by H. G. Wells's Martians; indeed, as Susan
Sontag first noted and others have repeated often since, many of the monster
movies of the fifties are barely veiled allegories of Communist conquest (see "The
Imagination of Disaster" in Against Interpretation [New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1966]). This motif does not seem to have played any prominent role in novels
and short stories, however. Fiction writers who wish to depict the Russians invading
New York or London do so directly, rather than disguising them as dinosaurs or
giant ants. Another motif noted by Sontag in fifties monster movies does occur in
fiction: when monsters appear, they are usually products of the bomb itself and
therefore symbols of nuclear science run amok.
Russian invasion stories almost always focus on the efforts of a resistance
organization or at least of an individual to overthrow the oppressor. One of the
best known is C. M. Kornbluth's Not This August (1955), which has the following
epigraph from "Notes On the Next War" by Ernest Hemingway: "Not this August,
nor this September; you have this year to do what you like. Not next August, nor
next September; that is still too soon. . . . But the year after that or the year after
that they fight" ( Scholastic, November 9, 1935). In the novel, war in fact breaks
out in 1965, a full ten years in the future. The Russians and Chinese have invaded
the United States at the conclusion of a lengthy nuclear exchange in which missiles
routinely lobbed in are routinely destroyed. Kornbluth uses many motifs from World
War II: rationing of food and electricity, ersatz chocolate, censorship, women
filling traditional male jobs as mail carriers and fire control technicians. Like many
others, Kornbluth understands at some level that a nuclear war cannot be
successfully fought. The typical nuclear holocaust is an uncongenial environment for
anti-Communist posturing; but the postwar setting creates a situation in which
conservative Red-fighting fantasies can be fully elaborated. The "real" war in this
novel begins when the Russian army moves in.
In Not This August, the Russian invaders at first cultivate the goodwill of the
American population, convincing many citizens of their basic decency. But soon the
mask of civilization is tossed aside and the Communists reveal themselves in all
their tyrannical savagery, engaging in mass executions (members of the American
Communist party are among the first to be shot) and imposing impossibly harsh
quotas on farmers, whose crops they export back to their own country while leaving
native Americans to starve.
In what initially seems like a move prompted by pure paranoia, the Russians
scour the countryside for fissionable materials; but, the United States Army has in
fact stashed two tons of plutonium, and an underground resistance is engaged in
smuggling this material and assembling bombs. The protagonist becomes involved in
this plot and discovers a secret underground rocket site with a satellite fully armed
with nuclear weapons and ready to launch. The group which built it was killed there
by its own commanding officer to preserve the secret of the satellite, its 364
ordinary atom bombs (one for each day of the year?), and its two cobalt bombs,
following the surrender of the government to the Russians.
The resistance stages its armed uprising on the night before Christmas (hence
the British title, Christmas Eve) and threatens the bombing of China and Russia
unless they surrender. The novel ends on a note of muted hope, but it is hardly
possible to conceive that the underground plot will succeed: the Russians have been
shown to be too ruthless, Kornbluth has argued persuasively in mid-novel that
nuclear deterrence will not work (an argument he never answers), and it is
predicted at the conclusion of the work that the Russians will build their own
satellite and perpetuate the balance of terror. What began as an account of fierce
resistance becomes fatally bogged down by the inherent logic of nuclear war. The
best that can be hoped for is an unstable, and thus potentially deadly, stalemate.
Despite its contradictions and the crude caricature of the Russians it contains,
Not This August is a superior example of its kind, containing vividly drawn portraits
of various American types, carefully depicting the ambivalences of its hero, and
avoiding the typical love-interest cliches which abound in this sort of fiction. The
details describing the actions of the occupying army and of the struggle for
survival of ordinary citizens are often striking. Especially effective are the
portraits of people earnestly engaged in denying the reality of what has happened
to them, pretending that life can go on much as it always has. (For a portrait of the
American public as still more incurably passive see Oliver Lange's Vandenberg
[1971].) The resistance Kornbluth urges may, in the end, be futile. Nonethless, he
makes it more appealing than most other authors because he grounds it in the lived
experiences of his characters and not in vaguely defined patriotism or abstract
politics.
Robert Shafer's The Conquered Place (1954) handles the theme of post-nuclear
war resistance against Russian invaders even more effectively by exploring the
conflict between the point of view of those living in occupied territory and the
exiled American military commanders who want to use the resistance for their own
strategic ends--going so far as to strike with atomic weapons the city they have
fought so hard to save. Collaborators called "snooks" are the principal target of the
resistance.
The building of a classic underground resistance is detailed in Samuel
Southwell's fairly sophisticated If All the Reloels Die (1966). On the fantastic side
is Theodora DuBois's Solution T-25 (1951), in which the cruel invaders are subdued
when the resistance doses them with a niceness drug. A more credible weapon-secretly stored missiles--does the trick in Mervyn Jones's On the Last Day (1958),
but to more ambiguous effect. The focus on collaborators in many Russian
occupation novels evidently results from their authors' belief that the Communists
are so ruthless and powerful that actions aimed directly at them are likely to prove
fruitless. The struggle is aimed instead at the more attainable target of the
collaborators.
D. G. Barron's The Zilov Bombs (1962) contains a plot similar to that of On the
Last Day. The foolish Western Europeans, believing Russian lies, have abandoned
their nuclear weapons and subsequently been conquered and occupied by the USSR.
The narrator reluctantly becomes involved in a plot to assassinate the chief Russian
leaders with a smuggled A-bomb. Finally he abandons his moral scruples and pushes
the button after his co-conspirators have been killed. The book ends abruptly with
the pressing of the detonator. It is striking that the notion of nuclear revenge,
though appealing, is difficult to present convincingly. At the last moment authors
often experience a failure of nerve and cannot bring themselves to describe the
success for which they so obviously hope. The invaders have usually been depicted
as so powerful and so ruthless that it is impossible to imagine any convincing device
that will dislodge them.
The immediate postwar world is almost always presented in bleak terms.
Fantasies of triumphant limited wars are confined to the imaginations of wargamers
like Kahn and Hackett. Conservatives also tend to regard nuclear war as a
catastrophe. Even the wildly nationalistic militarist Jerry Ahern ends by seeing
some good in some Russians, and declaring the war an act of stupidity which has
resulted only in an ecocatastrophe which all but wipes out life on Earth (see the
ninth volume of The Survivalist series, Earth Fire ).
The fantasies of an improved, or at least more interesting, world, which abound
in tales set longer after a nuclear war, are missing in the works discussed in this
chapter. To the uninitiated reader, this will come as no surprise: who would expect
cheerful optimism in the wake of a holocaust? Yet this fact strikingly
differentiates this group of stories and novels from the bulk of the works with
which this study is concerned.
Chapter Four
The Long-Term Effects of Nuclear War
Most nuclear war fiction can be fairly clearly divided into one of two groups:
those depicting a conflict and its immediate consequences, and those set in the
more distant future, long after the war has taken place. Thanks to the vigorous
tradition of postholocaust adventure stories in science fiction, the latter
considerably outnumbers the former. The landscape after an atomic war is
transformed in fiction in many strange and surprising ways.
Perhaps the most common attitude which people hold toward nuclear war is that
such a conflict would be simply the end of the world in some sense or other. The
fascination of secular apocalyptic literature, much of it drawing on traditional
religious imagery of Armageddon and the Last Judgment, has been widespread in
our century since long before 1945. It is no surprise, then, that works depicting
nuclear war should be written from the same perspective. Consider some titles:
Doomsday Eve, Doomsday Clock, Doomsday Wing, After Doomsday, The Day After
Doomsday, The Last Day, The Last Days, On the Last Day, The Seventh Day, Deus
Irae, Alas, Babylon, A Small Armageddon, The Dark Millenium. The fact that in none
of these works does the world end in any sense comparable to that depicted in the
book of Revelation underlines the symbolic nature of this fascination with the
apocalyptic theme. Yet, since most of us in our modern secular culture no longer
believe in the Last Judgment, and the solar nova which will one day engulf the Earth
is too far distant to capture most people's imaginations, nuclear war is the nearest
thing we have to Armageddon, if not to the end of the world proper.
But most authors--including some of those who use apocalyptic imagery-- are
reluctant to imagine even so modest an end as the annihilation of all human life. The
apocalypse is often rumored but seldom portrayed. Stories of the collapse of
civilization abound, however, and have abounded long before the atomic bomb was
developed. In fiction, the new dark age of the post-nuclear war era cannot always
be sharply distinguished from similar dark ages whose causes are different or
unspecified, as in Walter Van Tilburg Clark's "The Portable Phonograph," Stephen
Vincent Benet's "By the Waters of Babylon," or, more recently, John Crowley's
Engine Summer (1979). Clark's story first appeared in 1942 and Benet's in 1937,
but many contemporary readers automatically interpret them as being set in worlds
devastated by nuclear war. So pervasive is the notion that atomic Armageddon is
our destiny that any book portraying a societal collapse is liable to be interpreted
as a post-nuclear holocaust novel, as happened, for instance, in the case of Ursula
Le Guin's 1985 novel, Always Coming Home. Le Guin strenuously refuted the claims
of reviewers to see a nuclear war in the background of the work. On occasion, even
the jacket copy of a book will signal a nuclear war whereas the text contains no
such thing (e.g., Paul MacTyre, Midge [1962]).
Even when nuclear war clearly provides the background of a narrative, it is liable
to be more or less optimistic. This is well illustrated by the fact that the vast
majority of stories and novels concentrate on the survivors, not on the victims.
Those few writers who have dared to suppose that nuclear bombs might literally
destroy human life imagine a variety of mechanisms leading to doomsday, one of
which is the sterilization of the species through exposure to radiation. Most
writers have realized that a degree of radiation sufficient to allow some people to
survive but render all of them sterile is extremely unlikely. Yet the concept is an
attractive one because it allows an author to make clear the threat to the
continued existence of humanity posed by the danger of nuclear war. The earliest
statement of this theme occurred in Poul Anderson and F. N. Waldrop's 1947 story
"Tomorrow's Children." Even here, mutants will survive. Few authors are willing to
consider the end of the human race, and when they do, often no less fantastic
means of avoiding the end than mutation is considered.
It is striking that even when extinction threatens, effective political action to
end the threat of nuclear war is entirely lacking in these works. Authors shun racial
suicide, but they cannot conceive of politics as an alternative. The sense of the
utter powerlessness of the ordinary citizen one gets from reading the bulk of these
works is overwhelming. The authors may hope to stir their readers to action, but
the nearest most of them come to political analysis is in expressing the hope that
political leaders will behave wisely. It may be that in the popular mind nuclear war is
the symbol of our common death. Folk wisdom tells us that we must accept that
fate as inevitable; indeed, it is much easier to resign oneself to extinction than to
engage in the complicated and exhausting task of staving off an atomic
Armageddon. The mesmerizing power of the threatened end of civilization, if not of
all life on Earth, seems to cast a pall over the human will. Even otherwise intelligent
people have said, "If the bomb drops, I hope I'm right under it and never know
what happened."
One need not be an advocate of civil defense to deplore such fatalism. Authors
are not so pessimistic as the general public in this regard. They seem to believe
that nuclear war, though inevitable, is survivable--by a few.
Yet there is a certain grim logic in viewing the human race as rushing headlong
into oblivion like the lemmings of folklore. We have, after all, evolved a science
which enables us to destroy ourselves, and social systems which make that fate
difficult to avoid. These familiar truisms lead many writers to adopt an elegiac tone
when writing of the future of the human race. Ray Bradbury's The Martian
Chronicles (1950), discussed in chapter 1, is the best known of these elegies for
humanity. The sequence of early stories placed near the end of the book reflects
Bradbury's brooding on the fate of humanity in the four years following Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
In contrast with the earlier stories which are little more than variations on the
horror fiction to which Bradbury was devoted early in his career and in which the
Martians are the aggressors, the humans the victims, The Martian Chronicles
depicts human beings as despoilers, a race which pollutes the pristine canals of
Mars, smashes its precious artifacts, and disregards the wisdom left behind by the
noble ancient Martian civilization. Only isolated individuals here and there display
sensitivity and understanding, at the price of radical alienation from the rest of
humanity. It is quite clear that the qualities Bradbury regards as distinctively
human are those he scorns most. In War of the Worlds (1898), H. G. Wells had
compared the assault mounted by the Martians upon the Earth to the genocide
inflicted on other races by Europeans. Bradbury is clearly reversing the pattern to
the same end, allowing the Martians to be portrayed as the innocent victims this
time.
The defilement created by the human invasion of Mars can be removed only by
removing the race itself. This is accomplished, to begin with, by having almost every
human settler return to Earth when war breaks out in a rather unconvincing parallel
to the flight of emigres from Europe just before each of the world wars (in the
brief sections entitled "The Luggage Store" and "The Watchers"). Readers witness
the outbreak of nuclear war through the eyes of the despicable Sam Parkhill in the
1948 story "The Off Season." The sole pair left in the Martian cities in "The Silent
Towns" is unworthy of perpetuating the species; and, even though the last man on
the planet is kind and sensitive, he dies, survived only by the family of admirable
robots which he has created (in "The Long Years," originally "Dwellers in Silence" [
1948]).
In The Martian Chronicles, both Martians and human beings are apparently
annihilated more than once, only to be revived for one more requiem. The Martians
die with a dignity denied most of the humans. The book is one long farewell to the
optimistic vision of endless human progress so lovingly depicted in prewar science
fiction. Bradbury was not alone in greeting the atomic age with a dirge for the
human race. Among others it is worth mentioning Clifford D. Simak and his City
stories, published during the same period and written in the same nostalgic,
funereal mood, although they do not include the specific theme of nuclear war.
"There Will Come Soft Rains," which uses the collapse of a highly automated
house to depict the death of humanity. The actions of the various servomechanisms
reveal the characteristics of the family members who once lived here and who
remain only as silhouettes of paint on the house's blackened exterior. The family
dog, which has outlived the humans, dies just before the house destroys itself--a
moment reminiscent of the death of Odysseus' dog upon his return to Ithaca,
although in this case the death marks the obliteration rather than the recovery of
hope. The poem by Sara Teasdale which gives the story its title (first published in
Harper's, July 1918) captures the mood of estranged mourning which dominates the
latter part of the novel: nature will go on, quite unconscious of the disappearance of
humanity.
"There Will Come Soft Rains," one of the last-published stories in the series,
forms the natural conclusion to The Martian Chronicles. The much more optimistic
tale which follows it, "The Million-Year Picnic," had appeared in 1946 and
represents the more conventional tradition which insists that the human race must
always be depicted as surviving and prevailing. Yet as we have seen, Bradbury's
pessimism about humanity finds expression even here as hope rests in making a
clean break with previous human history. Bradbury is the most nostalgic of science
fiction authors. In most of The Martian Chronicles, his nostalgia is anticipatory:
longing for the best that humanity could have been but seems doomed never to
realize.
Seven years later Nevil Shute evoked a similar nostalgia in his best-selling
depiction of the death of humanity, On the Beach. Whereas many who read The
Martian Chronicles undoubtedly overlooked Bradbury's pessimism, identifying with
the lyrical Martians or the few decent humans, the common fate of the human race
is not so easily ignored in On the Beach. The book gains its power from the
successive elimination of one hope after another, as a last expedition by submarine
explores the world in vain searching for signs of life, discovering, for instance, that
a radio signal coming from Seattle is caused only by a window shade blowing against
an overturned pop bottle, which in turn periodically triggers a radio-telegraph key.
On the Beach depicts the last days of the survivors left in Australia, the last
habitable continent to be blanketed with lethally radioactive fallout. Much of the
novel reads like a collection of those bittersweet human interest stories in which
the terminal cancer patient tastes one last, coveted pleasure before dying--the
fishing trip, the automobile race, the love affair. These characters' desires are
touchingly human, the fate which awaits those who desire them touchingly familiar.
Only the scale is new: as Jonathan Schell so vividly points out in The Fate of the
Earth (1982), in nuclear war we leave no one behind to mourn or remember us; our
work is not carried on by the next generation; our deaths lack meaning, serve no
purpose. The characters in Shute's novel are incapable of confronting this
prospect. They cope by denying the truth, pretending that life will go on
indefinitely. They die, for the most part, individually and quietly.
Several authors have sought to distance themselves from the death of humanity
by creating a narrative from the viewpoint of alien observers who muse over the
ruins (see, for instance, Richard Savage's When the Moon Died [1956]). Such
authors have solved the problem of creating a narrative of an event which has no
surviving human witnesses, but at a considerable cost in credibility. Other writers
use the device of setting their world- wrecking holocausts on other planets,
whether they depicted a war on the moon (A. Bertram Chandler, "False Dawn"
[1946]; Herman Wouk, The Lomokome Papers [1956]), on Mars (Pelham Groom, The
Purple Twilight [1949]), or an imaginary planet (Alfred M. Young, The Aster
Disaster [1958]).
Few authors try very hard to make their world-wrecking wars scientifically
plausible. Only a very few quite recent works deal with the possible depletion of the
ozone layer and its possible consequences. Very recently, the possibility of a
nuclear winter has begun to creep into the picture, but not usually as an apocalyptic
device. So far, most fictional nuclear winters are relatively mild. Less catastrophic
versions of nuclear winters based on accounts of cooling caused by volcanic
eruptions appeared as early as 1947, in Anderson and Waldrop's "Tomorrow's
Children," and 1957, in Christopher Anvil's "Torch" (Astounding, April 1957); but no
one seems to have anticipated fully the findings of contemporary scientists. Only in
1985, with works like Brian Aldiss's Helliconia Winter, did the theme begin to be
developed fully. More world-destroying novels, particularly those published in the
fifties, have combined biological with atomic warfare.
Whatever its projected cause, the death of the Earth has been too fearsome a
fate for many to consider seriously. Our sense of the naturalness and inevitability
of death is rooted in an organic cycle which depends on the continued fertility of
Earth. The lifeless cosmos may be contemplated briefly with awe, but human beings
cannot feel truly at home in it. If the nuclear optimists are correct, an atomic war
need not be a true Armageddon, and the failure of nerve represented by the
paucity of true end-of-the-world stories is insignificant. But even if the optimists
are wrong, the tendency to overstate the consequences of nuclear war may well
make it more difficult to prevent. It is possible to become mesmerized by the awful
prospect. Thinking about the unthinkable is something that should be done by
others than the likes of Herman Kahn. Appealing as the apocalyptic metaphor may
be, it may also be terribly dangerous. People are all too ready to pose the
alternatives as global death or the status quo. Since stories of the dying world
seem as often to paralyze their readers as to galvanize them to action, perhaps the
insistence of most writers on providing a few survivors has a useful function: the
existence of ragged remnants of humanity may provide the psychic room needed to
contemplate the real danger. Readers seem to discount stories of atomic doom like
On the Beach too heavily simply because they take them as overstating the case.
Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka attempt to make just this point in Warday
(1984) by pointing out that even a nuclear war which fell far short of Armageddon
would be an unprecedented disaster.
All this acknowledged, the frightening truth seems to be that nuclear war is far
more threatening than the average person recognizes, the death of Earth through a
nuclear winter or other ecocatastrophe all too probable. What authors have failed
to make credible in fiction is perhaps our eventual fate. It is difficult to imagine
any electable president choosing, like the hero of Theodore Sturgeon's "Thunder
and Roses" (1947), to allow his nation to be destroyed without retaliating; but such
could be the only chance humanity has of surviving the next war.
If racial death is not common in the postholocaust wasteland, what experience
is? The answer is sex. Sex flourishes where death is kept at bay. The phenomenon
is familiar: on the brink of battle, with death looming near, a man and woman cling
together, asserting life in the face of death. In Mary Arkley Carter's story of
imminent nuclear war, The Minutes of the Night (1965), teenagers terrified of
impending death frantically make love. Traditionally, soldiers and their wives and
girlfriends conceived children just before they went off to war, affirming that
there would be a new generation, even though the current one was threatened. It is
not surprising to find their descendants frenziedly copulating in their fallout
shelters. Indeed, the subject of sex in nuclear war novels is given far more
attention than, for example, radiation sickness. Part of the reason for this
preoccupation is simply a function of the conventions of the popular novel which
demand a love interest. But the extremes to which authors will go to involve sex in
their plots demonstrate an obsession which goes beyond mere convention. They
seem to be feverishly battling atomic thanatos with ergs. (See Albert I. Berger,
"Love, Death and the Atomic Bomb: Sexuality and Community in Science Fiction,
1935-55," Science-Fiction Studies 8 [1981]: 280-90.) ;
It is useless to survey all the vast number of ways in which the erotic infuses
the postholocaust novel, but certain aspects of the subject are especially pertinent
because of what they tell us about popular attitudes toward nuclear war. One might
justifiably expect that people would be somewhat depressed in the wake of the
conflict. Indeed, Ibuse's account of the behavior of the victims of Hiroshima in
Black Rain (1967) suggests that one of the effects of experiencing nuclear
devastation at close range is a sharp decrease in libido, with most survivors losing
interest in sex altogether. While this seems to have been true in fact for
Hiroshima survivors such a possibility has rarely occurred to those who write about
fictional wars, although the protagonist of Alfred Bester's "They Don't Make Life
Like They Used To" (1963) has suffered a drastic loss of libido; but his ailment
exists merely to be cured with the help of an enthusiastic young woman. The
subject is treated in a much more sensitive manner in Edward Bryant's "Jody After
the War" (1971) in which a young woman fears and flees love and marriage because
of her all-too-rational fears of the sort of pregnancy she can expect in a
radioactive world.
Instead, a nuclear holocaust is portrayed over and over again as liberating the
libido, justifying all manner of erotic behavior which would be otherwise taboo. The
erotic preoccupations of the characters in some nuclear war fiction are so
exaggerated as to be absurd, as when a thermonuclear explosion flings a beautiful
young woman into the arms of an appreciative protagonist of Robert Moore
Williams's The Day They H-Bombed Los Angeles (1961). So consistent is this
coupling of atomic fission and fleshly fusion that H. Beam Piper's suggestion in Uller
Uprising (1952) that one might learn how to build an atomic bomb by reading a sexy
best seller named Dire Dawn does not seem far-fetched. (The hyper-erotic Dire
Dawn is written by a woman, which illustrates another genre fiction stereotype
since modern male pop fiction authors, like their counterparts throughout most of
history until the seventeenth century, consistently depict women as being more
interested in sex than men.)
Even during the conflict itself, one of the main concerns of the inhabitants of
fallout shelters is the nature of the sexual arrangements (Philip Wylie, Triumph
[1963]). The world of the ruined future outside often has considerably more open
attitudes toward sex than the present (Edgar Pangborn, Davy [1962]). Adulterous
promiscuity may be just)fied by the need to enlarge the damaged gene pool (Syd
Logsdon, A Fond Farewell to Dying [1981]).
Monogamy is the least of the taboos which nuclear war demolishes. In many
stories, the war creates the setting for the classic desert island fantasy, where
otherwise guilty sexual deeds make sense, providing a kind of atomic
permissiveness. Prominent among the taboos overridden is that against incest. In
Wallace West's "Eddie for Short" (1954), almost the last person on Earth is a
young pregnant woman who is thoughtfully provided with a devoted black midwife as
a companion. As her pregnancy develops, she studies the Greek classics, as her late
husband had requested. Her interpretation of Sophocles is nontraditional, for when
her son is born, she happily names him Oedipus (hence the title) and looks forward
to bearing his children.
Ward Moore's "Lot" (1953) also creates a sympathetic setting for incest, as the
father of the family in flight from an atomic attack on Santa Barbara abandons his
blithering idiot of a wife and his whining sons at a gas station restroom, to drive off
into a presumably happy future with his sexy fourteen-year-old daughter, Erika. In
the sequel, "Lot's Daughter" (1954), the protagonist is made to pay for his
callousness when Erika abandons him in his turn, leaving him with their child.
Whereas the first story insists so strongly on the loathesomeness of the rest of
the family that father-daughter incest is made to look like a logical alternative, the
second seems to reject that view. A similar case for end-of-the-world incest (the
holocaust in question is caused by nerve gas), also modeled on the story of Lot and
his daughters, had already been published: Sherwood Springer's "No Land of Nod"
(Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1952), in which a wife solemnly makes her
husband promise to mate with their three daughters and continue the race. (See
also Robert A. Heinlein, Farnham's Freehold [1964], and Bertrand Russell, "The
Boston Lady" [1972].)
Sex with young girls is common, notably in Piers Anthony's Var the Stick (1972)
in which Var finds that he can only save a twelve-year-old girl from being destroyed
by a mutant minotaur by depriving her of her virginity. She is deeply grateful for
this heroic deed and later becomes his lover and companion. Although the book
makes token gestures toward equality for women, it is rampant with sexism, as are
most novels of the neobarbarian genre. The moralistic hero of Dean Ing's Pulling
Through (1983) manages to denounce his underaged cookie and have her too when
the young girl he has arrested for sexual misbehavior winds up in his shelter as the
bombs go off outside. Chaperoned by his sister and her family, he is spared the
temptation to trifle with the young lady while the rems accumulate; but she proves
herself to be such a trooper that he later weds her. Although he's much older than
she, they don't make such a bad couple: he has lost a good deal of weight through
starvation in the shelter, which has improved his looks considerably. It's an ill war
that blows nobody good.
A number of graphically pornographic or semipornographic novels with a nuclear
holocaust providing the background for unbridled lust were written during the
sixties, when pornography publishing houses encouraged, for a brief period,
experimentation with standard conventions of the genre. The combination of sex
and nuclear war achieves its apotheosis in these peculiar hybrids. (See Gyle Davis,
Sex '99 [1968]; M. J. Deer, Flames of Desire [1963]; Jane Gallion, Biker [ 1969];
George H. Smith, The Coming of the Rats [1961] )
Yet not everyone celebrates the coming of sexual liberation in the wake of an
atomic war. Judith Merril rejects the typically male vision of a permissive
postholocaust world in Shadow on the Hearth. One of the many difficulties with
which the young mother of the story has to deal is the unwanted attentions of a
civil defense official. The persistent courtship carried on by this man is depicted as
absurd considering the holocaust through which the characters are living. The last
thing on the woman's mind is sex. The novel's ending reaffirms monogamy as her
husband successfully makes it home.
Male authors as well as female sometimes reject the vision of the nuclear
wasteland as a rationale for male sexual aggression, as evidenced by Robert C.
O'Brien's Z for Zachariah (1974), in which a teenaged girl needs all the resources
at her command to avoid being raped by the violent, abusive older male who may be
the only other person alive. In a very large number of stories, rape is a prominent
feature of the immediate postholocaust scene, and some stories are built entirely
around the rape theme, such as "The House by the Crab Apple Tree" (1964) by S. S.
Johnson. But rape is almost always presented as a horror, just one more aspect of
the atomic catastrophe; it is not celebrated like the other forms of taboo sex
discussed.
Similarly, postholocaust fiction almost never legitimizes male homosexuality. And
the exceptions which do depict gay sex sympathetically, such as James Sallis's
"Jeremiad" (1969), do not present it as a consequence of postholocaust sexual
liberation. Typical is Derek Ingrey's Pig on a Lead (1963), the young protagonist of
which flees the disgusting desires of a sanctimonious but lustful dirty old man and
finds excitement with a young woman. In Robert Adams's Horseclans series (1975), homosexual men are sadistic, brutal pedophiles. And in Patrick Wyatt's Irish Rose
(1975) and Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World (1974), men
confine most of their lovemaking to males out of contempt for women. But the
ultimate homophobic atomic war tale is Henry Slesar's "Ersatz" (1967), in which a
soldier flees a transvestite offering him sex in a bar, preferring to return to the
nuclear war raging outside. Better dead than taint oneself with gay sexuality, it
would seem.
An important subcategory of the postholocaust love story is the Adam and Eve
formula, in which the two survivors of a holocaust must mate to ensure the
continuation of the human race. The genre is a large one, including many stories not
depicting a nuclear war, and was well established long before the atomic era. One of
the best known early examples is Alfred Noyes's 1940 novel No Other Man,
mercilessly satirized in Ronald Duncan's 1952 atomic test catastrophe novel The
Last Adam (London: Dobson). Satiric treatment of the formula also figures in
Damon Knight's "Not With a Bang" (1950; note the punning title), which is little
more than a joke criticizing female prudishness. At the end of the story the last
man stands paralyzed and dying in a men's room while the last woman waits outside,
too proper to enter and see what is taking him so long.
So insistently carnal are the relationships in most nuclear war novels that there
is little room for romance; most of their love stories are little more than sexual
encounters. Yet from time to time love blossoms in the postholocaust landscape and
takes on special meaning. In a moving scene in an otherwise forgettable novel,
Virginia Fenwick's America R.l.P. (1965), a young nurse spends her honeymoon caring
for the blackened body of her bridegroom, scorched by the blast of an atomic
weapon as they left the wedding. When he dies, she at first refuses to believe it,
then allows herself to die as well.
Perhaps the most significant function of love in the atomic ruins is as a force
reconciling former enemies, signalling an end to hostilities. In Philip Wylie's
"Philadelphia Phase" (1951), the hero, abandoned by his frivolous society girlfriend,
falls in love with a young Russian woman named Tanya who urges the rebuilding of
Independence Hall (destroyed by earlier Russian attacks) as a symbol of freedom.
She is, of course, beautiful: "She had been lovely in overalls. In a low-cut evening
gown, she was astonishing." He patriotically proposes at Valley Forge; but Tanya, in
despair of ever having children because she has been sterilized by the bombing,
kills herself. The former girlfriend redeems herself by throwing herself into the
work of reconstruction and is reunited with her lover. Wylie treats the theme of
Russian-American reconciliation with extreme caution; the early cold war period of
the story suggests an obvious rationale for the author's timidity. Tanya is Russian,
but not an enemy (she is one of those liberated by the American assault on the
USSR depicted in Collier's "Preview of the War We Do Not Want"); more American
than some Americans, she steps conveniently out of the way at the appropriate
moment--after having proved the point that Americans and Russians can love each
other--to leave the reader with a red, white, and blue ending to which even the
most rabid anti-Communist could not object.
The reconciliation in David Graham's Down to a Sunless Sea (1979) is more
unflinching. Almost the only survivors of a world-enveloping holocaust are a
planeload of refugees from New York and another planeload of Russian refugees,
mostly women. The captain of the American plane (male) falls in love with the
captain of the Russian plane (female), and together they will help found a new and
better world from their place of refuge in newly warming Antarctica.
In neobarbarian fiction featuring the typical conflict between a highly technical
and a primitive culture, love is often the key to reconciling the adversaries to one
another--see, for instance, Robert Coulson's To Renew the Ages (1976), Paul 0.
Williams's The Dome in the Forest (1976), and Patrick Tilley's Cloud Warrior
(1984). Even racial conflicts have been reconciled through the power of love in this
genre. In Edmund Cooper's The Last Continent (1969), the primitive white survivors
of a cataclysmic nuclear race war live in Antarctica while the victorious blacks live
on Mars. A new and final genocidal war is prevented by a black-white pair of lovers
who persuade the leaders of the two races that they can live in peace and reclaim
the Earth with newly rediscovered technology.
Perhaps the ultimate story of an amorous armistice is Albert Compton Friborg's
"Careless Love" (1954), in which the defense computers of the two opposing nations
fall in love and create universal disarmament and peace. Most stories of romantic
reconciliation in this sense are only slightly less absurd. Nuclear war is not a hurt
that can be made well by a kiss, as Edita Morris recognizes in The Seeds of
Hiroshima (1965). A young American tries to brush aside the fears of an attractive
Hibakusha (survivor of the atomic bombing) in his love for her. Their romance is
doomed, however. They first embrace while on a trip to protest atomic weapons in
Tokyo and return to Hiroshima to find that the woman's sister has just given birth
to a horribly deformed son. In shame and bitterness, the sister leaps off a cliff
with her newborn child and the narrator resolves never to marry, dedicating her
life instead to struggling for a peaceful world. Morris's thoughtful treatment of
the theme makes clear by contrast how superficial are most reconciliations in these
works.
Science fiction has been revolutionized since the early seventies by the
emergence of a number of talented female writers who do not share the traditional
male attitudes about sex and sex roles. One of them is Suzy McKee Charnas, whose
Walk to the End of the World, mentioned earlier in this chapter, depicts a savagely
antifeminist postholocaust world in which women are blamed for the war and made
into slaves, beasts of burden, and even fodder. In the 1978 sequel, Motherlines, a
much more complex sexual picture emerges in which two rival clans of women, the
Free Fems and the Riding Women, roam the desert, making lesbian love. The latter
group stimulates parthenogenesis by mating with stallions. This feminist separatist
utopia is clearly a reply to the misogynist dystopia of the first volume. Vonda
McIntyre's Dreamsnake (1978), although it includes rape and the sexual abuse of a
child, also depicts a romance, untraditional in that it is the heroine who is the
assertive, dominant figure. She makes love with a beautiful young man, for instance,
though her heart belongs elsewhere, and she falls into the arms of the smitten
lover who has pursued her throughout her adventures only after she has rescued
herself and her adopted daughter.
Some male writers have been affected by changing attitudes toward sex roles
as well. One is Paul O. Williams, whose Pelbar Cycle presents various models for
male-female relations, implying that equality is best. Especially noteworthy in this
regard are the second and fourth volumes, The Ends of the Circle (1981) and The
Fall of the Shell (1982). However, unlike Charnas's novels, these works establish no
logical relationship between the sexual patterns and the war which lies in the
background.
One expects more or less irrelevant romances in popular fiction, but even among
the more serious nuclear holocaust tales, few lack a love story--or at least a dose
of sex. The new revisionist novels have had an impact, for recent
authors seem self-conscious about adhering to the traditional exploitative,
essentially irrelevant sex subplots (see, for instance, Trinity's Child [1983] by
William Prochnau). Yet the sex theme remains mandatory and so dominant that one
is led to conclude that however irrelevant many of these erotic encounters are, the
contemplation of the nuclear holocaust arouses fears of annihilation so intense that
only a human embrace offers a shield. On the Beach is in this regard not much
different from "Dover Beach," depicting a world in which love presents the main
consolation of people living in a world emptied of transcendent meaning.
Another way in which atomic warfare is connected with sexuality is in its effect
on reproduction. In The Man with Only One Head (1955), Densil Barr depicts
universal sterilization from cobalt-bomb-induced radiation as creating a frenzy of
illicit copulation (one would suppose no contraception was available in 1955);
adultery is consequently made a capital crime, despite the fact that 43 percent of
the married population is indulging. Barr satirizes the values of his time by stating
that men would rather see the human race die out than have their wives
impregnated by the one man left fertile on Earth.
Other effects of radiation are more commonly depicted, but the most
immediate and dramatic of these, radiation poisoning, is rarely described; even
when a character is heavily dosed with radiation, he or she usually lives, in keeping
with the tendency of authors to concentrate on survival. The longer-term effects
of radiation include cancer, which is seldom touched on (Pangborn is an exception,
as are Kunetka and Strieber), sterility, which we discussed earlier, and birth
defects. Genetic changes induced by radiation, in contrast, are extremely
commonplace, taking a variety of forms: defects such as might be expected, and
also fantastic animals and human-animal hybrids, and, most commonly of all,
superhumans with extraordinary powers, especially mental telepathy.
Fantastic monsters abound. In Margot Bennett's The Long Way Back (1954)
there are two-inch long ants and huge carnivorous plants. In Philip K. Dick and Roger
Zelazny's Deus Irae (1976), and in Zelazny's This Immortal (1965) and Damnation
Alley (1969) (also in The Cursed Earth [1982], modeled on the latter), the heroes
must battle mutated beasts of various sorts; radiation seems little more than a
convenient excuse for introducing fantasy creatures into these otherwise realistic
narratives. In A. M. Lightner's The Da' of the Drones (1969), villagers herd and
worship giant bees. Gigantism, in fact, seems to be the most popular result of
mutation in animals, in fiction just as in Hollywood monster movies. Tyrone C. Barr,
author of The Last Fourteen (1959), specializes in gigantic mutants, most of which
are good to eat: shrimp, salmon, toads, various fruits. One of the fourteen survivors
of the holocaust is killed by a huge featherless duck. In this, as in many other
cases, the new species have evolved and established themselves far too rapidly to
be biologically credible.
Chapter Five
Avoiding Nuclear War
Avoiding a nuclear holocaust: it might be supposed that such would be the aim of
the authors of nuclear war fiction. The issuing of awful warnings. The depiction of
Armageddon. Foreshadowing the wretchedness of the new dark age. And for a
minority of authors, this is so.
Yet most of those who have depicted nuclear war or its aftermath in fiction
have done so in ways that avoid coming to terms with the nature of a nuclear war in
the real world. There are sound commercial reasons for this avoidance. The subject
has never been truly popular, as noted in chapter 1: realistic depictions of nuclear
holocaust are too disturbing to appeal to a mass audience. The experience of
reading such a work is too much like staring into one's own grave. The best-seller
status of Shute's On the Beach was an anomaly, perhaps due in part to the book's
careful exclusion of all aspects of the war except the relatively tidy effects of the
blanket of fallout which engulfs the globe. It contains no melted eyeballs, no
hanging flaps of skin, no suppurating sores, no cancerous lesions, no mounds of
rubble, no deformed babies--in short, no nuclear war. Even so, it scared readers
silly. The relative success of Kunetka and Strieber's Warday may be ascribable in
part to the moderate scale of the war it describes, and the same is even more true
of the amazingly understated Alas, Babylon.
Aside from these three, few fictional works which have focused primarily on
depicting the course or immediate aftermath of a nuclear war have ever attained
true best-seller status. In science fiction, by far the greater number of well-known
novels and short stories depict the distant future, with the holocaust Iying in the
distant past: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Davy, Dreamsnake. And even when they
choose nuclear war as their subject, most authors accommodate it to our fears and
willful ignorance in one way or another. The strategies of avoidance are many, but it
is this form of avoidance that we shall discuss first.
In spy thrillers the holocaust is usually avoided literally. The superagent hero
almost always succeeds in thwarting the plot of terrorists or vicious pacifists to
plunge the world into atomic Armageddon. When their bomb does explode, as in the
cases cited in the Bibliography, it usually does not signal the beginning of a
holocaust. The danger of nuclear war provides only a source of suspense, a
motivating threat of the sort provided in earlier fiction by the microbes, rays, and
poison gases wielded by would-be rulers of the planet.
The political content of thrillers varies, but they are predominantly
conservative, depicting the Russians or Chinese as crazed aggressors bent on world
domination. Such views do not lend themselves to thoughtful warnings of the
dangers of nuclear war, except insofar as such war is precipitated by the failure of
liberals to accept the necessity of the policy of deterrence through strength.
Because of their need for successful heroes and penchant for conservative politics,
thrillers do not provide a hospitable setting for serious examination of the
consequences of the nuclear arms race.
An exception to the rule is Nicolas Freeling's examination of the responsibility
of the scientist in the construction of nuclear weapons in his thriller of
international terrorism, Gadget (1977). He depicts better than anyone the morbid
fascination the bomb can exercise over a man of peace, a man like Robert
Oppenheimer. Freeling gives concrete form to the debate over whether the
scientist who works on arms can separate himself from responsibility for his
products, as a kidnapped physicist finds himself fascinated by the task of
constructing the bomb which terrorists have forced him to create. His wife's
reaction fits far better the mold of traditional heroism: she rouses herself from
her stupefied lethargy to argue passionately that he must resist, and when she
fails, removes the excuse that he must endanger others to save those he loves by
escaping along with her children. Her "irrational" views--seen as literal madness by
the authorities--are clearly the purest sanity.
But typically, atomic thrillers are nothing like this. The bomb is an arbitrary
threat and the morality of its creation and use are not closely examined. Most
nuclear war fiction is, of course, science fiction. Although science fiction is capable
of thoughtful and sophisticated explorations of political and moral issues, the vast
bulk of it is simple escapist fantasy. Far more thoughtful treatments of nuclear war
exist in science fiction than in thrillers, but the majority of science fiction authors
trivialize the subject in one way or another.
Perhaps most striking is the way in which, as we have seen, radiation-induced
mutation becomes a sort of magic wand to justify the creation of marvels and
monsters. The notion of mutated superbeings and beasts had been around for a long
time before Hiroshima, and even before the bomb went off, Henry Kuttner was
putting the new device to work in his "Baldy" stories. The equation radioactivity =
mutation = telepathy is one of the most bizarre consequences of the atomic age in
fiction, but that did not prevent it from rapidly becoming a cliché. Even when a
science fiction author attempted a more sober treatment of the theme of birth
defects, as in Judith Merril's "That Only a Mother" (1948), the equation tended to
creep in. The baby in Merril's story may lack arms and legs, but it has preternatural
abilities. Merril may have been satirizing the established pattern by portraying a
superbaby who turned out to be defective, but outside of science fiction the
combination would have seemed ridiculous. Indeed, outside of science fiction the
supernormal maturity of the child would be seen as a delusion of the crazed
mother, but the science fiction context suggests that its abilities are real.
When Merril explored the consequences of radiation more thoroughly, in Shadow
on the Hearth (1950), which is hardly a science fiction novel at all, she depicted a
mild case. And Merril's treatment of the subject is one of the best. The
protagonists of most nuclear war science fiction are spared the horrors of
radiation disease entirely. It is almost entirely outside of science fiction--in the
novels depicting the victims of the Hiroshima bomb--that detailed descriptions of
the course of radiation disease are presented from the point of view of the
sufferer. Given the claims of science fiction to scientific accuracy, the avoidance
of this topic is remarkable. One would not expect the theme to appear in science
fiction adventure stories, for there is nothing heroic about wasting away in agony,
but radiation disease is absent even from most of the more thoughtful nuclear war
science fiction. Indeed, cancer, blindness, even loss of hair and skin lesions--all of
these ordinary consequences of exposure to high levels of radioactivity are
extraordinarily rare in fiction. Radiation is often mentioned as a threat, but one
which is successfully avoided by the principal characters.
Traditional science fiction sees itself as a problem-solving genre, and this
attitude can lead to a peculiar sort of avoidance in which the problems posed by
nuclear weapons are disposed of in a cavalier fashion. Impenetrable shields or other
superatomic technology is developed, aliens invade and impose disarmament or
computers do the same, nuclear war turns out not to be as bad as had been thought
and can be lived with, or humanity is replaced by something less belligerent:
superhumans or supermachines.
Less traditional writers (Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, for
instance) often treat the subject in a satirical manner. There is something to be
said for the argument that the concept of nuclear war is so irrational that only a
satirical treatment of it is adequate. Norman Spinrad's "The Big Flash" (1969) is
both absurd and telling. But there are problems with this point of view as well.
Often the writer seems to be considerably more concerned with working out a
particular conceit than with exploring the absurdity of nuclear war (see Knight's
"Not With a Bang" [1950]). And the absurdist approach can be a sophisticated form
of avoidance.
Surely one of the reasons for the relative popularity of the film Dr. Strangelove
was that it echoed people's feelings that the military was insane, the bombs
uncontrollable, and doomsday inevitable. If these feelings accurately depict reality,
the appropriate reaction would seem to be panic or despair rather than sardonic
humor. Instead, absurdism is often a coping mechanism which allows one to shelve
nuclear war mentally as simply one of life's insoluble quandaries. This attitude is
akin to the fatalism of people who cavalierly hope to be the first to go when the
bombs fall. If nothing can be done about the danger of nuclear holocaust, then one
is released from responsibility for doing anything whatever about it and is better
off not thinking about the subject at all. Absurdist treatments of the theme then
become not courageous explorations of what terrifies us but a form of not thinking.
Almost entirely absent from fiction, both science fiction and otherwise, is
effective political action to prevent nuclear war or its recurrence, as noted earlier.
When action is taken, it is usually by high government officials and not by ordinary
citizens. There are very few works in which there is any sort of organized protest
against nuclear weapons; and when common people do act, their deeds are usually
either foolish or villainous. In those few cases in which the protesters seem
intelligent and well motivated they are ineffectual. The effect of the vast majority
of this fiction is not to inspire protest but to plunge readers into despair.
In part, this result may be an artifact of the parameters of this study. A truly
successful protest movement would prevent a nuclear war from taking place, and
therefore a novel that depicted one would necessarily be excluded from
examination. Yet I have read hundreds of near-nuclear war novels as well, and the
dearth of effective protest is universal. There are exceedingly few nuclear war
novels which articulate pacifist positions. Insofar as writers express pacifist
sympathies, they do so by imagining the worst of horrors, not by providing
alternatives. There is some question whether the reading of more nuclear war
fiction, if that could be promoted, would inspire more people to action or simply
reinforce their tendency toward despair.
Such matters are, of course, outside the realm of literary criticism. An
artistically successful novel can be morally and politically irresponsible. In the
twentieth century the two go hand-in-hand more often than not. Yet political
questions impose themselves in reference to this particular theme more than most
others. It is safe to say that most writers decide to write about nuclear war at
least partly because they wish to prevent one from happening. Such motivations
have been cited to me personally by Brian Aldiss, Helen Clarkson, and Theodore
Sturgeon. It is not irrelevant to ask how well they succeed, quite apart from
artistic questions.
English-speaking writers generally lack the kind of political traditions so well
established in countries like France and Germany. The remarkable degree to which
German writers, for instance, have involved themselves with protests against
nuclear arms is well documented in Raimund Kurscheid's admirable study, Kampf
dem Atomtod!: Schriftsteller im Kampf gegen eine deutsche Atombewaffnung
[Fight Against Atomic Death!: Writers in the Fight Against German Nuclear Arms].
Not only have many German fiction writers and dramatists signed petitions,
marched, and spoken out directly on the issue of nuclear war, but they have also
frequently written nonfiction articles on the subject as well. However it is notable
that few of them have written fiction depicting such a war (Hans Hellmut Kirst is
one of the few well-known exceptions). Apparently nothing like the proliferation of
nuclear holocaust tales in English has taken place in German-speaking countries.
German writers may have been more committed and outspoken than their British
and American counterparts, but aside from a handful of novels and plays aimed
primarily at direct agitation, their concerns have not been expressed in their
creative work.
There are individual English-speaking authors who have become directly involved
in the antinuclear movement. Brian Aldiss is a striking example. As a young soldier
who was spared the necessity of invading Japan by the dropping of the Hiroshima
bomb, Aldiss felt grateful for the weapon, and during the fifties he remained
critical of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, whose motives he
suspected were contaminated by its leftist leanings. His first story dealing with the
subject, "Basis for Negotiation" (1962), was actually a satire on the CND's widely
publicized Aldermaston marches. Even when, in 1964, Aldiss included in Greybeard a
note of sympathy for the protesters, privately he was far from sure that they
should be supported.
Later events changed Aldiss's mind. Living as he did in the 80s a few scant miles
from the Greenham Common encampment where British women have been protesting
the placement of American cruise missiles, he became directly involved in the
protest in person and in statements to the press, including a letter to the London
Times. The issue that concerned him most directly was the danger of a nuclear
winter. Having been at work for several years on his Helliconia novels, in which a
planet goes through a multimillenial change of seasons, he found a fortuitous
opportunity to treat the nuclear winter theme in Helliconia Winter. Although
Helliconia's winter is natural and not artificially induced, he parallels it with nuclear
winter on Earth in a fascinating and most effective fashion. Even more strikingly,
he satirizes the arms race by depicting the political leaders who insist on the
ruthless extermination of the enemy as fools who fail to realize the essential
interdependence of all Helliconian life. Helliconia Winter does a fine job of
connecting ecological concerns to the danger of nuclear war. The novel is highly
recommended, along with the two preceding volumes, Helliconia Spring (1982) and
Helliconia Summer (1983).
The achievements of Aldiss and others demonstrate that artistry and political
effectiveness cannot be entirely separated. Perhaps the politically most useful sort
of tale is one in which the characters are so attractive and vividly realized that one
identifies with them deeply and wishes them not to undergo the suffering entailed
in an atomic conflict. Surely that is one of the secrets of the impact of Ibuse's
Black Rain (1967). The notorious failure of most science fiction to create vividly
realized characters makes it generally an inhospitable genre for this sort of
protest.
Another characteristic of science fiction leads to another form of avoidance:
most science fiction is popular fiction which places heavy emphasis on adventure.
Being vaporized in a millisecond is not an adventure. It is not even an experience.
Therefore most science fiction dealing with nuclear war depicts the aftermath and
not the war itself. A large number of these adventure stories take the
postholocaust setting for granted as a well- established background, the exact
nature of which need not be explained. The causes of the war which transformed
the world are usually vague or unknown, the number of bombs dropped and their
design are similarly not specified, and only those aspects of the war which relate
directly to the plot (the mutation of monsters, a surviving supercomputer) are likely
even to be mentioned.
Stories of grisly hand-to-hand combat in the wake of a nuclear holocaust can
have a moral purpose, even when badly written. Leonard Fischer's inept 1950 pulp
novel, Let Out the Beast, is clearly intended as an awful warning. Its protagonist
keeps insisting on the need for ruthlessness in the struggle to survive, but it is
apparent by the end of the novel that the very qualities which have made him a
survivor have also rendered him less than human. As the title implies, the Darwinian
struggle has turned man into beast. In such works, tales of the struggles between
postholocaust neofeudal tribes may become metaphors for the political struggles of
our own time, as in the novels of Williams's Pelbar Cycle.
More frequently the struggle is presented for its own sake. The nuclear war
novel is often only a lightly disguised western or old-fashioned war yarn. Even in
these cases, writers of postholocaust action tales have generally felt impelled to
deplore the cataclysm which provides the background for their protagonists'
adventures. Or at least that has been true in the past. Recently a more ominous
sort of combat-oriented nuclear war fiction has burgeoned. The seventies produced
a spate of conservative thrillers denouncing the Left and the young, but the values
reflected in these works were relatively conventional and the authors clearly
deplored the wars they described. Only Robert Adams's long-running Horseclans
series and, to a lesser degree, Piers Anthony's Battle Circle novels, both of which
began in 1975, display a consistent enthusiasm for ferocious bloody combat. In
Adams's books the holocaust is barely mentioned. In the foreground is an unending
round of rape, torture, mutilation, and gruesome slaughter. The Horseclans novels
are also unusual in depicting surviving scientists as villains bent on world domination
(although it is difficult in this sort of fiction to distinguish heroes from villains).
With the advent of the eighties, this became the dominant variety of nuclear
war fiction, changing the aspect of the genre radically. Although more thoughtful
works like Yorick Blumenfeld's Jenny (1981) and Strieber and Kunetka's Warday
received notice from reviewers, the taste of readers of popular fiction seems to
have undergone a shift which resulted in the greatly accelerated production of
enthusiastically vicious, brutal, and gory nuclear war novels. Suddenly the
postholocaust landscape, like the Wild West or the Dark Ages, has become a
legitimate and popular landscape for combat stories. The success of films like The
Terminator (1984) and the Mad Max movies from Australia (specifically Road
Warrior [1982] and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome [1985]) reflects the same
phenomenon, as does the popularity of roleplaying and video adventure games
modeled on nuclear war, and comics with postholocaust settings, like the Judge
Dredd series. Especially among younger readers, avoidance of nuclear war as a
realistic possibility now takes the peculiar form of plunging gleefully into the
radioactive landscape in search of adventure. More than forty novels of this type
have been published in the period from 1980 to 1984. In previous decades it was
unusual to find more than one or two a year. In the 80s they made up over half of
the nuclear war fiction being published.
Typical is Jerry Ahern's Survivalist series (1981-), discussed in chapter 3 and
described in length in the Bibliography. Like most of the heroes of these works,
Ahern's hero is a combat veteran whose main survival skills are marksmanship and
ruthlessness. These novels may reflect the frustration of the generation of young
men who returned from Vietnam to find their experiences not only unappreciated
but detested. They reflect the frustration and rage of young people who seem to
have adopted the view that the only sensible politics is: waste the other guy before
he wastes you. A speech by one of Ahern's protagonists who learns to enjoy
slaughtering villains with Rourke sums up the spirit of the whole series:
I know this sounds horrible, with all that's happened--I mean, World War Three
began two days ago. But here I am, wearing a cowboy hat, riding in a fire-engine red
'57 Chevy, out to rescue some people trapped in the desert. Two days ago, I was a
junior editor with a trade magazine publisher and dying of boredom. Maybe I'm
crazy--and I'm sure not happy about the War and all--but I'm almost having fun.
Ahern's novels are fairly trivial entertainments for men who enjoy combat
stories, yet they are disturbing because they demonstrate that there is still a
significant audience for stories which follow one of the deepest- held American
patterns in our Wild West mythos: the story of the Wimp Who Picks Up the Gun
and Becomes a Man. Even Rourke's squeamish wife learns to shoot and stab with the
best of them, and is the better for it. Posing as a tough-minded confrontation with
facts softer folks try to forget, Ahern's survivalist fiction evades coming to grips
with the likely consequences of a nuclear war in any realistic way.
In William W. Johnstone's Ashes novels (1983-), the politics are even more
extreme. The protagonist rages against gun control, the ACLU, Big Government,
welfare, labor unions, newscasters, and pacifists. He creates a sort of right-wing
utopia and eventually becomes the object of religious worship. Yet Johnstone is
eager to demonstrate that he is no simple-minded redneck. He rails against racism
(even while depicting blacks in rigidly stereotyped ways), endorses some liberal
causes (profit sharing), and opposes some conservative causes (censorship of
pornography, religion in the public schools--although he's not consistent on the
latter point). The protagonist has certain pretensions to culture: one of his favorite
symphonies is "Wagner's Ring," and he reads poetry by "Wadsworth." The cover of
each volume features an alert figure holding an automatic rifle while over him
hovers a phoenix, symbol of the bright new right-wing hope which will emerge from
the ashes of corrupt liberal America.
But saturating Johnstone's works, and making them typical of the type, is a
pornographic concentration on extreme violence, in his case particularly on rape and
sexual torture, especially of children. In this new atomic action fiction, violence is
both a horror and a source of intoxication. Johnstone dissects the phenomenon in
the eighth chapter of Part Three of Out of the Ashes:
Sometimes a soldier will fire his weapon until it's empty and will never reload, so
caught up in the heat and the horror of combat is he. Pull the trigger over and over;
feel the imaginary slam of the butt against the shoulder; kill the enemy with
nonbullets. The yammering, banging, metal against metal makes it difficult to think.
So you don't. The screaming, the awful howling of the wounded and the yelling of
the combatants blend into a solid roaring cacophony in your head. An hour becomes
a minute; a minute is eternity. God! will it never end? No! don't let it end; the high is
terrific, kind of like a woman moaning beneath you, reaching the climax.
Because for once Johnstone is not merely whipping up the bloodlust but truly
trying to explain what it feels like for a soldier to be caught up in a killing frenzy,
he adds: "One soon learns the truth: you didn't climax, you shit your pants." Aside
from this one remarkably honest passage, however, most of the novel is a chain of
sadistic sex, torture, and bloodshed, each incident thoroughly deplored, of course,
then followed by the next, the whole profusely interlarded with right-wing
editorializing.
Johnstone takes sadistic sex further than any ol the other later novelists of
nuclear violence but he is not untypical of the rest in his emphasis on rape. These
are quintessentially masculine novels aimed at a male audience. The fascination of
rape haunts these works, recurring again and again. In fact, the entire atomic
adventure drama is strikingly masculine. It is notable that whereas protagonists
created by male authors normally set out on a quest when the bomb drops, the
protagonists of women authors generally stay close to home, caring for the sick and
the dying. Men sometimes rescue children in the course of their adventures
(although more often than not children fail to be rescued), but they rarely settle
down to care for them. That is the role of women. Vonda McIntyre's Snake (in
Dreamsnake) is a successful attempt by a feminist to combine the adventurous,
erotic spirit of the traditional hero with the compassionate and nurturing qualities
of the traditional heroine. The novel is admirable. But it was the macho swagger of
the male writers captured the public imagination. The adventure stories continued
to pour out. Others cited in the Bibliography are by D. B. Drumm, Frederick
Dunstan, L. Ron Hubbard, Dean Ing, Dennis Jones, Luke Rhinehart, James Rouch,
Ryder Stacy, and the indefatigable Robert Adams, who published the long-running
Horseclans series. Not all of their books are as ferocious as those of Ahern and
Johnstone, and most of them are better writers, but the same themes unite them:
fatalism about nuclear war, extreme individualism in which survival for its own sake
is the highest ideal, and--in most cases-- bloody sadism.
In one of 1984's most popular films, The Terminator, the audience is invited to
regard nuclear war as inevitable and to suppose that the best way to prepare for
the future is to arm oneself and prepare for the internecine combat which will
surely ensue in the wake of the holocaust. Most of the new fiction takes the same
view. It depicts political action to prevent a nuclear war as at best irrelevant, and
at worst suicidal. These novels suit perfectly the 80s mood of revived cold war
animosity toward the Soviet Union apparent in films such as Red Dawn, Rocky IV
and White Nights. Although fiction writers preceded filmmakers in expressing this
mood, they were clearly part of the same phenomenon. Nuclear saber-rattling was
definitely in vogue.
Despite the title of Ahern's Survivalist series, most of these novels are not
about survivalism as such. Indeed, in one of Drumm's Traveler books (1984-)--which
in many ways seem like a parody of the whole genre--the hero destroys a villainous
group of survivalists. (Dean Ing's Pulling Through [1983] is a true survivalist tract,
and it lacks most of the qualities we have been discussing.) In these stories, killing
is not part of an integrated philosophy of survival; it is depicted for its own sake.
Atomic sadism does not entirely dominate the current crop of fictional nuclear
holocausts, however. Several thoughtful and carefully researched works have
appeared recently. The most significant are Strieber and Kunetka's Warday and
William Prochnau's Trinity's Child (1983). None of these authors was content to
repeat the clichˆ©s of his predecessors, and all engaged in considerable
background study and larded their works with fact. They take a firmly antiwar
stance as well.
Prochnau's novel is perhaps the more interesting. Its title refers, of course, to
the code name for the first atomic bomb test in 1945, "Trinity." The novel
illustrates only too convincingly how a nuclear war once begun can become nearly
impossible to control, and how close to holocaust we live on a daily basis. The novel
also has a contemporary emphasis in that the president it depicts is in some ways
similar to Ronald Reagan: he is an elderly hawk who refuses to believe that the
Russians would ever dare to defy his firm stance. It is in fact his aggressive
posturing which has triggered their decision to attempt a limited preemptive strike.
He is not entirely a negative figure, however; his native common sense and good
judgment save much of the country in the end. But for most of the novel, he is
unfortunately unconscious, and the idiotic kneejerk reactionary secretary of the
interior who is mistakenly assigned the duties of commander-in-chief almost
precipitates Armageddon.
The book is filled with details concerning the difficulties of planning and
communicating inside the military during a nuclear war, including a good deal of
emphasis on the dangers of electromagnetic pulse effects--something Prochnau's
book has in common with Strieber and Kunetka's. Unlike the latter, however,
Prochnau does not assign EMP an overwhelmingly important role. A host of highly
credible mishaps cause the course of the war to go wildly out of control. (In many
ways the plot illustrates the weaknesses of the usual nuclear war scenarios
produced by Pentagon experts as they are discussed in Paul Bracken's The
Command and Control of Nuclear Forces, published the same year.) The Russian
missiles prove to be highly inaccurate and their commanders incapable of keeping
accurate track of the damage they are causing. Less technically sophisticated
nations like China and Pakistan cannot be certain even of the identity of their
attacker. The presidential helicopter is all too probably destroyed in flight, EMP
partially disables the command plane, and the war escalates in a blundering, idiotic
fashion, beyond the control of anyone. Prochnau underlines the danger of
destroying the leadership of one's enemy when that very leadership is the only
force capable of bringing a halt to the war and preventing ecocide. He even hints at
the possibility of a nuclear winter by speculating that dust in the atmosphere might
trigger a new ice age. This is an exaggeration but is remarkable considering that
the novel was written before the first paper on the subject appeared: R. P. Turco,
O. B. Toon, T. P. Ackerman, J. B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan, "Nuclear Winter: Global
Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions," Science 222 (December
23,1983):1283-92. This seminal study is commonly referred to as the "TTAPS
paper" from the initials of its authors.
The novel is interesting politically as well, as NATO refuses to sacrifice itself
by coming to the aid of the U.S., the government of the USSR is depicted as torn
by internal debate, and the mentality which insists on victory at all costs is seen as
the most dangerous possible stance that the nation's leader can take. Prochnau is
unique in combining a high degree of political sophistication with a thorough
knowledge of military hardware and strategy.
His treatment of women, however, is idiotic (few male authors of popular fiction
who want to be modern about women seem to have any notion of how to go about it),
but otherwise his characters are appealing and vividly portrayed, and the rather
complex action is clearly conveyed. One of the most striking features of Trinity's
Child is the way in which the holocaust is finally prevented after a limited but
devastating nuclear exchange. A long chain of improbable fortuitous coincidences
and a great deal of simple good luck results in the president reestablishing
command over the the military and calling a halt to the the plunge toward holocaust
which his replacement has inaugurated. At one point, the mutiny of a crucial B-52
bomber crew plays an important role in averting disaster. Given the initial "bolt
from the blue" attack by the Russians--itself highly improbable--the rest of
Prochnau's scenario convinces in its detailed depiction of disaster and fails-cleverly--to convince in its depiction of the rescue of humanity from annihilation.
During the years of research on this book I have often been asked which works
I recommend most highly. In Chapter 1 I cited a number of them which I consider
the most significant literary works depicting nuclear war or its aftermath. Here it
is appropriate to list those works with the greatest potential for political impact on
readers still uninformed about or unmoved at the threat posed by the world's
nuclear arsenals. Avoiding a holocaust in this sense is, after all, the most serious
purpose such fiction can perform. For its persuasiveness and contemporaneity,
Prochnau's book certainly ranks high on the list. No other novel is as effective in
depicting the probable course of a nuclear war. In portraying the effects of fallout,
no one has done a better job than Helen Clarkson in The Last Day. And the work
which best conveys the tragedy of the destruction of civilization is Russell Hoban's
Riddley Walker.
But if I were to single out one work which should be read with attention by
persons concerned with nuclear war, it would be Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain. No
writer has more affectingly depicted the human tragedy that is nuclear warfare.
Nuclear deterrence remains an acceptable policy of national defense largely
because of the failure of imagination which our leaders willfully impose on
themselves. The cloud of "nukespeak" which surrounds the atomic arms debate
obscures the reality of the danger confronting us. Creative writers like Ibuse make
the abstractions of the scenario writers concrete and remind us that nuclear war
cannot be other than a crime against humanity and against the Earth itself. Blunted
by decades of professional jargon and simple avoidance of the topic, the best of
the fiction writers can reawaken our sensitivity to the holocaust that has loomed
over the horizon for the past four decades and which threatens to shadow the
future of our children unless we are stirred, at last, to do something to prevent it.
Supplementary Checklists
The following checklists are provided to aid those in search of texts on themes
closely related to nuclear war. They are not as comprehensive as the main
bibliography (nothing published since 1984, for instance), and are merely
suggestions for further study. The reader wondering why a particular item was not
listed in the bibliography may well find his or her answer here.
(The main bibliography is too long for me to print. You can find it at
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/nuclear/a.htm .) Either of these lists should
help you locate one book for your oral report. Those of you who are slow readers
should choose a book and start reading by this weekend.
Near-War Narratives
In this checklist, nuclear war is more or less narrowly averted, usually by the
thwarting of the schemes of terrorists or nuclear blackmailers.
In a few cases, the war seems imminent, but does not actually break out during
the story. Many of them are cold-war thrillers in which atomic bombs are used as a
suspension-building threat, replacing the older threats of poison gas and the like.
Often these novels have little to say about nuclear weapons as such, though some
may be interesting to scholars. Many are discussed in Martha A. Bartter's The Way
to Ground Zero: The Atomic Bomb in American Science Fiction (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1988).
Ambler, Eric. The Dark Frontier. 1935.
Anvil, Christopher. The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun. 1980.
Ardies, Tom. This Suitcase Is Going to Explode. 1972.
Asimov, Isaac. "Silly Asses." 1958.
Avallon, Michael. The Doomsday Bag. 1969.
Ayer, Frederick. Where No Flags Fly. 1961.
Bagley, Michael. The Plutonium Factor. 1983.
Ball, John. The First Team. 1971.
Bass, Milton R. Force Red. 1970.
Beliayev, Alexander. The Struggle in Space. 1965
Blish, James. "Sponge Dive." 1956.
Boland, John. Holocaust. 1977.
Bone, J. F. "Triggerman." 1958.
Boulle, Pierre. "The Diabolical Weapon." 1966.
Boom, Ben. Kinsman. 1979. Millenium. 1976.
Bretnor, Reginald. "Maybe Just a Little One." 1947.
Brodeur, Paul. The Sick Fox. 1963.
Brunner, John. The Brink. 1959.
Buckmaster, Henrietta. The Lion in the Stone. 1968.
Bulmer, Kenneth. The Doomsday Men. 1968.
Caidin, Martin. Operation Nuke. 1974.
Carr, Robert Spencer. "Those Men from Mars." 1951.
Carter, Mary Arkley. The Minutes of the Night. 1965.
Chester, Roy. The Damocles Factor. 1977.
Christian, John. Five Gates to Armageddon. 1975.
Clark, Ronald. Queen Victoria's Bomb: The Disclosures of Professor Franklin
Huxtable, M.A. (Cantab.). 1967
Collins, Larry, and Dominique La Pierre. The Fifth Horseman. 1980.
Condon, Richard. The Manchurian Candidate. 1959.
Conley, Rick. "The Best Laid Plans." 1980.
Cory, Desmond. Sunburst. 1972.
Craig, William. Tashkent Crisis. 1971.
Creasey, John. The Terror. The Return of Dr. Palfrey. 1964.
Crowley, John: The Translator. 2002
Cunningham, E. V. Phyllis. 1963.
De Camp, L. Sprague. "Judgment Day." 1955.
del Rey, Lester. "Over the Top." 1949.
___. "Shadows of Empire." 1950.
Dick, Philip K. "Foster, You're Dead." 1954.
Ehrlich, Max. Big Eye. 1949.
Fellowes-Gordon, Ian. The Night of the Lollipop. 1979.
Fitzgibbon, Constantine. When the Kissing Had to Stop. 1960.
Follett, James. The Doomsday Ultimatum. 1976.
Forbes, Colin. The Year of the Golden Ape. 1974.
Frank, Pat. Forbidden Area. 1956.
Freemantle, Brian. The November Man. 1976.
Gallery, Daniel J. The Brink. 1968.
Gardner, Alan. The Escalator. 1963.
Garfield, Brian Wynne. Deep Cover. 1971.
Gary, Romain. The Gasp. 1973.
Granger, Bill. The Shattered Eye. 1982.
Gray, Michael Waude. Minutes to Impact. 1967.
Greatorex, Wilfred. The Freelancers. 1975.
Griffith, Maxwell. Gadget Maker. 1955.
Haggard, William. The Conspirators. 1967.
___. The High Wire. 1963.
___. Yesterday's Enemy. 1976.
Haining, Peter. The Hero. 1974.
Harrington, Robert Edward. The Seven of Swords. 1978.
Hodder-Williams, Christopher. Chain Reaction. 1959.
Hoppe, Arthur. Miss Lollipop and the Doomsday Machine. 1973.
Hough, S. B. Extinction Bomber. 1956.
Hunter, Matthew. Cambridgeshire Disaster. 1967.
Katz, Robert. Ziggurat. 1978.
King, Stephen. The Dead Zone. 1979.
King-Hall, Stephen. Moment of No Return. 1960.
Knebel, Fletcher. The Night of Camp David. 1965.
Kopit, Arthur. End of the World. 1984.
Le Guin, Ursula. The Lathe of Heaven. 1971
Luke, Thomas. The Hell Candidate. 1980.
McCall, Anthony. The Holocaust. 1967.
McCutchan, Philip. The Man from Moscow. 1965.
MacLean, Alistair. The Golden Rendezvous. 1962.
Maine, Charles Eric. Count-Down. 1958.
Mair, George B. The Day Khruschev Panicked. 1961.
Mason Francis Van Wyck. The Deadly Orbit Mission. 1968.
Meadows, Patrick. "Countercommandment." 1965.
Meyer, Bill. Ultimatum. 1966.
Milton, Joseph. The Man Who Bombed the World. 1966.
Neville, Kris. "Survival Problems." 1974.
Pincher, Chapman. The Eye of the Tornado. 1978.
Piper, H. Beam. "Operation R.S.V.R" 1951.
Pohl, Frederik. "Critical Mass." 1961.
Poyer, Joe. Operation Malacca. 1966.
Quest, Rodney. Countdown to Doomsday. 1966.
Reeves, Lynette Pamela. Last Days of the Peacemaker. 1976.
Reynolds, Mack. "Sweet Dreams, Sweet Princes. " 1964.
Rothberg, Abraham. Heirs of Cain. 1966.
St. Clair, Margaret. Sign of the Labrys.
Salinger, Pierre. On Instructions of My Government. 1971.
Sambrot, William. "Deadly Decision." 1958.
Sanders, Lawrence. The Hamlet Ultimatum. 1977.
Sela, Owen. An Exchange of Eagles. 1977.
Serling, Rod. "The Shelter." 1962.
Setlowe, Rick. The Brink. 1977.
Shore, Thelma. "Is It the End of the World?" 1972.
Smith, Carmichael. Atomsk. 1949.
Spillane, Mickey. The By-Pass Control. 1966.
Stanton, Ken. Ten Seconds to Zero. 1970.
Stewart, Edward. Launch! 1978.
Sutton, Jeff. Bombs in Orbit. 1959.
Taylor, Ray Ward. Doomsday Square. 1966.
Tenn, William. "Will You Walk a Little Farther?" 1951.
Terman, Douglas C. First Strike. 1980.
Tregaskis, Richard. China Bomb. 1967.
Trew, Antony. Ultimatum. 1977.
Upward, Edward. The Night Walk and Other Stories. 1987.
Van Vogt, A. E. The House That Stood Still. 1953 (rev. 1960 as The Mating Cry).
Varley, John. The Barbie Murders. 1980.
Vidal, Gore. Visit to a Small Planet. 1957.
Wager, Walter. Viper Three. 1971.
Walker, Jerry. Mission Accomplished. A Novel of 1950. 1947.
Washburn, Mark. The Armageddon Game. 1977.
Watts, Peter. Maelstrom. 2001.
Way, Peter. Sunrise. 1979.
Wheeler, J. Craig: The Krone Experiment. 1986.
Wibberley, Leonard. The Mouse That Roared. 1955.
Wilhelm, Kate. City of Cane. 1974. . Welcome, Chaos. 1983.
Wynd, Oswald. Death, the Red Flower. 1965.
Doubtful Cases
In a surprising number of cases, it is uncertain whether a nuclear war has
occurred or not. There are many vague holocausts to which no cause is ascribed. To
list them all would be to go far beyond the bounds of this study; but in the case of
most of the following works, one could make a reasonable case that the cause of
the holocaust might well have been a nuclear war. In almost all cases, these works
have been listed by one scholar or another as nuclear war narratives. Many others,
erroneously listed as nuclear wars by these same scholars, have been omitted
because their texts specifically make such a label inappropriate. Not uncommonly,
tales of worldwide pollution (like Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's False Dawn) and
ecocatastrophes of other sorts have been misidentified as concerning nuclear
holocausts.
Bester, Alfred. The Demolished Man. 1952.
Bishop, Michael. "Vox Olympica." 1981.
Black, Dorothy. Candles in the Dark. 1954.
Boorman, John. Zardoz. 1974.
Burns, A. Europe After the Rain. 1965.
Dick, Philip K. "Imposter." 1953.
___. "The Turning Wheel." 1954.
Eklund, Gordon. Dance of the Apocalypse. 1976.
Erlanger, Michael. "Silence in Heaven." 1961.
Farmer, Philip Jose. A Woman a Day or The Day of Timestop. 1953.
Fitzgibbon, Constantine. Iron Hoop. 1949.
Forstchen, William R. The Flame Upon the lce. 1984.
Gibbs, Lewis. Late Final. 1951.
Goldston, Robert. The Shore Dimly Seen. 1963.
Groves, J. W. Shellbreak. 1970
Harrison, Helga. Catacombs. 1962.
Heyne, William R. Tale of Two Futures: A Novel of Life on Earth and the Planet
Paliades in 1975. 1958.
Kelleam, Joseph E. "The Eagles Gather." 1942.
Key-Aberg, Sandro. "The End of Man." 1967.
LeGuin, Ursula. City of Illusions. 1967.
Macauley, Robie. Secret History of Time to Come. 1979.
MacTyre, Paul. Midge or Doomsday 1999. 1962
Murry, Colin. Phoenix. 1968.
Piper. H. Beam. "The Keeper." 1957.
Seabright, Idris. "Short in the Chest." 1954.
Van Vogt, A. E. "Co-Operate--Or Else!" 1942.
Wilhelm, Kate. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. 1976.
Williams, Jay. The People of the Ax. 1974.
Wilson, Richard. "A Man Spekith." 1969.
Wongar, B. "Maramara." 1978.
Zelazny, Roger. Today We Choose Faces. 1975.
Nuclear Bomb Tests
In a number of cases a nuclear holocaust is not the result of a war at all, but of
atomic bomb testing. These works, because they often closely resemble nuclear war
novels, are likely to be of interest to the reader of this study, so they are listed
below. A few deal with protests against atomic testing.
Anvil, Christopher. "Torch." 1957. Asimov, Isaac. "Hell Fire." 1956.
___. "Paté de fois gras." 1956.
Ballard, J. G. "The Voices of Time." 1960.
Buzzati, Dino. "A Siberian Shepherd's Report of the Atom Bomb." 1963.
Compton, David. "Mutatis Mutandis." In Laughter and Fear. 1960.
Dobraczynski, Jan. To Drain the Sea. 1964.
Duncan, Ronald. The Last Adam. 1952.
Ellanby, Boyd. "Chain Reaction." 1956.
Harrison, Michael. The Brain. 1953.
Hatch, Gerald. The Day the Earth Froze. 1963.
Lawrence, Henry Lionel. The Children of Light. 1962.
Lymington, John. The Giant Stumbles. 1960.
McAuley, Jacqueline Rollit. The Cloud.
MacGregor, James Murdoch. A Cry to Heaven. 1960.
Maine, Charles Eric. The Tide Went Out or Thirst. 1958.
Masson, Loys. Barbed Wire Fence or The Shattered Sexes. I95X.
Murphy, Robert. "Fallout Island." 1962.
Roberts, Keith. The Furies. 1965.
Schary, Dore. The Highest Tree. 1960.
Shadbolt, Maurice. Danger Zone. 1 976 .
Trevor, Elleston. The Domesday Story.
Wood, William. The News from Karachi. 1962.
Reactor Disasters
The following works concern accidents involving nuclear reactors and other
nonmilitary atomic installations. Some of them closely resemble the nuclear
holocausts listed in the main bibliography.
Aldiss, Brian. Greybeard. 1964.
Brennert, Alan. "Jamie's Smile." 1976.
Brown, Jerry Earl. Under the City of Angels. 1981.
del Rey, Lester. Nerves. 1942.
Fontenay, C. L. The Day the Oceans Overflowed. 1964.
Gotlieb, Phyllis. Sunburst. 1964.
Heinlein, Robert A. "Blowups Happen." 1940.
Hoyle, Fred. The Westminster Disaster. 1978
Jackson, Basil. Epicenter. 1976.
Jameson, Malcolm. Atomic Bomb. 1943.
Kavan, Anna. Ice. 1967.
Levy, D. The Gods of Foxcroft. 1970.
McQuay, Mike. Matthew Swain. Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight. 1981.
Piper, H. Beam. "Day of the Moron." 1951
Pohnka, Bett and Barbara C. Griffin. The Nuclear Catastrophe. 1977.
Queffele, Rodney. Countdown to Doomsday. 1966.
Sambrot William "Nine Days to Die " 1960
Samuel, Edwin. "Danger!" 1960.
Schroeder, Karl. "The Dragon of Pripyat." 1999.
Scortia, Thomas N. The Prometheus Crisis. 1976.
Shiras, Wilmar H. Children of the Atom. 1953.
Tubb, E. C. Breakaway. 1975.
Warriner, Thurman. Death's Bright Angel. 1956.
Wells, Barry. The Day the Earth Caught Fire. 1962
Womack, Jack. Ambient. 1987.
Ziemann, H. H. The Explosion. 1979.