King of the Cold War crisis film, Dr. Strangelove became a cultural touchstone from the moment of its release in 1964. The duck-and-cover generation saw it as a satire on nuclear issues and Cold War thinking. Subsequent generations, removed from the film's historical moment, came to view it as a quasi-documentary about an unfathomable secret world. Sean M. Maloney uses Dr. Strangelove and other genre classics like Fail Safe and The Bedford Incident to investigate a curious pop cultural contradiction. Nuclear crisis films repeatedly portrayed the failures of the Cold War's deterrent system. Yet the system worked. What does this inconsistency tell us about the genre? What does it tell us about the deterrent system, for that matter? Blending film analysis with Cold War history, Maloney looks at how the celluloid crises stack up against reality--or at least as much of reality as we can reconstruct from these films with confidence. The result is a daring intellectual foray that casts new light on Dr. Strangelove, one of the Cold War era's defining films.

King of the Cold War crisis film, Dr. Strangelove became a cultural touchstone from the moment of its release in 1964. The duck-and-cover generation saw it as a satire on nuclear issues and Cold War thinking. Subsequent generations, removed from the film’s historical moment, came to view it as a quasi-documentary about an unfathomable secret world. Sean M. Maloney uses Dr. Strangelove and other genre classics like Fail Safe and The Bedford Incident to investigate a curious pop cultural contradiction. Nuclear crisis films repeatedly portrayed the failures of the Cold War’s deterrent system. Yet the system worked. What does this inconsistency tell us about the genre? What does it tell us about the deterrent system, for that matter? Blending film analysis with Cold War history, Maloney looks at how the celluloid crises stack up against reality—or at least as much of reality as we can reconstruct from these films with confidence. The result is a daring intellectual foray that casts new light on Dr. Strangelove, one of the Cold War era’s defining films.

Emergency War Plan examines the theory and practice of American nuclear deterrence and its evolution during the Cold War. Previous examinations of nuclear strategy during this time have, for the most part, categorized American efforts as “massive retaliation” and “mutually assured destruction,” blunt instruments to be casually dismissed in favor of more flexible approaches or summed up in inflammatory and judgmental terms like “MAD.” These descriptors evolved into slogans, and any nuanced discussion of the efficacy of the actual strategies withered due to a variety of political and social factors. Drawing on newly released weapons effects information along with new information about Soviet capabilities as well as risky and covert espionage missions, Emergency War Plan provides a completely new examination of American nuclear deterrence strategy during the first fifteen years of the Cold War, the first such study since the 1980s. Ultimately what emerges is a picture of a gargantuan and potentially devastating enterprise that was understood at the time by the public in only the vaguest terms but that was not as out of control as has been alleged and was more nuanced than previously understood.

Accessible to general and academic readers, Gospel Thrillers interweaves close readings of key themes in a little studied fiction genre with 'real world' tensions over biblical vulnerability, evident in political and cultural debates over the Bible and in popular literature about the Bible and Christian origins.

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was a logician, a philosopher, and one of the twentieth century’s most visible public intellectuals. Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell: A Cultural Sociology brings those three aspects together to trace Russell’s changing views on the role of science and technology in society throughout his long intellectual career. Drawing from cultural sociology, history of science, and philosophy, Javier Pérez-Jara and Lino Camprubí provide a fresh multidimensional analysis of the general themes of science, technology, utopia, and apocalypse. The book critically examines Russell’s influential interpretations of the turn-of-the-century mathematical logic, World War I, the metaphysics and epistemology of mind and matter, World War II, nuclear holocaust, and the Vietnam War. In Russell’s compelling narratives, humanity was a powder keg and the match was represented by different and successive meta-adversaries, such as religion, communism, and American imperialism. And the only way to avoid a coming global Holocaust was to follow his own salvific recipes. In working around Russell’s role in the cultural perception of the final destiny of humanity, Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell invites the reader to think about the place of the techno-scientific sphere in human progress and decadence in both our current epoch and the distant future.

This deep dive into hundreds of Hollywood’s most iconic and beloved lines is a must-have for every film buff. "You Talkin’ to Me?" is a fun, fascinating, and exhaustively reported look at all the iconic Hollywood movie quotes we know and love, from Casablanca to Dirty Harry and The Godfather to Mean Girls. Drawing on interviews, archival sleuthing, and behind-the-scenes details, the book examines the origins and deeper meanings of hundreds of film lines: how they’ve impacted, shaped, and reverberated through the culture, defined eras in Hollywood, and become cemented in the modern lexicon. Packed with film stills, sidebars, lists, and other fun detours throughout movie history, the book covers all genres and a diverse range of directors, writers, and audiences.