This first book-length critical examination of nuclear war motion picturesfeature films, documentaries, and educational short filmsin addition to recognizing a new film genre reflects an important era of modern film history.Taken as a whole, the 25 contributions by 21 film specialists brought together here provide a comprehensive view of 32 feature films, documentaries, and educational short films comprising a representative selection of the new genreall produced between 1946 and 1975 by American, French, British, and Japanese film makers. In addition to discussions of such well-known films as "On the Beach," " Hiroshima," " Mon Amour," " "and "Dr. Strangelove," " "the collection analyzes and comments on a number of less well known but important films such as "A Thousand Cranes," " Countdown to Zero," and "To Die, To Live," " "documentaries and educational short films that hitherto have been inadequately presented in cinema literature.Marshall Flaum, one of the outstanding figures in the field of television documentaries, has provided an unusually interesting Foreword, and Jack Shaheen, the editor of the volume, has added a perceptive Preface and has appended a list of distributors and credits. A major contribution to the serious study of the nuclear war film genre, the book thus provides an analytic text with apparatus and notes, and will be of interest to general readers as well as students of the film and film makers."

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.

Ranging across fiction and poetry, critical theory and film, comics and speeches, Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War explores how writers, thinkers, and filmmakers have tackled the question: Are nuclear weapons white? Paul Williams addresses myriad representations of nuclear weapons: the Manhattan Project, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear tests across the globe, and the anxiety surrounding the superpowers' devastating arsenals. Ultimately, Williams concludes that many texts act as a reminder that the power enjoyed by the white Western world imperils the whole planet.

In this post-apocalyptic novel from Newbery Medal–winning author Robert C. O’Brien, a teen girl struggling to survive in the wake of unimaginable disaster comes across another survivor. Ann Burden is sixteen years old and completely alone. The world as she once knew it is gone, ravaged by a nuclear war that has taken everyone from her. For the past year, she has lived in a remote valley with no evidence of any other survivors. But the smoke from a distant campfire shatters Ann’s solitude. Someone else is still alive and making his way toward the valley. Who is this man? What does he want? Can he be trusted? Both excited and terrified, Ann soon realizes there may be worse things than being the last person on Earth.

This collection offers a fresh interpretation of the Cold War as an imaginary war, a conflict that had imaginations of nuclear devastation as one of its main battlegrounds. The book includes survey chapters and case studies on Western Europe, the USSR, Japan and the USA. Looking at various strands of intellectual debate and at different media, from documentary film to fiction, the chapters demonstrate the difficulties to make the unthinkable and unimaginable - nuclear apocalypse - imaginable. The book will be required reading for everyone who wants to understand the cultural dynamics of the Cold War through the angle of its core ingredient, nuclear weapons.