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Understanding the Imaginary War Matthew Grant

Understanding the Imaginary War By Matthew Grant

Understanding the Imaginary War by Matthew Grant


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Summary

Presents a comparative overview of the cultural imaginations of nuclear weapons and the anticipation of nuclear destruction. It considers representations of elements of the Cold War in popular culture and thought across Europe, Japan, USSR and the USA, providing a significant addition to Cold War historiography.

Understanding the Imaginary War Summary

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

Understanding the imaginary war 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.

Understanding the Imaginary War Reviews

'Understanding the Imaginary War is useful both as a historical tool, but also as a reminder that nuclear weapons still exist, and that nuclear war is still a very real possibility. If anything, the current political situation between Russia and the United States, and especially the inclusion of Article 27 in Russia's 2014 Military Doctrine relating to the possibility of using nuclear weapons to respond to a conventional attack, shows that emotions felt during the Cold War still affect contemporary relations.'
April Curtis

'The book's fresh approach to the topic and wide range of perspectives will be welcomed by all with an interest in history, political science and cultural studies, and in particular by those of us interested in the Cold War and the history of nuclear weapons.'
Dr Mattias Eken, University of St Andrews, Reviews in History

'The volume succeeds in providing a deeper understanding of the cultural responses to nuclear weapons and is an important entry in Cold War historiography, bridging the gap between political, cultural, psychological, and emotional interpretations of nuclear weapons.'
Emily Gibbs, University of Liverpool, Journal of Contemporary History

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About Matthew Grant

Matthew Grant is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Essex

Benjamin Ziemann is Professor of Modern German History at the University of Sheffield

Table of Contents

Introduction: The cold war as an imaginary war - Matthew Grant and Benjamin Ziemann
1. The apocalyptic fiction: shaping the future in the cold war - Eva Horn
2. Building peace, fearing the apocalypse: Nuclear danger in Soviet cold war culture, 1945-91 - Miriam Dobson
3. Nuclear themes in American culture, 1945 to the present - Paul Boyer
4. The imaginative landscape of nuclear war in Britain, 1945-65 - Matthew Grant
5. German angst? Debating cold war anxieties in West Germany, 1945-90 - Benjamin Ziemann
6. After Hiroshima. Gunther Anders and the history of anti-nuclear critique - Jason Dawsey
7. Hiroshima/Nagasaki, civil rights and anti-war protest in Japan's cold war - Ann Sheriff
8. Catholic anti-communism, the bomb and perceptions of apocalypse in West Germany and the USA, 1945-90 - Daniel Gerster
9. 'The nuclear arms race is psychological at its roots.' Physicians and their therapies for the Cold War - Claudia Kemper
10. Imagining the apocalypse: nuclear winter in science and the world - Paul Rubinson
11. Images of nuclear war in U.S. government films from the early cold war - Lars Nowak
Index

Additional information

NLS9781526131904
9781526131904
1526131900
Understanding the Imaginary War: Culture, Thought and Nuclear Conflict, 1945-90 by Matthew Grant
New
Paperback
Manchester University Press
2018-07-31
320
N/A
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