Conclusion Without Closure

Abstract

One of the purposes of this collection of nuclear disaster fictions is to illustrate the huge range of responses to the threat of nuclear destruction made over the last seventy years (taking Wells’s The World Set Free as the beginning of the imaginative epoch). While some of these responses may be bizarre or grotesquely inadequate, they only mirror and seldom surpass in banality or sheer ignorance the responses of men closely associated with the actual development of nuclear power. For example, General Groves of the Manhattan Project assured a Congressional hearing in 1945 that radiation death was a ‘very pleasant’ way to die,² and in June 1953 Winston Churchill, describing the British entry into the arms race, said, ‘We had one and let it off — it went off beautifully.’³ Even as late as 1960 W. C. Anderson, who witnessed the American nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, could concoct a truly horrifying mélange of parochial responses in a book called 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Pfft (or 12,000 Men and One Bikini). At the first explosion the author solemnly meditates, ‘God had given men the key to His secret, and He undoubtedly meant for it be used.

The world needs a wash and a week’s rest.¹