[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] [Image removed at the request of the copyright holder.] The minute hand of the famous Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just moved closer to apocalypse: it is now set at five minutes to midnight. This is the most dangerous level it has been since 1988. […]
Last month, I noted a parallel between certain pre- and post-Hiroshima nuclear warfare narratives. Here’s an even more common one, this time between the knock-out blow itself and nuclear warfare. Here’s the American astronomer Carl Sagan, from the final chapter (“Who speaks for Earth?”) of the 1980 companion book to his acclaimed television series, Cosmos:
Between the wars, it was a commonplace that poison gas would be used in the next war, would be used in large quantities, and would probably be used against civilians. This was a natural enough assumption; after all, it was used liberally enough in the Great War, and it was widely assumed that science would
The front cover of Victor Lefebure’s Common Sense about Disarmament (London: Victor Gollancz, 1932); the artist’s name is Douglas L. Dick. (I also have a colour scan — the title is in red and the background is a cream tint — but it’s rather muddy and much less striking than the monochrome version above.) Note
Actually, as interwar visions of armageddon go, this is pretty mild. But it reminded me of the scene in Terminator 2: Judgement Day where Sarah Connor has a nightmare about the coming nuclear war, with a nuclear warhead exploding over a playground filled with children: He was lying on a hill-side. Below him there was
As was widely announced in the picture-houses of the United Kingdom at the close of 1936: THERE IS NO DEFENCE AGAINST POISON GAS This is from a book by the German exile and novelist Heinz Liepmann, Death from the Skies: A Study of Gas and Microbial Warfare (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1937), 273. There’s
Last night I watched Threads, an extremely affecting BBC film from 1984 about the effects of a full-scale nuclear war on one British city, Sheffield.1 One might say it’s a very British ‘kitchen sink’ approach to the subject, following the lives of two ordinary families during the international crisis (involving Iran — so what else
Just as reading Orwell serendipitously led me to a reference to the next war in the air, so too has reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Here, Mustapha Mond, one of the Controllers of the world state, gives an impromptu history lesson (I’ve cut out unrelated, interleaved dialogue from another strand of the plot): ‘The
If you were wondering what the biggest and loudest air raid siren of all time is, then wonder no more, because it’s the American Chrysler Victory Siren, made in the 1950s. Well, I don’t know for sure that it was — I’d like to see what the Soviets had to offer — but it was
As everyone knows, cockroaches are supposedly the only creatures able to survive a nuclear explosion.Which may be an exaggeration, but not by much. Well, I think I’ve found the pre-atomic, chemical equivalent! It’s from a novel published in 1926: Poison gas in the open is one thing. Dropped on a densely populated town like London
