It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction.
In addition to "There Will Come Soft Rains" we have short stories like Stephen Vincent Benét’s "By the Waters of Babylon."
In that story, society has been bombed back to the stone age. Even religion is a stone age recreation. Something like hot and cold running water seems like it must come from gods’ magic.
This short story was particularly meaningful for me when I read it in school. I lived the same distance from New York City as the protagonist. And this was during the last days of the Soviet Union, which had placed my small hometown on its top 10 places to bomb list.
In Walter M. Miller Jr.'s book A Canticle for Liebowitz, we’re back in society that's recreating itself, with the Catholic Church acting as a centralizing force again, as after the fall of Rome and European plagues. Monks discover, collect, copy, and maintain shreds of texts.
Apart from increasing society-level anxiety, that focus on the dramatization of nuclear war is considered to have turned people away from nuclear power. Imagine the different potential outcomes had our authors not been so talented. You can go back to Plato’s Republic for explanations of why sad music, for example, is bad for society. But maybe the real effect was on swaying public opinion, protest movements, regulations, and where people choose to focus their productive talents.
> "It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction."
Quite the reverse. That people say that the fear of war (nuclear or not) is "quaint" means that the wealthy and privileged first world has forgotten about war and that's not a normal state of affairs. The 18th and 19th centuries were wracked by war after war between major powers, culminating in the First World War ("the war to end all wars" remember?) and then Second World War in the first half of the 20th century. It was very surprising to everyone that another global war hadn't materialized by the 1980s.
Fear not, military rearmament spending worldwide has shot upwards as nations prepare for the inevitable wars to see who will be the new global top dog. We are all about to re-learn some old lessons, albeit at a heavy cost.
Indeed. We are sleepwalking into WW III and no one seems to care.
Quaint? We are the closest we've ever been to nuclear annihilation, according to the experts: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/
Yes, it's not part of the daily fear and considerations people take anymore.
No more nuclear duck and cover drills; no more fallout shelters scattered around cities.
Look at the history of that clock and tell me if you think it's a useful timepiece.
Maybe this is a bit, but just a bit, better (though backward looking): https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the+bomb%2Cnuc...
The doomsday clock covers general catastrophe, not just nuclear annihilation.
For sure, but it doesn’t pervade public consciousness in the same way. Not sure why, perhaps because the memory of mass-scale war has faded with the previous generations.
Fear of nuclear war was useful for midcentury US elites because it could be transmuted into fear of Communism. Since 1991 it just isn't as useful for that purpose, so the culture industry doesn't push it anymore. Their use against Japan in WW2 has also (just about) fallen out of living memory.
That is likely true. But on its own terms, communism itself (and socialism) is an idea with deadly consequences.
This study estimates the number of 20th century deaths due to communism at 94 million: https://www.cato.org/commentary/100-years-communism-death-de...
I'm genuinely unsure why those was posted in response to my comment. Did you mean to reply elsewhere?
Whenever the "tens of millions killed by communism" number gets trotted out, it's invariably considering everybody who died due to lack of assigned resources under communism. Which is fine, but it means you need to go over to the west and count up all the people who died of preventable means (not to mention making per-capita adjustments) as well for a fair point of comparison.
Every person who died of preventable illness because they couldn't afford healthcare? Death by capitalism. Every dude who puts a bullet in their head because of financial strain? Death by capitalism. Every person who's ever died of complications of malnutrition while their country exports food (the U.K., large swathes of Africa).
Numbers are meaningless when you don't put them in context.
IIRC it comes out to over a billion deaths.
Nuclear annihilation on any sort of global scale is further off than ever in the past 60-70 years or so. The doomsday clock is mostly worrying about climate change, conventional war and Facebook boomers spreading and believing fake news.
I don't mean that things are fine, just that Nuclear annihilation is less of a concern than some make it out to be.
This is actually still a reasonable concern to have. Coincidentally, just yesterday I came across a reference to the book Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen, speculating on how a global thermonuclear war could start in modern times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War:_A_Scenario
The scenario she presents is fictional, but it’s all based on current nuclear arsenals and response protocols. While what I’ve read of it certainly makes it seem like a worst-case scenario in a “nearly everything that can go wrong does” sense, it’s disturbing how relatively few things going wrong it actually takes—in a span of under two hours—to reach “civilizational collapse” level outcomes.
With the expiration of New Start earlier this year, there are no nuclear arms control agreements in effect between the US and Russia, which hasn’t been the case since the 1960s. Russia, China, and the US are all actively modernizing and developing new nuclear capabilities. China has been greatly expanding their nuclear arsenal, building hundreds of new silos. North Korea has an expansive set of tactical and strategic nuclear systems and are in strategic cooperation with Russia. Russia is 4 years into a destabilizing land war, have developed several new weapons systems, and are now in a nuclear weapon sharing agreement with Belarus. And I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of other things.
We are in a period of strategic instability and an arms race that is unlike anything we have seen in the last 50 years. You can quibble with the specifics all you want, but I don’t think anyone can argue that we are at a lesser risk of nuclear war that we were, say, 20 or 30 years ago
Russia is bankrupt, and can't develop anything because it sent its best and brightest people to be drone fodder, and they died. If there's a new nuclear power it will be Iran, and if there's a nuclear first strike it will be by Israel.
Risk of any use of nuclear weapons is quite different from "nuclear annihilation". There are vastly fewer and vastly less powerful nuclear bombs/warheads today than 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago.
The shelling of Mauripol in Ukraine at the beginning of the current war was roughly equivalent to Hiroshima in explosive yield. It had a lot more destructive power though, since it was distributed across a huge amount of explosions, and blast damage falls approximately with the square of distance to center of explosion.
Mauripol in 2022 was not a place you wanted to be in. When a bomb falls on top of you, it makes no difference if it is small nuclear or large conventional, you very much die anyway.
I'm not trying to make war seem nice or sell the idea that the world is heading in a great direction, I'm trying to make the point that nuclear annihilation is less of a threat today than before.
In addition, usage of tactical nuclear weapons comes up again and again from Russian sources, driven by the situation in the Ukraine war.
Plus the current US President has purged most of of the military leaders who might resist any unwise or unlawful orders regarding nuclear weaponry. (Or just in-general, for that matter.) Potential orders he mused-about during his first term.
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/03/military-officials-ousted-r...
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2024/10...
Yeah, the US regime has basically been speed running the impotent dictator's playbook. Start from a place of weakness and incompetence, and cause a bunch of senseless destruction to distract from it. Using tactical nuclear weapons would be right in line with that, especially after having started this quagmire in Iran with no way to win.
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No. The past year has substantially nudged things in the other direction.
I'd say it's tough to say.
On the one hand, one of the major nuclear powers is embroiled in a war in Europe. Which is extremely bad news and clearly makes the probability of nuclear war increase.
On the other hand, we're getting better and better at targeting, which means much smaller warheads can get the job done. We have little use for 50MT behemoths any more (excepting doomsday weapons).
Er...the 50MT device was a cold war dick measuring stunt, not the demonstration of a practical strategic weapon. But, yeah, we (the US) don't even build 1MT devices any more, because 1) we have to fit them into submarines and bombers where size and weight (and economic) requirements limit yield, and 2) we figured out pretty quick that due to diminishing returns on destructive footprint, bigger bombs were pretty much a waste of effort (and produced other side effects like more fallout). Among other gotchas, you're constrained by the cube-root law; ten times more yield is not anywhere close to 10 times more destruction on the ground.
So, since we saw first-hand what devices of ballpark 20KT yield did to an urban environment, numerically most of the operational US nuclear weapons are around 100KT (margin of error and all that)[1]. So, yeah, better targeting, smaller warheads, yada yada. Still one-shot/one-kill for an entire city and the surrounding area. I mean, McNamara could handwave with statements like "optimistically, only millions dead" (paraphrased), but I don't think that kind of thinking has aged well.
That said, things are not worse because the Big Three have Big Bombs (or don't). It's because the strategic landscape has changed. One of the big 3 is lead by a guy who thinks nuclear weapons are just like big hand grenades or something and that negotiation is a zero-sum game. Another bit three leader is maybe just holding on to power by his teeth (or not...who knows) and came of age in the 'nuclear war is winnable' era. And there are more players at the table. Israel has nukes. North Korea. France and the UK. And India and Pakistan. South Africa had them before, and could again. And Iran will get them at some point, sooner or later. And we're apparently going to give the Saudis all the required tooling and expertise required, though there's apparently a firm pinky-swear no weapons will come of it. So we aren't looking at a 'simple' US/USSR cold war, with some Chinese spice in the mix. We have regional power, some of them not known for long-term stability, some with extremely volatile regional situations, with the ability to knock over the apple cart.
So what is the escalation/deescalation path if, say, KYI has a real bender one night and decides that NK nukes Seoul? Or Tokyo? Or what if they just pull a June 1950 and march all the way to Pusan conventionally? Do we nuke Pyongyang? All their nuclear facilities (the ones we know about)? Or glass over the whole place? And what then does China do, us having set off a nuke in their literal back yard on top of their Little Buddy? Under such circumstances, I do not expect the current administration to take a measured step back and say "we need to think this through...".
Uncertainty. That's why a lot of us (who lived in the Cold War) think things look a little shakier than usual.
[1] To head off the inevitable "well ackshually...": Yes, the big players still have big bombs. I haven't been involved in this area in a while so things have probably changed a bit, but we still have some of the big boys in the 300KT+ range sitting on Minutemans for old times sake. I assume the Russians still have a bunch of their 1/2 to 1MT devices in silos. And the Chinese were pretty proud of their absurdly large 4MT+ devices, supposedly still in service.
I mean, we have nukes, so we're one day closer to nuclear annihilation each and every day, and I'm not even an expert!
A fun quip, but p(nuclear annihilation) is always less than 1 unless it actually happens, so we’re only one day closer to potential annihilation.
That they claim something so blatantly ridiculous is one of the reasons they have no credibility in my eyes.
quaint?
I don't think we're going to make it.
Miller's situation is a little more nuanced - he was crew on an Allied Bomber that levelled the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy during World War I, falsely believing it was occupied by German troops. His subsequent PTSD was a driving force behind his subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism, and he uniquely imbues the novel with the structure and lexicography of a closed order. His fear was not so much war - atomic or otherwise - as it was the loss of knowledge and tolerance as a consequence of the cyclical and barbaric nature of human society.
Indeed he takes some other significant cues from Bradbury - who faced a similar, if less poignant, Road to Damascus moment upon learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
For example, the concept of 'Booklegging' is lifted wholesale from Fahrenheit 451, published a few years prior. Bradbury has oft-cited political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, and Miller makes his views very clear by the time we encounter the flanderised Atheist in the final third of Canticle - reinforcing his core theme of the juxtaposition of scientific progress and moral wisdom, and the shared thematic motif expressed by Montag in Fahrenheit 451 that the books of the past have messages that can save society from its own destruction.
As such, it is clear to me that the fear of war - and the trendy nihilism imbued by the then innovative atomic variant - doesn't so much affect mid-century fiction as the cultural and societal upheaval seen as the Baby Boomers assumed their place as the generation in ascension. In many ways this echoed the post-WW1 Brideshead Revisted era of England, merely substituting a surplus of capital for a dearth of inheritors.
Thus, while both can be read as atomic jeremiads, they are more appropriately realised as treatises to the social and political mores at the time. The scare for the average American wasn't so much Nuclear as it was 'Red' - something that can be seen in the stubborn cargo-culting of very American Institutions and Practices in the post-apocalyptic canon. As can be seen across the US Sci-Fi Canon, preservation of self is often secondary to the preservation of American Exceptionalism; be it via an ICBM or the stochastic terrorism of McCarthy.
When I was in high school (late 70s) we lived on Hood Canal in Washington state less than 10 miles from the Bangor Nuclear submarine base. My dad would often joke that it was probably the best location to live when WWIII starts because we'd just be instantly annihilated instead of having to suffer through some kind of post-nuclear hellscape.
It shouldn't be astonishing. The bombs dropped in Japan did create nuclear shadows of human beings when their bodies were annihilated. When Bradbury wrote it (1950), that was very, very fresh.
It’s been a very long time, but I read Alas, Babylon in middle school.
I remember aspects of their modern existence also being problematic (IIRC a house in florida with lots of windows doesn’t fare well without AC)
On topic of fear of nuclear war:
After reading Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, I'm surprised we as a species are still around.
A book I highly recommend, but personally found distressing to read, especially the chapter on the strategy of targeting civilian populations, which continues to haunt me.
Reading Philip K. Dick's short stories in publication order is also quite something in that respect. It was so pervasive in his early stories.
Beautifully articulated, but I have to disagree with you on nuclear power. We're close to the point where renewables and battery tech are a solution to all our power needs. Remaining obstacles being primarily political / geopolitical.
Meanwhile, after 70 years we're still no closer to a safe long term solution for nuclear waste. Every new and untested nuclear reactor design falls into the same pro-innovation bias of failing to address it's own unintended consequences. Like the utterly wild and rarely estimated cost of decommissioning older plants.
and the climate is so hot that nuclear power plants are having to be shut down so their waste heat doesn't sterilize their cooling rivers.
We also don't fully appreciate how much this shaped the American Baby Boomer psyche. My dad talks of regular Nuclear War drills in elementary school.
Or a certain cohort of Gen X who were old enough to watch The Day After or Threads and comprehend the possibilities.