This study will range across continents and cultural forms and more than six decades, but it is anchored by Arundhati Royʹs assertion, used as this bookʹs epigraph,¹ that nuclear weapons² are white weapons, and that the virtues and vices of white people and nations are condensed in the figure of nuclear weapons. Royʹs proposition is explored from a variety of critical positions inRace, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds, from inside and outside the perception of whiteness: how have nuclear weapons been read as representative of the scientific achievement, military superiority and responsibility of...

The idea that antagonism between races might be expressed in a future genocidal war leaving some races extinct and others to inherit the Earth had three main permutations in the late modern period. These spheres of cultural, political and military activity are not as divisible as this chapterʹs sections indicate, and relevant points of contact will be discernable. The first section outlines the myths of racial destiny generated from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, most centrally the Aryan myth of eradicating Judaism that would inform the policies of Nazi Germany. The second section surveys (primarily Anglophone) future-war fiction...

The claims in Fitzgeraldʹs essay ʹEchoes of the Jazz Ageʹ (1931) have influenced the collective memory of the 1920s as an era characterized by fashion, disaffection with orthodoxies and an American cultural nationalism propelled by the growing international status of Hollywood cinema and jazz music. After the Great War – which Fitzgerald and others termed the ʹEuropean Warʹ,² signifying the USAʹs aloofness – America had emerged economically and culturally dominant. Many European states were in debt to the country across the Atlantic as a result of war loans.³

These are just ʹechoesʹ in 1931; the hubbub of the 1920s gave...

Several depictions of the world after nuclear war are situated in Australia and the Pacific, and this chapter closely analyses the colonial and postcolonial politics of one such depiction in detail. Seminal post-nuclear-war textOn the Beach(novel 1957; film 1959) is set in the region, as are short stories by Martin Amis and J. G. Ballard, the comicTank Girl(1990; film 1995), and a section of Julian BarnesʹsA History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters(1989) (in some of these texts the psychosis of focalizing characters makes actual locations and historical events uncertain). Novels such as...

The ʹblack planetʹ that the popular rap group Public Enemy refers to is the Earth of the future. This feared Earth is not one where all other races have been replaced by the black African diaspora: this planet is ʹblackʹ (ʹor just brownʹ) because the colour lines determining procreation and biological issue will be ignored by our descendants. If those lines are overridden by love and sexual desire then the racial categories of the twentieth century will be irrevocably intermingled. Public Enemy rapper Chuck D asks defenders of racial purity, ʹWhatʹs wrong with some color in your family tree?ʹ and...

In asking how the cultural production of the black Atlantic has used the symbol of nuclear weapons to critique the supposed technological and moral superiority of the Western nations developing them, I draw upon the ideas posed by Paul Gilroy inThe Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness(1993). Seeing the capital generated by slave labour on New World plantations as a necessary component of the economic motor of modernity, Gilroy argues slavery was ʹinternal to western civilisationʹ. Yet members of the African diaspora were historically denied full citizenship of the West, with scientific racism implicated in that refusal. Central...

This chapter discusses three novels set during the USAʹs project to construct the first atomic bomb. These novels, each written during a different period of the Cold War, explicitly refer to the racial politics of the Manhattan Project, and in particular the contested assumption that the first atomic weapons were white (specifically Anglo-Saxon) bombs. This assumption is made by characters within these novels, and was present in the US media of the period. Writing in theChicago Defenderin September 1945, NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White criticized Winston Churchillʹs desire to keep the bomb under ʹAnglo-Saxonʹ control. The same month,...

ʹI am become death, the shatterer of worldsʹ: these words, taken as J. Robert Oppenheimerʹs reaction to the Trinity atomic bomb test, have often been repeated in popular culture.² They come from theBhagavad Gita(which translates as ʹSong of Godʹ), a lecture given by Krishna to Arjuna on the battlefield before the start of the Kurukshatra War. TheBhagavad Gitais part of the epic poem theMahabharata, a central text within the Hindu tradition.³ The nuclear weapon programme that India revealed to the world in May 1998 also invoked Hindu history and culture, in order to justify the...

This final chapter performs the synoptic work expected of a last chapter, looking back to the literary, scientific and political languages used to represent nuclear weapons since 1945 and thinking about how these traditions remain visible in early twenty-first-century attitudes towards nuclear weapon possession. In addition, this chapter analyses how the meaning of these representations can be connected to race, ethnicity, nationhood and civilization. In the following discussion of proliferation, the terrorist use of nuclear weapons and the fictional construction of the Third World as the primal site of World War Three, for one final time we pay attention to...