The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

by Dan Carlin

The generations that grew up in the first few decades after the Second World War had the specter of a nuclear conflict hanging over them—they talked about it, wrote and sang about it, and had nightmares about it. American children often did emergency drills in school that taught them what to do and how to behave during a nuclear attack. The literature and popular entertainment of the period was saturated with themes of atomic (and later thermonuclear) war. “The End of the World” became a popular trope, a fantasy. It didn’t even matter if you lived in a so-called neutral country, because no region would escape the fallout—literally—if a third world war happened. In the era when the superbombs were new, people from many varied backgrounds—scientific, military, political, artistic, and philosophical—began to think about the odds of this happening as if their very lives depended on it.