Presents a comparative overview of the cultural imaginations of nuclear weapons and the anticipation of nuclear destruction. It considers representations of elements of the Cold War in popular culture and thought across Europe, Japan, USSR and the USA, providing a significant addition to Cold War historiography.

Matthew Grant is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Essex
Benjamin Ziemann is Professor of Modern German History at the University of Sheffield

Introduction: The cold war as an imaginary war - Matthew Grant and Benjamin Ziemann
1. The apocalyptic fiction: shaping the future in the cold war - Eva Horn
2. Building peace, fearing the apocalypse: Nuclear danger in Soviet cold war culture, 1945-91 - Miriam Dobson
3. Nuclear themes in American culture, 1945 to the present - Paul Boyer
4. The imaginative landscape of nuclear war in Britain, 1945-65 - Matthew Grant
5. German angst? Debating cold war anxieties in West Germany, 1945-90 - Benjamin Ziemann
6. After Hiroshima. Günther Anders and the history of anti-nuclear critique - Jason Dawsey
7. Hiroshima/Nagasaki, civil rights and anti-war protest in Japan's cold war - Ann Sheriff
8. Catholic anti-communism, the bomb and perceptions of apocalypse in West Germany and the USA, 1945-90 - Daniel Gerster
9. 'The nuclear arms race is psychological at its roots.' Physicians and their therapies for the Cold War - Claudia Kemper
10. Imagining the apocalypse: nuclear winter in science and the world - Paul Rubinson
11. Images of nuclear war in U.S. government films from the early cold war - Lars Nowak
Index