Understanding the imaginary war: Culture, thought and nuclear conflict, 1945-90
- Submitting institution
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The University of Essex
- Unit of assessment
- 28 - History
- Output identifier
- 1516
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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-
- Publisher
- Manchester University Press
- ISBN
- 9781784994402
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This edited collection is 120,000 words long and brings together an international team of researchers to investigate how the idea of nuclear war was imagined during the Cold War. It argues that the idea of nuclear war was central to the metaphorical nature of the Cold War, as it enshrined both the absence of actual war on the one hand, and the possibility of absolute, apocalyptic destruction on the other. The idea of nuclear war was integral to the Cold War, whether it was used to stress the deterrent value of nuclear weapons or used by peace movements to argue against that idea of deterrence. This volume argues that, despite an enormous literature on nuclear deterrence and peace movements, little attention has been paid to how nuclear war was imagined in this period.
First discussed at a workshop held at the German Historical Institute, London, the original idea for the volume came from Ziemann, with Grant then joining the project as co-editor. The pair contributed equally to the lengthy introduction (12,500 words), which sets out the intellectual parameters of the volume’s approach and discusses the inter-relation between nuclear war and the metaphorical nature of the Cold War. They also contributed equally to editing and commenting on the chapters of the nine other contributors, who are from a range of UK, US, and European universities. Grant also wrote a single-authored chapter of 10,000 words on the imaginative landscape of nuclear war in Britain, 1945-65, examining how the ability to imagine (or not imagine) nuclear destruction shaped Britain’s Cold War culture.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
