Nuclear Realism

Abstract

The forms collected here as “nuclear realism” seek ways to imagine what everyday life in the ontological bunker of the ’80s created by the nuclear age would look like if stripped of the ideological obfuscations of the nuclear imaginary of the Cold War. This chapter explores the tensions of survival in near-future speculations about life during wartime imagined through realist, often oppositional modes of writing and filmmaking. There are three sections: the first examines the melancholy and liberatory workings of memory in dramas of nuclear war created in the realist mode; the second studies the related forms of nuclear satire; the third looks at pop music’s reaction to the nuclear condition. In all forms of nuclear realism in the ’80s, the shelter and accompanying bunker fantasy play small but emblematic and always ultimately futile roles within the broader social world they both partake of and split apart. Despite their adherence to reality effects and avoidance of overt fabrication, the anti-bunker fantasies of nuclear realism are as “fantastic” and stylized in their own way as the survivalist scenarios discussed in Chapter 7. Each form affords to the present different arguments about the basis of society: fellowship and community or neo-barbarian Hobbesianism. Even the most defeatist form of the bunker fantasy uses doomsday to argue political philosophy: when the bombs drop, we’ll finally discover once and for all who was right about human nature and American democracy.