Nuclear Culture

Abstract

Over the last forty years, there has been an academic shift within nuclear scholarship, with attention diverting away from military, political, and scientific approaches, and alternatively favoring social, cultural, and psychoanalytical histories of the Cold War. This perspective has moved away from “top down” histories of the nuclear age, instead tracing the social and cultural changes instigated by the development of nuclear technologies. This scholarship originated in America in the 1980s, and this pioneering research foregrounded cultural studies of the nuclear, without specifically addressing nuclear culture as a concept. This research inspired and influenced a series of international scholars who considered nuclear culture in greater detail. This movement coalesced with the “cultural turn” of the 1980s, and by the turn of the century there had been a large expansion of historical work examining the approaches, applications, and methods of “nuclear culture.” A key aspect of this expansion was a movement away from American perspectives, with many historians across the world producing research on nuclear cultures in Britain, Europe, and Japan. As nuclear historians have continued to move away from political, military, and scientific narratives and toward an understanding of the sociological, cultural, psychological, and ontological resonance of nuclear technology, the concept of nuclear culture has been repeatedly disputed, interpreted, defined, and redefined. Indeed, numerous scholars from a variety of disciplines have interrogated the terms “nuclear” and “culture,” pushing the ever expanding theoretical and methodological frames of the field in their attempts to produce and refine a coherent definition of the topic. Eschewing the monolithic treatment of individual national contexts, cultural scholars have attested to the pluralism of cultural life within the atomic era, outlining the competing attitudes and ideologies that dominated the period. Taking inspiration from this content, this bibliography presents the existence of multiple nuclear cultures within global societies, outlining the varied realms in which nuclear attitudes have manifested themselves. Here, we draw together the disparate strands of nuclear scholarship, outline the key subcategories within the field, and highlight specific readings within each subsection to provide a concise yet comprehensive overview of the many facets that scholars have conceived under the moniker of “nuclear culture.” Subsequent sections shall outline the varied theoretical and methodological approaches that have been employed by nuclear scholars, with a final section focusing on key conceptual elements within the field and the relevant scholarship that concerns them.