Nuclear Deterrence, Democracy, and the Cold War in Tim O'Brien's the Nuclear Age

The Nuclear Age is the story of 49-year-old William Cowling, a man who has lived his life under the looming threat of a nuclear war. The author Tim OʼBrien describes the novelʼs two main themes: “[H]ow and why we become politicized and depoliticized” and “the safety of our species, our survival. We wonʼt survive if we canʼt stop thinking of nuclear weapons as mere metaphors” (McCaffery 141). In this novel, OʼBrien is concerned with an excessive sense of helplessness in the public, or more specifically, a crisis of democracy in the nuclear politics of the United States. Critic Daniel Cordle is correct when he says, “The Nuclear Age is particularly significant because it makes obsession with this constantly threatened but deferred possibility the overriding focus of the narrative” (104). He suggests that the narratives of the nuclear thriller genre remove the nuclear threat through the heroic actions of the central protagonist. In addition, most of the nuclear disaster narratives represent a nuclear war or its aftermath, and thus the plots do not remain in suspense. However, he does not regard the novelʼs “focus on the psychological impact of the long, drawn-out nuclear suspense” as critique of nuclear deterrence theory (105). This paper aims to analyze how The Nuclear Age problematizes U.S. politics based on the logic of nuclear deterrence theory. Under nuclear deterrence theory, it is only a small number of people in the highest reaches of government who can make the ultimate decision to use atomic and hydrogen weapons. Without any say in the matter at all, the general public has to passively tolerate the prospect of a nuclear apocalypse. Thus the novel chronicles the subversion of democracy and its psychological impact on the characters under the logic of nuclear deterrence.