British Nuclear Culture: Official and Unofficial Narratives in the Long 20th Century by Jonathan Hogg (review)

This is a treasure trove of nuclear-themed nuggets of information, ranging from now tragicomic newspaper advertisements of the 1930s hyping radium as a desirable property of hair dyes and health lamps to an impressively thorough listing of books, plays, films, and even video games with still disturbing scenarios of devastating attack by nuclear and thermonuclear bombs. The volume will undoubtedly be useful as a compendium of information on how various British media responded to the nuclear revolution. Beyond that, its intellectual claims and contribution are less clear. In part this is because of presentational problems. The writing, particularly in the more conceptual sections, is not always lucid, as illustrated by the cloudily repetitive sentence: "The cultural logic at play meant that it became normal for anti-nuclear sentiment to be part of the cultural backdrop of British culture, suffusing many cultural forms" (pp. 156–157; emphasis added). In addition, the default method of exposition is the literature survey in which sources are blandly summarized: "Simone Turchetti has published work on Bruno Pontecorvo" (p. 77); "Jolivette has also published a collection of essays" (p. 105); "The work of Don Cordle will be discussed" (p. 134). The book contains so much detached synthesis of this kind that it is not easy to identify the conventional wisdom to which Hogg presumably intends to offer an antithesis.

Hogg is also at times unclear in his arguments, including whether he is offering a novel perspective on what the title phrase "British nuclear culture" implies. At the outset Hogg asserts: "So much of the history of the nuclear age has been written from the official perspective alone" (p. 8). But soon thereafter he acknowledges: "Existing research on anti-nuclear activism is a rich area of scholarship" (p. 15). He never makes clear how far if at all he is claiming investigation of the unofficial perspective as a novelty of his book. More importantly, despite much technical discussion of the concept of culture, and despite making a persuasive case that Britain's twentieth-century discourse was peppered with references to nuclear weapons to a greater extent than often now remembered, Hogg left this reader unsure whether he is also making the much stronger assertion that this peppering became so intrusive that it dominated and therefore defined British culture as a whole, at least during the Cold War.

One difficulty Hogg faces in assessing the relative cultural power of all things nuclear is that he almost completely ignores other culture-influencing factors. Thus, despite organizing his book chronologically (a wise decision), he fails to emphasize the crucial synchronicity whereby in 1945 Britain had to assimilate the horror of the nuclear bomb as it was also having to respond to the horror of the Nazi death camps. Britain's culture was arguably then as much a Holocaust culture as a nuclear one. Even within his chosen nuclear agenda, moreover, Hogg's grasp of the issues is uneven, reflecting his expertise in cultural history rather than strategic studies or politics. The Cold War's fascinating, almost theological, debate about nuclear-weapons doctrine, which so preoccupied many of the era's cleverest people (and so alarmed many of the rest of us), receives only sketchy treatment. Even though the nuclear disarmament movement was the principal source of an unofficial nuclear narrative and has been extensively discussed in a rich secondary literature, it is covered here in a notably inexpert way. For example, Hogg notes that it was "not uncommon to see CND [the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a group favoring unilateral nuclear disarmament] charged with communist sympathies" (p. 143), implicitly dismissing such charges as mere propaganda by commenting on the "prejudicial language" (p. 143) in which they were couched. In reality, CND did fall under Communist Party influence, and its pro-Soviet tendencies help to explain why, when the peace movement revived in the 1980s, the British Left's leading nuclear disarmer, E. P. Thompson, created...