Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives

Notes

243 Introduction 1. Leinster, Fight for Life, 4. 2. Ibid., 53. 3. Amis, Einstein’s Monsters, 9. 4. Diacritics 14 (Summer 1984) on nuclear criticism; Science Fiction Studies 13.ii (July 1986) on nuclear war and science fiction; PLL: Papers on Language and Literature 26.i (Winter 1990) on nuclear criticism. 5. Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives),” 20–31. 6. Norris, Derrida, 164. 7. Hinds and Windt, The Cold War as Rhetoric, 6. The other major study in this area is Medhurst et al., Cold War Rhetoric. 8. Williams, “Nuclear Criticism,” 246–48. 9. Schwenger, Letter Bomb, 31. 10. Dowling, Fictions of Nuclear Disaster; Mannix, The Rhetoric of Antinuclear Fiction. 11. Berger, “Nuclear Energy,” 121. 12. Jacobs, The Dragon’s Tail, 120–21. 13. Ruthven, Nuclear Criticism, 82. 14. Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men, 171. 15. Klein, “The Future of Nuclear Criticism,” 77. 16. Clarkson, The Last Day, 183. 17. Stone, Literary Aftershocks; Cordle, States of Suspense; Jacobs, Dragon’s Tail. 18. Cordle, “Cultures of Terror,” 1186–99. Further commentary on this subject can be found in Norris, “‘Nuclear Criticism’ Ten Years On,” 130–38. Notes 244 notes to Pages 9–15 1. The Atom—From H. G. Wells to Leo Szilard 1. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 111. 2. Weart, Nuclear Fear, 55. 3. Cromie, The Crack of Doom, 1. 4. Priestley, The Doomsday Men, 207. The book was originally subtitled An Adventure and then, in the 1949 edition, A Thriller of the Atomic Age. 5. Cromie, The Crack of Doom, 177–78. 6. Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium, 8. 7. Ibid., 233, 221. 8. Frederick Soddy’s “Lecture to the Royal Engineers, 1904,” quoted in Carlisle, Scientific American Inventions and Discoveries, 373. 9. Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium, 4, 33. 10. Ibid., 246. 11. Ibid., 247, 249. 12. The full dedication reads “To Frederick Soddy’s ‘Interpretation of Radium’ / This Story, Which Owes Long Passages to the Eleventh Chapter of That Book, Acknowledges and Inscribes Itself.” An alternative American title for the novel is The Last War: The World Set Free. 13. Wells was, however, well aware of how new technology could change the paradigm of war and designed The War in the Air to demonstrate that air forces would compel us to replace the notion of war fronts with that of areas. 14. Haynes, H. G. Wells, 78. 15. Canaday, The Nuclear Muse, 231. 16. Wells responded to Soddy also in revising his statement in his 1902 essay “The Discovery of the Future” to say that the “most insistently convincing” nightmare involved the extinction of life in a far-future ice age. In 1925 he added a footnote stating that “the discovery of radio-activity has changed all that.” Wells, The Discovery of the Future, 34, 37. 17. Wells, The World Set Free, 56. Unless otherwise stated, subsequent page references are to the 1988 edition. 18. Wells, The World Set Free (1924), 9. 19. Ibid. (1924 ed.), 10. 20. Wells, The World Set Free, 139. 21. Ibid., 137. 22. Ibid., 71. 23. The Hell Bomb was the title of the journalist William L. Laurence’s 1951 book about the hydrogen bomb. Wells, The World Set Free, 86. 24. Graves, “Fiction,” 837. 25. Brians, Nuclear Holocausts, 3. 26. Wells, An Experiment in Autobiography, 569. 27. Wells, The World Set Free, 176, 172. 28. Bartter, “Nuclear Holocaust as Urban Renewal,” 150–51. 29. Soddy’s comments of 1915 are quoted in Weart, Nuclear Fear, 29; Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 569. notes to Pages 15–21 245 30. Sinclair, The Millennium, 33. 31. Ibid., 47. 32. Capek, Krakatit, 15. 33. Meek, “The Red Peril,” 492. The passage continues: “The vacite bombs destroyed the air and would produce a complete vacuum for several hundreds of yards around their place of explosion or ‘point of burst,’ and it was confidently expected that they would destroy any aircraft within the radius of this action. Uranite was a substance somewhat allied to the common radite, but immensely more powerful. Its action was to start a progressively atomic disintegration in anything other than air with which it came in contact.” 34. Vanny, “The Radium Master,” 271. 35. Dickson, H. G. Wells, 362. 36. DavidC.Smith,TheCorrespondenceofH.G.Wells,531.Wellshadalreadyusedtheplanned title for his film in 1928 for a collection of journalistic pieces entitled The Way The World Is Going: Guesses and Forecasts of the...