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future rePortage on world war iii 215 In one form or another, all the narratives examined in this volume have dealt with war. In many cases the duration of combat is telescoped into a single day known variously as “X-Day,” “Doomsday,” or just “The Day.” However, the Cold War also saw the emergence of a quasi-documentary subgenre that described a conduct of the war that was repeatedly imagined but never actually took place. Therootsofthissubgenrelieinthefuturehistoriesthatbecamepopularinthelate nineteenth century, particularly after the success of George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871). This body of writing has been definitively examined by I. F. Clarke in his pioneering study Voices Prophesying War, where he shows that the main impetus behind its development was the imperial rivalry between European powers and the United States. In the wake of World War II, the expectation of yet another war very soon became a routine ingredient within Cold War discourse. James Burnham, for instance, dramatically opened his 1947 study The Struggle for the World with “The Third World War began in April 1944” and went on to outline a prolonged super power confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The nuclear age for Burnham signified an indefinitely prolonged state of war readiness , especially as the Cold War had entered an “explosive state” where hostilities could break out any time over the next five years.1 Although George Orwell ridiculed Burnham for being “too fond of apocalyptic visions,” he nevertheless incorporated many of the latter’s ideas into Nineteen Eighty-Four.2 Burnham was playing his part in making familiar the concept of an imminent war, and the message seemed to be getting through, because soon after the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1947 a Gallup poll found that 73 percent of Americans believed chaPter 13 Future Reportage on World War III 216 under the shadow a third world war was inevitable.3 This public expectation obviously arose from a number of factors, but one important source was the literature of imminent nuclear holocaust that became increasingly prevalent in the postwar period. Within months of the end of the Second World War, Life magazine was preparing its readers for the next international conflict. “The 36-Hour War,” which appearedinthe19November1945issue ,wasaboutjustthatsubject:preparedness.The article was designed as a commentary on and fictional extrapolation of the warnings expressed by General Henry H. Arnold, commander of the Air Corps, for the UnitedStatesnevertoletitselfslideintoastateofmilitaryvulnerability.Nowhereis mention made of Pearl Harbor, but its shadow falls right across American defense deliberationsofthelate1940sandbeyond:“Weeksandweeksofcongressionalhearings in 1945 laid bare the scandalous negligence before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; and God knew, the Republicans cried, that the same Democrats were still in office and showing nothing like the required alertness against the new perils.”4 Theperceptionofdanger,paradoxicalasitsoundsforanAmericawithitseconomy buoyant and its monopoly of the atomic bomb, is written into “The 36-Hour War” as a sneak attack from enemy bases located, bizarrely, in equatorial Africa. The article raises the problem of defense against atomic rockets—virtually impossible, even with interceptor rockets—and argues that the best defense is the promise of overwhelming retaliation. Despite the deaths of some forty million citizens and massive devastation, the essays insist that the United States can win the war, but this assertion is offset by the grim graphic of New York in ruins. From the same period Will F. Jenkins (Murray Leinster) narrated similar unprovoked attacks in The Murder of the U.S.A. and Fight for Life (1947) by an unnamed enemy. The first of these is a strangely abstracted narrative where the origin of the attack is left unexplained. Most cities are destroyed, and survivors use a systemofunderground bunkerscalled “Burrows” thatultimatelyprove to be ineffective. Leinster’s major purpose is to document the physical and psychological effects of the attack: “The nation they had believed they guarded was dead; its cities not even heaps of debris, but merely hollowed chasms in which poisonous radioactive gases formed and seeped out upon the countryside. The Burrows were useless, and doomed. The nation was a chaos of tiny, isolated hamlets and small towns, united only in their hatred of the unknown enemy.”5 Leinster’s narrative sets the tone for subsequent accounts of nuclear attack, presenting it as unexpected, well-planned (cities and Burrows are targeted), and delivered over the North Pole. Since the only country to possess such sophisticated military technology is the United States, the attack constitutes a fantasy reversal, where American know-how is turned against the United...

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