Doomsday Machines

Doomsday Machines

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1980s

Thirteen films that are essential to understanding the nuclear age
"The bomb, Dimitri, the hydrogen bomb."
 • Alex Wellerstein
"Launching missiles is your job."
The sublime banality of Frederick Wiseman's "Missile" (1988)
 • Alex Wellerstein
Hitting the jackpot
William Gibson's disturbingly plausible 21st-century slow disaster
 • Alex Wellerstein
Playing at the End of the World
An interview with historian and game designer Malcolm Craig about post-apocalyptic tabletop role playing games in the Cold War
 • Alex Wellerstein
You too can survive a nuclear war — if you have a flying car
The essential contradictions of Dean Ing’s Survivalist novel “Pulling Through” (1983)
 • Alex Wellerstein
Christmas at Ground Zero
Weird Al Yankovic's post-apocalyptic carol (1986)
 • Alex Wellerstein
"Nuclear weapons repel all thought, perhaps because they can end all thought"
Martin Amis on the difficulties of writing about nuclear war
 • Alex Wellerstein
Critical mastery
The sublime art of nuclear posters
 • Alex Wellerstein
Trinity goes to Hollywood
Which movie did the first atomic bomb test best?
 • Alex Wellerstein
"The battlefield is everywhere"
The wild nuclear maps of "Wild" William Bunge (1988)
 • Alex Wellerstein
"Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?"
The West German nuclear zeitgeist as reflected in two pop songs
 • Alex Wellerstein
Pantex employee photos, 1980s
Team photographs at a nuclear weapons factory offer a glimpse into the mundanity and materiality of the bomb
 • Alex Wellerstein
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