(print) xix, 280 p.

Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- I. Early responses -- 1. The day America first heard the news. p.5 -- 2. How Americans imagined the bomb they dropped. p.9 -- 3. President Truman, the American people, and the atomic bomb. p.17 -- 4. Diplomats and strategists confront the bomb. p.41 -- II. Nuclear culture in the Cold War's high tide -- 5. The American medical profession and the threat of nuclear war. p.61 -- 6. Edward Teller and Project Chariot. p.87 -- 7. Dr. Strangelove: Stanley Kubrick presents the apocalypse. p.95 -- III. Going underground: nuclear America, 1963-1980 -- 8. From the test ban treaty to Three Mile Island. p.107 -- 9. Nuclear war in the writings of Bible-prophecy popularizers. p.129 -- IV. The Reagan era: the freeze campaign and after -- 10. The battle for public opinion in the 1940's and the 1980's. p.167 -- 11. Star Wars: the cultural implications of Reagan's strategic defense initiative. p.175 -- 12. Another cycle of nuclear activism ends. p.182 -- 13. "You must keep reminding us:" post-Cold War college students contemplate nuclear issues. p.187 -- V. The view from the nineties -- 14. Nuclear menace in the mass culture of the late Cold War era and beyond. p.199 -- 15. Hiroshima in American memory. p.226 -- 16. The Enola Gay controversy and the perils of "historical revisionism". p.246 -- Index. p.269