"This is an important and courageous work-a polemic that rails against the orthodoxies of the small but growing scholarship concerning nuclearism and popular culture. Shapiro has thrown down an intellectual gauntlet, with impressive interdisciplinary credentials, challenging readers to rethink ubiquitous assumptions about the atomic age."
Mick Broderick, author of Nuclear Movies
"This valuable cross-cultural study explores an array of well-known and, in some cases, undeservedly forgotten atomic bomb films. Shapiro's perceptive, personal, and highly readable analyses of American and Japanese movies illuminate not only themes of nuclear menace but also many facets of the postwar cultural terrain. This definitive study makes clear how deeply nuclear preoccupations penetrated the mass culture of the nation that developed and first used the bomb and the nation whose citizens first experienced the bomb in all its devastating power."
Paul Boyer, author of By the Bomb's Early Light
1. 1895 to 1945: Prototypical bomb films
2. 1945 to 1949: The initial elation after Hiroshima and Nagasaki
3. 1950 to 1963, Part 1: A complex growth industry
4. 1950 to 1963, Part 2: Cold war fantasies
5. 1964 to 1979: Losing faith in social institutions
6. 1980 to 1989: The Reagan era
7. 1990 to 2001: The post-cold war years
8. 1945 to 2001: Japan's atomic bomb cinema