The Origins of British Nuclear Culture, 1895–1939
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10068652 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kirk Willis (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1995 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 59-89 |
| Publication date | 1995-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of British Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9371 • E-ISSN: 1545-6986 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1086/386067 |
| OpenAlex | W2099990788 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 11 |
| References cited | 21 |
The images are familiar and ineradicable: cities scorched by blasts of tremendous heat, with thousands of civilians vaporized, thousands of others burned and disfigured, landscapes rendered desolate and uninhabitable by radiation; submarines, automobiles, luxury liners, and airplanes powered by clumps of uranium the size of a human fist; homes heated and cooled by limitless supplies of cheap energy drawn from secure reactors; land-based particle beam weapons capable of destroying airborne missiles and thus of providing a protective shield for civilian populations; eccentric physicists with thick central European accents, unkempt hair, ill-fitting clothes, and a crazed gleam of unearthly mischief in their eyes; politicians, civil servants, joint chiefs blinkered by hatred and ambition, ignorant of even the first principles of science and technology, careless of civilians, reckless in brinksmanship, and arrogant in assessments of military capability. Such images, indeed, are part of the consciousness of all citizens of the atomic age: we who have stared at the newsreels of Nagasaki and Chernobyl, sat riveted with John Hersey's unforgettable Hiroshima , laughed over the absurdities of Dr. Strangelove (1964), winced at the smiling publicity of atomic energy authorities or the local power company's plans for a new reactor, trembled at the apprarently inexorable proliferation of nuclear technologies into the Third and Fourth Worlds, or grown angry at the exaggerations—both budgetary and practical—of yet the latest “generation” of weapons systems. And yet the images of obliterated cities, atomic-powered ships, and particle beam weapons—images which have come to define so much of the anxiety as well as opportunity of the postwar world—all existed in the popular consciousness in Britain and America long before August 1945, before, indeed, December 1941 or even September 1939
Atomic energy · Clothing · Hatred · Nuclear weapon · Physics · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Publicity · Social science · Sociology · Engineering · History · Law · Nuclear Issues and Defense
Independence and Extinction in Scottish Wilderness Writing
Independence and Extinction in Scottish Wilderness Writing
Italian news coverage of radiation in the early decades of the twentieth century
From the Spanish Civil War to the ‘Nuclear Age’
Dissenting Scientists in Early Cold War Britain
The politics of the unknown
Nuclear landscapes
Britannia Rules the Atom
What is British nuclear culture? Understanding Uranium 235
Safeguarding the atom
Introduction
Relativity
The physicists
The culture of the Cold War
Class, Culture and Social Change
War Stars
Background to Modern Science
Voices Prophesying War, 1763-1984
The Long Wait
A say in the end of the world
British Thinking about Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear fear
The Next Hundred Years
War Stars
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
| Unique citing works | 11 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,79 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2023 (12) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 11 |