Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-21T20:04:10.125Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Protect/Protest: British nuclear fiction of the 1980s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2013

DANIEL CORDLE
DANIEL CORDLE*
Affiliation:
School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham, NG11 8NS. Email: daniel.cordle@ntu.ac.uk.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Analyses of nuclear fiction have tended to focus on the literature of the United States, particularly that of the 1950s. This article not only switches attention to British literature, but makes the case for the 1980s as a nuclear decade, arguing that the late Cold War context, especially renewed fears of global conflict, produced a distinctive nuclear literature and culture. Taking its cue from E.P. Thompson's rewriting of the British government's civil-defence slogan, ‘Protect and Survive’, as ‘Protest and Survive’, it identifies a series of issues – gender and the family, the environment and socio-economic organization – through which competing nuclear discourses can be read. In particular, it argues, British fiction of this period functions by undercutting the idea that protection is possible. Hence, although few nuclear texts advocate particular policy positions, they are characterized by a politics of vulnerability. Proposing for the first time the existence of a distinctive 1980s nuclear culture, it seeks to suggest the broad parameters within which further research might take place.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 45 , Issue 4: Special Issue: British Nuclear Culture , December 2012 , pp. 653 - 669
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Anon., Protect and Survive, London: Central Office of Information, 1980, p. 2Google ScholarPubMed. Although first produced in 1976, the pamphlet was, after some agitation to bring it into the public domain, reprinted in 1980 and made available for sale.

2 Gee, Maggie, The Burning Book, London: Faber, 1983, p. 155Google Scholar. Ellipses and italics in original.

3 Cordle, Daniel, States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008Google Scholar.

4 Masco, Joseph, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Michel Foucault's point that the ‘atomic situation’ has produced a state of affairs in which ‘the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence’. Foucault, Michel, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Volume 1 (tr. Hurley, Robert), London: Penguin, 1998, p. 176Google Scholar.

5 Evans, Peter, ‘SS 20 Russian missiles expose Britain's weakness to attack’, The Times, 16 January 1980, p. 4Google Scholar.

6 Seed, David, ‘The debate over nuclear refuge’, in Mitter, Rana and Major, Patrick (eds), Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History, London: Frank Cass, 2004, pp. 117–142Google Scholar.

7 Advertisement, The Times, 22 November 1980, p. 24.

8 Davies, Ross, ‘Bunker bouquet’, The Times, 16 September 1981, p. 19Google Scholar.

9 Hudson, Kate, CND: Now More than Ever – The Story of a Peace Movement, London: Vision, 2005, p. 135Google Scholar.

10 Protect and Survive, BBC2, 30 January 1982.

11 Wardle, Irving, ‘Reviews: Drill Hall’, The Times, 1 August 1984, p. 8Google Scholar.

12 Swindells, Robert, Brother in the Land, London: Puffin, 2000, p. 9Google Scholar. No italicization of Protect and Survive in the original.

13 Briggs, Raymond, When the Wind Blows, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983Google Scholar. No page numbers in text.

14 Thompson, E.P., ‘Protest and survive’, in Thompson, E.P. and Smith, Dan (eds.), Protest and Survive, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980, p. 57Google Scholar.

15 I discuss what constitutes ‘nuclear literature’ at greater length elsewhere. Cordle, op. cit. (3), pp. 23–41.

16 Anon., op. cit. (1), pp. 5–6, 19.

17 Anon., op. cit. (1), pp. 7, 14.

18 May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, 2nd edn, New York: Basic Books, 1999, p. xxiGoogle Scholar.

19 Nadel, Alan, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 See www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101830, accessed 30 November 2010.

21 Young, Alison, Femininity in Dissent, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 1Google Scholar.

22 White, Alyson, ‘Thinking for ourselves’, in Minnion, John and Bolsover, Philip (eds.), The CND Story, London: Allison and Busby, 1983, pp. 84–89, 88Google Scholar. For a well-known contemporary (1984) articulation of this position, from the other side of the Atlantic, see Caldicott, Helen, Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War, revised edn, Toronto: Bantam, 1986Google Scholar.

23 Amis, Martin, ‘Introduction: thinkability’, in , Amis, Einstein's Monsters, London: Vintage, 2003, pp. 7–28, 9Google Scholar.

24 Amis, op. cit. (23), p. 18.

25 McEwan, Ian, The Child in Time, London: Vintage, 1992, p. 179Google Scholar.

26 McEwan, op. cit. (25), p. 88.

27 McEwan, op. cit. (25), p. 88.

28 Graham, David, Down to a Sunless Sea, London: Pan, 1980, p. 232Google Scholar.

29 Anon., op. cit. (1), p. 6.

30 Anon., op. cit. (1), p. 7.

31 Anon., op. cit. (1), p. 10.

32 Masco, op. cit. (4), p. 32.

33 Masco, op. cit. (4), p. 32.

34 For a discussion of the complex means by which the scientific modelling of nuclear winter entered, and was contested in, public discourse, see Badash's, LawrenceA Nuclear Winter's Tale: Science and Politics in the 1980s, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Lawrence, Louise, Children of the Dust, London: Lions Tracks, 1986, p. 19Google Scholar.

36 Amis, Martin, London Fields, London: Vintage, 2003, p. 43Google Scholar.

37 Swindells, op. cit. (12), p. 26.

38 For an excellent overview of the protracted history of The War Game, including its influence in the 1980s, see Shaw, Tony, ‘The BBC, the state and Cold War culture: the case of television's The War Game (1965)’, English Historical Review (2006) 121, pp. 1351–1384CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Ruth Longoni and Walter Wolfgang, ‘CND and the unions’, in Minnion and Bolsover, op. cit. (22), p. 131.

40 Swindells, op. cit. (12), p. 138.

41 Lawrence, op. cit. (35), p. 90.

42 Lawrence, op. cit. (35), p. 113.

43 Gee, op. cit. (2), p. 254.