Neither Fire nor Ice: Postmodern Revisions of America's Post-Cold War Apocalyptic Nightmare

Abstract

On March 6, 1990, The Bulletin ofAtomic Scientists set back its famous Doomsday Clock, signifying, for the first time in many years, that we had moved away from, rather than closer to, the horrors of a nuclear midnight. Just as this long-awaited adjustment of the clock signaled the brighter dawn of a post-Cold War world, so too did it offer mute testimony to the pervasive presence ofmetaphoric imagery in the discourses ofArmageddon. However, as the fears ofnuclear annihuation diminish, so does the cultural dominance of the imagery with which it was associated, thereby making room for new, post-Cold War anxieties and iconographies. Indeed, much ofthe imagery with which these new neuroses are now routinely associated made its debut during the last decades of East-West atomic anxiety. Consequently, many ofthe narratives that first explored and exploited these now-contemporary concerns and images are not recent works, nor postmodernist per se. However, they are informed by similar sensitivities to the uncertainty, incoherence, and incipient chaos that problematizes contemporary attempts to retotalize our cultural and cognitive realities. Towards a Typology ofNew Armageddons In the wake ofthe Cold War, the thoroughly depopulated cities ofStanley Kramer's On the Beach (1959), along with Arch Oboler's Five (1951), Ranald MacDougall's The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), and Mick Jackson's Threads (1984), have become increasingly anachronistic previsions, fading along with the memory ofthe Soviet Union, its rapidly deteriorating strategic arsenal, and the hair-trigger anxieties ofa world eternaUy poised on the brink ofseU-immolation. Ofcourse, the image of the bomb has not entirely left us, but it has undergone a change in social valence. Nuclear weapons are now increasingly associated with terrorist activity, thereby engendering a narrative trend in which the atomic bomb is no longer represented as a globe-smashing behemoth, but as a backpack-sized expression of radical—or Third World—wrath and vengeance. However, even as the scope and danger ofnuclear weapons shrink, new technologies of mass-destruction loom large in our immediate future. The toxic terrorism conducted in Japanese subways is only a minuscule precursor ofgreater dangers, according to a swelling tide oftexts obsessed with biological and ecological catastrophes. New images have begun evolving to replace the old mushroom-cloud specter of nuclear decimation. We are now invited, often urged, to refocus our fears upon