During the Cold War, this is one prediction nobody wanted to think about, but everybody did.  That didn't mean that people lived in constant fretting about the bomb.  Fifty years of that would have been too much for anyone's nerves.  In fact, there was a weird ambiguity about atomic energy.  Within months of Hiroshima, breakfast cereals were giving away atomic bomb rings, dozens of businesses in every major city added "atomic" to their name, and the symbol of the atom was a mark of modernity, not fear.  Atomic energy was seen as the harnessing of an incredible new force previously unknown on Earth, but it was a force that had a horrible potential for destruction as well as creation.  That's why things like these paintings by Bonestell appeared every now and again, showing just how great the destructive power of the bomb was.

It's been over ten years since the end of the Cold War.  The threat of Soviet missiles is long gone with the Soviets themselves and the chances of the entire world looking like these pictures is very remote.   But it's one of the paradoxes of our world that the end of the threat of universal annihilation hasn't ended the threat of individual annihilation, and that is a bit more frightening.  We learned to live with the prospect of civilisation ending with a whacking great bang, but we could console ourselves with the thought that only a raving madman would go and press the button.  Since September 11th, however, we have had to adjust to the fact that there are madmen in the world who may not have the power to bring us all down, but would be all too happy to make New York or London look like an annex of Hell.

Artwork copyright© Bonestell Space Art, used with permission

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