The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 10 | Issue 11 | Number 6 | Article ID 3726 | Mar 05, 2012

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Nuke York, New York: Nuclear Holocaust in the AmericanImagination from Hiroshima to 9/11　　カクヨーク、ニューヨーク−−ヒロシマから９．１１にかけてアメリカ人の想像した大破壊

Robert Jacobs, Mick Broderick

Nuke York, New York: NuclearHo locaus t in the Amer i canImagination from Hiroshima to 9/11

Mick Broderick and Robert Jacobs

Discussed Manhattan (it is asuccess). Decided to tell Stalinabout it […Believe Japs will fold upbefore Russia comes in. I am surethey will whenManhattan appearsover their homeland.

-President Truman, Personal Diary,July 18, 1945

Collier's, 5 August 1950. Cover art byChesley Bonestell.

Introduction

Almost immediately after 9/11, cultural tropesthat had long been associated with the nuclearattacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki wererelocated to new roles as descriptors of theattack on New York City. Where once termslike "ground zero" referred to the detonationpoints of the nuclear weapons that weredropped in Japan, Ground Zero now refers to

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the site where the World Trade Center towersonce stood in lower Manhattan. 1 Thisappropriation of framing mechanisms fromHiroshima and Nagasaki to New York City wasnothing new: it held true to an Americantradition that began in August of 1945. WhenAmericans felt that bifurcated sense of victoryand vulnerability upon the news of the bombingof Hiroshima, it was a short journey for theword Hiroshima to take on a second, shadowmeaning in American culture—it becameshorthand for fears of an inevitable nuclearattack on America itself—and almost always thetarget of this imagined attack was New YorkCity. While Lifton and Mitchell claim that,"Hidden from the beginning, Hiroshima quicklydisappeared into the depths of Americanawareness," we have found instead that itbecame ubiquitous in American culture andremained so throughout the Cold War andbeyond, particularly as shorthand for Americaas nuclear victim, not nuclear perpetrator. 2

This same inclination can be seen in early presscoverage of the Fukushima nuclear disaster inJapan last year. A great deal of press coveragein the United States was focused on thedangers of radioactive contamination on theAmerican West coast, on America as vulnerableand a victim.3 This inversion of the history ofHiroshima and Nagasaki took a firm hold onthe American imagination once the formerSoviet Union developed nuclear weapons oftheir own in late 1949. However, even with theend of the Cold War, the 9/11 attacksreinvented notions of an American Hiroshimaas the inevitable follow-up to the attacks on theWorld Trade Center and the Pentagon.

On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks westaged the first public showing of the NukeYork, New York exhibition at the HartellGallery, Cornell University.4Nuke York, NewYork exhibited of a broad range of depictions ofa nuclear attack on New York City drawn fromAmerican popular culture from 1945 to 2011,including sources from newspapers, magazines,Civil Defense pamphlets, film, television, books,

protest material, comics, computer games,online websites and material culture objects.This article presents

Superimposed image from the officialpictorial history, Operation Crossroads,1946.

an overview of the material exhibited in theNuke York, New York installation and itssignificance for reflecting on the bomb inA m e r i c a n h i s t o r i c a l m e m o r y a n drepresentation.

In the years prior to the July 1945 Trinity testin New Mexico and the August 1945 atombombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the cityof New York was already implicated. AsTruman's diary note attests, "Manhattan" wasthe ubiquitous code name designated for thetop-secret $2 billion allied wartime researchproject. Terms such as ‘Manhattan EngineeringWorks' , ‘Manhattan District ' and the"Manhattan Project" quickly becamesynonymous with state secrets, big science,

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nuclear energy and atomic annihilation.5

In that terrible flash 10,000 milesaway, men here have seen not onlythefate of Japan, but have glimpsedthe future of America.

-James Reston, New York Times,12 Aug 1945

One of many post 9/11 blogs evokingnuclear terrorism.

From the day of the atom bombing ofHiroshima, paradoxically, imagery of a nuclearattack on New York City became ubiquitous. Itis and remains abundant in print, radio, music,movies, television programs, interactive video,computer and console games, internet sites andonline blogs. The earliest image in our curatedexhibition, Nuke York, New York, comes from anewspaper published on August 7, 1945,immediately after the first atomic strike. Themost recent comes from post 9/11 websites thatpredict a terrorist executed "AmericanHiroshima."

Our curated exhibition offers a wide sample ofmedia and imagery produced over the past

decades and each item serves to reflect thezeitgeist in which they were produced. Someare overtly political, some intend to effectshock or ridicule, some to entertain, and someto educate.

A leitmotif of American popularculture of the past two hundredyears hasbeen the imagination ofNew York's destruction […] No cityhas been moreoften destroyed onpaper, film, or canvas, and no city'sdestruction hasbeen more oftenwatched and read about than NewYork's.

-Max Page, The City's End, 2008

Early Cold War depictions typically presentedthe vast scale of destruction if New York Citywas attacked with atomic weapons of the era.The Soviet explosion of a nuclear device inAugust 1949 resulted in an avalanche of suchimagery evoking imagined attacks on theUnited States, often centered on NYC, thefinancial and cultural heart of the USA.Mainstream Hollywood films, for example,began depict ing a nuclear war and adevastated New York as a fait accompli.6

Graphic magazine illustrations in Life, Colliers,ReadersDigest and Popular Mechanics, as wellas lurid comic book artwork, frequentlydisplayed nuclear cataclysm befalling the BigApple.

New York daily newspaper PM, 7 August1945.

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As the American and Soviet arsenals grew, andthe scale of nuclear weaponry and the reach ofdelivery systems increased (from A to H bombs,from bombers to ICBMs and from nuclearsubmarines to MIRVs), the depictions grewever more dire. By the late Cold War manydepictions assumed a camp or counter-culturesensibility often expressing derision or hostilitytowards American militarism.7

With the easing of superpower tensions in thepost-Cold War era, the imagined nuclearaggressor increasingly became Arabic orIslamic terrorists, and as the enemy changed sotoo did the imagery, especially after 9/11. Incomputer games players can either fight, orbecome, invading armies or terrorists trying tonuke, or prevent disaster befalling, Manhattan.Recent network television programmingdepicts New York as falling victim to nuclearattack, often from ‘dirty bombs' or ‘suitcase'weapons. On websites warning of impendingterrorist attacks on New York City one candetect enmity towards perceived "liberal elites"as well as patriotic fervor designed to stokehostility towards America's enemies.

"The Atomic Future" supplement, ChicagoSun, 3 May 1946.

Expressing existential despair, patriotic fervor,technological fetishism, defrayed guilt, orapocalyptic voyeurism, depictions of a nuclear

attack on New York City are as emblematic ofthe atomic age in the United States as is themushroom cloud. We encourage visitors toNukeYork, New York to consider this sample ofimages from the Cold War, and beyond, and todraw their own conclusions.

Newspapers

The first images depicting a nuclear attack onNew York City were published in newspapersto provide a reference so readers could graspthe scale of

destruction from the nuclear attacks onHiroshima and Nagasaki. These imagesappeared as early as the first edition after thebombing of Hiroshima on August 7th. PM, anevening newspaper published the first image ofa nuclear attack on New York City on August7th. The theoretical bomb was detonated aboveCity Hall and the map of New York City belowit showed areas labelled, "point of impact""total devastation" "burnt out area" "area of

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concussion" and a vague area filled with "x-raysfrom gas."8 Many of the same print motifs thathad been so striking in describing thedestruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki werefar more grim when turned back to measurethe potential impact of an enemy nuclearweapon on American cities: the concentriccircles of destruction, the skyline measuringdistances of impact.

Early Cold War depictions typically showedmaps of NYC with indexes of correspondingdestruction. Sometimes they showed graphicsof the silhouetted Manhattan skyline showingthe reach of detonations from strategic "groundzeros" such as the Empire State Building.These depictions served to educate the publicabout the scale of destruction of largelyunimaginable weapons using a familiar andunderstandable model. Such depictions alsofunctioned to shift the perception of the UnitedStates to that of potential victim of nuclearattack rather than the perpetrator of an actualnuclear attack.9 These fictional representationsreveal an almost instantaneous sense of thevulnerability of Americans to nuclear weaponsat a time when sole possession of nukes wouldbe assumed to reassure American feelings ofsuperiority and invulnerability.

In the late cold war the New York Post devotedan entire parody issue to fears of World War IIIand the obliteration of New York in a nuclearwar. This November 1984 lampoon edition,including announcement of a 5,000-page obitsection, belittled many Manhattan institutions,from Mayor Koch to the United Nations, whilesatirizing the real effects of such an attack.

"By the marble lions of New York's PublicLibrary U.S. technicians test the rubble ofthe shattered city for radioactivity," Life 19November 1945.

In 2004 a New York Times op-ed titled"American Hiroshima" by Nicholas Kristofwarned that, "If a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, amidget even smaller than the one thatdestroyed Hiroshima, exploded in TimesSquare, the fireball would reach tens ofmillions of degrees Fahrenheit. It wouldvaporize or destroy the theatre district,Madison Square Garden, the Empire StateBuilding, Grand Central Terminal and CarnegieHall (along with me and my building). The blastwould partly destroy a much larger area,including the United Nations.

On a weekday some 500,000 people would bekilled."10

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Magazines

In the wake of Hiroshima, American magazinesrushed to fill the gaps in public understandingabout the new atomic weapons. Much likenewspaper art icles that detai led thedestruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,magazines made use of their readers'familiarity with the size, landmarks and relativedistances in New York City in order to describethe damage. A November 1945 article in Lifemagazine titled "The 36 Hour War," was thefirst of what would be many articles to use thelocation of the New York Public Library in anillustration of the damage done by a nuclearattack on New York City.11 In a MechanicsIllustrated article in 1946 we see the use of theubiquitous concentric circles of destructionsuperimposed over a map of Manhattan.12 Thatsame year Fortune magazine published afictionalized account of a nuclear attack on UScities (including NYC) titled "Pilot Lights of theApocalypse," invoking biblical images of theend of the world.13 A 1946 Reader's Digestarticle titled "What the Atom Bomb Would Doto Us," invited readers to imagine what wouldhappen if an atomic bomb was dropped directlyonto the Empire State Building.14 To helpreaders understand "What the Atomic BombReally Did," Collier's magazine published anarticle in 1946 that describes the scale ofdestruction "if an A-bomb blasted New York."15

The avenues of devastation are meticulouslylisted followed by the explanation that "theeconomic heart of the nation beats in thatarea."

Illustration by Chesley Bonestell,"Hiroshima U.S.A." Colliers, 5 August1950.

After the Soviet Union got the bomb in 1949some American magazines further imaginedNew York City as victim to an enemy bomb. In1950 Collier's magazine published an articletitled "Hiroshima U.S.A." accompanied byseveral original paintings by Chesley Bonestellthat envisioned New York City being attackedby multiple nuclear weapons.16 Many similarstories were accompanied by images of theNew York Public Library, the Empire StateBuilding, or the Bro

oklyn Bridge melting into a nuclear cauldron.These paintings relied on iconic buildings,cityscapes, and the shape of Manhattan Islanditself to trigger fear at the destruction of suchfamiliar architectures and landscapes. InOctober of 1950 Time magazine put LuciusClay the Chairman of the New York State CivilDefense Commission on its front coversuperimposed on an image of a mushroomcloud rising over the Empire State Building.17

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In 1955, images of New York City with amushroom cloud superimposed over it, evenfound their way into military magazines. Astory in The Army Combat Forces Journaldescribed the civil defense task of the armedforces and advocated stationing sufficientmilitary forces near large urban centers toassist in recovery from atomic attack.18 Theseimages, and the stories of attacks on New YorkCity were part of a psychological shift in whichHiroshima, the nuclear victim, moved frombeing an enemy target attacked by the UnitedStates, to a nickname for America itself, thepotential nuclear victim of the emerging ColdWar.1 9 Labeling a New York City full ofmushroom clouds "Hiroshima USA" was anexpression of a deep sense of vulnerability tothe new Soviet weapons.

Books

1945 and 1946 saw a flood of books about theatomic bomb and the nuclear future in

American stores. Among these early works wasan influential collection of writing byManhattan Project scientists called One Worldor None (1946).20 The first chapter of the book,written by physicist Philip Morrison and titled"If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand," describes aHiroshima sized bomb being detonated aboveManhattan: "Evidently there had been nospecial target chosen, just Manhattan and itspeople." Morrison wrote that, "the streets andbuildings of Hiroshima are unfamiliar toAmericans," and so he set his descriptionsomewhere more familiar to Americansreaders. Morrison's logic would be followed bydozens of other writers and artists who wouldchoose to depict nuclear explosions in NewYork City to invoke its familiarity to Americans.Physicist Ralph Lapp wrote of Americans in his1949 book Must We Hide? that "one person intwenty lives in New York City."2 1 Lappadvocated dispersing both population andindustry from urban centers in order for theUnited States to survive atomic attack.

"At the moment that we hear theshriek of the melting telephone inMoscow, I wi l l order a SACsquadron which is at this momentflying over New York City to dropfour 20 -megaton bombs inprecisely the pattern and altitudein which our planes have beenordered to bomb Moscow. Theywill use the Empire State Buildingfor ground zero."

-The President of the UnitedStates, Fail-Safe, 196222

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Political thrillers often positioned New YorkCity like a piece on a giant chess board of ColdWar politics. In Fail-Safe (1962) the Presidentof the United States agrees to bomb New YorkCity with American nuclear weapons after anaccidental American bombing of Moscow, as ameans to avert a larger crisis and moredestructive nuclear escalation.23Thirty SecondsOver New York (1970), riffing on the 1944Spencer Tracy film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,depicts the detonation of a nuclear weaponover New York City by terrorists fromcommunist China. Stories of the Cold Warturning hot were stories of cities beingattacked.24

New York City provided the perfect backdropto stories of the destruction of cities and ofhuman society. When well-known buildings are

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seen tossed about or dissolved by nuclearexplosions, when the iconic skyline of New YorkCity is seen to be the front line of the Cold War,all of America feels at risk. Few Were Left(1955) told the story of a small number ofpeople, maybe the last people left alive, whowere trapped in a New York City subway aftera sudden unknown event.25 In Shadow on theHearth (1950) Judith Merril shows thedeterioration of the well being of families in theNew York suburbs after the city is attacked andthe father doesn't return.26 Images of survivorsof nuclear war crawling out of the rubble ofNew York City were images of Americanseverywhere imaging themselves crawling outinto the rubble of modern technological society.

Post 9/11 America saw a resurgence of interestin novels of nuclear attacks on the UnitedStates. This new wave of books relocates thethreat to America to Islamic fundamentalism,and portrays a nuclear attack on New York Cityand the United States as fulfillment of biblicalprophecy. In 2005 the novel The NuclearSuitcase a terrorist attack on New York Cityuses a nuclear suitcase manufactured duringthe Cold War in the former Soviet Union, andpurchased on the black market by jihadists.27

The King of Bombs, published the same yearand with an image of Osama bin Laden in themushroom cloud over New York City on thecover, imagines the downfall of the UnitedStates after an Al Qaeda detonation of an H-bomb in New York City.28 Behold, an AshenHorse published in 2007 imagines a nuclearattack on five American cities, including NYC,as Islamic j ihadist act as agents of anapocalypse straight out of Christ ianeschatology. 2 9

Wire photo of anti-nuclear weaponsprotesters outside the United NationsBuilding, 1958.

Protest

During the last few years NewYorkers have exhibited an attitudewhich might be called a ‘prime-target-fixation syndrome.' This isan expression of apathy or fatalismoften found among those whobelieve that their city or locationwould constitute a prime target inthe event of a nuclear attack.

-Herman Kahn, Hudson Institute,July 18, 1964

Throughout the cold war policies of "massiveretaliation" or "mutual assured destruction"acknowledged implicitly that New York Citywould be a prime target in any nuclearexchange. Total war in the atomic age wouldbring annihilation to civilian populations. Bythe late 1950s and early 1960s Manhattan wasencircled by a ring of nuclear-tipped anti-ballistic defensive missiles such as Nike-Hercules stationed at batteries a few dozenmiles from the metropolis.30

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Some of the million+ anti-nuclearprotesters in Central Park, 12 June 1982.

At the same time President Eisenhower'sannual Operation Alert, nationwide defencedrills from 1954-1962, met with growing alarmand drew increasing civi l resistance.Campaigns by anti-nuclear activists led topopular, nonviolent protest. Pacifists DorothyMay of the Catholic Worker and Ralph DiGia ofthe War Resisters League were among the firstto disobey a New York City law imposing oneyear in ja i l and/or $500 f ine for non-participation in the Alert. Despite the draconianpenalties, every year more protesters gathered,and progressive women with childrenassembled in defiance of authorities. By 1960the young mothers group had drawn supportfrom cultural commentators such as Norman

Mailer.31 In 1961 over 2,500 joined the protestoutside City Hall that then spread to east coastcampuses. Later that year, Dagmar Wilson ofWomen Strike for Peace inspired 50,000women in New York and 60 other U.S. cities toprotest ongoing nuclear testing. OperationAlert was cancelled permanently the next year.

After the cessation of atmospheric tests in 1963and the negotiation of the first arms limitationstreaties in the 1970s, mainstream nuclear fearsre-emerged late in the cold war.

With over 70,000 nuclear weapons globally,many on hair-trigger alert, strategic rhetoricturned towards "first-strike" and fighting a"winnable," "limited nuclear war." However,when scientists calculated in the early 1980sthat global extermination would occur from a‘nuclear winter' after even a "limited" exchangeof weapons, the notion of "prevailing" becamedeeply contested. Around the world millionsmarched in protest against the renewed armsrace. On 12 June 1982 in New York over a

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million people gathered in Central Park todemonstrate against nuclear weapons. It wasthe city's largest single gathering of citizensand the biggest protest in U.S. history,dwarfing the massive No Nukes demonstrationagainst nuclear energy in New York a yearearlier.

Civil Defense

The Federal Civil Defense Administrationbecame a significant part of how Americansinterpreted the nuclear threat after theacquisition of nuclear weapons by the SovietUnion in the fall of 1949.32 The first civildefense booklet printed, Survival Under AtomicAttack, was mailed to over 10 million Americanhouseholds in 1950.33 While this booklet didn'tinclude specific references to New York City,many pamphlets and booklets published in1950 and throughout the rest of the Cold Wardid frequently refer to it. Some of these wereprinted and distributed directly by the federalgovernment while others were reprinted anddistributed by private businesses.

Sometimes the pamphlets used Manhattan as areference point to understand the impact ofnuclear weapons, and sometimes the city wasused to represent everytown USA. AtomicBombing: How to Protect Yourself, an officialbooklet printed by the government in 1950,presented New York City as America'shometown.34 Imagining a future war in whichnuclear weapons were launched at Americawith rockets, the pamphlet portrayed a missileexploding over Manhattan Island with thefamiliar Manhattan skyline and BrooklynBridge described as "your town." The 1955booklet Facts About the H-Bomb published bythe U.S. government, the New York City skylineis used as a scale to understand the width ofthe fireball from the Mike thermonuclear testconducted in 1952 in the Marshall Islands.35

Mushroom clouds superimposed over images ofNew York City frequently graced the covers ofcivil defense pamphlets. In 1950 both thebooklet You Can Survive Tomorrow's AtomicAttack and The Atom Bomb and Your Survivalportrayed mushroom clouds over graphicdepictions of New York City with many of thebuildings and surrounding areas in flames.36

The booklet Live: A Handbook for NuclearSurvival (1962) showed the Manhattan skylinehaving experienced nuclear attack andsignificant fallout danger, with New Yorkerssafely protected in a personal family falloutshelter underground.37

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The Federal Civil Defense Administration hadoffices in every state and major city. The tri-state area had many civil defense officescharged with preparing the population tosurvive an atomic attack. Civil defense officesissued book covers to school children,stockpiled toe tags to mark corpses after anuclear attack and stockpiled large quantitiesof food and other supplies for use after anuclear attack. In 2006 workers upgrading thestructural integrity of the Brooklyn Bridgefound a cache of 350,000 boxes of food,blankets and other supplies that had beenstashed in a room in the foundation of thebridge, to be used to feed and comfort NewYorkers after a large scale nuclear attack.38

Film

Within a year of the Soviet A-bomb, Hollywoodproduced features reflecting fears of acatastrophic war. The now familiar trope of thedeserted metropolis and a small band ofsurvivors was a novel premise back in 1951when Arch Oboler's post-holocaust Fivedepicted a former Empire State barkerdescribing New York's destruction. By the endof the decade The World, The Flesh, and theDevil (1958) portrayed a trio of survivorswandering the deserted, but undamaged,Manhattan. In the cold war comedy The Mousethat Roared a tiny European principality

"invades" New York during a citywide nuclearalert exercise and acquires a revolutionary Q-bomb, holding America ransom.39

A production still from Captive Women(RKO, 1952).

The Planet of the Apes, 1968

Nuclear war or an imminent attack againstNew York was featured in the stridently anti-communist Invasion U.S.A. (1953) wherepatrons of a downtown bar are led to believethey are experiencing an all-out nuclear attackon America, including the A-bombing ofManhattan. With the ICBM launch of Sovietsatellite Sputnik, American filmmakersresponded to the dread of a potential missilewar with Rocket Attack U.S.A. (1961) a lowbudget production that concludes with anAmerican spy desperately trying to halt thelaunch of a nuclear missile against New York.Based on a best-selling novel, the filmadaptation of Fail-Safe (1964) showed withforensic detail how an accidental nuclear war

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might occur, where the U.S. Presidentsacrifices New York City immediately afterMoscow has been destroyed in error.

A future, post-holocaust New York wasenvisioned as early as 1951 in Captive Women,set in the skeletal remains of Manhattan athousand years after an atomic war, nowpopulated by three tribes: the war-like UpriverPeople, the Mutates, and the Norms. NewYork's annihilation was powerfully evoked atthe finale of The Planet of the Apes (1968),where the iconic Statue of Liberty is discoveredhalf-buried on a beach. The sequel, Beneath thePlanet of the Apes (1971), continues the theme,revealing an advanced society of mutanthumans living in New York's devastated,subterranean remains. By the late cold war, asubgenre of low budget, post-punk Europeanexploitation films depicted life after a nuclearwar in New York, such as Endgame - Bronxlotta finale (1983) and 2019: After the fall ofNew York (1984).

Promotional artwork for The Divide, 2011.

Film allegories of nuclear strikes on New Yorkdate back to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms(1953) where a dinosaur, re-awakened by anAmerican atomic test, ravages downtownManhattan. The film inspired Japanesefilmmakers to create Godzilla and, in DestroyAll Monsters (1970), Godzilla emerges from theAtlantic Ocean to attack New York, destroyingthe U.N. building. The American remake ofGodzilla (1998) also features the giantirradiated dinosaur, spawned from Pacificnuclear testing, devastating Manhattan.

Before the September 11 Al-Qaeda attacks onthe World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thefirst Dreamworks movie, The Peacemaker(1997), depicted a White House nuclear analystand special forces officer narrowly averting aBalkan terrorist nuclear blast in lower

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Manhattan. They prevent the device from goingcritical, but nevertheless it detonates as a"dirty" bomb. In the comedy-drama BadCompany (2002) a CIA agent works with anovice to save New York City from an imminentnuclear terrorist act.40 Most recently The Divide(2011) depic ts a group o f surv ivorscontaminated by fallout trying to survive in abasement shelter after Manhattan has beendestroyed by nuclear missiles.

Comics

Before the Comic Book Code Authority wasintroduced in late 1954, artists and editorscould create lurid and violent graphic works forchildren and teenagers without industry self-regulation. A few of these controversial comicsdirectly addressed fears of a nuclear attack onNew York. Perhaps the most arresting imagewas Al Feldstein's January 1952 cover for EC'sWeird

Fantasy that depicts an incoming nuclearmissile above a devastated Manhattan, with theHudson River draining into a massive groundzero crater. Issues of Ace comics' Atomic War!(1953-54) repeatedly depicted mass destructionwith mushroom clouds towering above the NewYork skyline, or "to avenge what the Reds didto New York…"41

Atomic War! No.1, 1953

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Weird Fantasy, No. 11, January 1952Mighty Samson, No 2, June 1965

By the early to mid-1960s, comics increasinglyadopted fantasies set in a post-holocaust worldwhere nuclear war was a fait accompli longsince passed. The serial adventure of the"Atomic Nights" ran in Strange Adventurecomics from 1960-64 and featured a group ofsurvivors, protected by radiation-resistantarmour, exploring the post-nuclear remains ofNew York. Similarly, Gold Key's popular MightySamson ran for 32 issues from 1964-82portraying a partially blind, he-man mutantwho scouts amongst the ruins of "N'Yark",looking for atomic batteries and other pre-wargoods. The cold war comic construct of aninevitable nuclear holocaust destroying the BigApple remained resilient throughout the 1970sand 1980s. Like Mighty Samson, Kamandi "thelast boy on Earth" is set in a partly floodedfuture New York. During these decades of

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détente, a battered and submerged Statue ofLiberty frequently featured on comic covers toiconically convey a future atomic war, evidentin Doomsday + 1, and The Planet of the Apesseries. Marvel's Godzilla, King of the Monstersalso appeared across 24 issues, portraying themonster attacking New York with his fiery,nuclear breath.

A mutant toys with the idea of destroyingManhattan in Heroes, using the nuclearforce literally in the palms of his hands.

After 9/11 several comics concerned a post-nuclear Manhattan, some adopting postmodernirony, as in the From the Ashes "speculativememoir." Others imagined scenarios in parallelor alternative universes, such as Alan Moore'sWatchmen and Dark Horse publishing's ZeroKiller, both series retrospectively set in "other"New Yorks of the 1980s and 1990s.

Television

Television programming has entertainedsimilar disaster scenarios. In 1950, theMotorola TV Hour broadcast Atomic Attack,

based on Judith Merill's Shadow on the Hearth,featuring a suburban New York housewifelearning that Manhattan has been obliterated.

While simulating a nuclear attack against NewYork, Edward Murrow's advocacy documentaryOne Plane, One Bomb (1953) calls for civiliansto volunteer as aircraft spotters. Throughoutthe 1950s newsreels and live TV broadcasts ofthe annual Operation Alert civil defenceexercises regularly showed preparations for anattack by " f ive or more H-bombs" onManhattan. Testimonial TV advertisements byreal New Yorkers encouraged citizens to buildtheir own bomb shelters and were funded bylocal civil defence authorities.

In The Twilight Zone episode "One MorePallbearer" (January 1962) a millionaireconstructs an elab

orate bomb shelter under a Manhattanskyscraper but is driven insane, acting out hisfears in an imagined missile strike.

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With the end of the cold war, actor GeorgeClooney nostalgically created a live televisionbroadcast of Fail Safe (2000) screened in blackand white and set like the novel in the early1960s, culminating in the nuclear destructionof New York. Following the September 11terrorist attacks, television programmingreturned to scenarios of nuclear disaster. InJericho (2007), survivors in a small mid-westtown piece together news of multiple nuclearexplosions across America with New York Cityassumed to be among the targets. In Heroes(2006) a mutant artist with precognitive powersprophetically paints a nuclear explosiondevastating New York City while anothersuperhuman physically absorbs the ability toachieve cr i t ica l mass . The episode,"Meditations in an Emergency" from Mad Men(2008) revisits the Cuban Missile Crisis and thepreoccupation Madison Avenue advertisingexecutives have with nuclear war. Preventingthe terrorist use of "dirty" nuclear bombs inNew York remains prominent in televisionscenarios, including the two-part episodes "SetUp" and "Countdown" of Castle (2011), andthrough much of the final series of 24 (2010),where CTU agent Jack Bauer races to preventan Islamist strike against Manhattan usingstolen nuclear fuel rods.

Games

In a pre-9/11 version of Flight Simulator for thepersonal computer, a Soviet FSX TU-95 couldbe modified to enable a player to fly over NewYork and drop two nuclear bombs. For the PlayStation console PS2, Sony's Godzilla Unleashed(2007), encouraged gamers to select variousinternational cities, including New York, andbattle kaiju ega foes (movie monsters) from thefilm series and do battle across a recognisablecityscape, using Godzilla's radioactive breathand dinosaur tail to level skyscrapers andbridges such as the Empire State, Chrysler andMet Life buildings. The PC game World InConflict (2008) featured an elaborate attack onManhattan by Russian forces who storm the

city. Gamers could target the Statue of Libertyfor nuclear annihilation and watch an incomingmissile obliterate the icon, and then pan aboutin real time to view its destruction frommultiple angles.

Flight Simulator detonating two H-bombsover Manhattan.

DEFCON 4 enables players to simulate anuclear attack on the U.S.

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Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent(2006).

A number of computer strategy games, such asCuban Missile Crisis (2004) and Nuclear Strike(1997) rendered their imagined World War IIIto include strikes against New York. InDEFCON 4 (2006) multiple scenarios can bemodelled to include attacks on Manhattan fromsubmarine ballistic missiles, ICBMs andbombers, each registered on a geographicalWar-Room style chart, where detonations areaccompanied by statistics such as "New Yorkhit 10.6 million dead." Other games createparallel or alternate histories to narratives andgame play. In the first-person shooter X-Box360 game Turning Point: Fall of Liberty (2009)the Nazis have won World War II and yourmission is to prevent a Zeppelin from explodingan atomic weapon over New York in 1953.

A chilling cut scene informs the FPS gameSplinter Cell: Double Agent (2006). If theplayer fails in the attempt to thwart a terroristplot, downtown Manhattan is shown vaporisedin a mushroom cloud, with the smoulderingruins then viewed from the air. In contrast,expert gamers could also modify (mod)narratives and action to create their own "prod-user" content, such as a popular mod of GrandTheft Auto 4 (2008), uploaded to YouTube,

where the criminal protagonist calls in anuclear hit on New York from his cell phone,shown from atop a skyscraper, which blastshim off the roof.

Online

When Nicholas Kristof wrote his "AmericanHiroshima" op-ed he was merely bringing intomainstream visibility a right-wing culturalmeme that had been festering on the internetsince the 9/11 attacks in 2001.42

Survivalist online communities had long beenabuzz with stories of an imagined "AmericanHiroshima" being planned by Osama bin Ladenthat would target many American cities.However, as well as expressing their fears,such fantasies allowed them also to imaginetheir domestic enemies perishing. In thesedepictions of terrorist attacks on New York Cityone can detect hostility towards perceived"liberal elites" as well as patriotic fervordesigned to stoke hostility towards America'senemies.

One website offered the following declarationalongside an image of a mushroom cloudphotoshopped onto a picture of the New YorkCity skyline, "There is no question, based oncaptured documents and captured al-Qaida

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leaders that Osama bin Laden has beenplanning his "American Hiroshima" for manyyears—long before Sept. 11, 2001."43

Another website claims that, "Al-Qaida is nowputting out the word that they want to createan American Hiroshima. Then, while the entirecountry scrambles in reaction to the first bombgoing off, a second one goes off a few dayslater—just like Nagasaki. In order to make thiscontinue to appear like a religious war theproposed plan is to attack US cities with largeJewish populations (i.e. New York, Chicago,Miami, D.C, & Las Vegas)."44

These images present a postmodern, online,crudely photoshopped vision of Americanvulnerability. However they also present avoyeuristic fantasy about the incineration ofimagined "east coast" elites and ethnicminorities.

Since 9/11 many videos have appeared onYouTube that depict a nuclear explosion onNew York City. Some of these are crudeattempts to create compelling video effects bypeople working with video software programs,but many are further fantasizing about thedangers of imagined attacks by jihadists andthe imagined annihilation of multi-ethnicAmerican urban centers. Additionally, manysurvivalist websites began to provide online"Ground Zero calculators" which would allowvisitors to estimate the extent of the effectsfrom imagined nuclear attacks on Americancities.45 These sites allow the viewer to enterthe location and size of the bomb and the localweather conditions and view maps withconcentric circles of destruction and falloutplumes, allowing visitors to personalize theillustrations of the Cold War era in whichreaders were collectively presented with suchimages in newspapers or magazines.

Conclusion

It is clear from the diversity and longevity ofthese cultural manifestations, both statesanctioned and independent, that an "AmericanHiroshima" emphasizing New York City as thelocus for an "inevitable" nuclear attack haspenetrated deep into the American psyche.Justifying heightened national securitymeasures at the expense of civil liberties,senior staff in the Bush Administration'sDefense and State Departments publiclyforegrounded such an attack, not as an "if," butas a "when."46 Adopting this prognosis as apolicy fait accompli reinforces a complex andcontradictory sense of guilt and betrayal,

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where U.S. culture perversely projects apreemptive sense of outrage as a nuclearvictim, not a nuclear perpetrator.

As Max Page has shown, New York City haslong been emblematic of American progress,prestige and profit and regarded as a nationaland international site for both awe and envy.Visions of New York's destruction resonate with"some of the most longstanding themes inAmerican history", where each generation findsreason to imagine the city's end.47 Thisambivalence towards the Big Apple alsoinforms conflicting post 9/11 sentiments.Following Tom Engelhardt's incisive work,Victory Culture, historian John W. Dower hasargued powerfully in Cultures of War that theeuphor ia o f v i c tory over Japan wasextraordinary, but also fragile and ephemeral.48

"The underside of triumph was profoundanxiety—a presentiment that making and usingthe atomic bomb had birthed not peace butvulnerability of a sort inconceivable just a fewyears earlier […] When the twin towers of theWorld Trade Center were taken down onSeptember 11, this suppressed or diluted dreaderupted, certainly among Americans, as full-blown collective trauma."49 In its assembly anddisplay of a variety of mass mediated forms,our Nuke York, New York exhibition seeks togive witness to the lingering expression ofthese anxieties, from the atomic strikes againstJapan in August 1945 to post 9/11 America.

Mick Broderick is Associate Professor andResearch Coordinator in the School of Media,Communication & Culture at MurdochUniversity, where he is Deputy Director of theNational Academy of Screen & Sound (NASS).Broderick's scholarly writing has beentranslated into French, Italian and Japanese,and his major publications include editions ofthe reference work Nuclear Movies (1988,1991) and, as editor, Hibakusha Cinema:Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image inJapanese Film (1996, 1999). Recent co-editedcollections include Interrogating Trauma: Arts

& M e d i a R e s p o n s e s t o C o l l e c t i v eSuffering (2011) and Trauma, Media, Art: NewPerspectives (2010).

Robert Jacobs is an associate professor at theHiroshima Peace Institute at Hiroshima CityUniversity. He is the author of The Dragon'sTail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (2010),the editor of Filling the Hole in the NuclearFuture: Art and Popular Culture Respond to theBomb (2010), and co-editor of Images ofRupture in Civilization Between East and West:The Iconography of Auschwitz and Hiroshimain Eastern European Arts and Media(2012-forthcoming). His book, The Dragon's Tail,willbe released in a Japanese language edition byGaifu in April. He is the principal investigatorof the Global Hibakusha Project.

Recommended citation: Mick Broderick andRobert Jacobs, 'Nuke York, New York: NuclearHolocaust in the American Imagination fromHiroshima to 9/11,' The Asia-Pacific Journal,Vol 10, Issue 11, No 6, March 12, 2012.

Notes

1 On transposing and conflating Hiroshima and"ground zero" with 9/11, see Antoine Bousquet,"Time zero: Hiroshima, September 11 andapocalyptic revelations in historicalconsciousness," Millennium: Journal ofInternational Studies 34:3 (2006): 739-764, andMick Broderick, "Waiting to Exhale: SomaticResponses to Place and the GenocidalSublime," IM: Interactive Media 4. (Summer2 0 0 8 ) , h e r e(https://apjjf.org/admin/site_manage/details/wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/nass/issue4/pdf/IM4_broderick.pdf).

2 Robert Jay Lifton and Gregg Mitchell,Hiroshima in America: A half century of denial(New York: G.P. Putnam, 1995): xv.

3 Gary Andrew Poole, "On the West coast, aparanoid run on iodide pills," Time (March 17,2 0 1 1 ) :

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http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2059408,00.html

Dennis Romero, "Japan Earthquake: Couldnuclear power radiation reach LA?" LA Weekly( M a r c h 1 7 , 2 0 1 1 ) : h e r e(http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2011/03/japan_earthquake_radiation_la.php); MarkClayton, "Traces of Japanese radiation detectedin 13 US states," Christian Science Monitor( M a r c h 2 8 , 2 0 1 1 ) : h e r e(http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0328/Traces-of-Japanese-radiation-detected-in-13-US-states).

4 l i n k(http://www.nukeyorknewyork.com/Welcome.html).

5 Richard Rhodes, The Making of the AtomicBomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).

6 See Mick Broderick, "Surviving Armageddon:Beyond the Imagination of Disaster," ScienceFiction Studies, 62, (1993): 362-382.

7 Jeff Nuttall , Bomb Culture (London:HarperCollins, 1970).

8 "Here's what could happen to New York in anatomic bombing," PM (August 7, 1945): 7.

( h t t p s : / / a p j j f . o r g / # _ e d n r e f 9 ) 9 R o b e r tJacobs,"Reconstructing the perpetrator's soulby reconstructing the victim's body: Theportrayal of the "Hiroshima Maidens" by themainstream American media," Intersections:Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 24( J u n e 2 0 1 0 ) : h e r e(http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue24/jacobs.htm).

1 0 Nicholas D. Kristof , "An AmericanHiroshima," New York Times (August 11,2 0 0 4 ) : h e r e(http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/11/opinion/an-american-hiroshima.html).

11 "The 36 hour war: The Arnold Report hints atthe catastrophe of the next great conflict," Life19:21 (November 19, 1945): 27.

12 "Peace or else," Mechanics Illustrated(February 1946).

13 Louis Ridenour and Louis Nicot, "Pilot lightsof the apocalypse," Fortune (January 1946):13-15.

14 Robert Littell, "What the atom bomb woulddo to us," Reader's Digest (May 1946): 125.

15 Robert De Vore, "What the atomic bombreally did," Collier's 117:9 (March 2, 1946): 19.

16 John Lear, "Hiroshima U.S.A.: Can anythingbe done about it?" Collier's (August 5, 1950):11-15.

17 "Civilian Defender Clay," Time (October 2,1950).

18 "Another job for the Army," Armed CombatForces Journal 5:8 (March 1955): 32.

19 Robert Jacobs, "Domesticating Hiroshima:American Depictions of the Victims of theHiroshima Bombings in the Early Cold War," inUrs Heftrich, Bettina Kaibach, Robert Jacobsand Karoline Thaidigsmann, eds., Images ofRupture in Civilization Between East and West:The Iconography of Auschwitz and Hiroshimain Eastern European Arts and Media (Köln:Böhlau, 2012) forthcoming.

20 Dexter Masters and Katherine Way, eds., OneWorld or None: A Report to the Public on theFull Meaning of the Atomic Bomb (New York:Federation of American Scientists, 1946).

21 Ralph E. Lapp, Must We Hide? (New York:Addison-Wesley Press, 1949): 141.

22 Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, Fail-Safe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962): 262.

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23 Burdick and Wheeler, Fail-Safe (1962).

24 Robert Burchard, Thirty Seconds Over NewYork (New York: Morrow, 1970).

25 Harold Rein, Few Were Left (New York: JohnDay, 1955.

26 Judith Merril, Shadow on the Hearth (NewYork: Doubleday, 1950).

27 Henry Williams, The Nuclear Suitcase (Self-published: iUniverse, 2005).

28 Sheldon Filger, King of Bombs: A NovelAbout Nuclear Terrorism (Self-published:Authorhouse, 2005.

29 Lee Boyland, Behold an Ashen Horse (Self-published: Booklocker, 2007).

3 0 S e e t h i s(http://ed-thelen.org/loc-n.html#NewYork); this(http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/airdef/nike-h e r c u l e s . h t m ) ; a n d t h i s(http://www.techbastard.com/missile/nike/ny49.php).

3 1 S e e " O p e r a t i o n A l e r t " h e r e(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/pandeAMEX64.html).

32 Robert Jacobs, "Survival of self and nationunder atomic attack," The Dragon's Tail:Americans Face the Atomic Age (Amherst, MA:University of Massachusetts Press, 2010):61-83.

33 Federal Civil Defense Administration,Survival Under Atomic Attack (WashingtonD.C.: Government Printing Office, 1950).

34 Federal Civil Defense Administration, AtomicBombing: How to Protect Yourself (WashingtonD.C.: Government Printing Office, 1950).

35 Federal Civil Defense Adminstration, FactsAbout the H-Bomb (Washington D.C.:

Government Printing Office, 1955).

36 Federal Civil Defense Administration, YouCan Survive Tomorrow's Atomic Attack(Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office,1950); Federal Civil Defense Administration,The Atom Bomb and Your Survival (WashingtonD.C.: Government Printing Office, 1950).

37 Roger S. Cannell, Live: A Handbook forNuclear Survival (New York: Prentice-Hall,1962).

38 Sewell Chan, "Inside the Brooklyn Bridge, awhiff of the Cold War," New York Times (March2 1 , 2 0 0 6 ) : h e r e(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/nyregion/21capsule.html).

39 For a complete list, see Mick Broderick,Nuclear Movies (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland,1991).

40 Mick Broderick, "Is this the Sum of OurFears? Nuclear Imagery in Post-Cold WarCinema," in Scott C. Zeman & Michael A.Amundson, (eds) Atomic Culture (Boulder:University Press of Colorado, 2004): 127-149.

41 See Ferenc M. Szasz, "Atomic Comics," inScott C. Zeman & Michael A. Amundson, (eds)Atomic Culture (Boulder: University Press ofColorado, 2004).

42 Kristof.

4 3 " A n A m e r i c a n H i r o s h i m a " : h e r e(http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1455248/posts).

44 Major Van Harl, American Hiroshima?: here(http://www.chuckhawks.com/american_hiroshima.htm).

4 5 T r u t h i s T r e a s o n : h e r e(http://www.truthistreason.net/ground-zero-ii-interactive-nuclear-blast-calculator-and-fallout-map).

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46 See "Terrorist nukes are 'inevitable,'R u m s f e l d s a y s(http://www.canoe.ca/LondonNews/lf.lf-05-22-0003.html)", London Free Press (Canada), here(http://nci.org/nci-nt.htm).

47 Max Page: 4.

48 Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture:Cold War America and the Disillusioning of aGenerat ion , (Boston : Univers i ty o fMassachusetts Press, 2008).

49 John W. Dower, Cultures of War: PearlHarbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq, (New York:Norton, 2010): 224.