Books like Dr. Strangelove by Peter George

Candide: A Tale of Conviviality and Optimism in a Wretched World

A warlock from the Salem witch trials lands in modern-day Los Angeles, hunting for ultimate evil and facing a witch hunter who seeks to prevent the horror of the past from repeating itself.

A tense Cold War thriller in which American bomber crews, mistakenly over Moscow, must decide whether to release nuclear weapons, raising questions of accidental warfare.

A nuclear war scenario in the mid-1950s, as an American general orders a full-scale nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.

Did Dr. Strangelove's America really learn to "stop worrying and love the bomb," as the title of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film would have us believe? What has that darkly satirical comedy in common with the impassioned rhetoric of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech or with the beat of Elvis Presley's throbbing "I'm All Shook Up"? They all, in Margot Henriksen's vivid depiction of the decades after World War II, are expressions of a cultural revolution directly related to the atomic bomb. Because there was little organized, extensive protest against nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation until the 1980s, America's overall reaction to the bomb has been seen as acceptance or indifference. Henriksen argues instead that, in spite of the ease with which Cold War exigencies overrode all protests by scientists or others after the end of World War II, America's psyche was split as surely as the atom was split. In opposition to the "culture of consensus," which never questioned the pursuit of nuclear superiority, a "culture of dissent" was born. Its current of rebellion can be followed through all the forms of popular culture, and Henriksen evokes dozens of illuminating examples from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s.