Newinfamy
When the World Dies What if, when leaving the bunker after living through a nuclear attack, we discover ourselves to be the last persons on Earth? Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War </em>tells of an obliterating 1-megaton thermonuclear scenario: “Ground zero is zeroed. Traveling at the speed of light, the radiating heat from the fireball ignites everything flammable within its sight several miles out…” I tell of how we got to ground zero, a story contrasted with the current “Age of Barbie.” Our age, the 20 century and early 21st centuries’ “Age of Infamy,” has an evil reputation brought about by totalitarianism and total war. Each was criminal, shocking, and brutal. In a New York Times Sunday piece, “Anxiety in the Age of Barbie,” journalist Maureen Dowd writes, “Young women and men are distraught about the cost of housing, climate change, racism and prejudice, and young women are also affected by threats to their reproductive health.” These young adults, often college students, are my readers.By contrast, the historian Adam Tooze, author of <em>The Crushed, The Wages of Destruction, Shutdown, and The Deluge</em> claims the world is in a “polycrisis.” I agree. Cinematographer Christopher Nolan addresses our critical moment, like Tooze, in his film <em>Oppenheimer by noting the significance of the first atomic bomb test at Trinity (1945), “when the world irreversibly changed.” The advent of nuclear war, Nolan meant, threatened civilization.Our Age of Infamy’s doomsday arrives when the last millennium’s totalitarianism and militarism join hands. They began in World War I’s Flanders fields (1915), passed through Soviet Russia’s Gulags(1917-91), and Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau (1940-45), then the U.S.’s nuking of Hiroshima-Nagasaki (1945), the Hydrogen Bomb (Super, 1952), and the Cold War (1945-91). Now, with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats, dictatorship and total war continue in his Ukrainian invasion (2022-). My book (266 pages, 80,670 words) explains how and why that irreversible change in 1945 occurred and offers readers a radical way out of a threatened atomic Armageddon by “re-civilizing”: growing human rights and creativity to thwart civilization’s ending in the nuclear bunker. Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove</em> ends with songstress Vera Lynn singing, “We’ll Meet Again,” as the screen shows atomic bomb explosions destroying the world. My intended readers are a niche audience of young adults and university students, especially those enrolled in college “gened” (general education) classes. I want to think that these readers are wondering about their futures after reading When the World Dies</em>.<br>We live in a radically changed world. Our solution, recivilization, must be radical, or we may witness Armageddon if and when we have to step out of that bunker and find ourselves the last persons on a radioactive, scorched Earth. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road</em> gives us a fictionalized picture of life on an burned out planet.
Newinfamy 
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