The New Nuke Porn:
The nature of the doom these books threaten us with has recently undergone a subtle shift, especially in the realm of what I've called in the past "nuke porn." I coined the term (in a Harper's article) at the height of the Cold War to characterize the way nuclear war novels and films from Fail-Safe to Strangelove and the like adapted or imitated the techniques one could find in conventional porn: the excitement of arousal and buildup, the finger on the trigger as the world was brought to the trembling brink of a consciousness-obliterating climax. And the post-coital tristesse of "survivor novels" like On the Beach, where the onrushing end of the species licensed a doom-inflected licentiousness.
I attempted to make the point that it was not just novels and films like Red Alert (the template for Dr. Strangelove) and Fail-Safe and On the Beach that incorporated pornographic tropes and techniques but that the literature of real-world nuclear strategists had internalized the tropes and techniques of nuke porn. (Nuclear strategist Herman Kahn's elaboration of a 44-step ladder of escalation deliberately used the rhetoric of porn: Step No. 4: "hardening of positions"; No. 11: "Super-Ready status": all the way to No. 44: all out "Spasm or Insensate War."
3:41 PM
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