The 1950 Boulting Brothers film Seven Days to Noon is one of the earliest British films to engage with the atomic bomb and uses a number of strategies to contain the public fears of the super-weapon. When an atomic scientist steals one such device and threatens to detonate it in central London, an elaborate but efficient security system swings into action. Drawing on the imagery and practices of civil defence during the Second World War, central London is evacuated while the army hunts down the scientist, who is presented as undergoing a psychological crisis as a result of his work. Although he is finally located and the bomb disarmed, the film only achieves its reassuring message by suppressing the Communist threat from within (which would become the subject of Roy Boulting's 1951 film High Treason) and from abroad, which differentiates Seven Days from comparable American films of the period. Presenting an idealized version of Londoners' stoicism, the film actually shows the disproportion between the specifics of daily life in the city and the massive destruction the new weapon could wreak. The acquiescence of Londoners in their orderly evacuation is only possible because of their virtually total ignorance of the true nature of the bomb.

In the ever-expanding field of nuclear history, studies of ‘nuclear culture’ are becoming increasingly popular. Often situated within national contexts, they typically explore responses to the nuclear condition in the cultural modes of literature, art, music, theatre, film and other media, as well as nuclear imagery more generally. This paper offers a critique of current conceptions of ‘nuclear culture’, and argues that the term has little analytical coherence. It suggests that historians of ‘nuclear culture’ have tended to essentialize the nuclear to the detriment of historical analysis, and that the wide variety of methodological approaches to ‘nuclear culture’ are simultaneously a strength and a more significant weakness, in that they have little shared sense of the meaning of the term, its theoretical underpinnings or its analytical purchase. The paper then offers a study of Ewan MacColl's 1946 play Uranium 235, whose career reveals much about the diversity of cultures of the nuclear in post-war Britain. The study moves us away from a single, homogeneous ‘British nuclear culture’ towards a pluralistic critical history of cultural responses to nuclearization. These responses, I conclude, should be seen as collectively constitutive of the nuclear condition rather than as passive reflections of it.

Journalistic representations of a suicide pact in 1957 encapsulated wider popular assumptions on, and anxieties over, nuclear technology. Through an exploration of British nuclear culture in the late 1950s, this article suggests that knowledge of nuclear danger disrupted broader conceptions of self, nationhood and existence in British life. Building on Hecht's use of the term ‘nuclearity’, the article offers an alternative definition of the term whereby nuclearity is understood to mean the collection of assumptions held by individual citizens on the dangers of nuclear technology: assumptions that were rooted firmly in context and which circulated in, and were shaped by, national discourse. The article will argue that nuclearity was an active component in the formation of British identity by the late 1950s. The article is intended as a starting point for extended reflections on the ways in which nuclearity can add to our understanding of individual experience, nuclear anxiety and Cold War culture in post-war Britain.

The nuclear age had a profound impact on politics and international affairs. More fundamentally, it altered the way people saw the planet and their relationship with it. These attitudes changed gradually in the post-war period, with the 1960s a key transitional moment. This article explores these changing attitudes towards the environment within the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). At the beginning of the 1960s CND's concerns about nuclear testing and fallout fit easily into the dominant anthropocentric view of the environment. However, by the end of the decade they espoused a much more holistic, even ecocentric, attitude. This article examines how attitudes towards the environment were changing in the 1960s through a close examination of attitudes within CND, and argues that the modern environmental movement was a product of the nuclear age.

This article concerns the Atom Train travelling exhibition that the chief body of the British nuclear scientists' movement, the Atomic Scientists' Association (ASA), organized in collaboration with government offices and private industry in 1947–1948. It argues that the exhibition marked an important moment within post-war British nuclear culture where nuclear scientists shared aspects of their nuclear knowledge with the British public, while simultaneously clashing with the interests of the emerging British national security state in the early Cold War.

British popular newspapers were fascinated by the terrible power of the nuclear bomb, and they devoted countless articles, editorials and cartoons to it. In so doing, they played a significant role in shaping the nuclear culture of the post-war period. Yet scholars have given little sustained attention to this rich seam of material. This article makes a contribution to remedying this major gap by offering an overview of the coverage of nuclear weaponry in the two most popular newspapers in Britain, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, in the period from 1945 to the early 1960s. Although both papers supported British possession of the bomb, claiming that it was essential for the maintenance of great-power status, their reporting was more complex and critical than the existing scholarship has tended to assume. This article argues that sceptical voices in the press often disrupted official narratives and that journalists emphasized the potential dangers involved in the nuclear arms race. Newspapers frequently highlighted, rather than downplayed, the horrors of the bomb: it was repeatedly portrayed as a ‘monster’ threatening the world.