Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future presents an international collaboration of scholars and artists who examine multiple reactions of popular culture and the arts to the advent of nuclear weapons. Featuring both contemporary works of scholarship in several fields and works of contemporary artists grappling with what nuclear weapons have wrought, side by side, including Spencer Weart's updating of his classic book, Nuclear Fear.

From the dawn of the atomic age, art and popular culture have played an essential role interpreting nuclear issues to the public and investigating the implications of nuclear weapons to the future of human civilization. Political and social forces often seemed paralyzed in thinking beyond the advent of nuclear weapons and articulating a creative response to the dilemma posed by this apocalyptic technology. Art and popular culture are uniquely suited to grapple with the implications of the bomb and the disruptions in the continuity of traditional narratives about the human future endemic to the atomic age. Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future explores the diversity of visions evoked in American and Japanese society by the mushroom cloud hanging over the future of humanity during the last half of the twentieth century. It presents historical scholarship on art and popular culture alongside the work of artists responding to the bomb, as well as artists discussing their own work. From the effect of nuclear testing on sci-fi movies during the mid-fifties in both the U.S. and Japan, to the socially engaged visual discussion about power embodied in Japanese manga, Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future takes readers into unexpected territory

Chapter 1 Preface: Hiroshima Story
Chapter 2 Introduction: Filling the Hole in the Future
Chapter 3 1. Fetch Lights and Grocery Lists: Metaphors and Nuclear Weapons
Chapter 4 2. from Critical Assembly, Poems
Chapter 5 3. Robots, A-Bombs, and War: Cultural Meanings of Science and Technology in Japan Around World War Two
Chapter 6 4. The Day the Sun Was Lost, Manga
Chapter 7 5. The Summer You Can't Go Back To, Manga
Chapter 8 6. "The Buck Stops Here": Hiroshima Revisionism in the Truman Years
Chapter 9 7. Godzilla and the Bravo Shot: Who Created and Killed the Monster?
Chapter 10 8. Thank you Mr. Avedon
Chapter 11 9. Target Earth: The Atomic Bomb and the Whole Earth
Chapter 12 10. Nuclear Culture
13 11. Nuclear Fear 1987–2007: Has Anything Changed? Has Everything Changed?