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Like the expected energy abundance of the Atomic Age, the flow of information during the Information Age is also expected to become ‘too cheap to meter’, since communication capacity and information exchange has increasingly become available and certain costs have been reduced. The fears associated with the Information Age are grounded on the disruptions and dislocations in the corresponding patterns of knowledge and work due to the introduction of new services and technologies. There is therefore a need to examine the consequences of exclusion, as well as the uncertainties related to the best means for taking advantage of these services and technologies to further human life quality and economic competitiveness. As we summarize the dominant themes in this book regarding the present era, we also have to know what to expect and how we should be taking on future applications.

This concluding chapter addresses the longing of residents of Oak Ridge for the days when the city was a muddy frontier at the beginning of the Atomic Age. Such a longing was shaped by positive memories of working for a secret atomic bomb project, but it was also colored with nostalgia for an imagined golden age of mid-twentieth-century America. In addition, this sentiment not only describes an opinion about the past; it also betrays a vision of contemporary America as a nation divided and in decline; a nation that has lost, or is in the act of losing, its purpose and character.

This chapter examines the alternate reality of the 2006 novel Half Life, wherein the United States has implemented a program of self-bombing to atone for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This bombing gives rise to a politicized minority of conjoined twins—modeled satirically on, and overlapping with, queer communities—who then serve as emblems of peaceful, post-nuclear coexistence. In examining Half Life's revision of Atomic Age history, this chapter focuses on the queer ecological implications of its narrative form. This chapter studies the novel's so-called “ironic environmentalism”; in so doing, it builds on previous work in environmentalist rhetoric and establishes irony as a new topic of inquiry for queer ecology.

Despite the lack of attention, he has received until recently in the Anglophone academic world, the German-Jewish technology critic and anti-nuclear militant Günther Anders (1902-1992) is a crucial figure for the history of modern apocalypticism. Between 1955 and 1985, Anders tirelessly wrote, lectured and marched for the cause of nuclear abolition. Drawing on his magnum opus, The Obsolescence of Human Beings and related works,this essay focuses on Anders’ role as a theorist in the Ban-the-Bomb movement, specifically his remarkable efforts to define the Atomic Age as a distinct, final epoch of human history and to imagine a history-ending nuclear war between the superpowers. The piece concludes with some thoughts about where to locate Anders in the history of attempts to imagine the “imaginary war.”

After the Second World War, the thinker who imagined the symmetrical rapport between pre- and posthistory in the most complex terms was Georges Bataille. His interpretation of history and time is all the thornier because it was completely opposed to his vision of history from the 1920s, notably as he had elaborated it in the journal 'Documents' (1929–1931). Prehistory as he had invented it in that early period undermined biological evolutionism, particularly by deconstructing the political rapports on which evolution’s political authority was founded. It had been the matrix of a contingent and formless conception of history that was devoid of any teleological compass. But after the war, Bataille placed prehistory in a highly antagonistic relationship with history. His reading of the cave paintings of Lascaux, determined by the catastrophes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, permitted him to weave a narrative of universal history. To reconstitute and analyze this narrative is to interrogate the relationships between history and fiction, between longue durée and the event, between evolutionism and catastrophism. In Bataille’s case, it allows us to track the movement of a thought that, fleeing the dystopian presentism of its era, took shelter in the Hegelian contemplation of the end of history.