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Chapter Five studies Ministerial reactions to the spy scandals that threatened Anglo-American nuclear exchanges. Considering the cases of Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs, Bruno Pontecorvo, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, it argues that Ministers were sensitive to claims from the United States that Britain was weak in the field of security. After the Fuchs and Pontecorvo scandals, Ministers reacted quickly to repair any damage to transatlantic relations by introducing new security procedures known as ‘Positive Vetting’. The chapter also uses newly released archival material to shed light on Ministerial reactions to the disapperance of the Foreign Office diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, in the spring of 1951. Their defection provoked widespread outrage and, once again, prompted a review of security in government, on this occasion the Foreign Office, on the instructions of the Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, now Foreign Secretary, which is explored here for the first time.

This chapter examines how Japanese literature grapples with environmental pollution by focusing on two texts: Ishimure Michiko's 1969 novel Kugai jōdo: Waga Minamatabyō (Sea of suffering and the Pure Land: Our Minamata disease) and the anthology Genbakushi 181 ninshū, 1945–2007 nen (Atomic bomb poetry: Collection of 181 people, 1945–2007, 2007), edited by Nagatsu Kōzaburō, Suzuki Hisao, and Yamamoto Toshio. Sea of Suffering deals with the Minamata disease and explores some of the paradoxes of negotiating nonhuman suffering amid human anguish, whereas Atomic Bomb Poetry tells the story of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and probes the ambiguity of negotiating nonhuman regeneration amid human suffering. The two works' many references to global human and nonhuman affliction advocate what Ursula Heise has identified as eco-cosmopolitanism, or “environmental world citizenship.” They also depict people as both determined polluters and haplessly polluted, harmed, and even killed by damaged environments.

At the end of the war he returns to Harvard. Fearing that he is blocked from promotion in the Government Department, he secures a tenure appointment in the Harvard Business School. A chance encounter in 1946 at LaGuardia Airport with his old boss at WPB, Ferd Eberstadt, leads to his introduction to Bernard Baruch and an invitation to join Baruch’s staff to work on US atomic policy at the UN. Harvard Business School gives him leave to work on controlling the atom provided he returns to his teaching duties in January 1947. Gordon becomes a key staff member at the working level but does not entirely share Baruch’s policy views. He works closely with Robert Oppenheimer and key scientific advisers to the American delegation. Gordon is drawn into the Bernard Baruch–Henry Wallace dispute and works out a tentative agreement to settle the differences between the two men with a key Wallace aide. But Wallace, at the suggestions of his political advisers, backs out of the deal. Baruch publicly breaks with and denounces Wallace, releasing Gordon’s memorandum to the New York Times. Gordon continues to work part-time with the US delegation to the UN and concludes that the chances for an agreement were never as close as he had believed, but he thinks that the UN diplomacy eventually paved the way for the international atomic inspection agency.

Chapter five explores the concept of the “world” that underlies Anti-Communist aesthetic ideology by concentrating on the figure of catastrophe. It argues that the Cold War imagination was driven by the newly discovered “unity” of the world due to the threat of global catastrophe. It examines the historical ties between modernism and the rise of atomic holocaust fiction, and argues that catastrophe functions in both as a fundamental aesthetic and a political figure for the unrepresentable.

America wins the war in Europe; Hitler is dead. After the dropping of the Atomic Bomb, the Japanese surrender and the most destructive war in human history is over. North Carolinians celebrated with wild abandon, cherishing the victory but mourning the loss of loved ones. The state would never be the same after the war—changing from a backward, poor society into an industrialized state with less poverty, better education, improved health care, and a move away from ruralism to urbanism.

The chapter explores how Roman Catholics in West Germany and the United States handled the permanent nuclear threat of the Cold War years from 1945 to 1990. Examining acts of popular belief as well as intellectual debates it shows that only few Catholics turned into pacifists while the majority kept approving war in general, using traditional Christian concepts such as the notion of a ‘just war’. However, changing relations between East and West and the fundamental transformation of the Catholic Church during the 1960s resulted in a change of attitude towards the atomic bombs. In the long run, Catholics expressed their opinions and fears more freely and, as the debates on rearmament in the 1980s show, they did so referring increasingly to apocalyptic images.