Sources
Help build the largest human-edited directory on the web.
Submit a site - Become an editor
Wikipedia. Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Are you an expert in this subject? Join the discussion and share your knowledge at Wikipedia.org.
Nuclear holocaust
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nuclear holocaust refers to the possibility of complete or nearly complete eradication of human civilization by nuclear warfare. Under such a scenario, all or most of the Earth is burnt and destroyed by nuclear weapons in future world war.
The word "holocaust" is defined as "great destruction resulting in the extensive loss of life, especially by fire."[1] It is derived from the Greek term "holokaustos" meaning "burnt whole." Since the 1970s the term "holocaust" has been more commonly associated with the Nazi Holocaust.
Nuclear physicists and authors have speculated that nuclear holocaust could result in an end to human life, or at least to modern civilization on Earth due to the immediate effects of nuclear fallout, the loss of much modern technology due to electromagnetic pulses, or nuclear winter and resulting extinctions.
Contents |
The theme is widely used in dystopian fiction books and films.
One of the first depictions of a nuclear holocaust is included in Olaf Stapledon's celebrated "Last and First Men" (1930). Unlike the post-1945 treatment of the subject, where the disaster is almost invariably the outcome of a war between states, Stapeldon depicts the holocaust as the result of class war between an arrogant ruling class and downtrodden miners in a future civlization. Abuse of the newly-discovered Atomic power source leads to what would now be called a chain reaction engulfing the entire world, so that "of the two hundred million members of the human race, all were burnt or roasted or suffocated - all but thirty-five, who happened to be in the neighborhood of the North Pole" (and of whom humanity is eventually regenerated for many more millions of years of existence).
Throughout the Cold War, nuclear holocaust was something most people were afraid of and it seemed to be very possible. The topic became somewhat less common after the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, as many of the works created during the Cold War were primarily just commentary on that conflict. Asiatic work that deals with the theme and western work influenced by it often borrow much imagery from American atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II in 1945. To this date, those bombings and the failure of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 remain the only nuclear disasters from which authors and screenwriters can draw real world experience with the aftermath of such instances.
Authors, directors, and game designers have approached the topic from a variety of angles and in every major media. Novels such as the Hugo Award-winning A Canticle for Leibowitz tell of a reemerging civilization several hundred years after the bombs fell, likening the civilization of the North American survivors to that of the dark ages in Europe. In other works, such as the Fallout series of video games, nuclear holocaust is used as a backdrop to a dystopian tale of a mutant monsters and beasts. In many of these works, a partly forgotten nuclear holocaust provides a backdrop to a new creation story. In a similar vein, the book The City of Ember ties a nuclear holocaust in with the tale of a new civilization's rise. In some, the holocaust seems complete. Nevil Shute's 1957 novel On the Beach, for instance, chronicles the extinction of the human race by radioactive fallout in the months following a massive nuclear war; "There Will Come Soft Rains", a famous short story by Ray Bradbury, depicts a world of alarm clocks and robotic vacuum cleaners operating endlessly in the absence of their owners. In the early 1980s two made for television movies, Threads in Britain and The Day After in the United States dramatized the devastating effects on civilization of a world nuclear war.