Nuclear Weapons and Popular Culture: Contemporary Representations of The Bomb

Nuclear weapons are too often seen as a bygone artefact of the Cold War. Britain's expanding nuclear arsenal is rarely considered by British public. Popular culture is the
only space that British citizens have to engage with what these weapons of mass destruction mean: it is the site where norms of nuclear warfare become meaningful and the possibility of nuclear war can form itself as normal in everyday spaces. This project engages critically with contemporary popular cultural artefacts - film, TV, videogames - to understand what this means for global security. Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis reveals the dominant popular cultural representations of nuclear weapons today. Online Comment Sentiment Based Analysis allows insight into how British citizens understand nuclear weapons through engagement with these artefacts. Together, this allows for thoughtful and
systematic exploration of the gap between public understanding of nuclear weapons and their implications for political geography and international relations. Critically, this moves beyond outdated Cold War knowledges and looks to understand the here and now - since nuclear weapons have never posed more of a threat. Importantly, this project navigates the (i) production and (ii) reception of nuclear weapons in popular culture. In doing so, it will expose narratives that are multiple and contested in the portrayal and understanding of nuclear weaponry and warfare, asking how to better engage with the threat of nuclear weapons.