By the Bomb’s Filmic Light

The nuclear era of American cinema has been over for a long time. What once inspired a soul-wrenching, destabilizing horror has become little more than a mundane nuisance for the latest superhero, a footnote to the dread machinations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The declining urgency of the nuclear threat has many causes. Writing for the Guardian earlier this year, Daniel Immerwahr, professor of history at Northwestern University, lamented not just our growing collective amnesia about Hiroshima and the scads of apocalyptic close calls of the twentieth century but the advancing age of its survivors