This study will range across continents and cultural forms and more than six decades, but it is anchored by Arundhati Roy's assertion, used as this book's epigraph, that nuclear weapons are white weapons, and that the virtues and vices of white people and nations are condensed in the figure of nuclear weapons. Roy's proposition is explored from a variety of critical positions in Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds, from inside and outside the perception of whiteness: how have nuclear weapons been read as representative of the scientific achievement, military superiority and responsibility of white Europeans and their descendants? How have they also been interpreted as manifestations of the destructivity, racism and recklessness of white civilization? As part of this process, Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War explores the ways nuclear representations in Anglophone literary, filmic and other cultural texts since 1945 have been pivotal sites for the articulation of racial, ethnic, national and civilizational identities. These texts are a way of making these identities coherent and legible, but the fact they must be produced means they cannot be taken for granted. Some of the nuclear representations studied in this book contest racial, ethnic, national and civilizational identities as meaningful and decisive ways of categorizing human life, and reveal them as insecure and disabling political compartments.

In this study, nuclear representations are defined as depictions of the following subjects: (1) the invention and use of the first atomic bombs; (2) the nuclear weapon testing and stockpiling of the Cold War superpowers; and (3) nuclear war (often referred to as World War Three) and life after such a cataclysm. Nuclear technology has been the subject of narratives of racial and national belonging and exclusion undoubtedly because its emergence (and deployment against Japan) was read by some commentators as an act of genocidal racist violence, and by some as the apex of Western civilization's scientific achievement. These opposing perspectives are interpretative poles that have been central to nuclear representations. By posing white moral and technological superiority against the destructive technology it supposedly invented, cultural producers have cited nuclear weapons as evidence against white Anglo-Saxon supremacism.