This final chapter performs the synoptic work expected of a last chapter, looking back to the literary, scientific and political languages used to represent nuclear weapons since 1945 and thinking about how these traditions remain visible in early twenty-first-century attitudes towards nuclear weapon possession. In addition, this chapter analyses how the meaning of these representations can be connected to race, ethnicity, nationhood and civilization. In the following discussion of proliferation, the terrorist use of nuclear weapons and the fictional construction of the Third World as the primal site of World War Three, for one final time we pay attention to the central contention proffered, debated and challenged throughout this book: that nuclear weapons ‘belong’ to the white Western world. In his history of American non-proliferation policy, Shane J. Maddock observes:

The nuclear powers’ defence of their entitlement to build weapons with nuclear technology is, of course, not solely (or even primarily) motivated by attitudes of national and racial maturity. For example, the hostile response of the United States to the USSR's building of missile launching sites on Cuba was not motivated by resentment at the enhanced political leverage that could potentially be exerted by this postcolonial island nation. It was motivated by a national security need, to prevent the Soviet Union from positioning nuclear weapons so close to the US mainland that there would be an unfavourable (for the USA) imbalance in the speed of the superpowers’ nuclear strike capacity.