“Cold War culture” and “nuclear criticism” have long been mainstays in the study of twentieth-century American literary and cultural history; as one of the Cold War's primary belligerents and the only nation to use nuclear weapons in wartime, the United States has held a privileged position in articulating the discourses by which they were understood and encountered—an encounter that was generally taken to be universal. Jonathan Hogg's British Nuclear Culture: Official and Unofficial Narratives in the Long Twentieth Century challenges this assumption by arguing for a distinctly British nuclear culture, or rather cultures, as his history of the nuclear age in Britain (running from Ernest Rutherford's earliest experiments with radiation in 1898 to 2014) focuses not only on local and regional particularities, but also on the plural, overlapping, and often contradictory narratives of the nuclear age that emerge in different media, ranging from journalism and protest pamphlets to, more recently, video games. Hogg complements scholarship that has drawn on government documents made accessible by the United Kingdom's Freedom of Information Act 2000 with an exhaustive scouring of newspapers, advertisements, film, television, and oral histories to locate as many explicit references to nuclear weapons and nuclear power as possible, it seems. Such striving for comprehensiveness seems a worthy endeavor for an attempt to open up a new window on British postwar history, beyond the well-established narratives of the end of empire and the rise of the welfare state.

As Hogg's subtitle suggests, his aim is to bring to light “unofficial” narratives of the nuclear age that contest the “official” narratives of what Peter Hennessey has termed “the secret state”—the largely hidden apparatus of Whitehall that sought to normalize nuclear weapons within both British policy and daily life. The official narrative made nuclear deterrence appear natural and possession of an independent nuclear arsenal inevitable and reasonable, while transforming the physical space of Britain with bunkers, bases, and bombers overhead. Resistance to the official narrative was treated by politicians and journalists alike as pathological: Hogg details recurring representations of the long-running Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as unwashed bohemians and childless single women. Nuclear anxiety and the fear of annihilation were taken to be inexorable facets of modern life, to be conveniently repressed without protest. Complicit with this official narrative, Hogg argues, is the work of an earlier generation of British nuclear historians who have focused almost exclusively on governmental and scientific elites acting in a social vacuum, taking for granted the legitimacy of the hidden, undemocratic structures they describe.

The unofficial narratives are predominantly grounded in that nuclear anxiety, a phenomenon that manifests itself in diverse and occasionally unexpected aspects of everyday life. For instance, Hogg observes how, from the earliest days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, women, and mothers in particular, questioned the continued relevance of the family unit if their children would confront a bleak future, if any future at all. British national identity was also affected by the bombings; many citizens expressed their shock and horror that their country was complicit in such atrocities. Britishness itself was at issue, as the territorial landmass of Britain was sufficiently small to be vulnerable to even a modest nuclear attack—there were common rumors that the island could be destroyed with a single bomb—prompting a meager civil defense program in the 1950s. Nuclear destruction became a recurring trope in fiction, popular television, and film, expressing an inchoate, amorphous fear of annihilation with varying degrees of nuance. Perhaps most poignant is Hogg's account of “The Family That Feared Tomorrow” (95–102), about the Daily Mirror’s reporting of a Blackburn couple who committed filicide and suicide, leaving behind a note that saw no future for their children facing the prospect of nuclear annihilation. The tale demonstrates the intertwining of the official and unofficial narratives, as the Mirror’s coverage gave concrete expression to the profound impact of nuclear anxiety, while simultaneously suggesting that the couple's acting upon their anxiety was abnormal and that idealized images like the traditional family could provide compensatory relief for it.

Hogg traces these competing narratives through their ebbs and flows, much as Paul Boyer has done for American nuclear history in By the Bomb's Early Light (1985). Hogg starts with the prehistory of the nuclear age, in which set-pieces of the mysterious powers of the atom were established. He follows with the immediate aftermath of the war, in which the prospect of atomic warfare was analogized to the Blitz. The 1950s and 1960s saw the rise of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and its famous Aldermaston Marches, which were met with countercultural suspicion and red-baiting. By the 1980s, Hogg argues, skepticism towards the official narrative had hardened into a common refrain of popular music, such that “the nuclear referent became something rumbling in the background” (134). His analysis is least compelling when he gets to the post-Cold War period, precisely because the distinctively British features of nuclear culture have been homogenized into the globalized entertainment market, where nuclear weapons often function as a punchline or a MacGuffin in films and video games, and public fear has shifted from global destruction to localized terrorist attacks. Our present, Hogg concludes, does not demonstrate that the nuclear threat has entirely abated, but only been rendered innocuous under such empty representations, allowing “the secret state” to continue unfettered.

British Nuclear Culture is an important book for mapping the terrain of this lightly trodden field. Jonathan Hogg has done the journeyman's work of marshaling diverse bodies of cultural production to adumbrate this particular national zeitgeist; indeed, at times his account seems like a catalog of explicit references to the nuclear. However, Hogg's attention to the visible, overt aspects of nuclear culture risks neglecting its latent effects which appear, like neurotic symptoms, divorced from their origin. If, as Hogg contends, “what we might call ‘British nuclear culture’ therefore became a persistent backdrop to everyday life, appearing more visible around times of crisis, but always there as a brooding corner of British culture” (4), then “nuclearity” should manifest itself in cultural representations that do not take the nuclear as an ostensive referent. Whither should we locate, for instance, important postwar works like George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954), or Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962), in all of which the nuclear plays a small but unexamined role? Texts like these would seem to operate upon what Walter Davis terms the “nuclear unconscious,” where nuclear anxiety appears only at the margins, to be repressed or deferred but nonetheless registered. Such a hermeneutic is, by his own admission, beyond the scope of Hogg's inquiry, but he has nonetheless laid the groundwork for scholars to pursue the more delicate lineaments of British nuclear culture in the future.