“Pandora’s box”. American cinema and society in the face of the nuclear nightmare between the Second World War and the Korean War (1945-1953)

With the destruction of Hiroshima, American society had to face up to the deep implications of nuclear energy and its possible uses. It was politics and all the President’s men whose first task was to decide how to use this mysterious and omnipotent power,piecing together an official view point which gave the bomb both a mythical and scientific aura. In a series of films between 1945 and the end of the Korean War Hollywood reflected a part of the general public’s conflicting views over the nuclear debate, giving body, albeit on celluloid, to the hopes and fears of a nation both fascinated and terrorised by the Bomb.