For the Love of Bombs

December 2, 2024 at 8:59 am Leave a comment

For the Love of Bombs: The Trail of Nuclear Suffering (London: Anthem Press, 2025).

Abstract

The truism that history is written by its winners reflects the literature about how the bomb came about, with apologetic books most often written by U.S. scholars. The physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the nuke’s ‘father’, is repeatedly centre stage, as in the case of the recent film about him. These are elitist stories that more often than not ignore the suffering and violence of the bomb to laypeople in general, and to marginalised groups in particular. Starting with the gruesome mining of uranium by First Nation people in northern Canada, and continuing with the racialist culture of uranium enrichment in the Atomic City of Oak Ridge, Peder Anker offers alternative perspectives. It’s a story of how the bikini swimwear came to fetishise the nuclear bombardment of the Bikini Atoll with its celebration of ‘sex bombs’ and (an)atomic ‘bombshells’. Our current global warming fears also hearken back to ordinary citizens wondering if atomic bombs would blow up the entire sky. If some of this was news to you, it might have to do with how the story of nuclear bombs has been told.

Review

“Bomben er ingen metafor,” Ny tid, April 20, 2025. [PDF]

Blog and op-eds

“Leslie R. Groves Invented the Atomic Bomb,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, July 21, 2025.

“Farewell Oppenheimer” Anthem, Jan. 29. 2025.

“The stories ‘Oppenheimer’ didn’t tell” Washington Post, March 15, 2024. [PDF]

“Årets verste film” Klassekampen, March 13, 2024. [PDF]

Podcast

New Books Network, with Miranda Melcher, March 30, 2025.

In the news

Janae Antrum, “Understanding the narrative 80 Years Later: African Americans and the A-bomb,” New York Amsterdam News, July 24, 2025.

Jade McClain, “Gallatin Professor Wants the Oppenheimer Narrative Up in Smoke,” NYU News, April 17., 2025.