The human imagination is quicker off the mark than any six-gun, bomb, or JDAM missile. Long before humans made it into airplanes, whole cities were being destroyed from the air — in an avalanche of popular fiction. By the late 19th century London had gone down in flames more than once and New York soon would follow; genocidal wars from the air were repeatedly imagined and described in which whole nations, whole races, were wiped out. In 1913, over three decades before the first atomic bomb was dropped, HG Wells had already imagined and named “atomic weapons” in The World Set Free, his novel about a 1950s atomic air war.

When it came to fantasies and fears of destruction we knew no bounds. As the scholar Stephen Weart has written in Nuclear Fear, A History of Images:

“Right from the start [the] new idea of atomic weapons was linked to an even more impressive idea: the end of the world. When [scientist Frederick] Soddy first told the public about atomic energy, in May 1903, he said that our planet is ‘a storehouse stuffed with explosives, inconceivably more powerful than any we know of, and possibly only awaitin

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