ABSTRACT
In America, visual imagery related to the “Atomic Age” stands ready for recall as a style, easily appropriated into retro-fashion and nostalgia. But Americans with access to the Atomic Age as style don’t necessarily stand ready to recall the era’s inaugural event—that of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thus, within Atomic Age aesthetics, understood as the performance of collective memory, there exists a gap. This chapter considers how that gap might not be so much the product of a collective mental block, but the extension of the structure of the Atomic Age archive as it was built in the Cold War. For the horrible imagery of nuclear destruction was not so much forgotten as it was lost, and it was lost as it was managed, even displaced, by competing iconography.
