ABSTRACT
The guiding motif of preceding chapters is that World War II drastically changed everything, forever—its continuing repercussions yet to be fully understood or played out. Consequences of the ultimate Good War, fought to destroy the evils of fascism and Nazism, would be simultaneously global and domestic, cultural as well as economic, political, and military. As discussed earlier, the Good War unleashed forces that would constitute a new historical matrix: systematic warfare against civilians, invention and use of the Bomb, rise of technowar, normalization of global conflict, media spectacles of death and destruction, the Holocaust, full-scale societal mobilization for war. For the U.S., the immediate postwar years brought a thriving war economy, expanding security state, an empire of bases, and a Cold War leading eventually to the general militarization of society. Hovering over the landscape, of course, was the dreaded (but also cherished) atomic bomb, a super weapon capable of destroying much if not all of human civilization within minutes. More than a half-century later, the American warfare state would still be robust, a site of apocalyptic possibilities in a world of escalating militarism, blowback, and terrorism.
