ABSTRACT
This chapter challenges the dominant view that Hiroshima and Nagasaki have undermined the modern arrow of time. Indeed, the atomic bombs reversed the techno-optimist arrow of progress toward an apocalyptic end of history by raising the fear of an imminent end of humanity. Still, considering the visions of a utopian future with free and abundant energy that also followed the bombings, the chapter argues that both visions remained anchored in the modern order of time, with its time-arrow oriented toward a future that makes sense of the present. The decades of tensions and contradictions between these visions did not deeply alter the modern view of humans as masters of nature. Rather than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was the emergence of climate and environmental concerns in the 1970s and 1980s that reconfigured the nuclear order of time, with the debate on nuclear winter shifting the public attention to long-term impacts of nuclear radiation on the planet.
