War Stars ─ The Superweapon and the American Imagination

Franklin (English and American studies) expands and updates his 1988 exploration of the how the roots of the invention and deployment of superweapons (nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, long range bombers, etc.) by the United States, a situation that he believes threatens global annihilation, has its roots in the American cultural imagination. From Robert Fulton's 1797 proposal of the submarine as a means of fighting the British navy, and thus the main obstacle to free trade and revolutionary republicanism, through novelist Tom Clancy's imagining the President ordering the dropping of nuclear weapons on the Iranian holy city of Qom in response to terrorist threats, he shows how Americans in fiction and in real life again and again perceive the advance of weapons technology as the means to peace and prosperity. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

H. Bruce Franklin is John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University. He is author of numerous books, including Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.