The ideological cure for atomic trauma had, then, to treat not military defeat or alleged “racial sickness” but the threat of extinction. And here we did something fateful and deeply ironic: we seized upon the weapons themselves as a means of alleviating the searing threat to existence created by those same weapons. Nuclearism, then, is an exaggerated dependency on nuclear weapons for strength, protection, and safety, whatever the evidence that they themselves are the instruments of genocide. The weapons are passionately embraced as a solution to death anxiety and the threat of extinction and a means of restoring a lost sense of immortality. Nuclearism can take the form of a secular religion, a total ideology in which grace and even salvation – the mastery of death and evil – are achieved through the power of the new technological deity.

As a millenarian ideology, nuclearism also needed a source of pure evil to combat. This source was all too readily available in the form of “communism”, the Soviet Union having engaged in massive killing and suppression of its people (Stalin killed more people than Hitler). In blending with a kind of sacred anticommunism, a religion in which devil hatred subsumes anything in the way of positive belief, nuclearism took on totalistic qualities, became associated with thought and feeling that was absolute and completely polarized. “Communism” at home and abroad became the repository for all evil; and America, by means of an insistent symmetry, the repository of good. Relations with the Soviet Union could then be understood in biblical terms; and a later American president could describe “communists” as “godless monsters”, and the Soviet Union as the “focus of evil” and the “evil empire”.

R.J. Lifton and E. Markusen: The genocidal mentality, Basic Books Publishers, New York, 1990.