Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in American Studies
Episode: Peder Anker, "For The Love of Bombs: The Trail of Nuclear Suffering" (Anthem Press, 2025)
Description: The truism that history is written by its winners reflects the literature about how the bomb came about, with apologetic books most often written by U.S. scholars. The physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the nuke’s ‘father’, is repeatedly centre stage, as in the case of the recent film about him. These are elitist stories that more often than not ignore the suffering and violence of the bomb to laypeople in general, and to marginalised groups in particular.Starting with the gruesome mining of uranium by First Nation people in northern Canada, and continuing with the racialist culture of ura...