After the Bomb: Influenced Ways of Thinking

After the Bomb: An Atomized World:

This ABC series, ‘After the Bomb: An Atomized World’ will explore the ramifications of dropping of the atomic

bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago. This era was characterized by a pulverisation of certainty, the

certainty: of the benevolent government, of scientific progress as beneficial, the nature of good and evil and of

one’s place in the world. For students today, an analysis of this collapse of faith and loss of belief in democratic

capitalism will help one understand and be able to dissipate the ramifications of future crisis’s. Informed by his

experience in the French Resistance and inspired by Nietzsches’ nihilistic worldview, Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting

for Godot’ emphasized the failure of political, social and religious institutions. 13 years later Antony Burgress,

inspired by Sarte and Camus’ existential outlooks, used ‘Clockwork Orange’ as a microcosm for McCarthyism,

the Space-Race and the growing international conflicts in Indo-China. Ultimately both texts analyse the

disintegration of the relation between the individual and authority after the bomb and the impossibility of

ordinary individuals to discern meaning of existence during the ambiguous Cold War period.

Any interface that existed between the individual and authority disintegrated with the bomb. Beckett constructs

an ambivalence surrounding the true nature of Godot who “couldn’t promise anything” and potentially “does

nothing” yet Vladimir and Estragon wait for him. Godot is reflection of the continuing prevalence of Cold War

governments who promised security and protection whilst simultaneously placing civilians at risk of as Norman

Cousins calls ‘the irrational death’ – unwarned annihilation. Mimicking Orwell’s ‘peace that is no peace,’

Pozzo characterises Cold War governments that ’behind this veil of peace, night, changing, will burst upon us’

demonstrating their hypocritical criticism of Nazi German’s mass extermination whilst in secret dropping the

atomic bombs. The 1949 post-war landscape and the innovative structure of the absent resolving act

demonstrates the moral vacuum that Sartre explains as existentialist