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Beliefs and narratives about the end of the world have fascinated people throughout history. In nearly every culture, sacred narratives are told about worldly cataclysm, the regeneration of the earth, and the creation of a terrestrial paradise (Talmon 1968:349-351; Thrupp 1970:11-15).1 Until recently, the end of the world has been interpreted as a meaningful and supernatural event, involving the annihilation and renewal of the earth by deities or divine forces. During the last half of the twentieth century, however, widespread beliefs about a meaningless apocalypse have emerged and now compete with traditional religious apocalyptic worldviews. The creation and proliferation of nuclear weapons, in particular, have fundamentally altered contemporary apocalyptic speculation, fueling fears of global annihilation and evoking widespread fatalism about the future of humanity. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 initiated an era of nuclear apocalypticism that has flourished in American religious culture, folklore, and popular culture; the most widespread and persistent belief that emerges from both religious and secular speculation about nuclear weapons is that they will be used to bring about the end of the world (see Wojcik 1997).
Since the mid-1940s, folk beliefs and assorted religious traditions have reflected the view that the invention of nuclear weapons is a fulfillment of divine prophecies. The prospect of nuclear annihilation has been readily incorporated into various apocalyptic belief systems and mythologized as a meaningful event that is an inevitable part of a preordained plan for the redemption of the world. The extent to which visions of nuclear catastrophe are found to be compatible with prophecy beliefs about a fiery conflagration at the end of time is indicated by a Yankelovich poll taken in 1984, in which 39 percent of a sample population agreed with the statement "When the Bible predicts that the earth will be destroyed by fire, it's telling us that a nuclear war is inevitable" (Jones 1985:67). If this sampling of the populace is representative, then as many as eighty-five million Americans may believe that nuclear apocalypse is foreordained (Halsell 1986:10).
Despite the end of the Cold War, beliefs about the inevitability of nuclear apocalypse persist today, stemming from the magnitude and seeming uncontrollability of nuclear weapons and the likelihood that they will be developed and...